After two decades of clashes between activists and geothermal supporters,
Lower Puna's most famous rainforest is up for sale.

by Alan D. McNarie

It was once a state-owned natural reserve area. Then it was the site of a failed geothermal power venture, more than 20 years of debate and litigation, and hundreds of arrests for civil disobedience. In the process, Wao Kele `O Puna became a worldwide cause célebre.
Now the 27,800-acre rainforest tract in lower Puna is up for sale - and once again generating controversy.
On April 1 of this year, Hawai'i County Councilmember Bob Jacobson introduced a resolution supporting a proposal for a California-based conservation fund called the Tides Foundation to purchase the land, then turn it over for management to a local activist group, the Pele Defense Fund, which has fought a long and bitter court battle with the Campbell Estate over forest preservation and Hawaiian gathering rights.
This did not set well with the Campbell Estate, which acquired the forest from the state of Hawai`i in 1985 for geothermal development. Campbell Estate representatives opposed the bill, which they claimed would illegally interfere with the estate's right to sell private property as its managers saw fit.
"To single out one piece of land and one landowner is inappropriate," maintained Campbell Estate attorney Gary G. Grimmer before the Council.
Jacobson denied the charge, saying that his resolution was not designed to force the Estate to sell to one particular buyer, but to encourage the non-profit foundation to bid on the land. He got some support from North Kona Councilmember Curtis Tyler. "I don't think that this ordinance says we're telling you who to sell this land to," he maintained.
Jacobson's wife, former Councilmem-ber Julie Jacobson, argued that such council resolutions were not something new. As an example, she cited the council's support, last year, for the acquisition of land to expand Pu`uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park.
Other Councilmembers expressed doubts. Council Chair James Arakaki worried that Campbell Estate might sue the County if the resolution passed.
"The Estate of James Campbell is very non-litigious," replied Grimmer, who said he believed his client "would pursue other avenues first, but might consider litigation as a last resort."
Hilo Councilmember Bobby Jean Leithead-Todd wondered if it would be possible to reverse the original land swap by which the Campbell Estate acquired the former nature preserve from the state - a move that Jacobson opposed, even if it were possible.
"The protection that needs to be placed on this is that it always needs to be in Hawaiian hands," he told the Journal afterward. "The state and the county have no resources to restore this forest."
After an often-heated debate, Jacobson agreed to defer his resolution to a later date. He told the Journal afterward that he wanted to meet with stakeholders in the area and with Councilman Gary Safarik, in whose district the tract lies, to re-work the language of the bill.

Modern Power vs.
Ancient Culture

The arguments for preserving Wao Kele O Puna generally run along two different lines: the value of preserving the rainforest itself, and the value of the rainforest in preserving Native Hawaiian culture. Campbell Estate, which acquired the land in order to lease it to Wyoming-based True Geothermal Energy Corporation for geothermal exploration, has argued that the tract is more valuable as a source of geothermal power. Estate representatives are still making that argument, despite the fact that True Geothermal was unable to locate a viable geothermal steam source on the property.
"Campbell Estate has not abandoned development of geothermal energy on the land. Campbell Estate has the land for sale and doesn't have any plans at all for the land except sale. However, one category of interested purchases would be those entities interested in geothermal energy development, " wrote Grimmer to Council Public Works and Intergovernmental Relations Committee Chair Leningrad Elarionoff.
(Geothermal, which generates electricity by tapping underground pockets of volcanic steam, has proved viable, after a fashion, at another site on the island: Puna Geothermal Venture's power plant adjacent to Leilani Estates. But after years of accidents and community protests, that plant still isn't producing the 30 megawatts of power that it had contracted to supply the Hawaii Electric Light Company (HELCO). The latest glitch, according to a HELCO official, was a plugged well that recently forced a major power drop.
"Earlier this year, they were at 5 megawatts, then they were up to 11, and now they're back up to 22-25," the official said. He noted that the company had no negotiations going with any company interested in the Wao Kele `O Puna site, and was concentrating instead on increasing Puna Geothermal's production, developing new and refurbished wind-power farms, appealing legal roadblocks to the expansion of their Kailua-Kona power plant, and promoting power savings through energy efficiency.
Grimmer's letter claims that Jacobson's resolution, as originally worded, is "full of express inaccuracies and 'spin' inaccuracies." But preservation advocates accuse Grimmer's letter of its own inaccuracies and spin doctoring.
Jacobson's resolution, for instance, stated, "Whereas, preservation and protection of Wao Kele 'O Puna is in the public interest of the people of the County and State of Hawai'i...."
"There is no evidence that the preservation and protection of the land is in the public interest," maintains Grimmer's letter. "In fact, acts of the Executive branch and the Legislature's inaction in 1986 [allowing the land swap to go through] indicate that geothermal development on the land is in the public interest."
But preservationists maintain that Grimmer's statement ignores a small mountain of testimony presented in the course of the Pele Defense Fund's lawsuit against Campbell and True Geothermal - testimony that not only swayed Judge Riki May Amano to reaffirm native Hawaiian gathering rights in the area, and even to expand those rights. Amano found that members of more than one ahupua`a (Hawaiian village district) had traditionally used the area, and told Campbell Estate that it had to allow access not only to "subsistence and cultural practitioners who are descendants of the inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778, but also to others "accompanying" them and to "persons related by blood, marriage or adoption...."
Campbell Estate, she wrote, "has failed to recognize or acknowledge Plaintiff's members' right to current and future usage, to which the Campbell Estate's land is subject."
The court found that Native Hawaiian residents from ancient times to the present had customarily come to the Wao Kele `O Puna area for such products as kukui, ginger, taro, ti leaf and awa, as well as for hunting and to cultivate mala'ai, or dryland garden patches.
"The importance of the 'ohana, or extended family, to the Puna people, and their continuing dependence on subsistence hunting and agriculture has persisted over time," Judge Amano ruled.
Hawaiian activist Hank Fergerstrom, who testified in favor of Jacobson's resolution, calls the area "wahi kapu" ("sacred land"), reserved only for such communal gathering activities.
"All this area out here is part of the sacred lands of Ola`a," he told the Journal. "These lands are so sacred that you couldn't pass through Ola`a. You had to go around it, even in the ancient times."
For the portion of the public with Hawaiian blood, at least, preservation of the lands was certainly in their interest.

