04-07-2014, 12:18 PM
Contradictions of Historic Preservation and Sustainability in Pahoa
My own association with, and love for, Pahoa began 40 years ago this month, April, 1974. Newly discharged from the military, I came to Hawaii Island looking for a new start. At that time, Pahoa Village and the surrounding area was dominated by the sugar industry. Cane fields came right up to the back of the houses in the alleys behind the stores. Giant trucks, nearly as tall as the storefronts and laden with cane, rumbled through town rattling windows. Mud poured out of the trucks onto the road. There was no bypass; and the cane was harvested by ripping it out of the ground, roots, soil and all.
I, like many other people around the world, have come to be concerned about the impact of human activities on the Earth’s living systems. The focal point of this concern that developed globally in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries has frequently been couched in terms of “sustainability”.
With the coming of the 21st century, the wooden boardwalks and storefront facades along Pahoa Village Road have captured the sentimental attention of well-meaning, civic-minded folks. The cry has gone out for “historic preservation”.
The history of the Pahoa Village we see today was created by logging Ohia Lehua and producing sugar cane – both done in an extractive manner destructive to the land. Neither logging nor sugar cane production were what any genuine description would describe as “sustainable”, which is defined by Merriam-Webster.com as “1. : capable of being sustained. 2. a : of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged b : of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods.”
Sentimentalizing those wooden boardwalks and storefront facades ignores, or worse, honors, the environmentally destructive activities that brought those boardwalks and storefront facades into existence.
In the most basic and material way, resources committed to historic preservation are not used for future sustainability. Moreover, historic preservation, at least in the case of Pahoa, may well even glorify a very unsustainable past and turn well-intended civic action away from sustainability.
I see a serious contradiction between historic preservation and sustainability in Pahoa.
Where to from here, preservation of an unsustainable history or generation of a sustainable future?
My own association with, and love for, Pahoa began 40 years ago this month, April, 1974. Newly discharged from the military, I came to Hawaii Island looking for a new start. At that time, Pahoa Village and the surrounding area was dominated by the sugar industry. Cane fields came right up to the back of the houses in the alleys behind the stores. Giant trucks, nearly as tall as the storefronts and laden with cane, rumbled through town rattling windows. Mud poured out of the trucks onto the road. There was no bypass; and the cane was harvested by ripping it out of the ground, roots, soil and all.
I, like many other people around the world, have come to be concerned about the impact of human activities on the Earth’s living systems. The focal point of this concern that developed globally in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries has frequently been couched in terms of “sustainability”.
With the coming of the 21st century, the wooden boardwalks and storefront facades along Pahoa Village Road have captured the sentimental attention of well-meaning, civic-minded folks. The cry has gone out for “historic preservation”.
The history of the Pahoa Village we see today was created by logging Ohia Lehua and producing sugar cane – both done in an extractive manner destructive to the land. Neither logging nor sugar cane production were what any genuine description would describe as “sustainable”, which is defined by Merriam-Webster.com as “1. : capable of being sustained. 2. a : of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged b : of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods.”
Sentimentalizing those wooden boardwalks and storefront facades ignores, or worse, honors, the environmentally destructive activities that brought those boardwalks and storefront facades into existence.
In the most basic and material way, resources committed to historic preservation are not used for future sustainability. Moreover, historic preservation, at least in the case of Pahoa, may well even glorify a very unsustainable past and turn well-intended civic action away from sustainability.
I see a serious contradiction between historic preservation and sustainability in Pahoa.
Where to from here, preservation of an unsustainable history or generation of a sustainable future?