Kahoolawe Holds Lessons For Maui’s Environmental Recovery From The Wildfires

The Hakio‘awa watershed is nearly impenetrable. Its rusty slopes of sterile hardpan are scarred with water-eroded fissures that streak toward the Alalakeiki Channel and Maui. Its ravines are choked with invasive flora, and water is virtually nonexistent.

But that’s where a small group of volunteers under the tutelage of Paul Higashino, Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission’s longtime restoration program manager, was carefully arranging mounds of soil, gravel and rocks last weekend to hold native shrubs and grass seedlings in place. They utilized techniques he developed over the years through a lot of trial and error to give the plants a better chance of taking root.

Many have seen firsthand over the past decade how revegetating the 37-acre area has slowed the runoff of red dirt “bleeding” into the ocean, as some described it. The volunteers have observed Kahoolawe slowly changing from red to green while working at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea, roughly seven miles across the channel.

Kahoolawe’s current state is a foreboding and extreme example of what can happen if Hawaii does not address the effects of severe, climate change-induced weather events.

Maui is only beginning its recovery phase after the Aug. 8 wildfires razed most of Lahaina and burned thousands of acres Upcountry. The community faces landscape-scale erosion, toxic runoff and questions over how to best deal with invasive, fire-friendly flora.

But the work being done on Kahoolawe could provide some answers.

“It’s a learning opportunity, obviously, but it’s a warning sign,” said Joseph Imhoff, program manager for the Skyline Conservation Initiative on Maui.

Key among Kahoolawe’s lessons are resourcefulness, ingenuity and acceptance that not everything will go as planned, something KIRC has learned over the course of nearly 20 years working to rejuvenate the island’s sterile environment.

Hardpan comprises more than 40% of Kahoolawe’s 28,800 acres, virtually unable to sustain life following centuries of destruction. What grows in the remaining 15,000 acres is mostly invasive, generally undesirable given KIRC’s mandate to restore the island to its former, forested native state.

If the ‘aki‘aki, a‘ali‘i, kawelu and other native species planted by the dozen volunteers from the Four Seasons survive in the Hokiawa restoration area, they will contribute to several long-term successes that KIRC has had on an island it took over management of after more than a century of degradation.

Alteration of the island’s environment started with the arrival of Polynesian settlers. But the landscape-scale destruction of its resources — which left the landscape barren or overcome by invasive species — began in earnest with the introduction of goats in 1783.

“This just shows them what can happen to an island, what is still happening to our islands,” Higashino said. “Look at the number of animals, the erosion.”

The uncontrolled population of goats — reaching 50,000 at its peak — decimated the native flora, while ranching later contributed to further destruction of the habitat. Maui, Molokai, Kauai and other islands throughout the state have faced a similar struggle to control invasive goats, deer and pigs.

Then, in the 1940s, the U.S. Navy started using Kahoolawe as a bombing range, volleying hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosives onto the land before returning it to Hawaii in 1994.

The U.S. Navy removed or destroyed 28,621 unexploded ordnance from the island before handing it over to KIRC to restore, preserve and determine its appropriate use. About 25% of the island remains littered with explosives and is inaccessible.

The Resources At Hand

In the pursuit of restoration, Higashino has used plates, hay bales, bedsheets, wooden pallets, logs and branches and mulched office paper to help keep plants in place, attract moisture and catch as much organic material as possible, to prevent erosion.

Keeping rainwater on the island is paramount to protect nearshore waters and revegetate the island, considering the average annual rainfall sits between 10 and 25 inches because the island falls in Haleakala’s rain shadow. That’s about how much rain falls each year in Lahaina, where more than 2,000 acres burned in the August fires.

Higashino, who also has experience doing fire recovery work on the Big Island, doesn’t make excuses. He just does what he can with the resources at hand.

“It’s about where do you put your time? Where do you put your effort?” he said.

In gullies, fishing nets recovered from the beaches are filled with rocks to slow the flow of the estimated 1.9 million tons of soil that runs off into the ocean every year off Kahoolawe. In the island’s restored areas, the newly built soils absorb water more than four times faster than on the hardpan.

KIRC has recognized for years that to build up the soil to reboot the dryland forest that was once established on the island, it needs soil, which means the negative effects of some invasive plants may be outweighed by their presence mitigating erosion.

Maui is facing a similar quandary, as the soil on thousands of acres of burn scars could wash away without putting something in place of the burnt foliage, which the U.S. Forest Service says could take up to three years to recover.

In late October, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service proposed an air drop of non-native seeds onto the landscape, raising concerns that it would be fueling a future fire.

Kahoolawe is also familiar with wildfires, experiencing them every few years, including in 2020, when a third of the island was burned. The cause of that fire is unknown, but could have been an illegal camper or a leftover bomb going off with the right conditions. A smaller fire in 2016 was attributed to a catalytic converter.

The 9,000-acre blaze in 2020 ran through tracts of buffelgrass, roasted kiawe and haole koa — many of the same species that fueled the Aug. 8 fires on Maui and others throughout the state in recent years.

