Lomography

Hmmm... some fresh subjects to edit from a couple rolls of 120 color reversal film and a plastic Holga camera. It took forever to get the negatives developed but worth the wait, I can already see versions of these submerged under beeswax.

                          

Art Affair 2013

Metal's Note- - 5" x 7" mixed media, beeswax, resin

Art Affair 2013 Camelot at Kaluanui...A Feast of Art & Merriment, at the Hui Noeau Art Center in Makawao. It's their annual live & silent auction featuring scores of original art pieces donated by artists on Maui. The auctions raise vital funds that enable access to exceptional visual arts programming for all ages and artistic abilities.
This is the piece I donated to this year's art auction.

Sea of Qi's Hollow- Encaustic

Sea of Qi's Hollow 10" x 10" Mixed media, beeswax, resin, sumi ink, coffee and xerox transfer. This is one of several pieces of mine selected this year for the 2013 Hui No‘eau's Juried Art Exhibition. Show dates are January 5 – February 15, Mon.—Sat.: 10 am - 4 pm 2841 Baldwin Avenue Makawao, HI 96768

Art Maui 2012

Art Maui 2012 annual juried exhibit is now showing until April 20th from 11:00-5:00pm in the Schaefer Gallery at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. Here are my accepted pieces.


Lost -encaustic, collage, cyanotype and van dyke prints, charcoal, vellum




Landscape With I Ching -encaustic, sumi ink, vegetable oil, image transfer, oil pigments


“The purpose of art is to keep us perpetually off balance.”- John Baldessari

When it comes to visual art, I make a conscious effort to let go of what I know and not keep doing what I do well. Randomness is interesting to me. There is always a great surprise in store for me when I work randomly- and so much in the final work that doesn't make sense and therefore a lot more peculiarity to ponder. Ridiculousness and absurdity are very good things when it comes to art.

I enjoy art exercises that explore energy, frequency and vibration, exercises that can capture these qualities.... when I lived in the city I loved to draw while I was on the subway, sometimes I would hold the pen perpendicular to the paper, not look down just straight ahead and let the pen record the bumpy motion and the stop and go of the subway car.
Other exercises I experiment with, capture data from the subconscious. I don’t do this one often enough, for good reason, but the results are always interesting, I place a drawing pad and something to draw with next to the bed, set my alarm for 3:00am, and as I wake up, immediately start drawing without turning the light on.
In the wonderful, wonderful amorphous world of art, being in a place of unclarity is a very cherished and desireable place to be, murkiness is active and alive, it’s where germination begins and opens up new ideas of thought.

Here's a damn good quote from Robert Rauschenberg, “If you’re in front of a good work of art and you don’t change your mind about something, you’re a fool.”
I wouldn't, in my own words, say that anybody is a fool, but I get what he's saying, it's not always about whether we can relate or not, whether we like it or not. Even if we don't like the work, or should I say, especially if we don't like it, we still look for things about it that presents something new, unfamiliar, off-kilter or even offensive to our thought pattern and our psyche. Good art opens the mind, refines our tolerance and helps us to be better thinkers.

Hui No’eau's 2012 Juried Exhibition

A nice start to a New Year, I got several pinhole photographs in this years Hui Noeau Juried Exhibit.


Popo kapa wai lehua- Wring out the dark rainclouds



Me ke 'ala o ka lipoa- With it's fragrance of the lipoa (seaweed)

Vegetable Oil and Sumi Ink Prints

Panel with "found papers", sumi ink and beeswax

An artist friend of mine shared with me a very entertaining technique using vegetable oil and sumi ink. You take a vat or small plastic tub, fill it with water. Then you work with two sumi ink brushes- one in each hand, one brush gets dipped in vegatable oil and the other dipped in sumi ink and you then alternate tapping the surface of the water with the ink brush and the oil brush. The oil resists the ink making a sort of marbeling effect that floats right on the surface of the water. After you get a pleasing composition,take a sheet of paper and just sort of gently 'kiss' the surface of the water in the tub, and quickly, carefully lift the paper right back out. The marbeled ink composition will transfer onto the paper. The effects are really lovely.

