Private Story
Reporting on the O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee's work to eliminate miconia
Summary
Mele Ana Kastner, a field crew lead with the O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee, doesn't hike for a living. Don't ever tell her how lucky she is to spend her workdays hiking in Hawai‘i. To call Kastner and her crew's work tracking down and destroying miconia calvescens plants before they establish themselves in the fragile mountain watersheds of O‘ahu "hiking" does a fundamental disservice to her strength, powers of observation, endurance, understanding of local plant biology, and plain good nature in the face of hardship.
Miconia is one of the most dangerous of Hawai‘i's invasives. Introduced from the Americas, the plant seems almost perfectly engineered to be a deadly threat to Pacific island ecosystems, destroying native forests with terrifying efficiency. In sixty-eight years miconia went from one plant in a Tahitian botanical garden to having destroyed two-thirds of the nation's forests, replacing them with monotypical stands propagated from that first plant, and justly earning its cursed monikers of the "Green Cancer of the Pacific," or often just "The Purple Plague."
O‘ahu, home to over a million people relying on an EPA-designated single-source aquifer, can't bear the threat of miconia's aquifer-robbing, landscape eroding, and near-shore reef threatening presence. After Lāhainā there is greater awareness of the deadly threat of invasive grasses in Hawai‘i but this delicate place faces a host of menacing flora and fauna. It isn't for no reason Hawai‘i is the extinction capital of the U.S. Further imperiled by global warming's allowing not only for increasing wildfire, but the movement of deleterious pests into ecosystems thrown wide to them as temperatures warm, Hawai‘i is a petri dish, a tiny control archipelago that will indicate wider possibilities for our global future as plants, animals, and disease migrate under a heating atmosphere. OISC's work is a fine example of how urgent, and hard, it is to get the cats back in the bag.