with this three acres here, where there were no trees. The mango trees down there along the streambed were here, and there were some Christmas berries, which is a weed tree, that were along the old track here, which was from the three or four disastrous years when they grew pineapple here, and ruined everything, by plowing slopes vertically, so they lost all the topsoil . . . But I had some idea--Handy and Handy wrote Native Planters of Hawaii . . . I knew there had been forest here up until around 1840. It was deforested very fast for fuel for the whalers in Lahaina and for the haole [Caucasian] settlers as they built houses . . . Then it was overgrazed; they put in cattle, but they didn't do very well. Then they started trying to grow sugarcane here; they built a railroad out here . . . It was technically described as 'wasteland'. . .from The Progressive: An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate (raw transcript)
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