Sustainability expertise common in Hawai'i, just ask the old-timers

Sustainability is the new watchword, the mantra for a generation with its eyes open.

But it's not new. It's old.

It may surprise some to know that there is a unique, large reservoir in the Islands of people with special knowledge and training in sustainability. Many of those people may not even know they have the information, but it's there.

They're the tens of thousands of folks aged, say, 50 and older, who lived in Hawai'i during the early to middle part of the last century—and particularly those who lived in outlying areas. That would include anywhere on the Neighbor Islands (Outer Islands in those days), and plantations and other rural areas of O'ahu.

It was a place and time when virtually everything was scanned for its potential secondary value before being thrown away. And even then, somethings would be simply set aside, in case you thought of a use for them later.

I was raised on an isolated pineapple plantation on west Molokai.

We didn't do so much recycling in the sense of converting materials back to raw materials for the construction of new things. Instead, we found new end uses for old things.

I was reminded of this recently while reading a commentary in The Honolulu Advertiser by Maui Land & Pine's chairman, David Cole.

“In an earlier era,” he wrote, “we purchased items in bulk and reused our jars, cans and rice sacks. Today, we import a nonstop parade of trash in the form of packaging for which there is no after-market on the island...”

In Cole's “earlier era,” we found new uses for all kinds of stuff..

Our families didn't throw away fabric, for instance.

Rice bags had value once the rice had all been steamed and loaded into kaukau tins. The fabric was resewn into surf shorts, and occasionally into shirts.

Those little cloth sacks that tobacco came in were tied around the mouths of faucets to catch bits of rust and debris from plantation waterlines.

Glass jars were used to store all kinds of stuff—wood screws in the shop, sugar in the kitchen (to keep out ants). Even when the lids had rusted away, the glass jar could still be used for jams and jellies and chutneys, with a poured-in wax cap.

An old soda bottle might become a chili pepper water container.

Many modern plastic items would age, go brittle and crack—becoming useless—while a glass container worked on and on.

Old coffee cans took the place of small plastic buckets today, and were also used in the shop to store drill bits, old nails, oily lawnmower parts and all the rest.

Smaller tin cans that once held peaches in syrup, baked and green beans and other food were used as small potting tins to start vegetables for the garden. Or to hold paint for small painting jobs. Or for storing kids' marbles.

Food waste fed pets and livestock, or went into a pit.

I remember one year being impressed by the trash pit—today it would be referred to as a compost pit—at a place where we used to go fishing. I was impressed because instead of a pit, it was a dense mat of melon vines. The melon seeds that had been thrown in were growing, fertilized by years of vegetable peelings, slop, bread crumbs, and, yes, a few rusty cans. This particular year, the trash pit yielded juicy melons.

Reusing things was the standard in those days.

Even our outdoor trash cans had previous uses. They were old 55-gallon fuel drums with the tops cut out.

My first bike was a used, fat-tired retread that my dad had painted green. It was indestructible, which was a good thing, because I was hard on it.

My first car had a 16-year-old body and 18-year-old engine—the result of taking the best parts of two cars that didn't work to make one that did.

Can we survive in a society in which we use less stuff? Of course. We already have, and actually, it wasn't that long ago.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Hawaiian water rights and ancient law: Book Review

In the bad old days of burning rivers and farmers dispossessed of crop-irrigating water, the powerless and their lawyers had few ready legal remedies.

But over time, persistent efforts brought ancient legal precedent to bear, to solve modern problems. It happened in Hawai'i—where early Hawaiian legal concepts were brought into modern koa-paneled courtrooms—and across the nation.

A new book by a nationwide array of legal experts, edited by University of Hawaii law professor Denise Antolini and Golden Gate University law professor Clifford Rechtschaffen, reviews the progress of common law and the environment.

“Creative Common Law Strategies for Protecting the Environment,” edited by Clifford Rechtschaffen and Denise Antolini, 2007, 426 pages, $69.96, Environmental Law Institute, Washington, DC.

As Boalt Hall professor Joseph Sax wrote in the preface, “the traditional common law remedies were utterly inadequate to deal with contemporary environmental problems, and a whole new body of law—indeed a new conception of law—was needed.”

Among the weapons available to a lawyer are the written law—the Clean Water Act, for example—and common law, which might be described as legal custom. It is law that may not be a legal statute, but which has developed over the years by judges ruling on specific cases.

