“The effects of benign neglect can be observed by taking a ride along the Hamakua Coast,” says Burt Smith, one of Hawai`i’s foremost experts on soil loss. “There one will see miles of mature Guinea grass waving in the wind. To those who look but do not see, all is well. To those who see — that is, stop the car, get out and walk into those waving fields of Guinea grass and look down, rather than across — the conclusion is somewhat different.<\/p>\n
“The first thing one observes is that the spacing between grass plants is between 2 to 4 feet with mostly bare soil between them,” he told Environment Hawai`i<\/i>. If you drop to your knees and look even closer, he says, you notice that the grass grows on little pedestals elevated above the surface of the surrounding soil.<\/p>\n
The pedestal’s height depends on how long the area has been neglected. “If one has an inquiring mind, the immediate question poised is, ‘What happened to the soil between the plants?'” he went on to say.<\/p>\n
“A goodly portion has been moved somewhere else,” he said, answering his own question. The reason the loss is not total, he explains, “is that as the plant grows, the roots expand, which results in pushing the plant upward a small amount, much like a tree pushing up a sidewalk.”<\/p>\n
If you want to know where the rest of the soil has gone, you only have “to drive the coast during a heavy rain, [when] the ocean along the coast has turned slightly yellow.”<\/p>\n
Though this is not good, it is, Smith says, “a vast improvement over the days when sugar was king and the ocean was brown.”<\/p>\n
The pedestaling effect, Smith notes, “is not confined to Guinea grass or the Hamakua Coast. It may be seen virtually anywhere in the state where bunch grasses grow under the management of benign neglect.”<\/p>\n
— Teresa Dawson<\/p>\n
Volume 10, Number 3 September 1999<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“The effects of benign neglect can be observed by taking a ride along the Hamakua Coast,” says Burt Smith, one of Hawai`i’s foremost experts on soil loss. “There one will see miles of mature Guinea grass waving in the wind. … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[283],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-september-1999"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}