The South Pacific
Nan Hauser was working in the South Pacific in 2017. Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands,has become her home base.
Nan’s biggest success story is indeed the Cook Islands, where she managed to appeal and turn all 772,000 sq miles of the island nation’s territorial sea into a whale sanctuary over the years.
She also established the Center for Cetacean Conservation and Restoration on Rarotonga, and the Cook Islands designated a whale sanctuary 200 nautical miles in either direction from their beaches in 2001. This is a wide length of the ocean, and if whales could only thank one person for providing them with a safe habitat, it would be Nan. One whale in 2017 would figure out a way to do precisely that.
