Saving Seafood

Both Sides in Marine Monument Fight Invoke Hawaiian Culture

August 17, 2016 — This year, a group of Native Hawaiian leaders urged President Barack Obama to expand Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, while keeping the main Hawaiian islands outside the boundaries. The move would make the monument about 582,000 square miles, more than twice the size of Texas.

The White House isn’t indicating when a decision will be made. Obama also has been asked to designate new national monuments in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Maine and elsewhere.

The effort to expand the Pacific monument has supporters and opponents invoking Hawaiian culture to further their agendas. Some believe expansion of one of the world’s largest marine conservation areas will protect a sacred place, while others say making more waters off-limits will harm fishermen for a cause pushed by environmentalists with deep pockets.

Peter Apo opposes adding the massive area to the monument and said doing so contradicts the way ancient Hawaiians managed natural resources.

Apo is a trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which supports expansion as long as the agency gets an official say in management of the area, including advocating for Native Hawaiian access.

It’s difficult to be a Native Hawaiian and an expansion opponent, Apo said.

“We look like we’re bad guys. We’re opposing what seems to be addressing a global problem,” he said of issues like climate change and overfishing that supporters point to.

He cited how Hawaiians utilized periods of kapu, or temporary restrictions in response to overharvesting.

“Food security was critical to Hawaiians,” Apo said.

It’s difficult to estimate the financial effect that expansion would have on the $100 million per year longline industry, which supplies a large portion of the fresh tuna and other fish consumed in Hawaii, said Sean Martin, president of the Hawaii Longline Association.

He estimated about 2 million pounds of fish annually come from the proposed expansion area, where vessels string lines ranging from a mile to 50 miles long in the ocean to catch fish.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

PETER APO: Marine Monument Proposal Isn’t ‘Hawaiian’

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.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

PETER APO: Obama Should Say No To Expanded Marine Monument

June 27, 2016 — President Obama is considering a request to more than quadruple the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to 580,000 square miles – an area as large as the states of Texas, California and Montana.

If Obama takes this step, the federal government essentially would assert control over hundreds of thousands of miles of ocean around Hawaii with no public discussion.

According to the Antiquities Act of 1906, the trigger to designate an area as a national monument is simply the president’s signature. No discussion required — not by Congress, not by state government and not by citizens who rely on the targeted geo-cultural area.

The Big Picture

The push to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is part of a larger global strategy to bring millions of square miles of the world’s oceans under a common umbrella of environmental protective governance that would designate vast expanses as marine sanctuaries, monuments or conservation areas.

The intent of such a sweeping global objective seems noble, given global warming and the degradation of the ocean environment. No doubt we need to manage our ocean resources better. But the zealousness with which a loose global coalition of ultra-conservative scientists and marine environmentalists are pushing to create new marine conservation areas is imposing draconian restrictions on human access to vast expanses of the ocean.

These restrictions work by installing a gatekeeper permit application process subject to a blanket of government regulations, some of which don’t make sense.

For instance, in Hawaii’s Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Monument, Native Hawaiians can practice subsistence fishing. So Hawaiians, with a conditional permit, can access the area and fish – but they have to eat the fish before leaving the zone to go home.

To this writer, clearly the analysis of the ultra-conservative wing of marine conservation scientists and environmentalists is: The less human access, the better.

The Long Shadow of Uncle Sam

The federal government already controls access to 850 square miles of Hawaii’s lands and is the second largest land owner in Hawaii. The inventory of lands under federal control, either by lease or title, includes some of the most important historic, cultural and strategically positioned lands, inland waterways and coastal waters in the state.

The list includes Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, Bellows Air Force Station, Kaneohe Marine base, Pohakuloa Training Area, upper reaches of Waimea Valley, Pililaau Army Recreation Center, Lualualei Naval ammunition depot, Fort Shafter, Tripler Army Medical Center, Camp H.M. Smith, Wheeler Army Airfield, Makua Valley, Volcanoes National Park, Haleakala National Park and a number of other less high-profile locations.

To this writer, as onerous as the degree of federal control over Hawaii lands might be, it pales compared to the tightening of the federal grip on hundreds of thousands of square miles of Hawaii’s Northwestern seas being put on the table by the request to expand the current boundaries of Papahanaumokuakea.

Read the full opinion piece at the Honolulu Civil Beat