It’s been more than 40 years since the National Park Service in Hawaii partnered with the University of Hawaii at Manoa to create what would become a crucial facet in the state’s conservation efforts: the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit.
It’s been more than 40 years since the National Park Service in Hawaii partnered with the University of Hawaii at Manoa to create what would become a crucial facet in the state’s conservation efforts: the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit.
Putting university scientists and researchers together with the people tasked with managing the parks seems like a no-brainer, but in the 1970s, there were almost no similar models. The lone organization that merged stewardship and science was in Mississippi, and it focused on broad national issues (this ultimately led to its disbanding).
“People wanted focus on their individual park needs,” UH professor emeritus Clifford Smith told a crowd of fellow conservationists during a Wednesday morning symposium at the 23rd annual Hawaiian Conservation Conference.
The PCSU could then use the research results to guide Hawaii’s long-term conservation plans — an approach that’s now taken for granted in the conservation world, said Sheila Conant, professor emeritus at UH and former chair of the zoology department. The organization “really broke ground.”
Today, there are nearly 350 staff members in the PCSU. Forty-eight percent are present or former University of Hawaii students and 21 percent are Native Hawaiians. Its long-term projects cover everything from studying the hoary bat population to the Maui parrotbill’s habitat.
“We really need to be paying more attention to plants and invertebrates,” Conant said, adding that she particularly was excited about two relatively new programs focusing on critically endangered plants and native snails.
Bryan Harry, a founding member of the Hawaiian Conservation Alliance, which puts on the conference, was the park superintendent at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in the 1970s.
Without the PCSU, Harry said, Hawaii’s national parks still would be nice places to visit.
“They’d be really nice,” he continued. “But there wouldn’t be any natural systems, there wouldn’t be any native systems.” And on the research side, Harry said, the university wouldn’t have world-class teachers managing those systems. The park was a natural laboratory, and with four decades of research on the books, people had access to the underrated component of historical context.
Successful ecological management involves even more widespread collaboration, however.
As the years went by, the PCSU began to work on community outreach, something that neither was funded nor considered a priority in the organization’s early days. And when outreach did become a focal point, volunteers and staffers found it difficult to convey their messages to private land owners. The technical reports weren’t something an average person would pick up and spend an afternoon reading, and the issues the PCSU was trying to broach weren’t without controversy.
“Fencing, ungulate control, setting aside conservation areas — those are already sensitive topics,” said Christy Martin, a 16-year PCSU veteran whose work focuses on alien pest species. Martin spoke of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demonstration in which people donned pig costumes to protest feral pig eradication.
The public’s mindset toward conservation began to change in part because of grassroots efforts. At Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, for instance, several Youth Conservation Corps groups helping to build ungulate fencing involved local kids.
“That really starts the ball moving,” Martin said. “They started to see the native plants and become concerned for them.”
Outreach is about “putting a human face to conservation,” she continued, and making what seems abstract a personal matter. In some cases, as with the spread of invasive miconia in the 1980s, the issue comes quite literally into people’s backyards.
“All of a sudden you had (the plants) on private lands. It really changes what needs to happen,” Martin said.
Julie Leialoha, now project coordinator for the Hawaii Cooperative Studies Unit at UH-Hilo, worked with local community associations to pay for supplies to push back the miconia.
“She had a zero budget,” Martin said. “The communities stepped up.”
Today, nearly all PCSU projects include some sort of outreach component. One of them is in downtown Hilo: the palila mural on Mamo Street.
In his closing remarks, PCSU unit leader David Duffy said that he hoped for a time when researchers would be able to create and sustain conservation projects and studies without the backbone of the organization.
“We would love to be able to go out of business,” he said. In the meantime, “I’m hoping it’ll turn out to be, in another 40 years, as inspiring.”
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.