Encaustic and Mixed Media

The Egg detail


The Egg, Panel with "found papers", sumi ink and beeswax

Cyanotype & VanDyke- studies with light sensitive materials

Camera Obscura

Zero 2000 Pinhole Camera 30 minute exposure

"In the high-tech world pinhole photography becomes perfectly an outsider, but a tiny hole is the oldest optics which led the Renaissance scientists to invent "Camera Obscura", ancestor of our modern cameras". Mieko Tadokoro

Lensless Photography

Here is a small preview from a very happy new assignment that I have been asked to participate. It is a collaborative project that revolves around a series of wearable tapestries, created by New York artist, Susan David. She has separate designs for each piece making them one of a kind and has painstakingly sewn sequence, beads, applied photo transfers and fine stichwork onto the backs of vintage jean jackets that she had been collecting over a period. Really superb work.
Susan and I have been hauling around a seamstress mannequin to different locations in Hawaii and photographing the jackets using all sorts of alternative photo techniques.
These are several of the images we processed using a pinhole camera.

My Grandfathers Drawings

These are classic. They are renderings or homework assignments that my grandfather had when he attended New York University College of Fine Arts- Dept. of Architecture back in 1935. They have a stamp in the lower left hand corner from the professor who issued the grades. D plus, B, C, etc. Interesting to try to apply a grading system to a drawing, even if it is from an architectural point of view.

One of the major challenges in art production is learning how to balance our thinking, about our role or responsibility as artists and balancing our thinking between true economic possibilities and the lack of economic possibilities. It is so important to find ways to strengthen our belief in ourselves and our art, to avoid putting too much emphasis on what other people think and to keep building on our belief in self-motivation and self-reliance and have the confidence to know that our creative abilities will make a significant difference in a world of intense competition and rapid change.

Miracle On The Mountain

Miracle on the Mountain- article from Maui No Ka Oi magazine
Pull on some boots, grab a digging stick, and help bring a Hawaiian dryland forest back from the brink.
Story by Paul Wood | Photography by Bob Bangerter

It’s dawn on a Saturday and dozens of people are parking in the gravel lot next to ‘Ulupalakua Ranch Store. You can tell by their dress that this expedition is no surfing safari: heavy boots, knit caps, down vests, Pendleton shirts and camo pants. The air is crisp and silent at 3,000 feet, back side of Haleakala. The mood is cordial but quiet, some handclasps and nose rubbing, but little inclination to chatter. Everyone knows why they’ve come, and it isn’t to socialize. Using stiff brushes, each person scours his or her boots assiduously, knocking off any seed or crumb of lowland soil that might be stuck in the treads. Then the assembled wedge themselves into four-wheel-drive vehicles—along with picks and ‘o‘o (digging sticks) and flats full of seedlings growing in long yellow dibble tubes—and the vehicles begin to caravan straight up the mountain over ranch trails and rocky pastureland.

The landscape is tilted and dizzying at this elevation. These leeward slopes are largely devoid of trees, and the wind beats unbroken against cracked boulders and weary kikuyu grass. The land is pleated and humped with domes, still twisted in the fantastic shapes of lava that once blew out of vents in Haleakala’s Southwest Rift Zone. The sea channel far below ripples in the wind. Sunlight and racing clouds play tricks of color on the cobalt flatness and on the red-brown islands off shore—eyelash-like Molokini, long Kaho‘olawe, and far in the eastern sky, the mirage-like dome of Mauna Kea.

"We're beginning a march back in time."
This was all forest once, from the top of the mountain all the way down to what is now called Wailea. People lived here in the old days, walking under a canopy light enough to allow a great diversity of life—a multitude of lichens and spiders, insects and birds that occurred nowhere else on Earth. This was one of the greatest dryland forests in all Hawai‘i. The dryland forests were quite different from their wetland counterparts on the windward side of the mountain, in that they comprised so many more species, species of all kinds, but especially of trees.

I could list the names of these trees, but the names would probably not ring a bell, unless perhaps you know the old chants. Holei is a lovely tree with fragrant flowers, the source of a brilliant dye. Kauila has wood that’s almost as hard as iron. Lama represented both lamplight and the enlightenment of the mind. These trees and dozens of others are almost gone from the Earth, just as the great forest that was their home is almost gone from leeward Haleakala. The key word is “almost.”

