Wells, Maine ? Taking advantage of Earth Day, President Bush tried to improve his environmental image and fend off attacks from Democrat John Kerry with a promise to restore or protect as much as 3 million acres of wetlands in the next five years.

Bush said after touring a Maine nature reserve with his mother that new government figures showed, for the first time in the nation’s history, the annual net loss of wetlands on farmland had been reversed. He said he wanted to broaden those gains.

“Instead of just limiting our losses, we will expand the wetlands of America,” Bush said after highlighting efforts to help wetlands at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. The 1,600 acres of salt marshes, beaches, forests and freshwater wetlands are a few miles from the Bush family’s compound at Kennebunkport.

Even if farm-related wetlands are improving, environmentalists such as Julie Sibbing of the National Wildlife Federation say the administration’s wetlands policies from the past two years put at risk some 20 million other acres.

In December, Bush abandoned a plan that could have further reduced wetlands protections by scaling back the law’s coverage of isolated ponds and streams, many of them dry for part of the year.

Kerry, commemorating Earth Day in Houston, said Bush was “once again … playing the smoke-and-mirrors game” by talking about wetlands conservation. “For the last 3 1/2 years this administration, this president, had a proposal that would have lost us 20 million acres of wetlands,” he said.