High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [82]
Haleakala Crater is fortified against invasion, because of its protected status as a national park, and because its landscape is hostile ground for pineapples and orchids. The endemics had millennia to adapt to their difficult niche, but the balance of such a fine-tuned ecosystem is precarious, easily thrown into chaos: the plants fall prey to feral pigs and rats, and are rendered infertile by insect invaders like Argentine ants and yellow jacket wasps, which destroy the native pollinators.
Humans have sated their strange appetites in Haleakala too, and while a pig can hardly be blamed for filling its belly, people, it would seem, might know better. The dazzling silverswords, which grow nowhere else on earth, have been collected for souvenirs, leis, scientific study, Oriental medicine, and—of all things—parade floats. These magical plants once covered the ground so thickly a visitor in 1873 wrote that Haleakala’s slopes glowed silvery white “like winter in moonlight.” But in 1911 a frustrated collector named Dr. Aiken complained that “wild cattle had eaten most of the plants in places of easy access.” However, after much hard work he “obtained gunny sacks full.” By 1930, it was possible to count the surviving members of this species.
The nēnē suffered an even more dire decline, nearly following the dodo. Since it had evolved in the absence of predators, nothing in this gentle little goose’s ground-dwelling habits prepared it for egg-eating rodents, or a creature that walked upright and killed whenever it found an easy mark. By 1951, there were thirty-three nēnē geese left living in the world, half of them in zoos.
Midway through the century, Hawaiians began to protect their islands’ biodiversity. Today, a tourist caught with a gunnysack of silverswords would find them pricey souvenirs—there’s a $10,000 fine. The Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, which owns adjacent land, are trying to exclude wild pigs from the crater and native forests by means of a fence, though in such rugged ground it’s a task akin to dividing needles from haystacks. Under this fierce protection, the silverswords are making a gradual comeback. nēnē geese have been bred in captivity and reintroduced to the crater as well, but their population, numbered at two hundred and declining, is not yet considered saved. Meanwhile, the invasion creeps forward: even within the protected boundaries of a national park, 47 percent of the plant species growing in Haleakala are aliens. The whole ecosystem is endangered. If the silverswords, nēnē geese, and other colorful endemics of Hawaii survive this century, it will be by the skin of their teeth. It will only happen because we decided to notice, and hold on tight.
Like a child anticipating sleighbells at Christmas, I saw illusory silverswords everywhere. I fixed my binoculars on every shining dot in the distance, and located a lot of roundish rocks in the noonday sun. Finally I saw the real thing. I was not prepared for how they would appear to glow from within, against the dark ground. They are actually silver. For all the world, they look like huge, spherical bouquets of curved silver swords. Cautiously I leaned out and touched one that grew near the path. The knives were soft as bunnies’ ears. Unlike the spiny inhabitants of other deserts, the arid-adapted silverswords evolved without the danger of being eaten. Defenseless, they became a delicacy for wild pigs. Such bad luck. This landscape was so unready for what has come to pass.
I never saw “winter in moonlight,” but as we trudged deep into the crater we saw silverswords by twos and threes, then clumps of a dozen. Finally, we saw them in bloom. Just once, before dying, the knee-high plant throws up a six-foot flower spike—a monstrous, phallic bouquet of purple asters. If a florist delivered this, you would hide it in a closet. Like a torrid sunset or a rousing thunderstorm, it’s the kind of excess that only nature can pull off