All those warm-dressed, clean-booted expeditioners are headed upslope with a single mission—to replant that forest one seedling at a time.

Auwahi is the name of the mountain district where this wildly unlikely reforestation is happening, nudged ahead by monthly outings of quietly determined volunteers.

The first time I went on one of these Auwahi trips was about ten years ago. I remember the austerity of the mountain and the smallness of the seedlings that we inserted into pockets of soil, signing off with a cup of water and a prayer, the wind whipping and whipping them as soon as we turned our backs. These seedlings had all come from the trees that remained in the vicinity, raised in a nursery back at ‘Ulupalakua Ranch headquarters until big enough to be returned to their bleak native homeland. The parents of these seedlings still stood, bent as geriatric patients in an apocalyptic nursing home. With our own backs bent in honor of the almost moribund trees, we planted their keiki (children) for them.

Dr. Art Medeiros is the man who identified the need, collected the native seed, and gathered the forces to heed the call for last-minute, hang-on-by-a-fingernail restoration of Maui’s formerly great dryland forest. Like an Old Testament prophet, the Maui biologist is bearded, eloquent, and standing resolute at the drawbridge before native Hawai‘i’s last stand. He’s the one who identified Auwahi as a “museum forest” with elderly trees that lived without hope—without an understory, a younger generation, a tomorrow. He convinced the Erdman family, whose ‘Ulupalakua Ranch encompasses Auwahi, to participate in an experiment. Together they constructed a ten-acre “exclosure”—a rectangular fenced area that excluded cattle, goats, deer, and pigs. And they sprayed that ten acres with herbicide to destroy the kikuyu grass—an imported grazing plant that chokes out all others.

Those steps alone could maybe suffice to allow a natural system to restore itself. But not at Auwahi. The original trees are too scattered and geriatric. So Art asked for volunteer planters to start these steep mountain caravans and begin reversing two centuries of environmental collapse.

Here are two statements that I have heard many times from Art Medeiros. One: “They said to me, ‘You are [expletive deleted] nuts, brah!’” Two: “It is okay to fail. It is not okay not to try. What are you going to say when your grandchildren come to you and ask, ‘Why didn't you even try?’”


I thought, “Who the hell built a botanical garden up here?” Then I realized. We did.

The last trip I made to Auwahi with the Saturday morning volunteers, bouncing up the high slopes for what seemed like an hour—the travel time must be far less, but I always lose touch with the clock on these mind-bending excursions—we parked by a fence with plants crowding and pushing against the boundary. On the other side of the fence line, treetops were whipping gleefully in the winds. I thought immediately: “Who the hell built a botanical garden up here?” Then in an instant I realized.

We did.

You can see Auwahi on Google Earth—a ten-acre rectangle of exuberant foliage against an otherwise bitten-to-nothing rockscape. A grove of reclaimed forest.

But Google Earth is actually out of touch, because it shows only what we now call Auwahi One. The next exclosure, Auwahi Two, twenty-three acres in size, has just this month been planted to its capacity. Art and his mainly volunteer staff are talking about bringing some of the rare elements back to Auwahi One—the ferns, for example, that can’t thrive without a “locked-in” forest canopy.

“With the ferns,” Art told me, “we begin a march back in time. People think that I know the Hawaiian dryland forest. But now, every year, we march back to a forest I am increasingly unfamiliar with.”

A visiting biologist has discovered a lovely white spider that lives only in the Auwahi forest. A bright red native bird, the endangered ‘apapane, has returned on it own to Auwahi. Art described the sighting as “almost a religious experience.”

“None of this could have happened without the Erdmans,” says Art. “They are the greatest. At one point they actually asked me, ‘Are we doing enough?’” You won’t find anyone to answer that question in the negative, not since late 2009, when the Erdmans gave the Maui Coastal Land Trust a conservation easement to more than 11,000 of its pastoral acres, including the Auwahi groves. Their gift permits agricultural pursuits on the land but bans development in perpetuity.

