This American Land

- Just ahead on "This American Land."

- [singing in Hawaiian] - An ancient Hawaiian form of fishing makes a comeback.

It's sustainable and spiritual.

- To have two fires in one summer, that was a real wake-up call for us.

- One Colorado community finds an incredibly resilient source of water right under their feet.

Put your feet up.

"This American Land" starts now.

[dynamic music] - Funding for "This American Land" provided by the Walton Family Foundation.

- Hello, and welcome to "This American Land."

I'm your host, Ed Arnett.

And in every show, you'll meet some of the people creating bold, new solutions to our conservation challenges.

For some of those answers, we need to reach back to our ancestors.

In ancient Hawaii, hundreds of fish ponds dotted the coastline.

They provided food and were a symbol of pride.

But with modernization, most were forgotten, fell into disrepair, and in many cases, were paved over.

Now they're experiencing a renaissance as people begin to realize this ancient form of aquaculture is key to creating sustainable fisheries in the islands.

Here's correspondent Brad Hicks.

- We have all of this pohaku behind me that we need to move.

- I want to help you.

- [speaks Hawaiian] - One stone at a time.

- Heavy.

- On the north shore of Oahu, they are building back what was taken away.

[soft upbeat music] Each stone has a place.

- Your face stones at the front are your alo.

- A purpose.

[both grunt] - All of these backfill stones are called your haka haka.

- A blend of ancient art... - A traditional-style rock wall building with no cement.

- And engineering.

- Finding the best places for these pohaku to serve that'll last generations.

- The wall is part of a fish pond that dates back 500 years, a place and practice nearly forgotten.

And what happened here in the town of Haleiwa is a story repeated hundreds of times across the islands of Hawaii.

- A new culture came and brought their waste here and introduced a different kind of culture and a way of thinking about the land and ocean.

And one of it was not recognizing the importance of fish ponds.

But again, it wasn't a choice.

It was forced upon us.

[birds singing] - Fish ponds in Hawaii are as old as the Hawaiian people.

[suspenseful music] The first arrivals, more than 1,000 years ago, adapted fish trap techniques so they could actually farm fish, some of the earliest aquaculture on Earth.

The ponds were positioned where springs and streams meet the sea, the permeable rock wall creating an ever-changing mix of freshwater and saltwater.

Herbivorous fish favored by the Hawaiians were drawn in because the brackish blend promotes phytoplankton, which they eat, and the freshwater kills ocean parasites.

The invention unique to Hawaii was the makaha, a sluice gate in the dry-stacked wall between the pond and the sea.

- And these sluice gates, made from traditional materials like wood, have different slot sizes where fish can get in through the gate at a certain size and they can't get out when they get bigger.

But there's more to it.

- A lot more.

The ponds create resiliency for nearshore fisheries by being a hatchery of sorts.

After fish have grown in the pond protected from predators by the sluice gates, the gates can be lifted to let them out to populate the reef.

- So you have an ecosystem within a larger ecosystem, which is the ocean.

[peaceful music] - Hawaiian land is historically divided into corridors that stretch from the mountains to the sea.

Each of these sections is its own ecosystem.

Rainwater from the mountains filters first through taro fields.

Silt settles out and the taro plants, a traditional Hawaiian staple, take up nitrogen from the water.

By the time it reaches the ponds downstream, the water has the right amount of nutrients to feed the phytoplankton, but not so much it will choke the pond.

And the sediment that's still in the water settles out in the pond, which protects the coral reefs just offshore.

- Our coral reefs don't like sediment.

This area has a lot of rain, but it also has the world's best coral reef ecosystem right on the other side of this fish pond, Kane'ohe Bay.

- Moli'i fishpond is nearly 1,000 years old, one of only four original ancient Hawaiian fishponds left on Oahu.

The largest on the island was Maunalua.

- And it was here for hundreds of years, a fishpond that produced, you know, millions of fish.

And we had this huge food resource which, unfortunately, we no longer have.

- After statehood in the 1950s, a Western developer turned the food source into suburbia.

