 Welcome to Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life. It's not something just done by scientists. It's not something that just lives in laboratories. But it's part of everyone, the fabric of everyone's lives. Every day we run into it. And I have with me today Mike Nahopi, if I've gotten that right, who is the Executive Director of the Kaho O'Lawaii Reserve, Island Reserve Commission. The Kaho O'Lawaii Island Reserve Commission, to see you do much better than I. And KIR received. And this is, I think the project doing that is just a beautiful example of sort of likeable science of why, how science really impacts people's lives, how projects were built off of science, how science actually feeds back into our lives, right? Yes. We're trying to integrate traditional knowledge from our ancestors, you know, native Hawaiians here on Hawaii, but also integrating what we see as the modern technology, you know, taking the best of both worlds, combining them together, and then creating this hybrid of way of interacting with the soil, interacting with the land, managing an island, and the ocean around it for the future generations. Yeah, I know. And this is beautiful. It's a beautiful goal for the sustainability and trying to build sort of a model for the other Hawaiian islands to follow. But so, I suspect a lot of people don't really know the history here of the island. I was reading a little bit, you know, some stuff you gave me about it. It's really, it's an island that's really been heavily abused, basically, right? Well, you know, it's one of the smallest islands here in the main island chain. And over 200 years ago, one of the British, one of the British captains came to Hawaii, brought this gift of goats. He brought it to Maui, placed them, and they placed the goats on Kaholavi. And after 200 years of goats multiplying and eating all the native vegetation, you lose all the natural topsoil, you lose the natural vegetation and the plants, and you're exposed to these high winds and you lose the topsoil. So not only do we have this devastation of the environment, so ecological devastation on the island, but then in 1941, the military comes to the island and utilizes it for over 50 years as a bombing range. So now you have, on top of goat damage, you have bombs and unexploded ordnance and remnants from the military occupation of the island. Yeah. So it's been really, its whole surface has been changed radically, I gather. I mean, there's huge gullies running down from its hills now that probably were not originally part of the landscape. There's no very little surface vegetation cover on parts of it. Yes. And so, you know, if you take a look at one of our slides we have here, you can see where Kaholavi is located. You know, we're just off the coast of Maui. We're only seven miles, but one of the difficulties that we have in this whole restoration effort of doing is that seven miles is one of the roughest channels in Hawaii. And our only means of going back and forth to Kaholavi is by boat. And we have our own landing craft that we take out there. You know, after all those years of devastation with the goats, you have this hard pan and we have another slide to show kind of an example of what the hard pan looks like. You have this, it's what you can imagine if you go out to a place and all the dirt is gone, up to 10 feet of soil is gone and that is the dirt that's the rock that's underneath. And it's all red because we have a very high iron content and it kind of is rust. You're basically sitting on rust. So you know, the island, one of our charts that we have here shows about 25% of the island is covered in this hard pan. The red areas. The red areas. And these are the areas that as it rains, water doesn't penetrate through it. It just runs off the surface and it goes all, and it goes, carries this silt and mud to the ocean and starts covering the reef systems that we have around Kaholavi. So and we have another slide to show you some of the unexplored ordinance that we've discovered. During the cleanup on the island, we've removed over a million unexploded ordinance items. And not only that, they picked up every piece of scrap metal that's bigger than your thumbnail, it was over a million pounds of scrap metal found on the island, just from bomb fragments of pieces being blown up on the island. And yet that work is by no means done, right? No. If you take a look at this next slide we have here, you can see the red areas which show that still 25% of the island has not been cleared. So and only the blue and green areas here are the areas that they've cleared down the four feet. So we can actually dig in the soil and plant in those areas. The rest of the islands we can walk around, but we can't plant in those areas in the ground. Right. So you don't want to be digging in. Yeah. We might dig and hit a bomb on the ground. So, you know, we had to come up very creative means of how do you restore this devastated area that you can't dig. And so we show you, we started off with this one picture here of, we had to use whatever we had. Right. So we went to a conference and they were giving away these lunches and we took all the lunch bags from everybody that were throwing away. We filled them with wood chips and seeds and laid them out on the hard pan area. And we found out that as the wind blows, it deposits soil in front of these bags that build clean soil. And eventually the bags break down and the bags have mulch and fertilizer and seeds. They grow into these clean soil and they finally penetrate into the ground. So we took those techniques and we said, you