Waking Up in Eden (14 page)

Just after sunset that night I drove to the end of the cottage drive. Under the big mango tree stood what looked like a large German shepherd. Then a pack of smaller animals appeared, some coal black, others slate gray. The pigs. I counted seven little ones, as well as the big he-boar. He looked more wolf than barnyard pig, standing on tall legs, staring at me from tiny eyes that glittered devil-red in the headlights. I steered the car over the lip of the driveway and onto the lawn, stepped on the gas pedal, and charged, honking the horn. The pigs scurried around in a panicked circle, then disappeared down the ravine.

The next morning I found signs of their rooting in the newly seeded grass, not ten feet from my parked car — practically on the doorstep! Over the next weeks, I saw the pigs from time to time as they grew older and bolder. Their manes ran stiffly down their spines just like a razor. Pigs are mean, a new friend Diego the Texan warned. “They can kill you. Then they'll eat you, too,” he said. “They're meat eaters.” Some people like the pigs, which reputedly make good pets. One Garden employee confided that he and his ex-wife used to sleep with their pet pig, all two hundred pounds. The pig had her own pillow.

I had grown oblivious to the countless roosters, hens, and broods of chicks that wandered in and out of the yard. But I'd be damned if I would share the place with pigs. James also grew more and more infuriated. Finally, I gave him the okay to invite his friends in to hunt. I didn't see the pigs anymore, although once or twice I heard a far-off gun crack.

P
IGS WEREN'T THE
only pests on Kauai. For the past week, Kauai's radio stations broadcast public announcements seeking volunteers for “Operation Sweep.” About fifty of us mustered in the Anahola Valley. Our mission: to repel a vicious invader, the ivy gourd plant. This innocent-appearing vine had crept across Oahu and the Big Island, consumed hundreds of acres, smothered utility poles, and buried whole valleys. It stole sunlight and ground space from other plants, until all that remained was a thick carpet of pale green ivy. Ivy gourd could grow a foot a day. And now it threatened Kauai.

Many volunteers showed up outfitted in heavy footgear, protective hats, and T-shirts with yellow letters stenciled across the backs: Pest Action Control Team. Thirteen young sailors from the frigate USS
Crommelin
had volunteered a day of shore leave to pull weeds while their ship was docked in Nawiliwili Harbor. “There would have been more of us,” explained the ship's recreational officer, “but last night they went ashore and some didn't feel too good this morning.”

The idea of weeding the jungle seemed impossible. But the crowd reverberated with hope that they could take back the
island from the eight thousand or so invading alien plant species that were ruining it. Jimmy Nakatani, Hawaii's chairman of agriculture, flew in from Honolulu for the sweep to see if, for once, his soldiers could make a dent. “There's a good chance we can wipe out ivy gourd,” he boomed over a portable sound system. “In the case of
Miconia,
” he explained, “we waited too long to do something. In this case, we decided to do it.
Just do it
.” The megalomaniac
Miconia,
an invasive tree from South America introduced to Hawaii in 1969 as an ornamental species, was Public Enemy Number One. So far nothing could stop its explosive growth, not biological warfare with imported insects or fungi, nor weeding, nor pesticides.

A short man with a canvas duck-hunting hat pulled low over thick glasses milled around the fringes of the crowd, throwing off energy even in repose. He introduced himself as Guy Nagai, the Agriculture Department's noxious weed specialist. He had been patrolling Kauai's backwoods when he discovered a wall of ivy gourd behind a hollow of houses — the first sighting of it on the island. “Today's objective is not complete eradication,” Nagai said as he took the mike. “We're looking for annihilation of the plant at its one-acre core.”

Most enterprises in Hawaii begin with an appeal to the gods, so we gathered in a circle, locked hands, and bowed our heads. A burly volunteer dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt gave a long, lyrical blessing: “Thank you, Lord, for helping us to do this work for the good of the community and to get rid of this noxious weed that we don't need. Thank you for the people who came from land and sea. Let them work in safety as they go into uncharted territory in the valley.”

