Kaho’olawe: The Other Forbidden Island
Off the west side of Maui are three visible islands (and the crater). One is Moloka’i, one of Hawaii’s lesser-visited, more sparsely-populated islands–also called the Friendly Isle. Another is Lana’i, the most private of the main islands. The third is totally uninhabited, unlike the other forbidden island in the chain, Ni’ihau. It’s Kaho’olawe, an island that will likely be long vacant due to its interesting, and later very unfortunate history.
During the 1800s, during the rule of King Kamehameha I, Kaho’olawe was the site of the Hawaiian kingdom’s penal colony. Men were banished there, for such crimes as stealing, breaking marriage vows, and promoting Catholicism.
King Kamehameha II reserved the island for government operations, a radical new concept to the old Hawaiian regime. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Kaho’olawe was leased to ranchers, who populated the island with grazing animals that eroded the landscape by summarily reducing the island’s vegetation down to nothing.
Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that was the end of Kaho’olawe as a viable habitat for residents or tourists. For the next fifty years, the island endured virtually irreversible damage from the US government in the form of constant munitions testing.
Today, Kaho’olawe is strictly off limits to visitors, including the waters approaching the shoreline, mostly because sections of the islands are riddled with unexploded ordnance from Kaho’olawe’s days as a practice target for the US Navy.
But Kaho’olawe has sustained some other, indirect climate and environmental changes as the result of farming and ranching. The great bridging cloud that once spanned the forest of Maui to the island of Kohoolawe, has disappeared as cutting and cattle destroyed the upper forests on Maui. With the cloud forest gone, and the rivers dry, Kaho’olawe is a true desert island.
In 1998, the United States Navy began a federally funded 10 year cleanup program which fell far short of its restorative objectives. Now Kaho’olawe preservationists are working diligently to remove the remaining unexploded ordnance, and to resoil & re-vitalize the land, and rejuvenate its cultural and historical value.
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