book comes from the author’s skill in moving back and forth among the various scales of history, from the local to the global. He steps back from Molokai to take in the whole island chain and then the entire Pacific Ocean and then the ever-tightening global web of commerce so that what was isolated and local can take on transoceanic and international significance. This mixing of scales is one of environmental history’s greatest contributions to the writing of history, and Graham is masterful in weaving those scales into a single, compelling narrative.
The white Americans who led a second major human invasion of the Hawaiian Islands came full of Protestant piety and, paradoxically, smug social Darwinist beliefs. They saw themselves as the “fittest,” morally and intellectually, in any competition. By the 1890s they had managed to overthrow the native monarchy and even get the islands annexed to the United States. After those triumphs, they proved as remorseless—and even brutal—as anyone in history. In their own eyes, and especially in the eyes of the sugar planters, they had to become the “keystone species”; that is, the arbiters of good land use, the rightful heirs of plenty, and the people best equipped to create and maintain a new and better ecology.
One of the most ardent of their agents was Harold Lyon, a plant pathologist employed by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association. Enthusiastically, he served both their self-interest and his own by promoting the wholesale importation of new tree varieties from every part of the world and releasing them onto the islands to create a new and better forest. These imported plants he would pit against each other, letting them “work out their own salvation.” The result, he hoped, would be a tougher, more resilient forest that would stop erosion and runoff and save precipitation that the planters needed for irrigation projects. Lyon’s science was based on the theory of evolution, but for him evolution became a “law” that humans must obey. Islanders should take competitive nature as a model. In focusing on one prominent scientist, Graham moves downscale to illustrate the ideology that many white Americans brought to the islands and tried to implement in the landscape.
Evolutionary science and environmental history can, and indeed should, work together to illuminate the past and ground us in reality, not in myth or ideology. But the laws of nature should not dictate how we write history. There is also the matter of what ought to be. Humans, unlike the trees and birds that arrived in the islands without any volition, did a lot of thinking about what separates “right” from “wrong” and distinguishes “ought” from “is.” They came up with competing ethical standards or ideals, primarily aimed at their relations with other humans but also now and then promulgated as guides to managing nature. And writing about that struggle for ethics makes history a moral discipline as much as a scientific one.
Wisely, the author does not take a strongly partisan position in current Hawaiian politics of land claims and counterclaims. On the contrary, he skewers all those who cannot see their own moral shortcomings, including not only Lyon but also a few prominent Hawaiian nationalists of our day who want all whites simply to go “home” and leave the islands under their native rule. Molokai, among the most “backward” of the islands economically, has in recent decades become a place of refuge for those nationalists who want to restore the old ways, which supposedly would remedy all perceived injustices. Graham’s book offers a stern antidote to such nostalgic and uninformed politics, which ignores the moral failings of the precontact past and the universal workings of evolution found in all nature and in all societies. At the same time, Graham is clearly sympathetic to the contemporary plight of the common native people, who have for centuries been given a raw deal. Those commoners he portrays as undeserving of their poverty, marginalization, and loss of identity in the currents of change.
In short, like many and perhaps most historians, Graham does more than describe the evolutionary changes in environment and society. He suggests that there are moral issues intertwined in this story that need careful sorting through and thinking about, although he does not set forth any rigid set of values by which to judge the past. One wonders indeed whether there is such a moral standard that all people could agree on.
Living in Hawai‘i, as both the author and I have done, can awaken one’s sympathies for the birds, plants, and people who have been the victims of competitive evolution—the losers pushed aside or now extinct in the race to acquire and reproduce. But what should be our moral compass to complement our scientific truths? If we take Darwin as a guide to writing a deeper, more inclusive kind of history—one that puts people into nature—to whom should we turn for ethical enlightenment? Evolution and ethics can seem like two separate spheres. Historians believe that facts and values should be brought together into a single narrative, but historians are not the arbiters of morality.
The study of history may suggest that ethics and moral sensibilities have evolved in unison with or in opposition to changing structures of nature, power, and dominance. We should not build a wall between the many forms of evolution. And the historian must try to ride that narrow cusp separating fact from value. I see this more clearly than ever after reading Wade Graham’s remarkable work about a little piece of land in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so far from the world’s attention and yet so valuable for its multilayered lessons.
Hawai‘i has long been one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, and for that very reason, it has become one of the most vulnerable and endangered. Always, it forces us to consider what has been right and wrong in the past; to describe as intelligently as we can the age-old competition for habitat, natural resources, and wealth. At the same time, through the practice of history we can find our way toward greater sympathy and responsibility.
Introduction
Outer Island, In Between
What does the history of Molokai have to tell us? Molokai is an island of the Hawaiian chain, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and physically average in most respects. It is the fifth largest of the group at 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, with an area of 260 square miles and a coastline of 100 miles. It has a representative mix of the astonishing variety of environments typical of the larger Hawaiian Islands: rain forest, mesic forest, semiarid grassland, high mountain bogs, sheer sea cliffs, broad alluvial fans, sandy and rocky coastlines, and fringing coral reefs. It sits squarely in the middle of the eight main islands of the Hawaiian chain: 25 miles east of O‘ahu, the capital and metropolis of the archipelago; 8.5 miles west of Maui; and 9 miles north of Lana‘i (see map 1). On a clear day, it is in sight of five of them (only Kauai and Ni‘ihau are out of sight, below the western horizon).
MAP 1. Location of Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Basin.
Molokai is also an exception: even occupying its central position, Molokai was always marginal to the political, military, and economic affairs of the Hawaiians, and it has remained marginal in the modern US territorial and statehood periods. For centuries, it has been known as a place of failure—politically, economically, militarily—and as a place of depopulation, emigration, and exile. It has borne much of the worst social and environmental damage in Hawai‘i and continues to lead the state in indicators of malaise such as unemployment, welfare dependency, invasive species, and erosion. It was known to the ancient Hawaiians as Molokai o Pule o‘o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer), a place of sorcery, poisons, and misty, remote places of refuge, an island easy to subjugate by invading armies but difficult to fully subdue or incorporate into social and economic orders imposed from outside. It has been known for the last several generations of people in Hawai‘i as “the lonely isle,” a place most often passed by; to most of the world, it is known simply as “the living grave,” where the lepers were banished to wait for death. In all of these senses, Molokai defines the limit of what is called “outer island” Hawai‘i—peripheral and rarely visited. But in physical terms, it is not on the periphery but dead in the center of the group, its cliff-edged, wind-scoured coasts marking off the four