My team headed down a road walled with giant, spiky agave
and morning glory, another pest vine that long ago had spread over Kauai. Our division leader, a volunteer named Ed, stopped and pulled back a green leaf curtain. “This is what we're looking for,” he said, tugging on an inch-thick vine dangling from a host tree. He pointed to another gnarled vine, as thick as a man's forearm. “And this is what we call the mother of all mother vines.”

“We're at ground zero,” Ed announced when we reached a settlement of three wood houses, built in a vaguely hip, California style. Our man Nagai had discovered that a woman from Thailand had occupied the third house. She had apparently bought some shoots at an outdoor farmers' market and planted them in her garden. Thai grow ivy gourd for its sweet, young leaves, which when steamed taste like a tender spinach. The woman moved back to Thailand three years ago, but her garden continued to flourish. The ivy vines produced thousands of little gourds, which spilled open, releasing untold millions of seeds into the immediate vicinity and beyond.

We broke open boxes of sawtooth machetes, quart bottles of pesticide spray, and cases of burlap gunnysacks. Our team spread out along the base of the hill and started pulling. So delicate, so harmless seemed the tendril-like shoots. Larger vines with thick, woody stalks put up more resistance. We felt as if we were trying to uproot small trees bare-handed. In a few minutes I had filled my gunnysack. It was dirty work. The troops revolted. Too many vines, too few gunny sacks. We resorted to a new tactic, which was just to cut at the root and spray the stump.

By lunchtime, we quit. But our commanders were happy. Nagai estimated that we had killed 70 percent of the plants
in the one-acre core. “We did a lot of damage,” he announced happily. Agriculture and Fish and Wildlife personnel would later arrive for serious spraying. Nagai planned to rappel down cliffs at the far end of the valley to clean out the ivy there. In another three months, he predicted, all known ivy gourd on Kauai would be dead. He and his troops would continue their monitoring, quickly zapping any new growth.

S
TATE BIOLOGISTS HAVE
no real hope of ever eradicating most alien species. Since European and American colonists arrived in the early 1800s, importations of foreign plants, animals, and insects have been both deliberate and accidental. A woman who wanted berries for pie, for instance, probably transplanted blackberry brambles in innocence. Barnyard goats and pigs burrowed into the hills, but without larger predators they quickly bred out of control, now responsible for much of the devastation of island vegetation. Stowaway ants on colonists' ships crawled ashore and have been decimating the local insect kingdom ever since. Due largely to alien invasions, 70 percent of the Hawaiian bird species are now extinct; 10 percent of the native flora is gone. Most of the flora's habitat was the islands' dry, or mesic, forestland, plowed under over the last century for pineapple and cane. Less than 10 percent of that fragile habitat remains.

All over the world, the extinction rate has accelerated. The great biologist E. O. Wilson conservatively estimates that every year, 27,000 plant or animal species — three per hour — are extinguished, never to be seen again. Scientists predict that by the year 2050, two-thirds of the planet's plant species could disappear entirely.

Some argue that nothing can really be done to stop the onslaught of imported plants. After all, they argue, people have been transporting slips, seeds, and roots from one corner of the earth to another since Marco Polo. These people point out that Hitler's Third Reich tried to enforce a native-plants-only policy.

In truth, plant introductions have immeasurably enriched our landscapes and diets. The yellow iris and rugosa roses that flourish in New England, as well as the cherry trees in Washington, D.C., are all introductions. Only three native American fruits are still in commercial production — blueberries, cranberries, and Concord grapes. Our wide array of citrus, peaches, melon, plums, and other vegetables and fruits — even the apple — come from elsewhere, thanks to Johnny Appleseed, exploring botanists, and nurserymen. So the problem isn't just imported species; it's the unknown Pandora's box factor. Which of the imports will be useful to man and which will explode into monster plants?

For almost as long as imported species have been causing problems people have been trying to undo the damage. One of the most famously misguided experiments in Hawaii was the turn-of-the-century introduction of the mongoose onto the larger islands, to hunt the rats that ate through acres of sugarcane. Only after the mongooses had bred themselves out of control did the farmers observe that mongooses hunt in daylight, rats at night, and never the twain shall meet.

