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Working alone, by hand, one man is turning 100 acres of alien trees into a refuge for Hawaii's endangered botanical treasures
Chain-sawing in his 100-acre wildlife reserve on the island of Kauai, Keith Robinson drops a foot-thick guava tree in eight seconds. Within minutes, dozens of guavas are brought to their knees, and Hawaii's winter sun shines on a new clearing. Robinson will clear an area of nearly four football fields, some 180,000 square feet of "alien forest": guava, silk oak, monkeypod and Java plum, to name just a few.
A month later, when the rains begin, Robinson will clear the slash with fire and zap recidivist shoots with an herbicide. Where poison can't be used, Robinson fills his ten-gallon backpack sprayer (which he designed) with jet fuel and uses it as a flamethrower to obliterate invaders. (He says his scorched eyebrows always reappear within two weeks.) He'll leave the area fallow for a couple of years while he clears another section, then he'll bring back the native flora-seedling by seedling, plant by plant. After ten years, plants of some 80 native Hawaiian species adorn his Kauai Wildlife Reserve, ranging from purest yellow hibiscus to red-flowered Kokia, rare white gardenias to delicate frilly Hibiscadelphus. Some species are down to their last few individuals in the wild.
Robinson is a botanically xenophobic Robin Hood whose dream is to reestablish an authentic prehuman piece of Hawaii, a place now awash with introduced species of plants and animals. The first person in his ranching family to graduate from an agronomy department, he is a tough, balding man of 55, always dressed in work shirt and jeans.
"I'm just undoing what my illustrious family did when they secured the land here 130 years ago," he says. Dubbed the "Hawaiian family Robinson" in Forbes magazine's 1995 roundup of America's 400 richest people, they sprang from a clan of prosperous Scots. Led by Keith's great-great-grandmother, the redoubtable Eliza Sinclair, they sailed away from their ranching life in New Zealand aboard their 300-ton bark, the Bessie, in search of new challenges. After looking at Tahiti and America's Northwest Coast, they landed in Honolulu in 1863, in search of real estate. Although the family was offered Waikiki, Ford Island in Pearl Harbor...