A Need for Seed

The other area of public interest, argue some preservation proponents, lies in the importance of Wao Kele 'O Puna to perpetuating native ecosystems - an importance that goes beyond the rainforest in Wao Kele O Puna itself.
"Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Being a small volcano, that means its surface is covered frequently," notes biologist Rick Warshauer of the U.S. Geological Survey's Biological Resources Division, who knows the rainforest well. "In order to maintain the native vegetation, there has to be a lot of seed sources of older kipukas [patches of rainforest among the lava fields]."
Those patches of native forest, he says, serve as havens from which native insects, birds and plants can repopulate new flows. Such pioneering life - wind-borne immature spiders, fern spores, seeds hitchhiking on birds or animals - are called "propagules."
"What you need is to have a large critical mass of diverse native vegetation to keep vegetation on Kilauea's flows native," he maintains. "Otherwise it will be snuffed out by aliens."
Wao Kele `O Puna, he says, is "as good [a rainforest] as you're going to find.... The whole landscape is a mosaic of different patches of substrates and different ages of substrates. You have representatives of young, intermediate and older-aged communities, all in close proximity of one another, so that dispersal of propagules is facilitated, and the web of life continues with native species. We're talking about both plants and animals."
Unlike much of lowland Hawai'i, Warshauer notes, Wao Kele `O Puna still contains native bird populations - though those populations were allegedly damaged by True Geothermal's activities, which cleared large patches of forest for roads and well fields.
"In 1994, before they [True Geothermal] wood-chipped it, the land that was wood-chipped had six of seven species of native birds," he notes. "They wood-chipped the forest, and several of the species are no longer there in the lowlands."
The rapid deforestation of other parts of the island have made preserving Wao Kele `O Puna even more urgent, Warshauer believes.
"Many species can't survive in introduced vegetation," he notes. "One of the biggest problems in windward Kilauea is that agriculture and residential development still consume native forest instead of re-using abandoned ag land. The problem is twofold. It has resulted in net loss of native forest for development, and an ever-increasing amount of abandoned ag land that becomes covered with weeds, which spread into the remaining native forest patches. I can't overestimate the importance of maintaining the Wao Kele O Puna area and other patches of native forest as native forest."

Two Decades of Litigation

The controversy has its roots in the early 1980s, when geothermal power was being touted as a route to energy independence for the islands, and plans were even proposed for a power cable running from geothermal plants in Puna to Oahu.
During that period, Campbell Estate applied for a Conservation District Use Permit to drill for geothermal resources on a conservation-zoned tract called Kahauale`a, on the edge of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The proposal quickly drew opposition from Volcano area residents, who forced a contested case hearing on the proposed permit. Those residents included Russell Kokubun, now a State Senator.
"One of the settlements for the contested case hearing on that Conservation District Use Permit was to propose a land swap," recalls Kokubun.
The state agreed to trade 27, 800 acres of Wao Kele `O Puna Natural Area Reserve and Puna Forest Reserve for 25,800 acres at Kahauale`a.
But first, there was a word that had to be changed. Hawaii Revised Statute 195-D stated that Natural Area Reserves were to be held in "perpetuity."
"They changed the law for the purpose of this land exchange, and most of the environmental community bought it hook, line and sinker," remarks Warshauer.
During or shortly after the land swap- witnesses with whom the Journal spoke disagree about the timing - most of Kahauale`a was inundated by lava.
Kokubun still defends the swap.
"A lot of people look at barren lava fields as totally worthless, but in actuality they're wonderful laboratories to study evolutionary biology," he maintains.
Campbell Estates and True Geothermal found themselves less than welcome in Lower Puna, as well. Residents and activists formed the Pele Defense Fund to challenge the land swap. Their attempts to stop the exchange were defeated in court, but the Hawai'i Supreme Court did give the group the right to challenge the Estate and True Geothermal on the issue of Native Hawaiian access rights.
After years of failed settlement negotiations, Judge Amano finally issued a written resolution in favor of the Pele Defense Fund on the gathering rights issue last fall. The judgment did not, however, block Campbell Estate from further development of the property.
According to Pele Defense Fund Secretary Margaret McGuire, a few issues still have to be worked out.
"We still have a monitoring plan to be settled ... to keep everything we've worked for all these years," she notes. "We felt there were some unresolved cleanup issues that they should be responsible for, but that hasn't gone very far yet."