Rats still flourish to this day in Hawaii. The Garden's botanists have found that even on remote cliffs and atolls, the rodents eat the seeds from some of the rarest plants. Mongooses overran Oahu and Maui long ago, raiding so many birds' nests that the
seabird and wetland bird populations have almost completely disappeared. Only Kauai and Lanai remain mongoose-free. Inhabitants are determined to keep it that way. A few days ago, I picked up a flyer in my driveway printed in old Wild West lettering, with a black silhouette of a mongoose:

I called up the state wildlife biologist, who told me that a tourist had reported spotting a mongoose at the banana plantation right around the corner from my cottage. Usually such a report spurs state officials to saturate the area with traps. But the biologist expressed skepticism. Foresters suspected that the last purported mongoose found on Kauai twenty-five years ago was merely a hoax — somebody probably had imported a dead carcass. The recent tourist may have actually seen a cat, he speculated.

I worried. My cat, Sam, was just the right shade of brindled brown and gray. Sam could have easily been over at the banana farm, sneaking around like a mongoose. I had a vision of Sam trussed up as an alien species.

While the specter of mongooses causes alarm, residents fear brown tree snakes even more. These snakes ate the entire native bird population of Guam. Honolulu Airport personnel have discovered frozen brown tree snakes in the wheel wells of planes arriving from Guam. So far no live snakes. Authorities, however, are pessimistic. The state biologist confided, “The snakes are here. If we've found one dead one, it means there are dozens alive that we just haven't found.”

Last week, Agriculture Department officials convened a
brown tree snake SWAT team training session, attended by fifteen eager Kauai citizens. Instructors hid plastic snakes in trees to train volunteers to hunt and trap them at night.

There's something sweet about the idea of trying to keep serpents off the Garden Isle. But I fear that locals have as much chance as Adam had in Eden.

I
N A CHAPTER
entitled “Evils of an Exotic Civilization,” Isabella Bird regretfully noted that small-mindedness and the inability to band together for a common good plagued the Hawaiian populace. The island peoples were so divided into nationalist and ethnic origins that they exhibited “an absence of larger interests shared in common,” she wrote. “Except sugar and dollars, one rarely hears any subject spoken about with general interest. . . . Those intellectual movements of the West which might provoke discussion and conversation are not cordially entered into, partly owing to the difference in theological beliefs, and partly from an indolence born of the climate, and the lack of mental stimulus.”

That observation, made in 1873, seemed still valid today when it came to plant rescue in the face of impending disaster. Perhaps more than any other place on the planet, the Hawaiian botanists had a mandate for staging a concerted, organized effort to study and preserve the native plants before they disappeared. Yet many botanists here wasted much of their energy arguing. The Garden's botanists were mad at the Nature Conservancy for grabbing credit for discovering species; other botanists were annoyed at the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources for proposing regulations governing propagation of endangered species. Rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic,
I called it. Botanists couldn't even agree on counting the species, much less saving them.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the feud between Harold St. John, Hawaii's botanical titan of the twentieth century, and upstart Warren Wagner. St. John was a little guy, short and wiry with a crew cut, who marched into the field on plant collection expeditions wearing his World War I–era buttoned spats over high boots. A cutthroat tennis player, his motto was “If I can't win, I won't play.” He stayed on the courts until age ninety-eight. St. John spent most of his long life in Hawaii, roosting at Honolulu's Bishop Museum, dominating the islands' botanical studies.

Some taxonomists are lumpers, lumping together different variations of one plant into one species. Others are splitters, who consider each and every distinction, no matter how minute, to constitute a separate species. St. John became the biggest splitter of all time, dividing what he had earlier classified as one species into two or three, or in some cases, two dozen or more.

St. John epitomized botanists of his era, thrilled with the dramatic speciation in Hawaii, the formation of multiple species from a single ancestor. Nowadays, botanists are trained to look for hybrids — crossing of species resulting in what appear to be new species but are really just variations. As St. John grew older, he continued to split and subdivide, claiming more and more new discoveries.