July 15, 2016 — It has surprised me that several notable Hawaiian leaders joined conservation advocates to help trigger the request to President Obama to expand the boundaries of the Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. I assume it means that they endorse the conservation model that underpins the global initiative to place 30 percent of the world’s oceans into marine reserves.
That conservation model is inconsistent with the traditional Hawaiian concepts of managing natural resources.
If the proposed monument expansion being advocated becomes law, the area that would be off-limits to fishing would dramatically balloon to 580,000 square miles, an area more twice the size of Texas.
The Western concept of conservation as a natural resource management strategy, if observed as actually practiced, seems based on two fundamental principles. The first is to “preserve” the area in perpetuity, protecting it from being used at all if possible. The second is to severely restrict humans from accessing the area, except perhaps for those who wish to study it.
The Hawaiian concept of conservation, or preservation or managing a natural resource – however you wish to characterize it – was never about closing out the resource forever. The traditional Hawaiian model would prefer planting a hillside in kalo (taro) as a productive, quality-of-life activity rather than adopting a model that would restrict access to the land simply to have it lie fallow. Indeed, by the time Captain Cook came to Hawaii in 1778, almost every bit of arable land was under cultivation, including such agriculturally marginal areas as the Kohala field system on the Big Island and Kahikinui on Maui.
Kapu Were Temporary
In practice, Hawaiians did invoke temporary kapu (restrictions) or closures in order to sustain or reinvigorate an environmental condition but always with the intention of returning it to a productive use and human access.
“Traditional Hawaiian fisheries management was carried out at a local level in sophisticated management schemes because biological processes that were the basis for management decisions often occurred on small geographical scales,” according to a 1923 Hawaiian-language article by Native Hawaiian fishing practitioner Z.P.K. Kawaikaumaiikamakaokaopua from Napoopoo.