know what, let's expand that and let's see if we can use, we have a lot of rocks. So what can we do at rocks? So we have another picture here of how we try to do the planting on the island with large rock corridors and adding soil on top of them and let the wind fill them with dirt. And they come back and plant them with native vegetation and hope and they've been taking. Well, excellent. You know, quite the challenge because, again, both the length of time and the extent of the devastation and the sort of the two kinds of devastation, the denuding by the goats and then the trashing with the ordinance basically. Yeah. And because of the type of devastation that we see out there, we had to use a hybrid type of restoration. The traditional way of planting as you would for native wine agriculture would not be effective here because this is not the type of environments that native wines would have seen when they came to Hawaii. They would have seen more pristine areas, thick soil. We have to use modern technology to overcome these difficulties that we introduce as our more modern landscape and to try to replace that and help integrate this with cultural practices and also with modern science. Yeah. You bring up a good point. It's not, you can't take a traditional technique necessarily and apply it productively to a modern-day problem, problem caused by something that the traditional Hawaiians would never have faced. They would never have seen that level of devastation or landscape, right? That's true. That would never have occurred. As does you. With volcanic eruption or something. Yeah. Well, in volcanic eruptions, they had techniques that you could see in the chats and stories of how the land restores itself after lava flows. And we're actually seeing that now. We've been studying in Hula the lava flows in the Puna area and how the regrowth of those areas were documented through the oral history and through the stories and legends relating to those areas. So we've seen the whole flow pattern was seen before and now we're kind of rediscovering them in the chats that were done before. So it's kind of another interesting part of science and Hawaiian culture practices. That is. So often we find that there's a wonderful sort of synergy between the two. If you can pick up the traditional knowledge for vanishes entirely, and if you find they're very interesting parallels or complementary pieces of modern science now. Yeah. And that's one of our goals of our organization. We are a state agency and most people think of, you know, we're administratively attached to the Department of Land and that's resources. So they think of, you know, DLNAR as this science organization and these land managers, but, you know, we're more looking at a future way of managing land that is more culturally appropriate, is also sustainable and we also want to use the best of science integrated together. And, you know, hopefully we can be on the testbed to try different techniques. And that's what we do a lot is experiment with different techniques of planting, restoring, managing the land. And when volunteers come to the island, they see our methods and hopefully they take those lessons home and they apply it to their own areas or they get interested in wanting to carry forth this knowledge that they're learning on Kahualavi to their own communities. Yeah. I mean, that was very interesting what you were showing me using the bags filled with mulch basically as initial sort of starter points to gather more windblown soil and all. You have to use what you have. You know, my restoration manager, he's very, he's very effective at using whatever materials we find. I think one year we went around Maui and started gathering all the phone books that people are throwing away and we strung wires through the phone books and we just let them flap through the wind and as the pages flapped open, soil started collecting in them and as we would walk by these rows of phone books, started throwing seeds in them and eventually they break down and they create, you know, plants that are growing within these phone books and the phone books has organic material. So, you know, where one plant that we, we even get one plant out of this whole project, that's one plant more than we had yesterday. Yeah. That's great. That's, that's, it's so, again, that's this beautiful model because islands, by their nature, are relatively isolated and have to become self-sufficient. You have to think in terms of what do we have on hand that we can use to accomplish our, our needs and it's just a whole island mindset, much more so than on a large landmass where you can really, you can say, oh, I'll just get her from over there because there's more of it over there. Yeah. And we had to think like that because, because we are so isolated, you know, it does take a long way to get there. And on Kaholabi, we have very little infrastructure. So because of that, we're kind of forced to think, okay, what can I use that I have right here? I have a lot of kiyabi, I have a lot of logs, I have a lot of wood chips, I have rocks and, you know, we're trying to experiment. What can we do with rocks? How can we restore the island with just rocks? And we're finding interesting things that are happening, laying rocks into little depressions in the soil. They create shade. And as we throw seeds under them, that shade actually keeps the ground moist, just a little bit longer when it rains at night. And it's enough that it's changed the ground when the sun comes up, the seeds can germinate and it protects them from the wind enough that they can establish