Environmental Heroes
Meet five individuals who are helping Maui stay green and blue.
Bill Harby and Jill Engledow
Piscean Spirit
By Bill Harby
Marine biologist Hannah Bernard’s long list of good works for the ocean would easily stretch from Ma‘alaea to Molokini. She has coordinated or served on numerous research and educational projects, written articles on marine ecology for both scientific and popular publications (including Maui no ka ‘oi), and worked with organizations like Greenpeace, Earthtrust, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Maui Ocean Center. She has also won numerous environmental awards, and was named 1994 “Environmentalist of the Year” by a Maui youth group.
Bernard has founded two Maui-based nonprofit environmental organizations: The Ocean Mammal Institute and the Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund (HWF), which is her current focus.
The fund’s official mission is “to protect and conserve Hawai‘i’s native wildlife with a focus on the marine environment.” Its two longest-running projects are the Monk Seal Watch and the Hawksbill Sea Turtle Project, both developed in 1996, when HWF incorporated.
The key component of both of these projects is education. Volunteers take to the beaches where seals or turtles are sighted, and inform adoring visitors about the animals, while protecting them from well-meaning but un-akamai humans who want to pet the wild animals.
A new NWF project is The Marine Conservation Fund, which is an alliance between conservationists and marine tourism operators. First on the agenda is to repair or replace old mooring pins around Maui to avoid damaging the reefs.
Bernard has been devoting her life to protecting the oceans since a pivotal day in San Francisco, when she was just 14. “Two oil tankers collided outside the Golden Gate Bridge, so I cut school and hitchhiked down to the beach and helped clean the oil off the animals and off the beach,” she recalls.
Bernard says that her devotion to the sea may have something to do with her “Piscean spirit.” That spirit has to be especially strong these days she says. “Those of us in this work—never have we felt more under siege, and our oceans are in trouble.
They’re dying.”
What gives her hope is growing community involvement. “They’re motivated, they’re ready to stand together on a grassroots level—or sea grass level.”
To become part of that swell of activity, call Bernard at 579-9138.
Ecologically Educated
By Bill Harby
Though just 22 years old, Colin McCormick has put in more time volunteering for the environment than most of us ever will.
McCormick—whose dad describes him as a “fanatic about native plants”—began helping protect native habitats in his junior year at Maui High School when he joined the Eco-Action Club. Over the next few years, he also volunteered countless hours with organizations like Youth for Environmental Service, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Pacific Whale Sanctuary and the United States Geological Survey. With these groups, he has done beach clean-ups around Maui; he has helped pull invasive ginger and miconia in Hana and the Waikamoi Forest Preserve; he has propagated native plants, and out-planted them into their natural habitats.
While still in high school, McCormick also co-founded Na ‘Opio o ka ‘Aina, (The Youth of the Land), a small group of high school and intermediate school students from Maui, Moloka‘i and Lana‘i. They met every month to perform environmental service projects, and form community action plans. The group also testified before the county council in favor of gaining more funding for conservation efforts on Maui.
“The more I volunteered, the more inspired I became,” says McCormick, who has just graduated from the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa with a bachelor of science degree in Botany.
He was also on a local environmental TV quiz show with his Maui High classmates, and was one of the young people chosen to represent Maui at an international youth conference in Honolulu that was sponsored by the United Nations.
McCormick says many people have inspired his passion for nature and science, and names high school counselor Ron Lau as the one who first taught him about the Islands’ fragile environment.
“I’ve always felt like I have to inspire someone else, too.” Colin says, That’s why last summer he mentored several kids, taking them out to natural areas to inspire them about conservation and science.
These days, McCormick, who was raised in Kihei, says he is focused on protecting native plant populations in his local area. “I think it’s important that people should be aware not just of native plants, but also the varieties of native plants from the particular area of their island, because it’s neat how micro-evolution acts in little areas everywhere. That sort of diversity should be protected.”
The Art of Conservation
By Jill Engledow
When Art Medeiros leads volunteer workers into Maui’s forests, he sees growth not only in the endangered native plants there, but also in the volunteers.
“It’s restorative of the human soul,” Medeiros says of preserving native forests. “Every month, when we go out, I see people touched, leaving different from when they arrived.”
Medeiros has a gift for bringing people together to help revive threatened ecosystems. A U.S. Geological Survey biologist, the O‘ahu native has worked on Maui since the early 1980s.
