Managing Environmental Diversity for Sustainable Human Communities: Lessons from East Maui, Hawai‘i, USA - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 88

This Chapter
This chapter outlines the environmental history of Kipahulu Valley, thus proposing
to explain its protected area status and to discuss the significance of this place in
terms of the conservation of biological diversity and the perpetuation of cultural
identity. An environmental profile describing the biophysical conditions in the
Valley indicates the basis for its national and international protected area designation.
As socioeconomic conditions have changed over the past century to accommodate
the conservation ideal and global environmental agenda, the case of East Maui has
illuminated the roles of protected areas in contemporary societies.
The roles of protected areas are multiple and subject to debate and contestation
within different national and local settings. The establishment of protected areas
in East Maui provides a historical understanding of the relationships among the
various stakeholders. History also suggests that the roles have not always been
the same and that accommodations have been made and will likely continue to be
made. The experiences demonstrate the involvement of a variety of interests, and
because stakeholders are not always equally represented, resistance is evident.
The complexities of competing and cooperating interests in East Maui suggest both
differences and similarities in how the place is represented by various groups.
Protection as Contested Process
The tradition of “writing the earth” ( geo , meaning earth; and graphien , meaning to
write) is still prevalent in geographic research, but a fundamental shift has generated
interest in the representations of both the writer and the subject. “Doing geography
is no simple exercise in just explaining the truth … cultural geographers should try
to explain the worlds they are part of … Therefore, the context of explanation is
essential” (Mitchell 2000 :16). The context for this study involved the collection
of information from and about three principal interest groups: resident, research,
and recreation.
Protected area research documents the struggles among interest groups. However,
the identification of interests with particular discourses associated with resident,
research, and recreation - let alone government - is problematic. Nonetheless, it
does provide an organizing framework to understand how places, in general, and
protected areas, specifically, are represented.
Conservation of environmental diversity - a significant concern of the natural
sciences community - involves more than the identification and monitoring of such
diversity. Concentrations of diversity recognized as globally significant are situated
amid residential communities that manage and re-create changing landscapes now
considered too valuable to be left unprotected. Protection is a contested process
involving a number of factors, ecological as much as socioeconomic.
Benton and Short ( 1999 ) wrote of the greening of contemporary societies as part
of an ecological meta-discourse. The numerous actors involved are critical in