One example: using trespass laws to address pollution. The smoke from your stack, or the offal you dump into the river, are trespassing in my air or in the water that runs by my town.

Hawai'i lawyers Kapua'ala Sproat and Isaac Moriwake, both with Earthjustice, write a chapter in the book that reviews the issue of native Hawaiian access to water, with specific reference to the water battles of Waiahole Valley, whose water had been diverted for a century through a tunnel to the dry fields of central O'ahu.

The battle to refill the windward valley's streams recalled ancient Hawaiian concepts of water and the property rights of the period of the Hawaiian monarchy.

One of the key theories of the battle was the precautionary principle—the concept that steps should be taken to mitigate the effects of a use that might cause public harm, even in the absence of scientific proof of that harm.

Another theory was that the state has a responsibility to manage natural resources as a public trust.

The result of years of legal battle and communty unrest was an entirely new framework for thinking about water. It's a way, Sproat and Moriwake say, that harkens back to the understanding of property rights of the days before the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

The view from Hawai'i is shocking—telescopes are showing galaxies colliding and evidence that matter is being ripped apart.

In the artist's illustration shown above (credit CXC/M. Weiss) the red color represents hot gas while the blue represents dark matter. Yellow spots represent individual galaxies. The weirdness: The big pink ball in the middle represents the densest dark matter, but there are no galaxies there. Why are the galaxies and the dark matter separate?

Astrophysicists, writing in an October 2007 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, say are baffled by data that suggests the mysterious “dark matter” is behaving in ways that violate known principles.

Dark matter is a kind of theoretical fix. Astronomers, trying to make sense of calculations that show there's not enough matter in the universe to account for its observed behavior, suggest there's something else out there that we can't see, but which adds significantly to the mass of the universe. Really significant—most of the matter in the universe is believed to be the mysterious dark matter.

In some ways dark matter is believed to act like regular or “light” matter, but it's impossible to detect, except indirectly. It doesn't emit detectable light or radiation. However, while you may not see the dark matter, you know it's there because it has gravity and its presence can bend light.

And it is believed to populate the university generally alongside regular matter.

“Nearly all of our observations and inferences support the conclusion that dark matter and stars concentrate together in the same areas. The abundance of dark matter relative to stars varies with the size of the object under consideration, but we're not accustomed to finding blobs of dark matter 'all by themselves,'” said Adam Bolton, at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy, in an email.

So it was a surprise when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Mauna Kea's Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and Mauna Kea's Subaru Telescope, at a galaxy cluster called Abell 520, where two galaxies were crashing into each other.

What they found was a region that had plenty of galaxies but very little dark matter, and another area with lots of dark matter and hot gas but few galaxies

Astronomers are not easily blow away, but here's what researcher, University of Victoria's Hendrik Hoekstra, said in a press release: “It blew us away that it looks like the galaxies are removed from the densest core of dark matter. This would be the first time we've seen such a thing and could be a huge test of our knowledge of how dark matter behaves."

"These results challenge our understanding of the way clusters merge. Or, they possibly make us even reexamine the nature of dark matter itself," said Dr. Andisheh Mahdavi of the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

The group plans more research to try to figure out what's going on. One of the suggestions is that dark matter may be even stranger than previously thought—that it has its own attractive force in addition to gravity, a force that would keep the dark matter together but would allow light matter to spin away.

Bolton, who was not part of the research team, said he anticipates that more observation will yield clues that suggest that dark matter really isn't misbehaving (at least according to currently accepted rules).

“If more sensitive observations confirm the authors' conclusion, I and many others will be convinced that there is a great puzzle here!” he said.

“Like many scientists, I tend to take a wait-and-see attitude towards a result like this. If it really, truly holds up, then it is extraordinary. But as the old saw goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...”

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Adze in French Polynesia's Tuamoto came from Hawai'i

A prehistoric basalt adze found 70 years ago in the Tuamotu archipelago of French Polynesia came from volcanic rock on Kaho'olawe.

This is a huge piece of news in Hawaiian and Pacific archaeology, Polynesian culture and Pacific canoe voyaging. It is hard evidence of two-way voyaging between Hawai'i and the islands south of the equator in western Polynesia.

It may be the first hard evidence of prehistoric Hawaiian material in the South Pacific. And it confirms Polynesian oral tradition, as well as the experimental voyaging conducted by the Polynesian Voyaging Society and canoes like the Hokule'a.