Protests, Arrests and a Weed-Stuffed Gate

The years between the land swap and Amano's ruling were not easy ones for some Puna residents.
"The Department of Land and Natural Resources gave them a conservation use permit, with conditions including monitoring and controlling alien weeds, disposal of waste products, how large an area they could bulldoze for the well field, and site restoration upon abandonment," recalls Rene Siracusa. Siracusa, who heads the non-profit environmental group Malama `O Puna, owns a house next to the Campbell Estate tract.
"The lawsuit does not concern Campbell Estate or True Geothermal's compliance with permits and licenses for geothermal activities," states Grimmer's letter. "The State has not cited either for any failures in that regard...."
Siracusa recalls differently.
"The first thing they did in violating their permit was to bulldoze more acreage than they were supposed to," she claims. "They got busted on that, and had to pay a little pittance.... One of the things they were supposed to do is that if they hit the resource, they were supposed to notify the emergency responders. One day, when I was sitting on my back deck, I looked up and I saw a [steam] plume coming from there... I figured they would notify the emergency responders, but the next day the plume was still there. Robert Patricci [another resident] got on the phone to Police and Fire, and sure enough, True had not made the report. They were busted, so they put out a big press release, saying, "Looky, we found a resource."
There were also problems with noise and traffic, according to Siracusa.
"They were supposed to conduct all of their activities in terms of traffic between the hours of seven and seven," she recalls, "but they were coming up at 4 in the morning, like a convoy of a dozen semi-trucks at a time...I had time from hearing them on the highway to throw on my bathrobe and put on my boots and drive down with a clipboard and write down the license plates of the semis as they went by. The license plates were all from Casper, Wyoming. They got cited by Judge Kimura."
Siracusa recalls that a University of Hawai'i geochemist charged with monitoring noise used a generator on property near her house to charge batteries to run the noise monitors.
"They drilled twenty four hours a day," she says. "We were hearing the drilling on one side of us and the generator on the other side of us. It was like we were sandwiched by the noise."
Another issue was invasive weeds, which Siracusa says the company had agreed to control.
"There is no valid scientific study, or any other study for that matter, that supports the proposition that the geothermal development of the land to date has caused alien species biota to date to invade the area," Grimmer's letter maintains.
But preservationists say that the weeds are there for anyone who chooses to study them. Siracusa and other have reported kahili ginger, Coester's Curse, melastoma and other invasive species moving in along the road that True Geothermal bulldozed into the drilling site.
Meanwhile, opposition to True's project was building both locally and nationally. Demonstrations at the site gate led to mass arrests for trespassing and civil disobedience. At one such demonstration, recalls Siracusa, protesters stuffed the company's gate full of alien weeds pulled from the roadside.
In March of 1994, True Geothermal abandoned its efforts to find a viable steam source on the property.
"Ultimately, True found out that there wasn't the resource up there. That little pocket was a fluke, and they had gotten so much bad rep that it didn't pay them to continue at two million bucks a pop per well," believes Syracusa.

After Trauma, Healing?

The long conflict has traumatized both the combatants and the larger Puna community. Some community members have difficulty speaking of the events surrounding Wao Kele O Puna without anger seeping into their voices. Other participants are reluctant even to recall it.
"I've deliberately blotted a lot of that time period from my memory," noted one environmentalist.
Behind the surface arguments about gathering rights and forest propagules may lie another, unstated argument for placing the forest into a preservation trust: it would save lower Puna residents from another battle with a new
developer.
Puna Councilman Gary Safarik hopes to work with Jacobson for that outcome.
"We're going to be meeting the first or second week in May, along with the people from Campbell Estate, and Pele Defense Fund and the Trust for Public Lands [another California-based nonprofit]," Safarik told the Journal. "...I feel good that we'll be able to come up with some sort of resolution that will address the needs of all the players, and I'll do my best to make that happen."
Asked why he felt he could succeed in mediating an issue that has resisted settlement for so long, he replied, "Because whatever we decide won't really force one side of the other to do anything." But he contends, "It will identify, for all the people that have a vested interest, the county's position on some of these lands."
Whatever form the amendment takes, it will probably be less specific than the original version. But Safarik supports the Pele Defense Fund's and Jacobson's general goal of preserving the forest.
"I think their broader vision is to preserve it for Native Hawaiian practices as well as for the environmental concerns, and to preserve it in its natural state forever, and those are my goals as well," he told the Journal.
"The gist was that I just basically want to preserve it [the forest] for future generations," Jacobson said. "It's a jewel, it's irreplaceable. It's what Puna is. All of Puna was once this forest."