 Welcome to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health, and the health of our planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. Joining me today are Kaimalu Sanich and Christian Dave Caviro from Leahi Landscaping. Welcome, Maula and Christian. Thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you so much for being on the show. So we're going to talk about sustainable landscaping today, but we want to know how did you guys come to start Leahi Landscaping? So the idea actually came like most ideas from a place of anger, where I feel like a lot of people on our generation, you know, we have a lot of anger that kind of brings us towards conclusions that create businesses. So for us it was a mixed bag of getting woken up by the loud landscaping crews all the time, almost every day for the entirety of our lives, and then also just the lack of environmental concern and reason which goes into landscaping. So the company was originally started in 2020, December, I believe, as an idea that a friend and I, Scott Tabor, had at a dinner party. Scott and I played around with the idea, tried to get things kind of up and running. Scott worked for a bank, so we ended up having to step back, and it was about that same time that I met Kaimalu. And Maula and I met at a dinner party of a friend of ours, and we just clicked immediately. I think the intro was Maula and I were talking, oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm a landscape designer. Oh, that's so cool. I just started a landscaping company. It's an electric, all electric landscaping company, and Maula just looks at his girlfriend and just goes, because we both had the same idea. We're both moving in the same direction, and it was beautiful coincidence that brought us together. That's great. So tell us about what your background is, Maui, and then maybe Christian can tell us what his background is. Sure. So I grew up on Maui, graduated from Kamehameh schools, and started my studies in architecture. So that's kind of where I imagined going. I know there was a lot of kind of environmental concerns around buildings specifically, but as I went through my studies, I realized I wasn't so much designing architecture as I was designing landscape architecture. So that's kind of what I ended up finishing my degree in in 2021. So I have a master's in landscape architecture, and just a passion for the environment in general. So that's kind of my background. I currently work for the University of Hawaii Community Design Center. So that's also an added layer of consideration for the community and appropriateness for the culture. So what is the community design center at UHM? Yeah, so we run out of the School of Architecture. We work on public focused or nonprofit design projects, oftentimes pre-pure procurement, so before the professional team works on it. So it's a lot of conceptual design incorporating community concerns into actual built structures. And how about you, Christian? What's your background? So I actually come more from a place of business than anything. My undergrad was concentrations in finance and accounting. I ended up going back to school later on and finishing with an MBA and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Hawaii. And yeah, I've mostly been in the business world. I worked for Tesla for a couple of years, so my background is in electrification. And then also just a slight politics touch too, just got involved with the neighborhood board in Kahala. Actually Grace, I believe you might fall into our jurisdiction, but became vice chair and just getting involved in the community here. That's great. So tell us about the way your company is all electric. How do you do it? Do you do it off solar power? Molly, you want to take this one? Yeah, sure. So we are all electric that kind of falls directly within our main mission and ethos of being just more environmentally friendly. We do charge everything off of a standalone solar facility. So we are entirely zero emission in regards to our tools. And also I was wondering, it looks like you guys began the company and specifically, Manalua Bay, was there a reason for that? Sure. Yeah, again, I think Christian spoke to it a little bit, the frustration of kind of watching our environment around us being neglected and degrading. We started mostly where we live, so Kahala, Manoa, those kinds of areas, those are areas surrounding Manalua Bay. And actually in 2002, Manalua Bay was deemed a contaminated water body. And that was not because there's a heavy amount of industry or commercial spills or anything like that. It's a direct result of residential landscapes and the unsustainable practices that homeowners and landscape companies employ on top of their yards. So part of this business was to kind of push back against that and provide another option, an alternative way to treat your environment, treat your yard. So Christian, can you tell us specifically what is not sustainable about how people are treating their yard? What are people doing that is not sustainable? So people know, not to do that. I mean, it's like many other products and industries in our day to day life. There's the monetary cost, and then there is what's called the total cost, the true cost. And what we've found just through our personal research, sort of exploration, in that the landscaping industry is actually one of the most impactful and harmful industries in the world. In addition to that, it's something that is directly in our environment every day. We've sort of been sold this idea of the perfect manicured lawn, the perfect green space in your in your own. And don't worry, there are these sprays that take care of everything for you. So you don't have to concern yourself with it. There are these machines that will come in and will make it look in a way that we view in our minds as natural, but it's