Natural Area Reserves Merit Protection, Not Reduction
Marjorie Ziegler may have summed up the sorry situation at Pu’u Maka’ala better than anyone else. “You can’t not fence and not manage and then say when the areas get degraded, ‘Pull them out’,” Ziegler said in testimony at a Natural Area Reserves System Commission meet–ing in September.
And she’s absolutely right. For what is being proposed for Pu’u Maka’ala – the slicing away of nearly a third of the Big Island reserve’s total area – is not the result of any act of God or natural disaster. It is instead the very predictable outcome of two decades of neglect by a state administration that seems almost embarrassed to engage in aggressive protection of the natural resources it owns.
And should the elements lobbying for removal of a portion of Pu’u Maka’ala be successful, one may reasonably expect to see the NARS Commission facing a long queue of similar withdrawal proposals, since, alas, Pu’u Maka’ala is not the only Natural Area Reserve that has suffered abuse at the hands of the state.
The question that the state and members of the conservation community should be asking now is: why? Why has the Depart–ment of Land and Natural Resources been so derelict in its responsibilities to natural areas? Plans for managing Pu’u Maka’ala drawn up a decade ago were not overly ambitious and certainly weren’t protested as extreme at the time. Yet of the 20 miles of fencing proposed, barely a quarter of that had been installed 10 years later. All totaled, of the 82,000 acres of NARS land on the Big Island, just 2,500 acres are fenced.
Now, with the DLNR under contin–ued budgetary strain, it seems all too likely that the whacking off of a por–tion of Pu’u Maka’ala will occur without so much as a recent proper biological survey having been made of the area. If any rare plants or birds or insects call the place home, the state will, in effect, be casting them on the mercy of the weeds and the hunters.
Contrast the state’s management of its own natural areas to that of private reserves that receive a two-to-one match from the state for each dollar their owners spend on fencing, hunting, and other measures to pro–tect natural resources. While the state’s gen–erosity is commendable – and probably necessary – one can only wonder why the state treats the resources under its direct care as some kind of unloved step-children.
What the Legislature must do is give the DLNR the same degree of ongoing, dedi–cated support for Natural Area Reserves it has provided to the owners of private re–serves. The issue is not one of defending or expanding areas available for public hunt–ing: the state Natural Area Reserve System, consisting of 109,000 acres, accounts for less than 10 percent of state-owned lands – and almost all of it is open to public hunting anyway.
The state’s legislators ultimately must decide the course to take. Shall they appease a small but vocal group of pig hunters and let the habitat of Hawai’i’s rarest animals and plants be degraded to the point desig–nation as a natural area is meaningless? Or will they give these resources the full protec–tions they deserve?
Our vote is with the birds.
Last spring, Australian authorities discov–ered hundreds of millions of small mussels lining the underwater surfaces of a marina in Darwin. Days later, they were all gone. The Australians had quarantined the area, poisoned it with chlorine and copper, and killed every living thing in the water, according to an account in the September 17 issue of Science magazine.
While the cure may have been drastic, there can be no dispute that it was far better than the disease.
It’s time Hawai’i took a lesson from the Australians, especially with respect to the Axis deer invasion of Maui.
Perhaps invasion is the wrong word, since the deer were deliberately introduced after state wildlife managers gave the Legis–lature assurances that the population would be manageable.
To be sure, some few individuals – hunting guides and ranch owners, for the most part – profit from having the deer on Maui. Why should the state suffer harm to its natural resources, and farmers suffer com–mercial losses, so that these few can thrive?
As has been learned on Lana’i and Moloka’i, where deer have caused un–told harm to natural resources, it makes no economic sense and it certainly makes no en–vironmental sense to “manage” deer for hunt–ing on Maui. The state, the National Park Service, and private land managers should band together at once and eradicate the deer. It may be difficult, but it will never be easier than it is now.
Volume 10, Number 5 November 1999
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