themselves. Yeah, it gives them a chance to start taking roots. Start taking roots. Of course, then as the plants take root, they'll like you break down that hard pang, roots are amazingly tough things in their own way, right? Yeah, there's, you know, there's so much change on the island. I first went to Kaholabi when I was 15 in high school, back in the 80s. And one of our projects was counting goats. And we counted 2,000 goats in just the one little valley that we were in. They were finally able to eradicate all the goats in 93, and the landscape has changed dramatically. I remember hiking on areas that you don't see a single plant or a grass or anything for miles. And today, a lot of the island is covered in grass. A lot of its alien species is blowing over from Maui, but it's still holding the soil down. And our work is trying to convert this landscape to a more traditional landscape for the purpose of reintroducing traditional Hawaiian cultural practices. Right. And you got still a lot of challenges ahead of you, because although we got rid of the goats and you got rid of the, well, some of the shells, but you still have, you were saying the other day, you still got alien mice, basically, that were not part of the native fauna at all, right? And they, actually, because you've got probably a million of them or more, they actually end up eating a lot of your little seedlings you put down, right? Yeah, that's one of the big problems we have is with this mice, they, anytime something tries to grow up, they just get eaten by the mice. And also, we have a very serious cat problem. We have over 500, 600 cats that came from the ranching areas about, you know, over 100 years ago. And Kaholabi was known for seabirds. And the seabirds only live on the steep cliffs and the little offshoot islets. But our goal is eventually, one day, the seabirds can return to the main island and as we people live in close proximity to the seabirds, we hopefully will rediscover our ancestral knowledge or ancestral relationship with the seabirds and rediscover stories and maybe recreate some of the chants and Ollelo and Hula or music relating to seabirds that we will rediscover by being in close proximity to seabirds. But of course, you've got the series of then intertwined, interlinked problems, right? Because you've got to get rid of the mice. Now, if you get rid of all the mice, presumably, your feral cat population will crash too, right? Since they presume to harm the heavy food item for the cat. But you will probably actually want to get rid of both simultaneously so that the cats don't prey on the remaining seabirds or anything. Yeah, that's the goal. And it's a large challenge, one. And it's a challenge that requires a lot of funding. So that's a difficult part of it. Well, yeah. But also a lot of very different kinds of technological expertise from what I'm just hearing you say. I mean, all this thing from thinking about land and soil, compaction, hard pan, erosion, to thinking about, yeah, how do we get rid of invasive species, plants, animals? How can we do all this sort of in a sustainable way, right now, and hopefully at a reasonably low cost without having to bring in a lot of extra stuff, right? So not only are we out there doing this restoration work, we have to live out there while we're out there. We can't just go back and forth, back and forth every day. So we actually manage a large base camp on the island. So we can house volunteers to do this work. And back with this is actually the old military camp that they built around the 80s. And we've kind of inherited it after the cleanup. We had to convert a lot of the mentality that was done during the military times. They had helicopters and large boats to bring supplies in. So they had these huge generators and burning thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. And you know, you turn that operation over to us, we have to rethink the way we live on the island, which causes, you know, we have to re-engineer life on Cajolave. Exactly, and that's actually bringing this to an interesting point. But I'm going to take a little break right now, because I'm being told we have to do so. So Mike, OPE is with us here, here on Likeable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and we'll be back in one minute. Hi, I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground. Every Friday here at 1 PM on thinktechkawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground, that library of shows that you can see of mine on youtube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you if you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on thinktechkawaii, called Konnichiwa, Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 PM. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 PM. Aloha. And welcome back here to the second half of Likeable Science here on thinktechkawaii. I'm Ethan Allen, and with me today in the thinktech studios is Mike Nahu-Pi, excuse me. I blow that every time. He is head of the Ka Hulawei Island Reserve Commission. And Mike, I realized I didn't properly introduce you when you first came on. And not only are you executive director of that group, but you're a former US Navy officer. You were a nuclear engineer trained as a civil engineer. You did nuclear engineering for the Navy I gather. And a graduate of Kamehameha Schools, as well as the US Naval Academy. And furthermore, a very talented artist, craftsperson. You could say maybe a word or two about your weaving, is it, or? Yeah, you know, my time on Ka Hulawei introduced me to, I spent a lot of time with the protect Ka