extremely unnatural. There are so many, if you look at sort of each individual part that goes into landscaping, you'll you'll find that there is a kind of this horrifying theme of we just need to get it done. We just need to get it done. And by any means necessary. And so you'll find application of chemicals of gasoline and high particulate motors and a close proximity to you, your family, your pets, and beans, you'd have negative externalities that's been off onto us. You know, and it takes it takes place in both sides. You have the health of the person living in the home or in the landscape, whether that's a personal residence, a hotel, a business. And then you have the crews who are actively involved in this process too. So on the crew side, you know, they're exposed to chemicals like Roundup, glyphosphate, which has been shown to cause many types of cancers. My father actually has Parkinson's and part of the main belief that why he has Parkinson's is because of his exposure to glyphosphate at a young age. So you have these these people who are being exposed to these things day after day after day, even gasoline motors, the vibrations from them can cause this nerve damage disease, which, you know, it doesn't roll back, it only progresses more and more. And then, you know, you have you, the homeowner, who after these people come and, you know, cut your lawn and blow these chemicals, these emissions and these particulates into the air in your direct living space, your working space, your vacation space, you are then exposed to it every single day. Every day you step outside, every day you walk on the grass, you know, lay on your lawn, you're exposed to it. And even those who don't own homes, even those who aren't privileged enough or fortunate enough to be able to afford their own, like their own land, you have these negative externalities spilling off into public spaces too. Molly mentioned Waterloo Bay and, you know, I've been fortunate enough to live in Kahala for most of my life. And I had a saltwater fish tank growing up. My dad had one rule, you have to catch everything yourself, you're not allowed to buy anything. So three days a week, I would go down to the beach in the late afternoon after school with my dad. And we would swim around with nets and, you know, try and catch new fish. You know, it was a small tank, 25 gallons, but, you know, it was fine. It was fun. Really involved me in the environment. And that repeated my, what I saw from like a young kid, even to now, you can literally witness the changes that are occurring in our environment. I used to swim out there and I would see turtles and I would see more eels and all sorts of beautiful fish and an ecosystem that you could tell it was being affected by something, but it was still there. Nowadays, I swim out to the exact same beach and there's nothing. It's desolate. It's dead. It's unproductive in the environmental sense. And, you know, a lot of that is caused by fertilizer runoff by sea walls that are being installed, which causes change the local ecosystems. Nothing is without consequence. And the landscaping industry as a whole has sort of either failed to understand or more likely just sort of ignored the true cost of their product. And it affects all of us. Yeah. I mean, that is terrible. So I am wondering, what can people do then? I mean, suppose, I mean, obviously they can hire you guys, but what can people do if they do not want to spray their yard with pesticides, but they have all these terrible invasive plants in their yard? How do they get rid of them? What can they do? And then I know you have a bunch of slides about, let's also talk about what kind of plants can we plant? What are good plants that we can plant there so that we don't end up having this issue where, you know, we're having to fertilize a lot and it's poisonous to the bay and everything. If you could take this one. Yeah, sure. So we've been cultivating this approach that we call like a landscape stewardship approach to the two resident residential houses specifically, but it's basically an ecological approach to yard maintenance. And it incorporates these kinds of larger systems thinking into the small scale residential home. So this is including a bunch of different sections. Obviously, we talked about the low emission equipment. This is cutting down on the global effect of carbon on the environment, but also the kind of local effect of the particulates and the volatile organic compounds that you find floating within the air around your home. But alongside that, we also have this approach to maybe invasive species or just kind of unwanted species, maybe in general. And we try and go and we categorize it based off of the three C's. So our approach is competition, concentration or companionship. So competition I think is most easily conceptualized in terms of the maybe evolutionary competition. So this happens kind of naturally. If you have a a mature ecosystem, they kind of overcrowds the smaller plants. So you can maybe plant more plants to discourage the unwanted plants from showing up. You could also give a competitive advantage. So to the plants that you want to plant. So we oftentimes just manual weeding is you know, you can't go wrong. It's hard work. And yeah, sometimes you have to know what you how to get rid of things like holy core. There's there's a lot of effort that goes into it, but you know, I think being able to select the the wanted plants from unwanted plants, I think is also important. The second C is concentration. So we all we often use these kinds of larger scale concentrations of elements to maintain populations of plants. I think a good example of of this would be if you had a house next to the ocean and you had some native plants that were maybe salt tolerant, then you could maybe pour saltwater to get rid of the unwanted plants and your