The Story of Hawai`i’s Departed Forests, Verdure, and Rains
In celebrating 2003 as the Year of the Hawaiian Forest, Environment Hawai`i is reprinting historical records that depict changes in its forested landscape over the last two centuries.
This month’s selection is taken from “The Planters’ Monthly” of September 1893. The author is identified as J. Barnett of Kohala.
On the Mahukona side of Hawai`i, one can travel for miles near the sea, through evidences of comparatively recent human habitation, and find no human inhabitant. Innumerable enclosures that stand side by side like village lots are said to have contained not long since each a house and a family. History tells of a dense population here. But it has melted away, as though a deluge had swept them and their belongings from the earth. Nothing remains but the stone fences; and even these are fast being leveled, and their constituent rocks scattered over the desolate waste.
And the wonder is, not why the people went, nor where they went, but why they ever came to build their homes in this barren place.
To look at this stony desert, it seems incredible that not so many years ago there were trees growing here, and meadow land and welling springs of water and vines and flowers and fruit. Not a spot of bloom, and not a stump of forest tree remains – nothing but the brown earth and the rocks. A mile up the hillside there is grass, brown at first, and by degrees changing into green; and miles away on the distant hills, a suspicion, perhaps, of foliage. But here there remains but the shadow of the substance that has disappeared. Men come and go at their own sweet will as the world well knows. But what volcanic disaster, what whirling tempest, fell upon the forest and the meadow life, and robbed the fruitful earth of its mantle of green?
The destruction began so insidiously, it was hardly noticed at first. Herds began to multiply upon the hills. Cattle and goats browsed upon the tender leaves of young plants in the forest glades. As old trees died, there were none to grow up in their places. Fire sometimes followed in the cattle’s track. The water from the springs in the forest depths was sucked up by the bare and thirsty soil, miles before reaching the sea. The rainfall ceased. The foliage of the lowlands withered. And the land that was once witted to be the abode of man became a desert waste.
For all the purposes of desolation, the patient plodding cow, aided and abetted by man, has proved herself more dangerous than the elemental forces of nature. On the average, each year, she can sweep through five acres of forest land more destructively than a cyclone….
In the plantation district the trees have been cleared away that cane might be planted. And vast quantities of wood have been used for fuel. The time was when the cane juice was boiled into sugar in open train over wood fires. So all the low land has been shorn of its trees, and the forest belt in these more fertile parts is each year becoming more distant.
All through North Kohala near the sea, the rainfall is not only much less than in former years, but it is also capricious. Its coming is so very uncertain that its uncertainty has become proverbial. Streams that once ran all the year now run only for a few months or even weeks. Other streams that start promisingly from the distant hills dry up and disappear long before they reach the sea.
There may be cosmic influences that disturb the rainfall from time to time. But there seems no doubt that the rapid destruction of the forests has been the main cause of our lack of moisture. And the work of destruction is still going on. The cattle and other animals still continue their desolating inroads upon the timbered lands and the forest belt is still retreating.
Here and there a land owner is making a tentative experiment in the planting of a little grove of trees. And here and there a rancher is making some effort to fence in and save the timber still remaining. But unless the government will offer some assistance, or at least systematize the work, the damage will undoubtedly increase as the years roll on.
J. BARNETT
Kohala, August 1893
Volume 13, Number 9 March 2003
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