any note of the physical world around them, tended to do so in a fragmentary way. A major shortcoming is a lack of attention to scientific studies, from archaeology, paleobiology, geomorphology, and other fields, which have the potential to fill in the wide blanks in the historical documentation. In addition, since the publication of most existing Hawaiian histories, the volume and quality of such work has multiplied enormously.7 This study has relied on several layers and registers of evidence, from traditional historic documents to recent research in the natural and social sciences to visual evidence such as images and mapping, in order to try to reconstruct and diagram physical changes in the islands; to provide a kind of moving picture of the sensible Hawaiian world; and to analyze these changes against the broader social, economic, and political canvasses.
The major signal exception to the foregoing complaints is the work of Patrick V. Kirch, one of the world’s leading Pacific archaeologists, and Marshall Sahlins, one of the world’s leading Pacific historical anthropologists, on the relation between Hawaiian social structure and history. Their 1992 collaboration, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, a two-volume study of a valley in Waialua District, windward O‘ahu, is a synthesis and pairing between archaeological and ethnohistorical investigations of the history of the Anahulu River valley, from precontact up to the aftermath of the Mahele, or land revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. By linking changes in the environmental and the social and insisting that historical analysis map both registers onto one another, this approach illuminates riddles that would otherwise have remained opaque. For example, the authors found, through archaeological excavation, a vast extension of irrigated taro pondfield and ditch construction in the upper valley, about which historical documentation had contained barely a hint. This building boom coincided with King Kamehameha’s second garrisoning of O‘ahu from 1795 to about 1810. They deduced that the king, having seen his first attempt at occupying the island collapse as famine spread under the pressure of his armies, resolved to install a self-sufficient warrior-farmer garrison that could endure indefinitely by settling his Hawai‘i-island fighters and their families on new taro lands high in the watershed. From 1810 to 1825, these lands were gradually abandoned as the ascendant Ka‘ahumanu faction of the ali‘i shifted its corvée demands away from agricultural produce to sandalwood cutting. Briefly, after 1829, there was a new burst of activity, ending with the total collapse of sandalwood resources.8 These discoveries confirm the basic interrelatedness of the natural and the social. Another example of interest is the evidence Anahulu presents of devastation caused by crop and plant diseases, blights, and animal invasions to the productive capacity of rural Waialua District, ultimately contributing to its social and demographic collapse.
Kirch and Sahlins tried, in their words, to “bring down the history of the world to the Anahulu river valley.”9 This study takes theirs as an inspiration, but it differs in that its Hawaiian location is larger, its time span longer, and its analytical framework focused on the reciprocating interactions between environment, economy, and society moreso than on the social structure as the driver of these.
Several works from American environmental history have helped to guide this study. A general model of how an environmentally literate history can illuminate larger historical questions is Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism.10 Applied to Hawai‘i, Crosby’s approach would benefit from a greater attention to diverse scientific and social scientific literature, to historical geography, and to the native Hawaiian side of the story, expressly including the history of processes begun by Polynesians that then continued, often in radically accelerated form, after 1778. In this regard, William Cronon’s book Changes in the Land and Stephen J. Pyne’s work, including Fire in America and Burning Bush, are excellent examples of how indigenous practices powerfully shaped land and water long before European arrivals.11 The work of Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, and Richard White on borderlands and frontiers is directly applicable to the history of Hawai‘i, which, in the period from contact in 1778 to the American-led overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, while remaining nominally sovereign, was nevertheless a borderland between competing imperial powers in the Pacific and a place where a diverse mixture of people from all over the world shared space with native Hawaiians in a complex, shifting “middle ground” between overlapping, rivalrous sets of political, economic, military, cultural, and environmental worldviews and practices.12
Donald Worster’s lifelong focus on how structures of class, expertise, and power interact in the settlement of marginal landscapes and, not coincidentally, his focus on the links between irrigated agriculture and political domination, inform this study throughout.13 Indeed, the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which he chronicled in Rivers of Empire, played a central role in the transformation of West Molokai into a terrain of industrial agriculture in the second half of the twentieth century (as will be seen in chapter 5). In Molokai and elsewhere in Hawai‘i, the Bureau of Reclamation and other government agencies at both the state and federal levels actively intervened on behalf of large landowners and commercial interests by imposing policy, fiscal, and legal frameworks that aided their capture of resources, often to the detriment of smaller, local interest groups and communities. This aspect of Hawai‘i’s history underscores its commonalities and continuities with the experience of the American West, including Alaska, with state and federal lands and environmental agencies and policies.
The recent work of Jared Diamond has brought wide attention to many of the insights of environmental historians by synthesizing their work and that of numerous scientific investigators in some of the fields previously listed into large-scale, panoramic histories of human experience, using comparisons between large and small social and physical entities, sometimes widely separated in time and space.14 His book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed proposed to link environmental factors with the historical failures or the collapse of societies. Diamond’s initial premise was that factors such as soil fragility, aridity, small size, extreme climatic conditions, and climate change contributed greatly to the likelihood of failure of societies. But in his survey of case histories, it is clear that the environment is rarely the determining factor. Severe cases of collapse occur both on small islands, such as Easter and Henderson in the South Pacific, and in large continental regions, such as the American Southwest and Central America. While all seem to share one or more types of ecological marginality, there are many different variables. Diamond tirelessly cataloged and sorted natural structures and factors according to rubrics such as fragility versus resilience or eight kinds of degradation, including deforestation, soil degradation, overhunting or overfishing, population growth, and so on. Yet, given his inclusion of so many dissimilar places, no pattern emerged that convinces one that environmental damage is a programmatic, comprehensible factor in the success or failure of different societies in different places at different times. Diamond allowed as much in his introduction to the volume, admitting, “I don’t know of any case in which a society’s collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contributing factors. When I began this book, I didn’t appreciate those complications, and I naively thought the book would be about environmental damage.” He designated five sets of factors: environment, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trading partners, and each “society’s response to its environmental problems.”15 On completing the study, he found that only the last factor “always proves significant”; the first four “may or may not prove significant.” In spite of the exhaustive taxonomies of factors, no hierarchy organizes all the many variables, and no set of rules orders them into a global logic or a set of criteria that would be useful for prediction. Each case study is a good description and is unique, like an address—or a history. In the end, Diamond succeeded in writing a series of fascinating histories—a venerable and valuable narrative art form to be sure—but fell short of his goal of finding a kind of science of the failures of societies.
What was missing, even from the point of view of satisfying narratives, was an appreciation for culture, a thing much maligned among historians and scientists alike, apparently because of its high-profile career among the anthropologists in the twentieth century. But it is inescapable. Even in the case of the smallest, most resource-impoverished places that Diamond described, it is easier to