herbicide becomes salt, the concentration of salt. And that salt may dissipate into the natural environment quickly with some watering. But you are able to select the plants that you want to grow. And you do so by understanding what plants you have and what they need and what they don't need. A classic one that we use is vinegar. The vinegar is basically an acid, you can increase the acidity of the soil. It's often time to kind of scorch the earth approach. If you have maybe some pavers that you don't want anything to grow on before some vinegar, it will dissipate into the environment naturally. And you can also add compost or organic matter to increase the base level of your soil. And the last C is companionship. So everybody's, I hope is familiar with companion planting. But this is, it's the concept that, you know, these, these species have evolved or co evolved with other species naturally. And if you plant those species together in these larger guilds, and they increase the survivability, the beneficial insects, the beneficial microorganisms of your yard and decrease the need for maybe herbicides or pesticides in the future. Yeah, no, that's all sounds great. I saw that you have a slide with the before, after a picture of the house that you guys designed a landscape for. Can you show us that house? So you want to explain what happened here, Christian? You know, I might be okay at this, but let me tell you, Malu is the master. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna blow a little bit of hot air here for a second. The things that Malu is doing with technology and historical research is next level. When I say that nobody else is doing this, I truly mean that nobody else is doing what he is doing. It is such a, it's an honor and a pleasure to just even watch him sort of get down into the weeds of this stuff. I, you know, that's my two thought thoughts on it. But Malu, can you talk a little bit about the everything that goes into design, everything that you do and just how you breed magic into that? Sure. So it all comes from the same place. So this kind of environmental lens ecological thinking, systems thinking. So yeah, we did, we did a design and install for this house here. This is incorporating not only native and native species, but also these kinds of more natural textures and pattern generation methods, alongside some of this more, maybe cutting edge technology that we have, we have available to us, you know, in the 21st century. So on the left here, you can see a before and after of the landscape and this kind of unique pattern there of the pathways themselves. This is again mimicking patterns that you can find all throughout nature. This specific one is called a Voronoi partition, Voronoi pattern, but it occurs across all scales from the cellular all the way up to, you know, our own pathways within that we see within the wild and then even all the way up through using cosmic scales. But it's kind of this consistency of, you know, natural touch all the way throughout the design. And that that design in particular and the installation particular was actually in California. So the benefit to this approach, I think that we've generated is that it can apply across different ecosystems and across different cultures. So a lot of our research in that sense was with the particular indigenous culture there and how they used their native plants, the chumash and what they the legends that they had surrounding them and the importance that they placed on top of the ecosystem. And now that's great. Now you had that one slide of Wailupe and showing that you looked at the native plants and then determined from there how to do a landscape. So can you go to the slide where there's native plants Michael on then? Sure. Yeah, that slide that you were just on kind of touches on this kind of what we're calling biocultural research where this is embodied knowledge within the indigenous culture that I think we all benefit from. And the more that you kind of dive into this, the more these these decisions become more make more sense and become more natural. So this particular design was in the Ili of Wailupe. So again, we're thinking on all scales. So we go all the way from the island scale of Oahu, we're within the Moku of Kona, within the Oahu Pua of Waikiki, and then the Ili, so the valley itself is Wailupe. I believe most people know it as Aina Aina now. But those those Mo'olalo, those stories of the place, they talk about the winds, the type of winds, type of rains. These are all factors that play into whether what to plant, what is appropriate for that space. So the next slide there was place names, actually, as well as some street names. But they begin to talk about what used to grow there, the Wili Wili, the Kulu'i, all these signs of more dry land to Messick type of species. So these are just considerations as we go through the design process. And it kind of gives us a list of plants that we can pull from when we start designing the landscape itself. So Christian, can you tell us about your nursery and how you obtain these plants and how you guys get these native plants that might not be in landscapes anymore? So we've been very fortunate in that we have, our customer base is very supportive of what we do. And none of this would be happening without them, without every single one of them. And this is still sort of a growth area for us. We are trying to diversify as quickly as we can with the limited resources that we have in this small business in the state of Hawaii. We, you know, it can be a struggle. None of the progress we would have made would have occurred without the community that we have behind us. So we were, most companies would be able to just come in and sort of buy the resources that they need. We take a different approach. We are in the community, we are talking to everybody in these environmentally