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Ancient Hawaiian Fishponds

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Old Hawaii had nearly 500 artificial fishponds. It took about a century to ruin most of them, or cause them to be abandoned. And for nearly that long, efforts have been made to start restoring the ponds.
The restoration movement has produced a string of failures. The focus (as of 1998, when this book was published) was on the south shore of Molokai, but planner Joseph Farber considered it to be "on the edge of failure."
"Ancient Hawaiian Fishponds" is an alternative development plan that would retain but demote technical experts and give real decision-making power to a community organization with an anti-Western (or subsistence) economic outlook.
A fishpond that is not too badly decayed can be restored, physically, for the price of a new 4 X 4 pickup truck. But regulatory costs can easily equal or exceed the work costs.
On Molokai, said Farber, all efforts were at a halt because state health regulators (following federal requirements) were not allowing any work to be done in pristine ocean waters -- not even moving fallen rocks back onto a pile where they had rested for several hundred years.
The idea that the ocean off Molokai is Class AA (pristine) and untouchable is a stupid joke to Molokai people, who watch thousands of tons of sediment erode off the naked hillsides every time it rains.
Farber considers that the ruin of the fishponds was a consequence of Western ideas of land ownership and production. In the old days, he believes, the community worked together under the direction of chiefs and konohiki (overseers) to successfully manage a valuable resource.
So, in addition to putting direction back into the community, he advocates eliminating (or at least simplifying) environmental regulations. "For fishponds to operate properly, the entire ahupuaa (adminsitrative district from shore to mountaintop) must be considered as a planning unit," says Farber. Divided ownership tends to prevent this.
In his interpretation, the high costs of meeting environmental regulations mean that only entities with lots of money can even attempt shoreline projects.
A community group cannot afford "the regulatory risks," which include "complexity and ambiguity" of interpretation, delays and inaction, changes in regulations, miscommunication, and lawsuits and administrative appeals against a project.
No doubt Western-style developers, who Farber evidently detests, would say the same about their regulatory hurdles.
There are two possibilities: The environmental regulations are too demanding and should be relaxed for all applicants; or, the regulations are just about right, but community organizations should be allowed to get away with an inadequate job, while monied interests should still have to do a good job.
Alternative two, despite its evident unfairness, is Farber's choice.
But before getting to that point, it is necessary to clarify the economic function of a Hawaiian fishpond. Farber is no help here.
The first question that needs answering before fishponds are restored is whether they can be made to pay for their own renaissance or will need a permanent subsidy.
And that depends on how much fish you can get. Farber gives many productivity assessments, wildly differing, with no way to tell which could be reliable.
The fact that ponds were unable to compete with commercial ocean fishing in the 19th century, which Farber acknowledges, suggests that fishponds are not the easy management system they are cracked up to be.
There are many suggestions that it is wrong to imagine that Hawaiians were interested in producing a high yield of fish, per acre, per year or per laborer.
First of all, commoners (makaainana) did not get to eat fish from most of the ponds, though they were driven to do all the work.
The actual goal of most ponds appears to have been production of a small amount of high-quality fish for an elite. The fish raised in a pond on Kauai and delivered live for a chief's lunch on the Big Island must have been the most expensive food, in terms of labor input, ever eaten.
But if that is the case, then the only hope for restoring the ponds is to have a large, permanent subsidy.
That would not be hard to justify. Farber says, "Fishponds have an intrinsic value far beyond mere economic considerations."
That is not quite right. The Old Hawaiians did not ignore economics. They just valued a fish differently if it was fed to a chief than if a slogger in the taro ponds ate it.
That valuation no longer pertains. If everybody pays the same for fish, the ponds can never pay their own way in fish. But maybe they could in culture.