Success at Auwahi has inspired a dozen or so other major landholders of these dramatic, dry mountain slopes (including Haleakala National Park) to form the Leeward Haleakala Watershed Restoration Partnership. The group intends to regrow native forest on more than 43,000 acres of what is presently stark pastureland.

These partners are not simply idealistic about saving rare plants and critters. They have practical ideas about the health of the land. The forest would yield valuable hardwoods. (Think koa, which is the mother of these dryland forests.) It would create job opportunities and supply the physical materials for traditional Hawaiian cultural practices. And it would raise the water table for a major part of the island, bringing rainfall back to now-parched hillsides, perhaps even regenerating the na‘ulu clouds that old-timers say used to feed not only Haleakala’s kula (mid-elevation) slopes, but also the hills of Kaho‘olawe. Art Medeiros is also envisioning a museum from which a school program would emanate.

And why not? Auwahi Three is already underway—151 acres for the new increment. The forest is growing again. Get yourself some good boots. This is the best experience you will find anywhere on earth to undestroy the natural order. You have something better to do on your day off?


To volunteer for an Auwahi service trip, call 572-4471 or email auwahi@yahoo.com. You will need ankle-high hiking boots, raingear, layered clothing, two liters of water, lunch, and sunscreen. High-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicles are most welcome.

2010 Environmental Heroes - Maui Magazine - March-April 2010 - Maui, Hawaii

2010 Environmental Heroes - Maui Magazine - March-April 2010 - Maui, Hawaii

Meet seven Maui residents who display a heroic commitment to our island's environment.
Story by Sara Smith, Jen Aly, Teya Penniman, Susanne Gnagy, Matthew Fullmer and Rita Goldman

They protect endangered species, preserve the wilderness, and reverse the harm we humans do to land and sea. Heck, they’re even impervious to kryptonite.

What turns an ordinary human into a champion of the environment?

The folks we highlight in these pages can’t leap tall buildings or bend steel in their bare hands. Only one or two wear special costumes when defending Mother Earth.

But they do share a remarkable power: They can see how enormous a job it is to save a planet, and instead of becoming discouraged, grow enthusiastic at the myriad possibilities for making a difference. And through their conviction, in very different ways, they’re showing the rest of us that we can, too.


The Stewards
Last Thanksgiving, the Erdman family gave Maui something to truly be thankful for: permanently protecting more than 11,000 acres of ‘Ulupalakua Ranch from future development.

Pardee and Betsy Erdman purchased the ranch in 1963. In time, sons Christian and Sumner got involved; the latter now serves as ranch president. As if running a viable ranching operation in Hawai‘i weren’t challenging enough, the Erdmans practice a holistic approach to stewardship that includes proper pasture management, invasive-species eradication, extensive reforestation efforts, and revitalizing the watershed.

It’s a formidable task, encompassing 18,000 acres that stretch from shoreline to an elevation of 6,000 feet and span three different ecological zones. The Erdmans succeed, in part, through innovation.

“We’re always focusing on the next problem,” says Pardee. To stay ahead of ever-changing invasive weeds, the Erdmans use a system called managed multispecies grazing. Rotating cattle, sheep, horses, and goats—which have different palates and eating habits—can help keep down weeds such as Sacramento burr and fireweed. Plus, hungry livestock reduce fire potential by devouring overgrown vegetation. This protects the maturing native ecosystems, which reciprocate by improving the water and mineral cycles—a symbiotic relationship that is key to the Erdmans’ balanced land-management strategy.

The Erdmans also collaborate with ten different private, federal, state, and county conservation agencies and organizations. Their most enduring partnership is with Dr. Art Medeiros of the U.S. Geological Service, who heads the Auwahi reforestation project—the state’s most successful restoration of native dryland reforestation—all of it on ‘Ulupalakua Ranch land.

In 2003, the Erdmans joined another Medeiros project: the Leeward Haleakala Watershed Restoration Partnership, a collaboration of the region’s major landholders to restore more than 43,000 acres of native forests. The goal: to preserve habitat for many of Hawai‘i’s endangered plants and animals, and improve the health of the watershed. Native koa trees, for instance, are very important because their sickle-shaped leaves point down, ensuring that captured mist condenses into water that drips to the ground. The partnership’s efforts are working. “The water and mineral cycle has improved,” Sumner confirms.

