On one of our recent volunteer work days, a young woman showed up. She is a senior at Kanu o ka ‘Āina, a New Century Public Charter School that is Hawaiian-focused and bilingual. It serves 220 students in grades K-12.
The school’s Web site says: “Our name kanu o ka ‘āina literally means ‘plants of the land’ and figuratively refers to ‘natives of the land from generations back.’”
This student has chosen “reforestation” as her senior project, and this is a topic that has sparked her intellectual and cultural passion for conservation work.
She has started an e-mail dialogue with the coordinator of our project, asking deep questions about the interactions between people and nature. Here is how the most recent exchange went:
Student: What did the native forest look like? What plants contributed to the forest being so in sync? How did the plants all live together without taking from one another?
Coordinator: The key thing to understand is that any system, including an ecosystem, eventually finds a state of equilibrium. The forces are in balance. There is enough sunlight, food, and water for everyone. The nutrients and water are recycled through the system, and are never used up. If something changes, then equilibrium can be re-established, but in order to do that, everything changes a little to make up for it. So if a new plant entered the ecosystem, everything will eventually find a new balance in competing with and interacting with that new plant.
What humans have done is to create an imbalance in the system that is never allowed to rebalance. We haven’t just changed one thing, we are constantly changing everything. When we turned forest into pasture, we changed not only the plants, but also the soil, the humidity, the blasting wind, the trampling from animals, the amount of nutrients, etc. What we are doing in reforestation is trying to reintroduce the key elements that are needed to rebalance the system ( native plants) and remove the key elements that are keeping it out of balance (feral animals.) We then must depend on the system to find its new equilibrium, because we cannot do it without the amazing forces of nature at work. We just set it up for success and stand back and watch it work. Makes one humble.