by wai (freshwater), carried from the stream in ‘auwai (ditches) and hawai (wooden flumes), often of bamboo stems (ha). Wai as the giver of life is associated with Kāne, the first god and giver of water: kāne ka wai ola. In prayers and mythic tales, it is the significant basis of the spiritual and of fertility. As an element, it is the basis of waiwai (wealth)—literally, much water.
Wai provides the founding structure of the human community, physical and legal: Hawaiian law, called kānāwai, “of the water,” describes first the management of water, which is itself a literal map of the division and tenure of land, and from this, the rigid system of ranking and class that overlays the productive landscape—each level called papa (stone strata), the same as the walls and terraces that divide and guide and submit the stream waters to orderly production. The lo’i and its associated irrigation works, barrages, ‘auwai, headgates, and so on are constructed by laulima (community labor, “many, many hands”). Under the rule of the luna wai (water boss), each planter receives a share of water in proportion to the amount of labor contributed, both in construction and in maintenance, to keeping the ditches clean and clear. Each ‘ohana tends an ‘ili (a collection of productive spaces made up of lo‘i ponds), kuauna (the banks of ponds and ditches where banana, coconut, sugarcane, and other crops are planted), mo‘o (strips of kalo or ‘uala land), and pauku (yet smaller strips, “land cut off”). An ‘ili could be pa‘a (complete) or an ‘ili lele (jumping ‘ili), made up of various noncontiguous pieces and strips. It could be an ‘ili ‘āina, subject to the konohiki (chief’s man) who controls the environs, or an ‘ili kupono, paying tribute directly to the ruling chief. Within it were koele (plots) cultivated for the ali‘i, who were designated by what kuakua (portion) of the land they eat: the ali‘i ‘ai ‘ili, ali‘i ‘ai ahupua‘a, “the chief who eats the subdistrict,” and the ali‘i ‘ai moku, “the chief who eats the major district or island.” Koele were also called po-a-lima (fifth-day patches), as they were worked for the chiefs on Fridays. Next were haku (lord or overseer) one, plots for konohiki; mahina ‘ai, usually dry-farmed plots for the people; and kihapai, plots for the tenants.
Together, all the ‘ili belong to an ahupua‘a, the basic political division in Hawai‘i.51 At the top of the ahupua‘a, generally organized as a single watershed demarcated by ridgelines, are the mountains and the uninhabited forested uplands, wao (wild, unpeopled), where wild foods and birds are gathered; next are the kula lands, where ‘uala and other dry crops are grown, where pili grass is gathered for thatching houses and where groves of kukui trees are harvested for their nuts for candles and food, and wauke (paper mulberry) trees are tended for their bark, which is pounded into kapa cloth. Then, the stream (kahawai) flows through the cultivated landscape (au) or the reticulate, irrigated pondfields to the beach (kahakai) and finally, to the sea (kai). Under the right conditions, rock-walled fishponds are built, either just inshore (loko wai) or offshore (loko kuapa), turning the space where the freshwater (wai), meets and mingles with the saltwater (kai), into fat fish, another kind of waiwai. Fishponds effectively encircled the sea, attaching it and assimilating it to the controlled relations of production of the land; they complete the linkage between the top of the watershed and the sea in both physical-environmental terms and political terms. Hawaiian space, bounded by the relation between water and land, is a fundamentally islanded space: the productive landscape is segmented and divided into ever-smaller pieces, each an island with its own water supply, isolated yet linked with others in a larger archipelago, which is itself surrounded by trackless, unproductive, uncontrolled wastes: the lo‘i and mo‘o within the ‘ili, the groves and patches within the kula, the stream surrounded by the wao of the forests; the ahupua‘a by the moku, the island surrounded by other islands, and they by the endless sea, where no chiefs claim rights. As physical space, land, and water is structured by environmental constraints, so too is it structured by the social hierarchy with its myriad subtle gradations, divisions, and constraints. And, vice versa, Hawaiian social space is fundamentally structured by the environment. The two are intimately grafted onto one another and are illegible as independent ideas (see map 2).
MAP 2. Map from 1901 showing locations of ahupua‘a land divisions and fishponds.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SETTLEMENT
The landscape was extensively transformed by people, both to fit their needs and inadvertently. Forests covering much of the lowlands were cleared, especially the leeward dry forests. When Europeans arrived, many remarked on the treeless character of the Hawaiian coastal uplands, which seem to have been mainly grasslands with interspersed fields and stands of trees extending as much as four or five miles inland in some areas.52 Archaeology indicates, through pollen cores and land-snail fossils present, for example, at the base of Diamond Head, O‘ahu, that dry forests grew down to the sea when Polynesians arrived. There had been few or no original grasslands.53 Prior to humans, there had been little or no fire away from active volcanic zones, and anthropogenic fire would have quickly transformed the dry and mesic lowlands, leaving isolated pockets of dry forest remnants and vast areas of more fire-adapted species such as pili grass, favored for thatching. More recent evidence from stratigraphy on the ‘Ewa Plain of O‘ahu suggests that, even prior to Hawaiian burning, the introduced Polynesian rat may have decimated forest plant species by eating seeds and fruits unadapted to herbivores. One study argues: “The main source of destruction of the native forests was the introduced Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans, not Hawaiian agricultural clearing and burning.”54 In his memoir, Patrich Kirch reflected: “It is a sobering thought that the delicate and vulnerable Hawaiian lowland forests may have been subject to a tidal wave of exploding rat populations, hundreds of thousands of little jaws munching away at the defenseless vegetation.”55 Rat predation on native birds, an unusually high proportion of which were ground nesting, especially in the lowlands, was also likely devastating.56
Whether or not the Polynesian rat preceded them in destruction, the human colonists clearly did their part: the expansion of ‘uala culture by forest clearance was particularly widespread and devastating, as the ubiquity of “burn layers” in the archaeological record attests.57 Evidence of the former forests on the now dry and nearly treeless West End is plentiful both in the presence of the vestigial pockets of trees that can still be seen in the deepest gulches of Mauna Loa and in Hawaiian tradition: the peak area was celebrated for a type of mythic poison trees, kalaipahoa, and for its marvelous o‘hia lehua groves, where every traveler was urged to make a lei of lehua blossoms.58
By 1600, at minimum 80 percent of Hawaiian lands below fifteen hundred feet were extensively altered; Kirch believes the figure to be closer to 100 percent.59 Studies of windward O‘ahu provide an intriguing indication of former lowland forest composition: Pritchardia, or lo‘ulu palms, once apparently a dominant species, went quickly in steep decline, limited thereafter to refugia such as Nihoa and the several tiny sea stacks off Molokai that even today remain covered by palm forests. One researcher, Stephen Athens, wrote: “Pollen diagram after pollen diagram from the coastal lowlands of O‘ahu show the same thing. The native forests of the lowlands disappeared in a matter of centuries. By AD 1400 to 1500 there was essentially nothing left.”60
With deforestation came erosion. Erosion sequences from O‘ahu have been carefully documented: over a comparatively brief time, a number of centuries, the coastline was totally transformed with the creation of square miles of new land, as bays infilled into new valley floors, and advancing sand barriers pushing out from stream deltas created marshy flatlands behind them. For the first time in these islands, enough marsh habitat existed for several species of duck, rail, and gallinule to tarry on their great Pacific migratory routes and establish breeding populations. Some are now recognized as unique subspecies—a case of evolution responding to anthropogenic environmental change in a very brief time frame.61 Most of the currently observable