Kana what? The story behind the island behind the blog

If you look on a modern map and try to find the island of Kanaloa, you probably won't have much luck. If, however, you were training to be a navigator in sixteenth century Polynesia, it was probably the first island you learned about.

Kanaloa or, by its modern name, Kaho'olawe, is the smallest of the major Hawaiian Islands. Due partly to its central location in the Hawaiian chain, it was where many navigators-in-training went to learn their trade. It lies just east of Maui, which turns out to have been bad luck since Haleakala - Maui's 10,000 foot volcano - strips the trade winds of their all-important moisture before they reach Kaho'olawe. So every year, Kaho'olawe receives less than 25 inches of rain, and most of that rain comes from intense winter Kona storms.

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OK... so the island doesn't get much rain. Fine. There's nothing we can do to change that. Besides, plenty of other places receive a lot less rain than Kaho'olawe but still manage to do OK. What I mean is they still have an active water cycle: it rains, water gets into the soil, plants use the water, water evaporates from the plants into the atmosphere, it rains, and so on. Unfortunately, because of Kaho'olawe's history, the water cycle on the island is broken. When rain falls, most of it doesn't penetrate the soil. Instead, it runs off to the ocean and takes the soil with it as erosion. So instead of helping the plants, the rain actually makes it harder for plants to survive. Don't get me wrong: rain is a good thing. But on Kaho'olawe the system is terribly broken. The island's water cycle has been replaced by an erosion cycle, which looks like this: Less soil means less plants --> less plants means less leaves and roots to stabilize the soil and protect it from rain --> less soil stability means more erosion --> more erosion means less plants.

So what happened? The short answer: We happened.