There is no mystery to the story of how I came to assist in placing Pia Valley in the hands of the State of Hawai‘i.

First came the why: I did it so that now it belongs to all of us. If you are a resident of the state of Hawai‘i, this valley belongs to you.

We are public landowners. This is the reality of the world we have constructed: if there is land, it must be owned by somebody. This is something we have invented, but nearly all of us have stood in an old growth forest or on an atoll or on the banks of a river and thought this is priceless, how can anyone own this? Yet now all of nature is owned, so at the moment there seems to be no better way to deal with this construction than with public ownership.

I did it so that the native Achatinella Fuscobasis, a tiny striped snail found only in Pia Valley, can survive. I did it for the O‘ahu ‘elepaio, Chasiempsis Sandwichensis Ibidis, a small endangered songbird whose only home is within Pia and the surrounding Ko‘olau valleys, and for the Asplenium dielectum fern, found only in Pia—like the snail, found only in Pia on the entire planet. I did it to lock in place a piece of the Ko‘olau Watershed. Pia, a sharply inclined valley to the east of Honolulu, gathers and filters rainwater and is a source of our drinking water, a source of our life. The life of the snail, the bird and the fern and our human lives are entwined.

And here’s the tricky bit. We own it, but we leave it alone. Andy Warhol, the soup can guy, was one of the most urban of artists, and yet he said “I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.” I agree. Wilderness is the original, not a copy, not a print; it is alive and kinetic.

Barack Obama, with his “You didn’t build that,” campaign phrase, comes to mind, in its proper context. He meant, of course, that we all need to contribute to upholding and maintaining the great infrastructure (and in our time, the recognition of natural infrastructure, nature as the original infrastructure of life) of America and the planet, reminding us that we must continue the work of those who have gone before. So it is with Pia Valley.

Hawai‘i state conservationists have been working in Pia Valley for many years, which is how we know in detail the life on its cliffs and within its walls. The conservationists were allowed on the land by the Pfleuger family, who owned it and intended to do what I have done, put it into the hands of state conservators. The head of the Pfleuger family needed to turn his attention in other directions and so put the land into a trust, but that trust somehow failed to pay the land taxes. The land was put into a tax auction and that is the how of my coming to own it. I didn’t build that, but I benefitted from the previous owners’ good intentions. Wilderness conservation, please understand, is dear to my heart, and having been made aware of the availability of the land, I went in, and suddenly I had 300 acres of O‘ahu in my hands. As soon as I could, I donated it to the state.

Rumors swirled. Let me put them to rest. I am not a native Hawaiian, although Hawai‘i is my one hanau, the land of my nativity. There was no grand area of land ripped from the hands of native Hawaiians, no generation-to-generation inheritance of the sins of the fathers. There was only a desire to wrest from human progress this priceless piece of our existence.

Those who have gone before us have left clues to guide us in our own quests for meaning. Those clues may form quite different meanings in one’s forward thinking than the author or speaker intended. For instance, I read these words from Arthur C. Clarke. He said “They’’ (‘whatever strange beings have adapted to it. . .’ it being the future,) “They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.” Clarke wrote his in Profiles of the Future (1962), and it will have been in the late sixties that I read it.  What I carried away from that reading was not that the universe would be old but that our earth, if not tended, would not forever be fresh and young.

I was either fortunate or unfortunate to see Richard Fleischer’s 1973 sci-fi horror Soylent Green right around the same time. In the film, set in a dark dystopian future, nature has been obliterated through overpopulation and overconsumption. Humankind, however, stumbles forward, unaware of what the planet had been, or could be.  Charlton Heston plays a detective on the hunt for a murderer, but his efforts lead him to a hidden cache of films revealing the former abundant life of the earth. The poignancy of the secret films of the long extinct sweet nature of earth broke my heart. This translated to me as the meaning of “the universe when it was young,” just earth as a living, thriving, flourishing planet. It occurred to me that I envied the generation that came three generations before mine as being the last secure in their un-awakened belief that nature was rich and larger than human life and would forever provide all a person could want—whereas my generation would be the last able to look upon natural beauty and not follow that pleasure with the worry of it continuing. “This place is so beautiful,” everyone has come to say. “We need to protect it.”

