How Centuries of Extractive Agriculture Helped Set the Stage for the Maui Fires

Many people dream of starting a farm. However, they must consider all the risks and costs before they make the decision to start one.

Whether it’s cattle or land, growing food or finding grants for your business, farming is not an easy venture.

In some of the old Hawaiian language newspapers, Lahaina used to have significant wetlands and lowland flats. They would say, “Lahaina sits in the house of the Ulu trees,” or the ancient breadfruit grove Malaulumulele.

People just describe almost the entirety of Lahaina town as this forested area filled with breadfruit. And as the plantations came in, they were cutting down a lot of these trees. It got to the point where they passed a law that made it illegal to cut down an ulu tree. And so plantation owners started to pile their bagasse, their spent sugarcane pressings, around the base of the tree and burn it.

After three or four burnings, it would kill the tree. They weren’t breaking the law. They weren’t cutting it down, but they were very systematically and deliberately eliminating the trees from this region.

Those trees probably had a very significant effect in terms of the region’s moisture. Deep-rooted trees are able to tap into the water table. If you look at the rainfall, Lahaina was always way too dry to grow breadfruit. But the fact that you had this huge breadfruit growth and all these wetlands essentially speaks to the fact that the trees were tapping into this subterranean water table, lifting moisture up to the surface, redepositing some of that moisture through leaf litter, allowing for additional rain capture, for reduced evaporation, increased carbon in the soil, and holding additional moisture.

You basically just had an entirely different ecology of that region for two reasons: the undisturbed flow of the river, which allowed the recharge of the subterranean water sources; and these extensive treed landscapes in that area. The plantations removed both of those. They diverted the river in its entirety and eliminated the tree cover. I think the long-term ecological implications of those changes were a huge factor in [the conditions that led to] the fire.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

It’s not a new concept, but it’s important to recognize that agriculture provides a lot of different services, most of which are not valued. Our country has, over the last century, become increasingly aware of the negative externalities of agriculture, in terms of soil loss, groundwater poisoning, and eutrophication and dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. As a country, we’ve started to acknowledge and at least begin to address the negative externalities of agriculture.

I would like to see the conversation shift to focus on agriculture’s positive impacts. Basically everything that can be done negatively, agriculture can also do it positively. Agriculture can contribute to soil remediation, improved water quality, and biodiversity. How do we encourage those activities? That work really needs to be accelerated and expanded. In Hawaiian culture, really any Indigenous culture, agriculture is the fundamental way that people interact with their environment. To me, it really sets the tone for our entire society.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Source: civileats.com