Waihee Watershed Project Could Help Climbing Fish

Michael Levine/Civil Beat

WAIHEE — At the foot of a cascading waterfall, what was once a mighty torrent becomes little more than a trickle. A rusty pipe drains much of the flow away from the stream bed. Further downriver, a man-made channel protects adjacent property from potential overflows. Where the stream meets the sea, plastic garbage chokes the wetlands.

From mauka to makai, from top to bottom, humans have pretty well screwed up the Waihee watershed. Rather than nourishing the valley and its inhabitants and providing nutrients to the ocean and its reefs, the liquid of life is being neglected.

But in this sea of destruction, some dare to swim against the current.

Hui O Koolaupoko is a Windward Oahu community organization committed to protecting water resources from Makapuu to Kualoa. Last weekend, it held its first "watershed walk," carrying on the work of the Kailua Bay Advisory Council. Some two dozen concerned citizens attended, with 125 more on a waiting list.

The event was designed to "help the community become more familiar with their ahupuaa," a Hawaiian concept that translates most directly as "watershed" but denotes a mountains-to-ocean system of resource management.

The work in Waihee, just north of Kaneohe, is part of a reawakening across the state to the importance of watershed health. The Hawaii Association of Watershed Partnerships includes nine different alliances of public and private landowners working to protect watersheds across six Hawaiian Islands.

Education that connects people to the land is sorely needed. When children were asked to draw the land features of their neighborhoods, their sketches failed to include fishponds or peninsulas but had one common feature: the Windward Mall. That horrified John Reppun, executive director of the Kualoa-Heeia Ecumenical Youth (KEY) Project.

"When you put up fences, learning stops," he said.

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