It's funny how these things happen. You bomb and invade a couple of countries, the casualties mount, and a suicide attack has just slaughtered 70 at a Baghdad mosque. But the schedule says it's movie night at the White House. It's a Cousteau film—yellow fish and French accents. It should be relaxing.

The time is April 2006, the movie is Voyage to Kure, and the Cousteau is Jean-Michel, son of Jacques. The you in question is George W. Bush, who became that night a titan of environmental conservation.

How did we ever get to a sentence like that? Maybe it started 34 years ago, when the people of the faraway American protectorate of Saipan wrote a constitution that wrapped lonely volcanic islands in legal protection. Maybe it was eight years of pushing by obscure science bureaucrats at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Park Service. Maybe it was the years of advocacy by Jay Nelson, director of global oceans legacy at the Pew Environmental Group, or Jim Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Bush. Maybe it was First Lady Laura Bush, who loved the photo book Archipelago, showing undersea creatures of the Pacific against solid backdrops. Maybe it was even Bush himself. Known for his love of weed whackers and snowmobiles in parks, the president did love to fish. Maybe he wanted a blue legacy worthy of the oceans. Maybe all these things had to happen together to make the next step possible.

What happened then is that George W. Bush showed up for movie night. It was a documentary on the rarely seen Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a skein of rocks and shoals tailing 600 miles from the main mass of Hawaii that have long deserved protection from pollution, overfishing, and tourism. Bush watched the entire 120-minute film, and then stayed to eat.

"I was surprised he showed up, and even more surprised he stayed for dinner," recalls Sylvia Earle, the noted marine biologist and National Geographic explorer in residence. The event's "open seating" was stage-managed by Connaughton so that the president was impounded faster than a Kennebec lobster. Cousteau sat on one side of the POTUS, and Earle (known as "Her Deepness") on the other. Key scientists and sanctuary managers were settled into the adjacent chairs.

"I don't remember what we ate, but it was a very nice meal," Earle says. "Six of us had an hour and a half of intense conversation." They talked about marine science, fisheries, conservation—"why the ocean matters, basically," she said. Bush was surprised to hear that many marine sanctuaries are actually "management areas" where fishing and commercial activities are normal. ("Then why do you call them sanctuaries?" he asked.)

Earle did not miss her chance. Knowing the president's piscatory predilections, she threw out a line. "I found myself saying to him," she recalls, "'If there are to be fishermen, there have to be fish.'"

It's an obvious point, one she says she repeated twice that night. But the Decider always liked obvious points. The president listened, debated, and then ended his evening by standing up and asking a question.