concerned industries and individuals who they have something that we need and chances are we have something that they need. And through labor trades, through even just simple discussions, we contain resources that we require to advance forward on a corporate level that allows us the diversification that will enable us to lower our pricing and make these types of services more affordable. One of the diversification measures that we've taken is our nursery. The nursery is, let's see, we finished the irrigation on it about three or four weeks ago. It's part of a service contract that we have with a local farmer who has been gracious enough to help us and provide guidance. And, you know, in exchange, we help her in every single way that we can. We've helped clear cutting for her. We've helped her establish, you know, different relationships with different native plants. It's been truly a give-give relationship where we're both just, you know, Malu and I are just pouring everything we can to see her succeed and she's really just helping us. Now, and it's not even just on the nursery side, Kaimuki Compost, Nate Augusten, who I believe was on the show, you know, the exact same thing. Here we have a concerned individual in this environment who is trying to make a change just as a single person, a single entity, LLC. Malu and I are on a very similar scale. We're a small business just trying to make it. And what we found is that through conversation, through understanding, we have been able to provide each other products and resources that we normally wouldn't have access to through that communication and through that relationship. There is no money being exchanged between us, but we have developed incredible value through each other. And we just make each other stronger. We've created sort of a kui of small business owners who are on a very similar playing field, an area that we are. And what we've found is that, you know, much like a fist, the more fingers you've got curled together, it's strong. And we've taken these tiny little businesses and we have created enormous growth potential and enormous value through it. So our nursery is just going to be another step that we take to provide native plants, to provide the affordability that's required. You know, it's easy to say, hey, be more environmentally friendly, like do better when you have access to large amounts of financial resources. But unfortunately, not everybody has that. And so it's sort of our duty, our responsibility as an industry to bring down that pricing as much as possible to make it affordable to everybody. So those who want to can. So it's no longer a financial issue, it's a moral issue. Great. So in the last few minutes, why don't we warm through those other slides for the landscaping, Malu, that you sent me about an example of the lower planting, the upper planting, how people, if they're trying to do this by themselves, what can they do to make their landscape more environmentally sustainable if you don't mind going to those pictures, like this. Sure. Yeah, this was a conceptual design we did for a lovely couple in Wailupe. But again, it's just the layer of adding native plants as your base. This is what you start with. And then upon that, you get the concept. So this first concept is this kind of the cascading feeling of plants falling over the side of a planter as you walk up the stairs. I think the next slide shows the upper planter and the specific plants that we recommended to go along with that. So these are, again, really basic conceptual designs, but getting people to think about their place in Wailupe and then what is appropriate to plant there. And then I'll leave this. Rob, I've been interested in Rosemary. Is that edible Rosemary that you're talking about? So yeah, they did ask for additional plants as well as natives. So Rosemary was an example of this cascading plant that wasn't native, but we try always with our base to start with the natives. And then if anything is requested further, then as long as it's not invasive, then we also provide that as well. Okay, go on. Sorry. Sure. So the second concept here was this kind of minimalist, almost more oriental style of kind of, yeah, a manicured landscaping that and native plants, again, also do play a role here. Akiya is also a really sculptural plant. Oli is awesome and really resilient to this kinds of environments. And then the last one is this idea of Kipuka. So we do have the potential to provide irrigation. So it's not always dryland forests or those types of plants. We can do mesic. We could do these kinds of water-intensive plants, but we always try and be really up front that this is a little bit more temperamental and it's going to cost you a little bit more. But we do provide that option. Yeah. I mean, you guys have inspired me to plant more drought tolerant plants now. I was looking online. I was asking my Alexa, I said, are pomegranates drought tolerant? All right. So it definitely inspired me. So thank you so much. I mean, we're out of time, so we have to wrap it up. I'm Dr. Neal. This is a healthy plant on the Think Tech Live Sharing Network series. We've been talking with Malu and Christian founders of Leahi Landscaping. Thanks to Michael, our broadcast engineer, and the rest of the crew of Think Tech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you in two weeks for more on Healthy Planet on Think Tech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. My guest will be Cindy Teixeira from the Hawaii Animal Juliana Alliance. If you have ideas for the show or questions for my future showguests, please contact me at HealthyPlanetThinkTech at gmail.com. Check out my website at GraceInHawaii.com or Instagram at GracefulLiving365 for more information on my projects, including future showguests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Aloha, everyone.