Other adzes tested in the same study came from a number of different volcanic islands and further bolster the idea of a period of active long-distance voyaging by Polynesians.

The coral islands of the Tuamotu have no basalt of their own. The basalt adzes found there came from volcanic islands hundreds of miles away and from nearly every point of the compass.

Clearly, pre-European Pacific voyagers conducted regular, back and forth long-distance trade, and if not a Polynesian Grand Central Station, the Tuamoto were a key crossing point, a navigational waypoint, a trade center.

If any more nails were needed in the coffin of the concept that Polynesians were downwind “drift voyagers” incapable of windward sailing, this is it.

It's been a bad year for anyone holding the idea that Pacific voyagers weren't consummate navigators and sailors. Earlier this year, researchers found that chicken bones on the coast of Chile came from the descendants of birds brought across the Pacific by Polynesians. That was the first hard evidence of something Polynesian being found in the Americas.

Now this.

Scientists Kenneth Collerson and Marshall Weisler, of Australia's University of Queenland, published in Science (www.sciencemag.org), their paper “Stone Adze Compositions and the Extent of Ancient Polynesian Voyaging and Trade.”

The 19 adzes they tested were collected by the famed Bishop Museum archaeologist Kenneth Emory from 1929 to 1934. They were found on nine coral islands, most of them low atolls—Arakita, Napuka, Takaroa, Katiu, Manihi, Ahe, Taiaroa and Nukutavake, plus the upthrust coral island Makatea.

The coral islands don't have good solid, dense-grained rock. And while a fair cutting tool can be made from things like a large clam shell, if you don't have metal, little cuts wood as nicely as hard, sharpened stone. So if you need to shape wood for canoes, for tools and for house construction, a heavy, dense, basalt adze is a nice thing.

The researchers tested the Tuamotu adzes for major elements, trace elements and isotopes, creating patterns that allowed the adze basalts to be accurately linked to their sources.

The results confirm that the Tuamotu group was a heartland of Polynesia, receiving valued hard rock from all directions—including Hawai'i.

The study found that individual adze stone came from Rapa to the south of the Tuamotu, Rurutu in the Austral Islands to the southwest, Eiao in the Marquesas to the north, the Pitcairn group to the southeast, Tahiti to the west.

And Kaho'olawe. The Kaho'olawe adze was collected on Napuka, 2,500 miles from its home lava flow.

There are several sources of stone on Kaho'olawe with the same chemical signature, and it is intriguing that one of them is very near the island's westernmost point, known as Kealaikahiki, “the way to Tahiti.

Most of the adzes, as might be expected, came from the nearest source, the Society Islands, which include Tahiti.

The Tuamotu are alternatively known as the Paumotu, the Cloud of Islands, the Dangerous Archipelago. For modern sailors, they are frightening because the islands are so low that they are frequently not visible until you can see or at night hear the surf breaking on their shores. And that's too close for comfort.

But for non-instrument navigators like the Polynesians, finding such islands was important to confirm their positions. And in the case of a long voyage from Hawai'i, if could also be a place to reprovision—since fresh food, water and other supplies would almost certainly be in low supply.

What to trade for provisions? What did the Tuamotu islanders need? Something that was easily stored in a canoe bottom and couldn't spoil. How about adze stone?

Another idea is that stones were brought as ceremonial gifts. Interestingly, modern canoe voyagers have developed independently a tradition of carrying stones from their home islands as gifts to people they visit.

“Imagine the value we place today on objects that originate from afar. They take on a special status of their own. This may be some of the value attributed to an adze brought from such a distance,” Weisler said.

The Kaho'olawe stone adze was found on the island of Napuka, in the northern part of the western Tuamotu. The adze was made of Kaho'olawe rock, but it was shaped in a Tuamotu design—suggesting that perhaps it was delivered as a raw chunk of rock, or a partly-shaped adze “blank.” And it was finished in the local style by the stoneworkers of the Tuamotus.

“The Kaho’olawe adze reaffirms that oral histories mentioning travel between Hawai’i and Tahiti are likely to have been based on real events,” Weisler said.

Furthermore, “This 4000 km journey now stands as the longest uninterrupted maritime voyage in human prehistory,” he said.

University of Hawai'i anthropologist Ben Finney, a co-founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, said the find appears to confirm a navigational decision made for the initial voyage of the voyaging canoe Hokule'a, for its 1976 Hawai'i-Tahiti voyage.