Hulawei, Ohana. And prior to that time, I was a military officer. So I was very much into what I was doing with engineering and the work in the military. But then my job was on Ka Hulawei in the 90s. And I spent a lot of time with protect Ka Hulawei, Ohana, a lot of Native Hawaiians. And I saw a lot of the Hawaiians doing crafts and hula. And I started to get re-interested in these things. I had seen them when I was a child. And I remember them when I was a child. But it encouraged me to explore it further. So I got involved in hula, and dance, and chanting. And then also, the Hula weaving. So I weave hats. I teach weaving classes and woodworking and then making implements. So I was able to have some of my stuff exhibited at Bishop Museum and also at the Smithsonian and spent time at the Folklife Festival with other Native American weavers. Wonderful, wonderful, very rich background. And yeah, I think what you're doing here is a beautiful example of sort of the richness of both engineering as a field, because you're using very multiple aspects of engineering, but also how it ties in to a lot of traditional Hawaiian sort of worldviews and this beautiful complementary aspects there. Yeah, it works really well. Some of my kumus or teachers before said, engineers make one of the best artisans for a lot of traditional crafts because there is a lot of repetitive pattern seeking and analyzing of patterns. And engineers have good visualization capabilities of analyzing patterns and expounding and projecting those patterns forward into newer takes of way of reproducing those forms. Excellent, excellent. And speaking of patterns, right before the break, we were talking about you're sort of based out of the old military base camp there on the island and you've had to really sort of rethink that and readjust it because it was all dependent very much on bringing in lots of diesel fuel and lots of supplies from the outside and you were trying to build a more self-sustaining way of life here, right? Well, true, and one of the things, the challenges that we have on Kahualawe is one is distance and it's the lack of infrastructure, but the real biggest challenge is water. And that's something that you see across all of the places in Hawaii, especially on Kahualawe. Our camp, we get about anywhere from 11 to 18 inches a year. Maybe the top of the island, we're a little bit maybe in the low 20s to high 20s. We're pretty much a desert island and we're trying to replant a desert island with almost no water. So what we have to do is find ways of collecting, creating, gathering water so that we can use it for living but also use it for the restoration effort. So this one photograph we have here shows this two half acre panels that we use to collect rainwater. And then we funnel that water down into the two storage tanks. There are about 180,000 gallons of storage and we have a capacity of a third tank. We have about a half a million gallons of storage located on the top of the island that we use for irrigating our plants. And we have a photograph here of what this and a computer simulation of all the irrigation lines, 28 miles or 26 to 28 miles of irrigation that we have laid on the island so that we can start plant cultivations on the island. And we found that just by watering these new seedlings for about three or four months, it increases its survivability from 10 to 15% to about 80%. And it really increased the effectiveness of our work. The other part is we have to have water to drink. For a long time in the military, they used to bring water in by boat. We actually create water for motion water. We have, we've been doing desalination through reverse osmosis for over 20 years on Kahola Lave. And it, but it's a very power hungry system. It takes a lot of electricity and probably for a gallon of water out there, probably the most expensive water that you could find in Hawaii. Because not only do we need diesel fuel, we transport that diesel fuel on our own boats, store it, run it through our generators, create electricity, run electricity to our desalination plant. So because of those high costs and that high effort of doing that work, we have to become more sustainable. How can we do this cheaper, more efficiently? And that was a project that we got a lot of support from the legislature. A lot of our representatives and senators supported that we find sustainability on Kahola Lave. Instead of keep asking for money, how can they invest through infrastructure that we can become more sustainable? So one of these photos here, we have a short video of our photovoltaic system. And this project was not only to build over 100 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels on the island, but was to re-engineer our camp operations to reduce the energy requirements for Kahola Lave and install over 80 kilowatts of battery. So right now we've gone from maybe 1,000 gallons a month of diesel fuel that would be burning for the two weeks that were opened. I think last month, I just got reports that were down to under 20 gallons. And we're getting even better as we learn how to re-live or how to change the way we live on Kahola Lave to be more energy efficient on the island. Excellent. Again, you're setting a beautiful model because of course the state as a whole has a goal of energy self-sufficiency by 2045. And so you guys are well in a way to... Well, we're beating that, right? Yeah, to say agency, we're following the directive of the governor and his policy of becoming self-sustaining on power. So we can now tell the governor that you can check Kahola Lave off and we are 