Now, working with Maui Coastal Land Trust, the Erdmans have established an agricultural easement that will preserve 11,000 acres in perpetuity as a working ranch and native wildlife habitat. The easement includes one of Maui’s most iconic views—the glorious stretch of pastureland mauka (upslope) of Wailea—and all of Auwahi.

“This is the largest-ever voluntary-easement donation in Hawai‘i, a true gift for future generations of Maui,” says Dale Bonar, executive director of the Maui Coastal Land Trust. “The Erdmans have a strong love for the land . . . a decades-long commitment to conservation.”

If Sumner has his way, it won’t stop there. “It goes beyond just our family,” he says. “We hope to lead by example.”—Sara Smith

Images From a Pinhole Camera

These images were taken with a pinhole camera made out of a paintcan. The lens for this paintcan camera is actually a small hole drilled into the side of the can- about the size of a pinhole. I used photographic paper instead of film for this particular camera, placed it inside the paintcan, then shut the lid tight. I used a flexible magnet to cover the pinhole until I found the image I wanted to catch. Then I set the can on a sturdy surface, made sure the hole was pointing at what I wanted to photograph, and I removed the magnet for an exposure time of around 8 minutes. Put the magnet back over the pinhole and made a B-line for the darkroom to develop the image.


Here is another interesting landscape image taken with a paintcan pinhole camera. The exposure time was approx.15 minutes. Notice the infinite depth of field typical of this type of lensless photography.

Culture Verses Nature

Maui’s first co-educational high school opened in 1913 in a small frame building at Hamakuapoko, close to bustling Paia town and near the large plantation camps of East Maui.




Hawaii architect Charles W. Dickey designed the the concrete, mission-style school building in 1921. Students came from surrounding communities, central Maui and Upcountry, often by horseback, via Kahului Railroad trains or buses, or over the well-worn footpaths from neighboring plantation camps.

In 1972 a new Maui High School opened in Kahului. The old Maui High closed its doors, beginning years of decline and deterioration.


I recently went to the site where the old Maui High stands today looking clean and fairly in-tact, the grounds were being very well tended to.


I decided to photograph the adjacent structure and beautifully decayed and graffitti'ied building of the old Maui Sugar Mill. With the secondary forest aggressively growing, ficus roots, trunks and branches breaking through all the concrete, I really admire the whole process and found this place to be a real treat to do photo shoots.








I thought it was interesting to compare my color photographs in 2009 of the Sugar Mill with these old 1920-30's black and white photos of old Maui High and this area when it was first constructed.



Photos of Old Maui High School and the Old Haiku Mill

Ko'olau Forest Reserve

I caught some beautiful images here as we went botanizing in the Ko'olau forest reserve on Maui with wildlife biologist Fern Duvall and the Native Hawaiian Plant Society. We entered the forest from the top of Olinda Rd., approximately 6,200 feet elevation and hiked in from there for about a mile or two. It went from hot, dry and sunny, as we walked and slowly changed to misty, cool and muddy. By the time we reached the first bridge, my camera was dripping wet!! Time to put it away, but did manage to photograph some rare and peculiar native Hawaiian plant species; clermontias, ferns- a'mau, repeatedly forking ferns- Sticherus?, native geraniums, mountain naupaka, ohelo, tropical hydrangeas' to name a few and a dominant tree line of ohia.


The upper forest zone of Ko'olau heads up towards Haleakala's northern slope and is cut into many gorges, the biggest of these is the outlet at Keanae, called Ko'olau Gap. Ko'olau, which means 'windward,' catches the rain clouds and squeezes out about 80in of rain annually on the coast and a mighty 200in to 300in up the slopes. No surprise - that makes for awesome waterfalls as the rainwater rushes down the reserve's abundant gulches and streams.

The Lost Art of Photogravure

AT ITS ORGIN, photography was intimately linked with printmaking. Some folks had been experimenting with light-sensitive materials since the 1810s. Their efforts were motivated by the desire to make stable fixed images directly from nature, or to make "etchings by light."