That decision: sail for the Tuamotu group first. It's hundreds of miles wide and hard to miss. Then, on having reconfirmed your position, sail the few hundred miles from there to Tahiti.

Did other Polynesian navigators also use the Tuamoto group, which is central in western Polynesia, as a waypoint? Or did they visit for other reasons? That's not yet known, but the visits occurred and continued to occur for an extended period of time, the paper's authors say.

“Our data show that the Tuamotu adzes originate from the Marquesas, Pitcairn, Austral and Society Islands; that is, most of the island groups surrounding the atoll archipelago ...postcolonization voyaging must have been common enough for voyaging knowledge to be passed across generations and that it continued until about 1450 CE when most voyaging ceased in East Polynesia.” they wrote. (CE, for Common Era, is the equivalent of AD, which stands of Anno Domini. 2007 CE and 2007 AD are the same year.).

This isn't the end of this adze/voyaging story. The remarkable thing about the techniques Collerson and Weisler used is that they can be applied to any basalt material, and will determine where it came from.

“Given the amount of adze material from Polynesia in museums, we believe that its quite likely that if more funding was available for our work, that we will make other very exciting and significant discoveries,” Collerson said in an email.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

The 'Io, Hawaiian hawk, holding its own

A symbol of Hawaiian royalty and one of only two surviving native Hawaiian birds of prey, the Hawaiian hawk, 'io, is on the federal Endangered Species List, but its population appears to be at least stable and may be growing a bit.

(Photo: Michael Walther, Oahu Nature Tours)

The raptor today is only found on the Big Island, although fossil 'io have been located on several of the islands from the Big Island all the way to Kaua'i.

The animal is part of a clan of hawks called buteos, making it a cousin of the red-shouldered hawk, the red-tailed hawk and the rough-legged hawk. It has the scientific name Buteo solitarius.

The birds stand up to a foot and a half tall, and can occur in either a dark-brown or pale brown color phase. Their habitat ranges from as low as a few hundred feet to a mile and a half high. For more information see www.fws.gov/pacificislands/wesa/io.html.

The hawk is a powerful flyer that eats insects, rodents, small birds and will even take larger birds like pheasant. It will also take other endangered species, notably the Hawaiian crow, 'alala.

One of the issues in figuring out how much protection the birds need is getting an accurate count. It was placed on the Endangered Species List at a time when nobody knew just how many there were. Over the years, the estimates have ranged within several hundred birds on either side of 2,000.

Among the issues is that the animals are fairly broadly distributed, but not real dense.

John Klavitter, now the biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, got his master's degree in part based on a thesis that discussed counting the hawks, and developing systems for figuring out whether your count accurately represents actual numbers.

In a paper written this summer, he noted that if you use recorded playbacks of 'io calls, they show up readily. The danger here is that the playback system may make it seem that there are more of them than there really are. The paper, by Klavitter and John Marzluff, “Methods to correct for density inflation biases in Hawaiian hawk surveys using attractant calls,” was published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Raptor Research.

His estimate in his 2000 thesis and in a 2003 paper in the Journal of Wildlife Management suggested at at the turn of the millennium, his team figured there were nearly 1,500 of the birds. (The actual estimate was 1,457, plus or minus 176.3 birds)

Based in part on that, he recommended the birds be down listed from endangered to threatened, but not delisted altogether.

The animals appear resistant to diseases like malaria and pox that severely impact other Hawaiian birds, they seem to be long-lived, and they seem to be reproducing appropriately.

There are still issues for them. They're only present on one island, meaning random events like hurricanes, fires or other catastrophes put them at risk. Furthermore, while they seem to be benefiting from some habitat change, a complete switch from native to non-native could put them at risk, researchers said. Their main nesting tree is the native 'ohi'a.

In recent work, Klavitter and co-researchers say the populations of 'io in some native wildland areas, such as around Pu'u Wa'awa'a, are as dense as those of its cousin hawks in North America, like the red-tailed hawk.

“The reason Hawaiian hawks were so dense was likely because our study plots were dominated by mature native forest with high amounts of human-created edge habitat and extensive areas with alien grass understory. Hawaiian hawks apparently have benefited from this habitat change just as several other raptors have benefited from habitat modification elsewhere,” the authors wrote.

That's not to say 'io prefer purely non-native habitat.

They still require tall, old trees—the kind they are likely to find in native 'ohi'a forest—for nesting and other purposes. Their nests of interwoven sticks can be more than 30 feet high.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate