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| Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2000 |
CULTURE ALSO PART OF ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISMby David Tenenbaum "The morning is clear and calm," the orator intoned from a mat in an open-air pavilion amid a vast tropical garden. With a fly whisk made of coconut husk resting on his shoulder and a carved wooden staff signifying his position, Gaugau Tavana plunged into a kava ceremony. Tavana, a Samoan chief and education director at the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, had explained that this tradition is used throughout Polynesia to greet honored guests and to defuse tension before negotiations. Kava, a tea made from shredded tree bark, numbs the mouth and calms the spirit. In his native Samoan, Tavana spoke with authority, his rich, sonorous voice rising above the gentle clattering of wind-rustled leaves in a river valley devoted to the vanishing native plants of Polynesia and Hawaii. Paul Cox, an ethnobotanist who directs the NTBG, translated with downcast eyes: "Voices have been heard in the depths of the underworld. We are glad that you are here. Please listen to the words that I speak." The kava ceremony was set in a section of the botanical garden devoted to plants that Polynesian settlers had brought to Hawaii 20 centuries ago. To the Polynesians, plants were not valued for "diversity" or beauty. Instead, dozens of plants, like taro and coconut, were at the core of their economy and culture, valuable enough to accompany the first Hawaiians in canoe voyages across thousands of miles of ocean. Even though we "honored guests" were actually journalists, not chiefs, the ceremony retained a certain authenticity. Long before disputes were settled by phalanxes of cell-phone-toting lawyers, the kava ceremony glued social bonds between hosts and visitors, and established a reciprocal obligation to civil behavior. By elevating us above them in status, our hosts were obliging us to honor their traditions and mana (spiritual force). The ceremony helped set the tone for the second annual Environmental Journalism Fellowship Program held May 8 to 13. The program is part of a larger effort to publicize the issues of tropical plant conservation and increase the volume and quality of reporting on the topic. Cox, a noted ethnobotanist, had enlisted NASW member JoAnn Valenti, science writing professor from Brigham Young University, to help mastermind the program. And Valenti had enlisted ten journalists for the chance to spend a week on Kauai. Often called Hawaii's Garden Isle, Kauai is the oldest large island in the remotest archipelago on earth. The scribes in this year's edition-staff and freelance writers for magazines, newspapers, and one Web site-had been told not to expect a tropical junket. Spouses, for example, were not invited. We had to pay our own way to Honolulu, after which the garden paid all expenses. We were expected to listen, question, and scribble 12 hours a day. Evenings were devoted to crafting a write-up of the day's events as a "legacy" for future attendees. I needed to return home with a 3,500-word story, and wound up deriding this onerous obligation as the "arm-and-a-legacy" project. But that's quibbling. The kava ceremony was an early sign that the seminar would deal broadly with the economic and cultural aspects of tropical conservation. Speakers at the introductory session, held in an open-air classroom overlooking NTBG's headquarters garden (the private group has three other gardens in Hawaii and another in Florida) talked about plants and the people who use them. Horticulturist Diane Ragoni, for example, described the breadfruit tree, whose large fruits are a traditional staple on many Pacific islands. Although not endangered as a species, the food is being replaced by expensive, unhealthy imported grub, so Ragoni has spent years traversing the Pacific to collect varieties for the world's largest collection of breadfruit trees, where she tries to breed better varieties. Cox and others sketched the scientific background of island biodiversity-describing genetic drift and bottlenecks, adaptive radiation, the lack of competition, and pollinator relationships. To demonstrate the intimate bond between plants and animals, Cox led us into the garden to admire the night-blooming Angrecum orchid, a yellow-flowered beauty with an eight-inch nectary. In the 1860s, Charles Darwin had predicted the existence of a moth with a stupendously long tongue, which was found 50 years later. If the one pollinator goes extinct, ditto the orchid. Cox stressed that this is not mere theory. In Samoa, where he works, a large bat that pollinates 75 percent of tree fruit species has been hunted nearly to extinction.
Too soon, we left the garden and hit the road to visit Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific." Here, scientists and resource managers from various agencies pointed out massive soil erosion due to water diversion for sugar plantations. Higher up the mountain, two panels discussed the political backdrop of conservation in Hawaii. We heard the ongoing argument between hunters and environmentalists, and then the main event-a discussion of the big kahuna of Hawaiian politics-the desire for sovereignty among many native Hawaiians, who feel, according to Kai'opua Fyfe, a member of the Native Hawaiian Convention, that the archipelago's traditional rulers were "overthrown" by the United States in 1893. The arguments were calmed, finally, by an open-air luau that served not just as interview time, but also as low-key conversations among sometimes hostile partisans. A final excursion took us to Kauai's north-west shore, where NTBG's 1,000-acre Limahuli garden rises from sea level to 3,000 feet. While lower sections were devoted to Polynesian plantings, most of the "garden" is grievously beset by weeds. The visit provided the only truly awkward moment of the week. Despite my long-standing obsession with killing invasive weeds, only JoAnn's intervention could convince the NTBG's restorationist to actually visit-not just discuss-the weed-eradication sites. The "lengthy" walk turned out to be about 500 yards. Despite the sometimes difficult interactions between scientists and scribes, mingling with dedicated botanists was a particular pleasure of the workshop. We saw extremely rare plants growing at NTBG gardens or nurseries and heard proud foster parents describe growing techniques. Most notably, we talked with Ken Wood and Steven Perlman, a daring duo who make a living hunting for rare plants throughout the Pacific by hitching ropes to trees and rappelling down cliffs. It's the only way-short of dangling from a helicopter, which they also do when money is available-to reach terrain that's not accessible to goats and pigs-principal destroyers of native plants. Cox says proudly, "We have the best rough-terrain botanists in the world. Our team will do almost anything legal, will take any risk, to help save a plant." Although the garden houses more than 1,100 unique plant varieties, its real goal is temporary storage until plants can be returned home. For now, however, Cox sees the need for an ark: "It's unsafe for (many plants) to exist in the wild." He likens the NTBG to "a home for battered women. It's not safe at home. The question is what we can do to make it safe at home." We did enjoy the odd off-task moment. Anne O'Malley, who was then the Garden's curator, arranged for us to paddle a four-person outrigger canoe that has made inter-island voyages. We dived to watch green sea turtles with Don Heacox, a straight-spoken aquatic biologist whose state employment is utterly unable to muzzle his mouth. And we spent a memorable evening at a traditional hula platform on the Napali Coast, where knife-edge cliffs slash into the ocean and all travel is by boat or foot. A private performance by a local hula group again revealed layers of complexity behind the face of conservation and change in the tropics. Far from disdaining the "hotel hula" of the 1950s and 60s, these back-to-the-basics hula dancers credited their commercial forebears for sustaining the vanishing tradition of dance and music-and thus allowing today's cultural revival. The sensuous dancing and pounding rhythm of hula was stunning enough in the foreground. In the background we journalists-accompanied by one lucky, slack-jawed tourist-saw nothing but trees, cliffs and ocean. After a Q&A on hula and a final dance, the musicians and dancers placed their leis--ceremonial necklaces--into a creche in the rocks. They turned west. As we did likewise, we watched the sun touch the Pacific. If you're considering applying for this fellowship, take my advice: Once you learn something about the islands, plan to spend some extra time there. Reason with your editor. Argue with your spouse. Do what-ever it takes, but don't board that 747 before hiking, kayaking, camping, or simply contemplating what you've learned. Next year's Environmental Journalism Fellowship Program is still under development. Information is available from JoAnn Valenti valentij@byu.edu, or at www.ntbg.org.
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