Customer Reviews

Conservation Biology in Hawaii (Cooperative National Park Resources Study Unit)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though it lacks a catchy title,"Conservation Biology in Hawaii" is intended for -- and deserves to find -- a large readership.
Its 32 authors are beating the drum for a particular view of life in these remotest of islands -- in the words of University of Hawaii biologist Kenneth Kaneshiro, that "the single most important resource of Hawaii is its native biota."
It is unlikely that many people share this belief. The great majority of Hawaii's people live in areas where very little of the original native plants and animals are left.
Before there can be a successful campaign for public support to save the remaining native areas, the conservation biologists will have to educate the voting public about the uniqueness of the islands' life.
Lloyd Loope, a researcher at Haleakala National Park on Maui, and Samuel Gon of the Hawaii Heritage Program point out that "Hawaii has the highest biological diversity per unit area in the United States."
It is not going to be easy to persuade most people that Hawaii's original lifeforms are "diverse" when the islands lack Polynesian reptiles, amphibians and pine trees and have few birds and almost no mammals. To a person who has lived on the Mainland, where a city neighborhood may be home to more than 100 kinds of birds, even the richest areas of Hawaiian birdlife seem impoverished.
The diversity that seems so precious to the evolutionary biologist can seem trivial to the layperson.
Hawaii has (or had) 300 kinds of land snails, but they are virtually indistinguishable except to another snail. A reduction in snail species to 299, or even to 99, may seem like a small loss.
But it can also be looked at another way. The islands are 70 million years old, and in that time only about 1,000 species of plants and animals successfully reached here. That is, only once every 70,000 years did a new organism find Hawaii and survive.
These lucky thousand rapidly evolved and split, until by the time humans arrived there were about 9,000 species in Hawaii. About 95% exist nowhere else, the highest percentage of endemism in the world.
Trying to save these 9,000 species one by one is futile. The strategy advocated by Charles and Danielle Stone, who work at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, is to preserve "natural areas." There are 175 different natural plant communities in the state, each supporting its complement of animals.
Only about half these 175 are reasonably safe from deliberate or accidental elimination now.
The dozens of short essays in this book will help any concerned citizen clarify his understanding of what change means to Hawaii's natural heritage. It is not necessary to read the whole book to understand the proposition, and apparently the editors don't expect most readers to do so.
From the point of view of political effectiveness, defenders of wildlife frequently hurt themselves by being too stringent. With two exceptions, the writers in "Conservation Biology" are not guilty of that.
But even these moderates find plenty of groups to find serious fault with: hunters, military officers, pet shot owners, state land use planners.
It is not only future developments that threaten what remains of the Polynesian lifeforms of the archipelago; many existing practices are steadily driving native plants and animals to desperate levels.
The authors recruited by the Stones present a strong case and they have a specific political program, which can be summed up as "functioning ecosystems offer the best return on the conservation investment."
Whether you agree or disagree, "Conservation Biology in Hawaii" is such a clear and accessible presentation of one side of the controversy that it makes itself indispensable.