I bent over placards introducing Pritchardia limahuliensis, a native fan palm endemic only to this Hawaiian valley, as I strolled the paths of Limahuli Garden & Preserve, my jacket soaked through by the steady rain typical of Kauai’s lush north shore, and inhaled the sweet scent of the white hibiscus koki’o ke’oke’o, once thought extinct.
However, even though I had come to Limahuli eager to see such rarities preserved in this 17-acre National Tropical Botanical Garden, I soon became entranced by something even more amazing: intricate layers of old rock-walled terraces that climbed the valley and disappeared into the dense highland forests above. They are a part of an ancient ahupua’a, an advanced system of land management and food production that once allowed Hawaii’s remote and densely populated pre-contact societies to be completely self-sufficient. Carbon dating has revealed that they are more than 1,000 years old.
Pre-contact, there were over 50 ahupua’a on Kauai, and there were hundreds or perhaps thousands more on the other Hawaiian islands.
Each ahupua’a had its narrow starting point high in the inland volcanic peaks and then widened, like a pie slice, to embrace a stretch of shore and the fishing grounds up to a mile out to sea. The Hawaiians described this area as spanning from mauka (mountains) to makai (ocean). To irrigate lo’i kalo (lowland taro pond fields), stream water was redirected into channels that were designed to move water from pond to pond and minimize stagnation. As a result, dryland farming produces five times as much per acre.
Extensive rock-walled fishponds blended nutrient-rich water from the taro ponds with tidal flow where freshwater streams met the ocean, producing the perfect environment for fattening fish caught through sluice gates. Except for people with understanding of forest care, the uplands were off-limits since they were regarded as wao akua (the realm of the gods).
Water is the organizing basis of the ahupua’a, according to Davianna Pmaikai McGregor, professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “Our word for wealth in Hawaiian is wa’i wai because if you had an abundance of water, your land was rich and you had an abundance of food,” says one Hawaiian speaker.
Decades of work to maintain and restore one of the last surviving instances of a complete ahupua’a are paying off in the town of H’ena at Kauai’s isolated northwestern point. 600 acres of agricultural terracing have now been restored by H’ena’s Limahuli Garden & Preserve. In addition to rebuilding taro ponds and revitalizing traditional mountains-to-sea land management, Hui Maka’inana o Makana, a grassroots community group that includes many descendants of H’ena’s original families, has also established the first state-sanctioned, community-based marine fishery.
As a result, H’ena has come to serve as a role model for initiatives to protect already-existing ahupua’a on all of the islands and to rebuild others that were long-since devastated by pineapple plantations and cattle ranches.
Lei Wann, director of Limahuli Garden & Preserve and a descendant of one of the original H’ena families, noted that the apuhua’a system was “extremely holistic, thinking about the ecology of the whole watershed, the agricultural area, and fisheries as one location.” Since we’ve been using this method to manage our resources for so long, we can now assess how effectively past generations understood and protected their environment based on what is still around.
The state government, the parks service, and private landowners are collaborating with courageous and diverse coalitions of community activists, scientists, and environmentalists on the islands to re-establish traditional sustainable practices. They are adapting them to the contemporary environment through initiatives that have made them well-known internationally, a crucial objective in a US state that now notoriously imports 85% of its food.
Sam ‘Ohu Gon, senior scientist at the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific, a task of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, described the ahupua’a as the “guide map to searching at Hawaii from a totally usual Hawaiian factor of view, taking you returned hundreds of years and imparting you the ideas of the humans who have lived there and been stewards of the land all this time.” It serves as a gateway to all of the historic know-how that is nevertheless actually applicable today.
In fact, according to Gon, the ahupua’a system, also known as moku, may serve as a blueprint for how to sustainably feed and house the planet’s expanding population in the face of climate change. Hawaiians were able to sustain several hundred thousand people without any outside help thanks to their tightly regulated farming and fishing systems, which used less than 15% of their terrestrial ecosystem, according to him.
The potential previous production and distribution capacity of these ahupua’a were calculated by scientists using spatial distribution models, and their future potential was assessed by accounting for current land use and a variety of potential future climate scenarios. They discovered that those production levels might satisfy the present-day consumption needs of Hawaiians. Hawaii was chosen by the UN in 2018 to be a Local2030 Sustainability Hub, an honor that acknowledges the state’s effective community-led organizing initiatives and their potential to serve as a role model for others.
Projects to restore native species, reforest uplands ravaged by grazing, reclaim estuaries, reconstruct taro fields and fishponds, and safeguard ocean fisheries are currently underway on every Hawaiian island. While new signage projects are delineating the boundaries of traditional ahupua’a, boosting awareness of the holistic system, in most regions, development hinders the restoration of a whole ahupua’a system.