Parts of the pond were paved over.

What was left was turned into a marina.

- When you take away that food source, you become dependent on those who bring in food.

So it takes away your autonomy, right?

To me, it's very deliberate.

- Anne Marie Kirk is a story catcher, a living archive of oral accounts from the ancestors.

We met her in the last true piece of Maunalua.

75 years ago, you could see the fishpond from here.

- This is in the 1950s.

So we're right here.

And Costco and Safeway and Ross would all be in this area.

So this area is filled in.

We have Koko Marina shopping center over here.

- When developers paved over the fish pond, they did more than take away the food source.

They erased the name.

Most people in the islands today know this place as Hawai'i Kai.

- Maunalua is a name we've said for 1,000 years.

Hawai'i Kai, we said for 70.

It's a development name.

When you start stripping the history of places, it's easy to build over it.

- Maunalua is not the only fish pond paved over for a mall.

At this shopping center, a 400-year-old fish pond has started reclaiming its ancient ground.

Water bubbles up from the springs.

Fish swim in their new old home.

[suspenseful music] - This is like the spirit of the old pond is saying, I'm still here.

- Yeah.

It's still here.

It never left.

- For native Hawaiians like Kehaulani Lum, the fish ponds are more than a food source, more than a name.

They are family and sacred.

- [singing in Hawaiian] - [singing in Hawaiian] - [singing in Hawaiian] - [singing in Hawaiian] - [singing in Hawaiian] - Along the shores of Pearl Harbor, she's working to restore a pond in her ancestral place.

- To the deities who still reside in this space and all the ancestors who were created before us, we offer our deepest gratitude.

[singing in Hawaiian] - The story of this pond changed in a single day.

[dramatic orchestral music] - December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

- After the attack, the Navy moved everyone out, the fish pond filled with silt, and was forgotten.

- I was raised not knowing anything about it.

Nobody ever talked about it.

I didn't learn about it in school.

- 70 years after the war, a Navy archeologist discovered the ancient rock wall buried under invasive mangrove.

- I was 50 years old when I walked into this space at the invitation of the Navy.

They came to my house and asked if we would come in and help them restore this.

- The Navy is now leading the project to bring the fishpond back.

- And they decided it's OK.

Let's build it right through the pond.

- Should we go collect some rocks?

- Yep.

- And they have an armada of volunteers.

- They're planting this baby coconut.

- Thousands and thousands of people have come in here giving their aloha to help the Navy fulfill its mission to restore a fully operational fish pond.

And that's what I would like to see, a fully operational fish pond.

[peaceful music] - Hawaii is the biggest per capita seafood consumer in the country, except most of it is now imported.

- We're just getting into that era of can these ponds be used to produce food again?

Where the young folks coming in and trying to relearn some of these tools that were here from the kupuna that were before us.

[soft upbeat music] - Which brings us back to the rock wall they're building at the fishpond in Haleiwa.

- I feel her becoming alive.

- Once a month, the Haleiwa pond holds a volunteer day... To restore the pond... - We need some help clearing out the weeds.

- And reconnect with the community.

- Oh, I love it.

- There's a reciprocal energy that people know are getting back what they're giving.

- OK, go get another rock.

- It is said in Hawaii, the passing of pohaku is the passing of knowledge, and every hand that touches the rocks bonds with the hands of the ancients who built the pond.

Fishponds were a central part of Hawaiian society.

There may never again be hundreds of them, but the dozens that remain are being rediscovered, restored, and respected, giving this old way a new day.

[soft upbeat music] - Now we take you to Central Florida where the dedication of bird lovers is sky-high.

The Audubon Center for Birds of Prey is in Maitland near Orlando.

A few months ago, staff and volunteers gathered for a milestone event.

A bald eagle that had been rehabilitated after injuries from another bird got a clean bill of health, a band on its leg, and quite a sendoff.

This was the 800th bald eagle this center had treated and released.

Director Katie Warner said goodbye.

While the bird was a little skittish at first, it then took off.

