“Grasses are invasive here,” my Kānaka Maoli agroforestry collaborator told me earlier this year. The statement seemed odd to me then, as I thought about the numerous homes with “nice” lawns, the many picturesque ranches across the islands dominated by different grasses, and the resorts and estates considered by many to be “luxurious” in part due to their expansive fields of neatly manicured grass.
The term “invasive” is political and contentious—depending on one’s goals, intentions, and point of view.
But I began to understand what my collaborator meant by his statement when he took us up Kohala Mountain to see how the many native trees, ferns, and other plants we’d been working with behaved and thrived together in mature communities.
With permitted access into Parker Ranch—one of the largest cattle ranches in all of the “United States” and the fourth or fifth largest landowner in Hawaiʻi, holding over 100,000 acres—we drove through its seemingly endless rolling hills of pasture, eventually meeting its fenceline that bordered a protected forest reserve. The contrast on either side of that fence was stark. On the side that we came from stood an un-arbored landscape blanketed by vast fields of grass, sparsely speckled with the remnants of long-decayed trees. The side that we climbed into was a densely canopied wet forest. Even from afar, one can see this distinct boundary—a broad, solid band of light green makes up the base of the mountain with a sudden transition into dark green beyond the linear and angled perimeters of the cattle fencing.