Photogravure is not a purely photographic medium. Photogravure is a chameleon, encompassing many manifestations of printmaking using a variety of darkroom and etching techniques, and is therefore hard to classify.

It often surprises people that the inventor of photography on paper, William Henry Fox Talbot, was also the father of photogravure... For Talbot, photogravure had been the logical evolution of his original invention of photography; transforming nature's sketches into permanent and beautiful printer's ink.

In photogravure, the fragile silver salts of normal photography are transcribed in the photogravure process with printing ink. This process adds to an appreciated esthetic improvement, the tonal and tactile qualities and the guarantee of absolute permanence. These values have always been recognized as famous photographers of the early 1900's such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand adopted photogravure with enthusiasm in Camera Notes and Camera Work. It ceased being used after the Second World War because of its cost. It is only recently that a few workshops have revived this old and marvelous process.

"The quality of touch in it's deepest living sense is inherent in my photographs. When that sense of touch is lost, the heartbeat of the photograph is extinct- dead. My interest is in the living" ~ALFRED STIEGLITZ FROM TWICE A YEAR 1938

I recently attended a three day intensive workshop in copper plate Photogravure, thus demystifying the process for me. We started out with an 8"x10" positive image (obtained from a digital image file or scanned negative) on transparency film and used photoshop and a printer to do this. After our image was printed out as a positive, we were ready to begin the very elegant, artful process.

THE FIRST STEP in making a photogravure print is preparing the printing plate. This pure copper plate must be thoroughly cleaned, its surface highly polished, and its edges beveled (to avoid damaging the paper during printing).


WHILE THE PLATE IS BEING READIED, the image is also prepared. A positive transparency is made from either an original negative or a copy negative. This film positive, which must be made the size desired for the final print, is then contact-printed under ultraviolet light to a gelatin-coated paper (known as carbon tissue) which was previously made light sensitive by soaking it in a solution of potassium bichromate, then dried. In this process, the action of the light through the film positive changes the melting temperature of the gelatin. Areas exposed to light have a higher melting temperature and are said to be "hardened" and less exposed areas stay the same.


NEXT THE IMAGE must be transferred to the prepared copper plate. The image-carrying tissue is adhered to the plate. This tissue/plate is then soaked in hot water softening the gelatin and allowing the paper base of the tissue to separate. Portions of the gelatin that received little or no light during exposure to the transparency remain soluble and slowly wash away, leaving a gelatin image that will act as an acid resist when the plate is etched. The gelatin image on the copper plate, now called a resist, is then dried.


NEXT THE PLATE IS placed in a succession of etching baths. Etching begins in sequence in proportion to the thickness of the gelatin coating and the viscosity of the mordant (Ferric Chloride) bath. The viscosity of the Ferric Chloride controls the speed with which the solution penetrates the gelatin. The result is a plate with many minute reservoirs or cells of varying depths. During printing, the deeper cells hold more ink and thus transfer more ink to the paper, creating the darker areas of the image


FINALLY, AFTER THE PLATE has been thoroughly washed, the gravure is printed - on an etching press, like all other forms of intaglio printing. Stiff ink is spread over the entire plate and worked into the recessed areas that form the image. The plate is then positioned face-up on an etching press. The artist places a piece of dampened, high-quality paper over the plate then covers the paper with etching felts for padding and passes this through the press. The rollers force the paper into the small depressions that hold the ink, creating a printed image. To make the next impression, the artist re-inks the plate and repeats the process. At the end of the printing session, the plate is thoroughly cleaned.

This procedure produces "grain" gravures, so called because of the random dots created by the dusted rosin. Photogravure is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, costly process used today by fine-art photographer-printmakers.

References and quotes: http://www.photogravure.com/about/index.html

Art & Science- Anna Atkins Cyanotypes

"Botanical illustration is often seen as a gap between art and science, not properly belonging to either", as mentioned in American Scientist Nov/Dec 2004.