 David Attenborough, now known in the western world at least, as our most passionate advocate for conservation issues, has been presenting the need for understanding the natural world in order to protect it since the 1950s. Rachel Carson warned us in the 1960s; her work in conservation entering the world’s consciousness with her book Silent Spring. Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic dome guy, said in the seventies that the entire population of the earth could live comfortably in the British Isles, and the rest could be left to wilderness for the health of the planet. E.O. Wilson, the half-earth guy, says exactly that; that we must preserve half of the earth as wilderness in order to survive and thrive. And here at home Nainoa Thompson and the crew of the Hokule‘a sail the world’s oceans to bring the message of conservation. Indeed, the globe is decorated with warning flags.

Hawai‘i’s plants and animals were already living their lives when the first humans to discover the islands stepped onto the beach. Those first humans developed a system for replenishing the ocean and land life that they took for their nourishment and shelter, making certain plants, fish and birds off limits for capture in certain times of the year. My family passed that knowledge of conservation on to me. My great-grandfather fought for many years and succeeded in winning the conservation of an area of special scientific interest now known as Volcanoes National Park.  My grandfather and my daughter who have painted the islands’ beauty, my step-father and brother who drew our dinners from the deep—the uncles, aunts  and cousins who cleaned and preserved streams and forests and beaches and their creatures and continue to do so, the daughter and other younger members of the family who work daily to protect the natural life of these islands, all these influences created in me a focus for this particular moment. I salute the ancestors, blood and not, for their work and care. I respect the living for protecting global life. Nature, those guiding voices, familial and further afield say, is where we put our focus.

Because of that mindset, Hawai‘i has a large and varied population of government and non-governmental organizations dedicated to conservation of natural resources. Because of that mindset, our community created the Outdoor Circle, a band of conservationists whose mild goal in the 1920s of creating pleasant beauty, translated into the planting of thousands of trees, became a priceless gift to future generations. Because of their work, Hawai‘i’s islands have no billboards marring any views, and as a result of their work Honolulu is a city of trees. Because of that mindset, our community created Na Ala Hele, and thousands of miles of hiking trails crisscross the land. And there are hundreds of groups guarding and protecting our islands, from mountain forests to ocean fishes. Because of that mindset, all of our beaches are public beaches. We are public landowners. We are rich in beauty and fresh air and water.

This then is our inheritance; our world as close to an Eden as our ancestors found ways to preserve it. Wilderness is not political; it cannot organize to protect itself or negotiate for better conditions. If we are to leave the pleasant beauty and the ability of nature and within nature, then the human race, to survive and thrive, must, yes must, defend it. It is no longer an option. Enjoy, and then defend: only then can we hope to be the ancestors our descendants will respect, revere, and thank. Plant a native tree, become aware of any remaining wilderness in your neighborhood, your county, your island and push for its preservation. Volunteer to clear invasive species and cultivate native ones. Write to your representatives to work for a ban on pesticides. Buy less and buy local if you can, and hold suppliers to a high organic humane standard. Grow some food. Get out on the land. Put “Help save some wilderness” on your bucket list. And maybe read more science fiction, or poetry. W. S. Merwin, twice poet laureate of the United States, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize, winner of the National Book Award, came to these islands to live among the nature which nourished his work. “While we close a door,” Merwin wrote in his poem At the Same Time, “flocks of birds are flying through winters of endless light.” Merwin cultivated the knowledge of an untainted parallel of lives to our own. There is a life alive outside of all human concerns. Our own small example, Pia Valley, is safe now. What shall we rescue next?

Banner image by Mareko Tamaleaa. Photos by Patricia Godfrey.

To read more about Pia Valley, click here.