Because of the extent of contamination with explosives, KIRC could only sit and watch as the fire moved across the island and ripped through a key supply depot on the island’s southeast end, where it destroyed two ATVs and a pair of Jet Skis.

The buffelgrass has grown back and charred kiawe trees still stand, keeping soils in place for now.

Given the lack of sufficient native seeds in storage for disasters, there needs to be a viable alternative if people take issue with the NRCS proposal to replant the burned areas on Maui with invasive grasses, according to Higashino.

“What do you have in your toolbox?” he said, careful not to endorse or outright reject the federal plan. “Something needs to be put in the ground.”

Matt Keir, a rare plant botanist with the Department of Land and Natural Resources, said he doesn’t disagree but the plan needs to advance native restoration.

“Maybe we’re selecting grass over dirt. And there’s lots of good reasons that we would want to do that,” Keir said. “It’s not the answer at the end of the book. We just need to say this chapter is going to switch to restoring some of the basic services.”

Beyond the leftover bombs, one key difference between Maui and Kahoolawe is land ownership and population. Higashino says he doesn’t have to worry about reaching a consensus with a diverse community of stakeholders like on Maui because the seven-member Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission has already laid out a plan for restoration which he is tasked with implementing.

“We’re all up against different things — money, land ownership, groups getting together and working together,” he said. “I’m glad I’m on Kahoolawe; I don’t have to deal with people or animals. All I have to deal with is bombs.”

The Kula Community Watershed Alliance, formed soon after the Aug. 8 fires, has overcome many of the land ownership hurdles in its community, after it rallied together in recognition that conditions need to change.

The alliance has already cleared 4.3 acres of invasive plants burned by the fires, chipping the cleared trees for mulch to stop erosion and lay out the conditions to restore the native landscape.

Eventually the mulch will become soil, Executive Director Sara Tekula said. But without action, tracts of Upcountry “would end up with hardpan like they have on Kahoolawe,” she said, “so we’d be in a lot worse shape.”

The restoration work on Kahoolawe has been primarily done by about 20,000 volunteers who have visited since 2003, with KIRC staff providing the necessary training.

It was the second time volunteering at Kahoolawe for Wendy Tuivaioge, who teaches Hawaiian culture to visitors at the Four Seasons.

“The island has been hurting for so long, so you have to break that cycle,” she said on the 45-minute boat ride over to Kahoolawe from Kihei. “Breaking that cycle means you have to come back and regenerate.”

And while for new visitors the landscape still appears stark, KIRC staff and repeat volunteers notice a clear difference in the vast tracts of amber earth visible from the deteriorating K-1, the island’s main road.

Crops of native grasses and shrubs pepper the area above the southeastern coast. Some were irrigated, others were not, but seedlings are now growing on their own.

From a distance it appears that bushes are only about as common as rock outcroppings, but longtime volunteer Matthew Eyerman said it’s a marked improvement since he first visited.

A decade ago, the only thing on Kanapou’s bare landscape was a line of wooden pallets, left there by Higashino to collect dust and dirt and to retain water and slow it down as it runs off the amber landscape. Now entire pallets are covered by bushes of ‘aki‘aki, among other species.

“You think you’re working on geologic time but it’s nice to see you’re working on a human timeline,” Eyerman said.

The timeline for restoring the island is often raised, said KIRC Executive Director Mike Nahoopii.

“The end result is just the culmination of a process of learning how to heal, being energized and learning the lesson that we never should let it get this bad,” he said.

Making Do

Higashino made several comparisons when explaining his methods to attract water and soil. But he said the “fundamentals” of understanding what plants need underpins everything.

“You know right where the pavement meets the cement, or a crack in Costco parking lot, where you got weeds coming up? Soil got there, there’s moisture gathering, you’ve got seed,” he said, explaining where he sometimes finds inspiration.

The fissures and ravines across Kahoolawe can provide those conditions, but where there is no crack, digging is impossible — both because it’s hard and because of potential explosives.

So Higashino and his volunteers create the conditions with the “layercake” technique, with what was left over by the military or what is already available on the land with a few inputs boated over from Maui on the Ohua, KIRC’s boat.

For the first time in his more-than 20 years working on Kahoolawe, Higashino planted his first ‘ulu tree last weekend in the hope it might yield breadfruit one day.

Standing waist-deep in one of the several fissures in the Hakio‘awa restoration area, the 69-year-old called to volunteers for the requisite ingredients: water, rocks, soil, gravel, more rocks, water crystals and, finally, the sapling.

It will grow out from the crack, by which time it should be strong enough to withstand the gales that shoot across the hardpan. It’s not 100% certain that it will survive, but Higashino thinks it might have a chance.

Thomas Boeker has planted natives across Kahoolawe on six trips over the course of a decade, some have been successful and others have not.

“With each successive trip you don’t see all the prior work as wasted time or wasted effort,” Boeker said. Instead they were “lessons for the next one.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Environmental Funders Group of the Hawaii Community Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.