The work of Anna Atkins is surely striking; she is well known for her amazing, Prussian blue-and-white cyanotype prints of seaweeds in her book published in 1843 on British Algae. Cyanotype is an early photographic printing process using the sunlight for contact printing actual objects as photograms on paper. Although Atkins was a competant watercolorist and draughtsman for botanical illustration, she brilliantly applied the cyanotype process to solve the difficulties of making accurate drawings of scientific specimens and self-published the first installment of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

Cyanotype is labeled now as an alternative photographic process used by many artists today. I have been playing around with sunprinting using cyanotype chemicals on silk material and also my handmade papers and am totally inspired by the work of Anna Atkins.

The images have an x-ray or MRI type of translucency that is stunningly beautiful against that Prussian blue backround. They are also accurate plant depictions and totally gorgeous!




Photo's of: Cyanotype photograms made by Atkins which was part of her 1843 book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

The Dunes Of Mo'omomi

"AT FIRST GLANCE the dunes of Mo'omomi appear nearly barren. The far cliffs of Mokio are dim in the salt haze, and arid scrub-wind whipped into curious forms-clings tenaciously to the sandy soils. And yet the site is rich in life; indeed, it is a last refuge for Hawaiian coastal vegetation. Within vast, integrated communities of nearly undisturbed native grasses and shrubs grow more rare coastal species than any other single place in the islands. What remains at Mo'omomi is a vestige of a major Hawaiian coastal ecosystem, a holdover from an ancient era.


Here, the shrubby ocean naupaka (Scaevola sericea- the most common of the islands' native coastal plants-shares the coastal strand with a beach morning glory (Ipomoea pescaprae), and with a mix of less frequently seen endemic Hawaiian plants. Carpets of rolling 'aki'aki grasslands provide a stabilized bed in the shifting dunes for a rare native nightshade, Solanum nelsoni.



In exposed patches of red volcanic soil, an endangered beach legume, the 'ohai (Sesbania tomentosa) flaunts its brilliant red flowers set on low-lying branches that seem espaliered by the wind against a backdrop of rocky terrain. No fewer than five globally endangered plant species make their last stand at Mo'omomi.




Among these is a native Gnaphalium, called 'ena'ena by the Hawaiians, that punctuates the sandstone plain with radient white foliage. Its succulent leaves are thickly covered with fine, sun reflecting hairs-a protective strategy common in the parched flats of Mo'omomi.



Another native plant, a heliotrope, forms silvery mats in the lee of consolidated dune crests. Its whorled, diminutive leaves also are clothed with delicate reflective hairs. The heliotrope's Hawaiian name, hinahina, evokes an image of the moon rising fully over an ocean horizon. (In Hawaiian mythology, the moon embodied a goddess, Hina-the mother of the island of Molokai. It seems appropriate that the island chain's best examples of hinahina occur on Molokai.)



Heliotropium growing with Nama sandwicensis, endemic to the Hawaiian Islands and the only member of the Hydrophyllaceae that grows on the archipelago. Its flowers are tiny and dark lavender in color.



Other plants to be found here include the Hawaiian endemic Chamaesyce degeneri, which the Hawaiians call `akoko or just koko. This species belongs to the Euphorbiaceae.



Also abundant among the sand banks is the Hawaiian endemic Lipochaeta integrifolia (Asteraceae). This island endemic genus, referred to in general as nehe in Hawaiian, is represented in the islands by some 20 species.


It is difficult to picture the ancient dry forest that once stood where Mo'omomi's dunes now hold sway. But, from what we know of remnant low-land dry forests at other sites in the Hawaiian islands, a diverse blending of trees with no single dominant species might have existed. Here in the dappled sunlight beneath the forest canopy, honks of giant flightless geese once joined the chorus of the ocean waves. Today the dunes and their specialized flora distinguish Mo'omomi, and the sands have preserved the area's singular fossils and artifacts...

The coastline of the Hawaiian islands perhaps have seen more change than any other biological zone in the entire chain. No wonder so many people regard saving Mo'omomi as a rare opportunity to preserve a living portion of the past for the future. The Hawaiian green sea turtles attempting to recolonize here are a hopeful sign that the coastal dunes can endure, even recover, if we acknowledge their significance with action." ~Samuel M. Gon III, The Dunes of Mo'omomi, article featured in The Nature Conservancy News Feb/March 1987

Photo's by: Bruce A. Bohm
Photo of 'ohai by: Kim & Forest Starr