His latest effort is a partnership of 13 landowners aiming to replant the leeward side of Haleakala with koa trees. This ambitious project requires the cooperation of ranchers, hunters, state and federal governments and assorted volunteers.
Once, the highlands of Haleakal¯a were clothed in koa, the tall, straight trees used to make canoes. Grazing animals have reduced the forest to a fraction of its former size. Reforesting will give habitat to native birds, restore a major watershed and one day, Medeiros hopes, provide logs for canoes.
While the Leeward Haleakala Watershed Restoration Partnership is just beginning, two other projects already flourish.
Working with ‘Ulupalakua Ranch, Medeiros and his volunteers have fenced in 20 acres at Auwahi to keep out animals that nearly destroyed a diverse dryland forest. Protected and replanted, Medieros says, Auwahi is “on its way back.”
On the hill above Kihei, they have fenced in 240-acres to protect Pu‘u O Kali Wiliwili Forest Preserve, “the best wiliwili forest left in the Hawaiian Islands,” says Medeiros.
He and friends have also formed ‘Olino, a nonprofit organization, to funnel cash donations and grants to these projects.
“There’s true wonder going on here in terms of diversification,” Medeiros says. “We have an opportunity to save these forests in this generation.”
To join the effort, call the Maui Dryland Forest Restoration Group at 572-4471.
The Caretaker
By Bill Harby
To meditate, a lot of people go to a temple, and so does Nobu Suda, but his temple is an ancient, over-grown heiau, and what he calls his “meditation” is to chop and tug and tear at the creeping plants that have smothered the heiau.
Almost every Wednesday for the last four years, Suda has led any other volunteers who’ve shown up to help uncover a heiau in Keanae.
“When I first went there I didn’t know there was a heiau,” he says. “You stand five feet away and you can’t see through it, it was so thick. Now you can see the whole top.”
It’s hard work pulling out the tangled hau, guava and inkberry, but Suda says, “everybody enjoys it because it’s a nice quiet place. You can meditate.”
Suda retired 15 years ago from his landscape maintenance business. Before that he worked for the state Parks and Recreation Division, and before that he labored in the pineapple fields. Born and raised in Haiku, he and his wife now live in Kihei.
So why drive an hour and a half each way once a week to do this back-breaking work? He says he wanted to help his friends, on whose property sits the heiau, and he didn’t want to see the ruins lost to history. But also very important: Nobu Suda likes to stay active.
No kidding. For eight years before he started on the heiau, he volunteered with the state Na Ala Hele hiking trail program, eventually putting in more that 1,300 hours helping build trails. Only two other volunteers in the state have put in more time with Na Ala Hele.
But now he devotes his volunteer time to the heiau. He shyly whispers that he feels “there’s a lot of spirits there.” He tells how a few weeks before, he had a sore knee, so he went to the four corners of the heiau and asked for help. “By the time I got home, no pain,” he says. “And the next day I went on an eight-mile hike.” He says there are times “when I’m chopping the trees, that it’s easy, like somebody helping you.”
Suda is also happy to accept help from us mortals. You can reach him at 874-1948.
Best of the Nest
By Jill Engledow
Last summer, every two weeks, the turtle supermom officially named 5690, and dubbed Maui Girl by some admirers, lumbered ashore, laboriously dug a hole in the sand of a West Maui beach, and deposited 80 or 90 eggs. Once again, 5690 was making history.
The turtle first appeared on Maui in 2000, the only green sea turtle known to nest on Maui in decades. She laid four nests, an impressive showing for a species that generally lays one to three nests every other year.
In 2002, the honu returned, and broke records by laying seven nests.
In 2004, she did it again, producing about 275 live hatchlings from seven nests, most on a Lahaina beach just yards from bustling Front Street.
No one knows why 5690 has chosen to nest on Maui, rather than return to her own birthplace as most turtles do. Collected as a hatchling at French Frigate Shoals in 1980, 5690 spent her first year at Sea Life Park on O‘ahu, then was released in 1981 from Hilo.
Turtle aficionados are delighted that the turtle reappeared, ID tag still attached, to lay highly visible nests that draw attention to her environmentally threatened species.
When wildlife workers arrived a few days after each hatching to free any remaining babies, 5690’s fan club gathered. Dedicated turtle watchers, excited kids and amazed tourists clustered around to watch workers gently dig to search for stragglers.
A human cheering section lined the tiny turtles’ path at a respectful distance as the babies paddled their way across the sand. Into the ocean they went, perhaps to return in 20 or 30 years to lay their own nests on this beach chosen by their amazing mother.
