When the state established the Natural Area Reserves System, its sponsors envisioned a growing, dynamic system. By 1978, approximately sixty sites had been nominated for inclusion in the system. Of those, 34 were forwarded by the NARS commission to the Board of Land and Natural Resources with a recommendation for approval.
By 1991, 19 reserves had been placed into the system. Since then, the approval process has gone into a deep freeze. While there have been nominations, not a single new reserve has been added.
Many attribute the freeze to hunter opposition. Others point to the declining NARS budget.
But bureaucratic inertia has played a role as well. According to NARS Commission chair Linda Pratt, the commission sent a new round of candidate reserves to BLNR chair Michael Wilson in July 1996. The Commission asked Wilson and DOFAW staff to review the candidate sites and pro–vide their recommendations.
According to Pratt, Wilson never responded.
Nearly three years later, Pratt tried again with Wilson’s replacement, Timothy Johns. In a letter to Johns dated February 12, 1999, Pratt observed: “It is our understanding from NARS managers and Island Administrators that the list of recommended NARS was never received by them.”
In April this year, Johns wrote back and promised to distribute the list of 10 candidate sites. Included on the list are a crater on O’ahu, a 30,000-acre site on the slopes of Mauna Loa, and a chain of craters near the summit of Haleakala.
The NARS Commission had hoped to hear advice from staff on the candidate sites at its September meeting, five months after the list was circulated for staff review. But by then, just one NARS manager Bill Stormont of the Big Island had prepared recommendations.
Of the three candidate sites on the Big Island, a section of littoral volcanic cones at Sand Hills in Puna was the only one Stormont considered appropriate. But the area has seen heavy traffic and bulldozing, and could quickly become “a trash dump,” Stormont warned.
A second site, Malama-ki in Puna, is weed-infested and in danger of encroachment from nearby papaya fields, he said, recommending it not be considered further.
As to the 30,000-acre tract identified as Mauna Loa Kipuka and Lava Flow, this, Stormont argued, would “be a massive hornet’s nest to deal with politically, socially, and managerially.” He suggested another form of state protection less restrictive than designation as a Natural Area Reserve, such as designation within the “protective subzone” of the Conservation District.
Stormont said he didn’t argue with the scientific basis for nomination of the sites as reserves. “But it’s not about the biology any more,” he wrote.
“Programmatically, a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of areas and acreage designated is insane. Criticism over not being able to care for what already is designated will be renewed. The haranguing over yet another large tract of public hunting area being designated as a NARS slated for eradication, in the mind of the hunter, will be considerable.”
— Christopher Joyce
Volume 10, Number 5 November 1999
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