100% self-sustaining now with the power we have on the island. We're now trying to become fossil fuel free. So we're now partnering with a couple other organizations. And we're still using gasoline on some of the vehicles just because we're looking at electric vehicles, but right now they don't build electric trucks or off-road vehicles with enough torque. But as they come, we're also looking at portable charging stations that we can tow with us to the work areas and we can charge them to the day while we're working and they'll be all powered up for us to go home at night and then we plug it into our system. But we're also looking at how do we get rid of propane because our kitchen is running on propane. And one of the things that we're hoping to invest with and partner with people about is using that excess electrical power we have now from the sun to create hydrogen and break water down into hydrogen and run the hydrogen through our kitchen and our water heater that we have, we have a propane water heater for the kitchen, everything else is solar, but how can we use hydrogen for our kitchen and then eliminate all fossil fuels from Kaho'lavi? So that's our next call for us. Fascinating. Great stuff. I was thinking when you were talking about the water issues, yeah, not only is there reverse osmosis, but of course there's passive solar distillation and there are new designs of stills that are much more efficient three or four times more efficient than the classic solar stills. Yeah, hopefully we'll be able to investigate the new technologies that are available. Not only the passive solar stills, but we've been talking to people about gathering water from the air. They're talking about humidity and distilling water from the humidity that's out of the island. We have some issues because we're very dry desert island, but we're open to looking at all different type of technologies. Yeah, there are fog fences and these kinds of things. There's also some brand new technologies now. Again, some of the material scientists are developing what they call slippery rough surfaces that are textured just right to tend to pull water molecules out of the air and condense them and have them run down together and actually form droplets. We're actually using that theory, that the ideas of the moisture from the air in a very low tech methodology. One of our planting areas, we are looking at the depressions that we find in the natural hard pan and putting rocks down. We have a lot of rocks. And just from the shade that the rocks produce over the soil under them, the nighttime dew that penetrates to the soil actually has now is able to stay in that soil a little bit longer, which allows seedlings and little seeds to germinate and to grow. So it's the same idea and the same theories but using an old school low tech approach. Now, it's amazing to hear you talk all this huge array of techniques spanning that whole spectrum from very old fashioned, very low tech to very current modern high tech. And it's great that you're able to synthesize that. And I really think it's, again, it's a perfect model here for Hawaii. Hawaii has to have that whole spectrum of approaches and techniques if we're really gonna thrive in the next century, right? I mean. Well, the science is always the same. The science is the same. It's the materials that are different and it's the construction techniques. Example is my own house, they built my house so that the corner of the house has all the windows and it allows air flow through the house. Those same techniques, we kind of went away when we went to more of the mainland building structures of the airtight buildings. But in Hawaii, we don't need that airtight building construction. So maybe some of those theories of elevated houses so wind flow cools the sub flooring and those things can come back. They're very same, the same science but just going back to some of the old techniques using new materials. Yeah, it's great stuff, it's great stuff. This is, I mean, this is a really wonderful example of restoring a sacred island and at the same time, really setting a vision for the rest of the state and an inspiration for the rest of the state about here are ways you can tackle these complex problems. So this is, it's great to have you here, great to hear all this wonderful stuff and I know you wanted to say it. You've got maybe 10 seconds to say it. Yeah, so I just want to show this last slide is what we're hoping for in the future. We want to build our education and operation center in Kihe. We have this eight acre property where we currently run the boat back and forth to Kahualave, but we want to connect this tie between Maui and Kahualave so that we can bring people to Kahualave and also quantify these lessons we've learned and to share them with other people. People can come and visit our center, they can learn some of these techniques, we'll have a museum, but we also want to honor the people that struggled to get Kahualave back to us. The early protect Kahualave, Ohana, people that fought the military, that stood up to get the people of Hawaii engaged so that they can get Kahualave back. We want to make sure that this next generation that we have coming and visiting us and working with us know these stories from the past so that they can always honor the work of our past generations have done to provide for them today. Absolutely, perfect wrap up here. We are out of time. Mike, I've so much enjoyed having you here. I've learned a tremendous amount from hearing your talk. And I hope you'll come back and join us on likable science on our next episode. Until then.