Sandalwood Salvation
Sandalwood Salvation
bringing back a forest, bringing back the rain, bringing back Hawaii
How lucky am I? First, an invitation to speak at a conference in Honolulu about two of my favorite topics, Integrative Design and the Materials Transition. Then a second invitation to stay at a friend’s “ohana” (guest house) halfway up a mountain on the Big Island, with a panoramic view of the Pacific.
Then my generous friend with the spectacular ohana, Gay, calls her neighbor, Wade Lee, a wildlife life ecologist who has been restoring a native sandalwood forest. And there comes invitation number three.
Both Gay and Wade are part Hawaiian, with stories of their ancestors weaving seamlessly into their everyday conversation. They know what’s native, what’s not, what’s missing and what happened. To my eyes, riding shotgun in an SUV across what really is a very big island, Hawaii is an endless segue of breathtaking vistas: lush jungles, waterfalls, lava fields, black sand beaches, big skies, big cliffs, grasslands, cinder domes, volcanic mountains. We drive through small towns with an unexpected cowboy vibe thanks to an Old West style of wooden storefronts. The murals, though, are pure Hawaii, with plenty of palm fronds and the occasional surf board.
I can see only the here and now, the surface. But for Gay and Wade, the landscape tells stories that go as far back as the beginning of time, to their personal history of what life was like for their families before Hawaii became a state.
In Wade’s great-grandmother’s time (her name was Kawewehiokealiiokalanikamamalu), about a million people lived on the islands and it was still possible to support a family growing taro. Almost everything Hawaiians needed could be sourced from the land or the sea. A century earlier, before a British explorer “discovered” Hawaii and opened the door to foreign trade, everything Hawaiians needed had to be sourced from the land or the sea. The closest landmass, the tiny atoll of Kiritimati, was 1,300 miles away.
If you hurt the land and the land no longer produces what you need to survive, you won’t survive. So in order for Hawaiians to sustain themselves, they truly believe that if you take care of the land, the land will automatically take care of you. — Wade Lee
Sustainability wasn’t an aspirational tagline. It was a given.
Today, with a population hovering near 1.5 million, almost everything from food to fuel is shipped in. The new “land and sea” are supermarkets and Costco.
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In 1778, in the grand tradition of seafaring explorers looking for short-cuts to India, Captain James Cook found something else: Hawaii. That same year, a newly minted United States, having declared its independence two years prior, was in the thick of fighting the Captain’s compatriots in a long, bloody Revolutionary War. No one could have predicted that Cook’s accidental find half a world away would set in motion long series of mostly unfortunate events that would eventually lead to Hawaii becoming the Union’s 50th and perhaps final state 181 years later in 1959.
There were disease outbreaks. Massive foreign trade debts. Missionaries. Massive foreign land grabs. Cattle ranches. Sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations. Invasive species. Pearl Harbor. And in more recent times, the beige ubiquity of highrise tourist hotels and the blight of billionaires.
Yet Hawaii still has an unconquerable wildness to it, a story so ancient there is a sense that this, too, whatever it may be, will pass. What are a few centuries in a 70 million year epic that began with Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, creating the islands?
On another day’s adventure, Gay took me to walk among Hawaiian petroglyphs carved into rocks in a narrow lava field that today is sandwiched between two halves of a golf course, not far from a high-end subdivision and some strip malls. It is thought they were made to record significant events: births, travels, political triumphs. They are hundreds of years old, perhaps more. But it is their very existence that is the most easily deciphered and enduring message. Like the lava fields upon which they are etched, they are proof that much happened before we were here. Much more will happen after we are gone.
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But we are here, now. This is our moment to make a difference.
Fifteen years ago, Wade’s family seized their moment, jumping at the chance to buy back some of their ancestral land, land that had been degraded, abused, squandered. They took out mortgages, cashed in 401Ks and bet everything on the wrecked remnants of what once was an Eden. For Wade, it was a daunting dream come true.
