Maui's Central Valley was forest, not `desert'

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# Letters To The Editor

Friday, January 10, 1997

## Not a Desert

Harry Eagar's usually informative column, Off Deadline, was full of errors Dec. 31 when confronting the issue of sugar growing in Maui's Central Valley. He spreads the fallacy that Maui's central valley was "naturally" a wasteland before sugar cultivation.

The natural state of the valley was a thick dryland forest. In this forest, giant flightless ducks, nene, and other birds roamed among trees that grew nowhere else in the world. Eagar compares the Valley to the Arizona desert. Find me one town in Arizona named for flocks of geese that lived there, as Pu`u Nene is named.

The Polynesians reduced this forest to a grassland by recurrent burning as a means to cultivate grass for thatches. But it was cattle that turned the Valley into a dust bowl. Beginning in 1793, for a whole generation cattle had been let loose to run over Maui. Cattle, pigs, goats and deer turned virtually all of Hawaii's dryland forest areas into dust. A Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands; edited by E. A. Kay (available in area bookstores), gives abundant details.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to see Maui's forests restored? The State convened a conference in Hilo this week to look into just that---the potentials of agro-forestry as a replacement for sugar cane. Mauians have far more constructive approaches to ``the sugar problem'' than espousing fallacious myths about Maui's "natural" wastelands. Reforestation would bring back one of the great lost pieces of Maui's enchantments.

Dr. Lee Altenberg, Research Affiliate

Hawai`i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
University of Hawai`i at Manoa