Steve Case. Benny Agbayani. Konishiki and Akebono. To this list of distinguished sons of Hawai`i soil, we would add that of Peter Vitousek.
Vitousek, son of Betty and the late Roy Vitousek of Honolulu, is one of the world’s leading lights in the field of conservation biology. Since 1984 he has been a professor at Stanford University, where he now holds an endowed chair as Morrison Professor of Population and Resources.
Environment Hawai`i interviewed Vitousek as he was embarking on a week of field work in the Kohala Mountains. Here are excerpts from that interview.
How did you become interested in the field of conservation biology?
I was born on O`ahu and spent a lot of time hiking in the Ko`olau as a kid, not knowing what I was looking at very much, but liking being outside a lot. We also spent some time in Kona, where my grandmother had a house and where my father was friends, from growing up, with a lot of the ranch community. And so the month of the year or so we were in Kona, we often went up on ranches with my father and his friends and looked around. I remember particularly going out with Sherwood Greenwell quite a few times. He really knew that land and loved pointing out the things on it. I saw `alala probably when I was four or five, and he described them, and that they were endangered, but that they were doing well right there, then. And a lot of things about the land that were really interesting, just really fascinating. So, getting to get out in rural Hawai`i with someone who knew it a lot was something that shaped a lot of what I am interested in now.
Did you pursue that?
No, I dropped it as an undergraduate. I was studying political science at Amherst College. But then as part of an English literature course on the literature of science, we read a book on biological invasions – a 1958 book by a British ecologist, Charles Elton, that is just a beautifully written description of what biological invasions can do to the areas they enter. There’s a chapter on what invasions can do to islands and there’s a lot about Hawai`i, on the effects of invasions.
A lot of things just came together for me then. I had that experience, seeing it and then reading about it and realizing that it fit somewhere in the context of conservation and of biology. I got really excited about doing something that related to conservation and biology, and then started taking biology courses. Then I went to graduate school in biology.
I did my graduate research in New England, and then I taught at Indiana University and University of North Carolina. I didn’t work in Hawai`i at that time. I worked mostly on the mainland. Toward the end of that time, I started working in continental tropics in Costa Rica and Brazil a fair amount, but when I moved to Stanford in 1984, I was close to home again and started working in Hawai`i. From the mid-1980s to 1990 or so, increasingly I worked here. Since then, almost all of my research has been in Hawai`i.
Do you have a laboratory here?
I work in the national park [Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park – editor’s note]. The park has been really supportive of having a place where researchers from universities can come and set up and carry out work.
We have a fairly broad group of people from a lot of universities who work in Hawai`i. I think we’ve had people from eight or 10 universities who have gotten their Ph.D.’s in some sort of association with a set of projects in Hawai`i that I’m involved in.
Hawai`i is just such an extraordinary magnet for this kind of research. If there’s an opportunity do it, a structure that makes it possible to come and learn, a lot of people want to. They come because there are questions that can be answered here that really aren’t accessible anywhere else in the world.
What are some of those questions?
For the kinds of things I’m interested in – which is how whole ecosystems work, how the relationship between plants and soils works on large scales of space and time – we can hold a lot of the things that make forests and other ecosystems on the continents different from each other, constant – we can keep them as constant as they can be kept anywhere in the world, and vary others.
For example, as you go all across the Hawaiian islands, we basically have only one kind of rock. It’s the same everywhere. Hawai`i’s not very diverse, because we’re so isolated. The few things that managed to get here naturally radiated to cover this extraordinarily broad range of environments. And that sort of constancy in rock and vegetation is something you just can’t get anywhere else.
I’m not saying that we can understand everything about Hawai`i and apply it to the rest of the world, because continental tropics are different from Hawai`i – not just more complicated, but different. But if we can understand the fundamentals of how a forest works here, then we can apply that understanding in continental areas and see how the things that make the continents differ matter for how those fundamentals play out.
What is the highest priority for conservation in Hawai`i today?
I’d say the highest priority has to be to take the areas that are in good shape, dominated by native communities and reasonably well protected, and take good care of them — areas that the national parks and the Nature Conservancy and the state protect. And even the areas that aren’t under active enough management, in many cases they continue to have ecosystems in absolutely beautiful shape.
It’s a lot cheaper and likely to be a lot more successful to keep them that way than it is to restore something that’s gone down a path. So, work to keep invaders out of those areas that are really still in good shape and to protect them against other types of deterioration has to have the highest priority. Those are places that are like no other places on earth. They are unique. They express Hawai`i in a way that changed systems can’t express Hawai`i. And they are resources for understanding how the world works that the global scientific community certainly wants very much to make use of. Keeping them has to be the highest priority.
What are you working on now?
We’re working in the Kohala mountains right now on a project dealing with peat moss, sphagnum moss, which is widespread in the Kohala mountains, also on Mauna Kea. It isn’t on the other islands at all, although there’s plenty of suitable habitat for it. And it gives every appearance, in terms of where it’s growing and what people have said about it, the extensiveness of it, of having spread substantially in recent times. One of our interests was to see, was this an invader and, if so, when did it come in. And if it isn’t an alien species from outside Hawai`i, has it indeed spread recently and if so what triggered its spread. And what are the consequences.
We’ve found this species of sphagnum in a 22,000-year-old layer of bog in the Kohala Mountains, so it’s not been introduced by people. But all of our measurements of timing of it show, it looks like a blanket of this moss in Kohala mountains is a fairly recent phenomenon.
What are the biggest challenges of conservation in Hawai`i?
In a purely biological sense, protecting those relatively intact systems has the greatest importance, and alien species are the biggest threat to those areas. No question.
More broadly, I think that a tremendously important challenge is making people aware of just how extraordinary a place this is. And making use of that – not just for people in Hawai`i appreciating what we have, but as an opportunity for people in the rest of the world to come and see and appreciate. I’ve been to Galapagos a couple of times. People come from all over the world and spend a great deal of money per person to see the Galapagos because of the history of Darwin’s observations there and because of the spectrum of plants and animals and terrestrial and marine life you can observe close-up. It’s a tremendously exciting place to be.
But biologically, Galapagos is nothing compared to Hawai`i. Nothing at all. And in terms of appreciating how the world works, evolutionarily, ecologically, culturally – there’s nothing like Hawai`i. And people who come here should see more of that, appreciate more of that, enjoy it more. Sure, the beaches and palm trees are great and drinks with umbrellas are fine, but beaches with palm trees and drinks with umbrellas are cheaper in Mexico. What is it about Hawai`i that is essentially Hawaiian that people can see, understand, and maybe even participate in when they’re here? And if that becomes an important part of how people see Hawai`i and why people come to Hawai`i, I think that’s really the greatest challenge facing the conservation community.
How to do that? Environmental tourism has costs. It poses its own threats to the resource. But how we’re going to make things work without that, I don’t see how. How we make that work, and make it work for the natural systems, and make it world culturally is I think the greatest challenge we have.
Peter Vitousek will be the guest speaker at Environment Hawai`i’s annual fund-raising dinner on July 27 at the Pagoda Hotel in Honolulu. Tickets cost $50, half of which is deductible as a charitable contribution. For reservations, call 1-877-934-0130.
Volume 12, Number 1 July 2001
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