The Lee family had their work cut out for them and no playbook to follow. The sandalwood forest they remembered had been clear-cut to create a cattle ranch. Instead of trees, the landscape was covered in kikuyu grass brought in from Africa to feed livestock brought in from California. Meanwhile, mongooses imported during the 18th century to rid sugar plantations of rats spread to many of the islands, including the Big Island. There they decimated—and continue to decimate—native wildlife. Several bird species have been driven to extinction. But rats, which are nighttime marauders, continue to thrive. It turns out, mongooses hunt during the day.
Halfway up the mountain on this side of the Big Island is a “dryland,” which means there is no irrigation. That wasn’t a problem when the annual rainfall tallied 40 inches. But turning a forest into a grassland broke the natural water cycle. The grass dried out and became easy tinder for fires. Topsoil, always thin on a volcanic island, eroded, leaving the land scarred.
Gay and I drove up the mountain on a one lane road past feral goats (another legacy of Captain Cook), through two sets of electric gates, the vast Pacific Ocean disappearing in the rearview mirror. Then suddenly there it was, a thriving sandalwood and koa forest, lush and green. A small dog, a self-appointed greeter, could barely contain his excitement announcing our arrival.
Wade gave us a brief primer on all things sandalwood. Six of the 18 species are native to Hawaii and, thanks to biology, simply can’t be grown in a plantation-style monoculture. It turns out it takes a forest to grow a sandalwood tree. They are hemi-parasites that tap into the roots of other plants for water. Koa trees make particularly good partners, or perhaps victims. No one has yet figured out the benefit to the koas, which are pretty amazing trees in their own right. What look like leaves are actually part of the stem, oriented not to gather light but to gather moisture from mists rising up from the ocean. Droplets funnel down a center crease in these stem-leaves, efficiently dripping water to the tree line where it is taken up by the koa’s roots and from there syphoned off by thirsty sandalwoods.
Water also transpires into the air through the stomata (pores) of sandalwood leaves and koa stem-leaves, reigniting a cycle of evaporation and rain. Last year, more than 40” of rain fell on the forest the Lee family has named Hāloa ʻĀina, an homage to Hawaii’s origin story about the mutual responsibility of people and land to take care of and provide for one another.
Life-giving water had revived soil microbiomes as well, percolating slowly through the ground downhill all the way back to the sea in an epic journey that takes a thousand years.
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Hāloa ʻĀina is a Hawaii’s answer to Knepp, the famous “wilding” project half a world away in the English countryside. Like Knepp (featured in books and now in a new documentary), Hāloa ʻĀina works because it embraces the dynamic complexity of nature. The land will never be exactly as it was pre-Captain Cook, but the functionality of the land has been restored.
Of course, not all the plants, animals and insects that made up the historic forest will come back. Some no longer exist. But each year more species of plants, animals and insects take up residence. Each year, the forest becomes more complex, resilient and prosperous.
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As a sandalwood tree ages, it begins to take up minerals from the soil in an effort to stave off disease. High concentrations of minerals improve the quality of sandalwood oil, very likely contributing to its antimicrobial properties and other health benefits. Sandalwood’s value for Hawaiians has always been therapeutic, not aromatic, although its scent is a slice of heaven. At Hāloa ʻĀina, only dead trees and branches are harvested because they have the highest concentration of minerals and make the most potent oils. It can take more than a half-century for a sandalwood tree to die, so this is not a fast crop.
Like Knepp, sales of farm/forest products (including oils that at retail can run several hundred dollars for a few ounces) and public tours of the land help pay the bills.
By every measure, Hāloa ʻĀina is a success. Wade is now writing the playbook the family wished they’d had fifteen years ago: a plan to help reforestation efforts throughout Hawaii.
Gay and I drove back down the one lane road, past the goats and toward the ocean. I felt more at peace than I have in quite a long time. In a world filled with way too much brow-furrowing, nail-biter news, here was proof it is still possible to reverse the damage, to fix at least some of what has been so horribly, carelessly, naively and sometimes intentionally damaged.
There is salvation in sandalwood.
How lucky are we?
Related post: Nature Bats Last
Related podcast: Restoring Water Cycles and Ecosystems with Alpha Lo