- Come on, girlfriend.

There you go.

Same way the other one went.

[laughter] - This group's activism goes back more than a century.

In the early 1900s, the fashion industry nearly wiped out all of the country's wading birds.

Designers used feathers for elaborate hats, killing hundreds of thousands of Florida birds.

With the help of then-New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, the Florida Audubon Society shamed the hat makers and their customers and helped put an end to the destruction.

The group has shown no shortage of spunk over the years.

In 1979 when bald eagles were threatened by the use of the insecticide DDT, Audubon member Doris Mager sat in an abandoned eagle's nest for days to raise money and awareness, and it worked.

Florida now has a stable population of about 2,500 nesting pairs of the bird that is the symbol of our country.

[soft upbeat music] - Building collisions and light pollution have also caused rapid declines in many bird populations, but this challenge does have some solutions.

For our next story, we go to some young journalists at Planet Forward, a program based at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.

Here's a look at how some birds in our nation's capital get a new start from dedicated volunteers.

[somber music] - Biologist Thomas Lovejoy once said, "If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environmental problems in the world."

Yet despite this insight, it is us who continue to drive the rapid declines in bird populations.

One significant contributor is building collisions, which in the United States alone kill over 1 billion birds every year.

[somber music] - The human impact is cascading.

[car horns honking] These circumstances where you have multitudes of instances that happen that somehow decimate a bird population.

Migratory birds, when they start going, it's like they are on a computer program that tells them, like, I need to go from D.C.

to Brazil, but they can't see what we can see, necessarily.

And so they're going to slam into a glass window because they think they can go right through it.

[machinery chugging] - Oh, I see it.

- Lights Out D.C.

is a program of City Wildlife, and we are looking for evidence of the problem that glass causes so that we can, A, rescue the injured birds, but document the problem so that we can educate and advocate for solutions because this is a problem, an environmental problem, that does have solutions.

We can minimize outdoor lighting.

We can use blinds on our house.

We can do all sorts of things to reduce lighting and make the glass visible to the migrating birds.

- The way that we look at birds is an indicator, because if they're out of balance, we know that the system is going to be out of balance as well.

- Most of our food comes from plants.

Even if we eat animals, that food is coming from plants, ultimately.

The birds are important to disperse the seeds so that the offspring aren't competing with their parents for resources right by them.

Not only for just the natural population of plants, but also if we're thinking about crop production and food that we would consume, a decrease in the population of birds that are eating insects that normally destroy the crops, you're going to see more crop damage.

You're going to see, like, this void of the next tier of animals throughout the food web.

- So we are driving to City Wildlife.

It's the rehab center where our four birds that we've found on the bird walk between the NoMa route and Union Station.

And they will treat them there.

They'll determine what their injuries are.

- We have a hummingbird who does need to be released, and we're just curious if you're OK with that.

- Yeah, I could do it, yeah.

In Rock Creek Park?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, sure.

- Yeah, OK, awesome.

- He's been in here for about 48 hours.

He's good now if you notice, as you noticed.

- [chuckles] - And what I would do is make sure there's some, like, low bush, you know, bushes around.

- OK, OK.

- Simply because he's going to want to go into a bush and sit for a while.

- You know, the people who do this, we definitely love birds.

We definitely care about nature.

We have all of these things.

But you know, one person can make a difference, especially when one person, several times over, right?

If it's me and it's Elizabeth and it's three one persons every single day that are out here doing this, this is how differences get made.

It's little things.

And we won't be able to completely stop all the strikes because glass is here.

But you know, if one bird makes it that wouldn't have made it, then that's really-- that's great, you know?

- Over the years of documenting it, we were able to get a coalition together of environmental groups in the D.C.

area and we were able to help get a migratory bird bill passed that now mandates new construction and substantial remodeling of buildings over a certain size, that they have to use bird-safe measures.

- While the local ordinance that City Wildlife's Lights Out D.C.

initiative helped to foster in has remained secure, environmental regulations across the country have come under attack in recent months, including the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is often considered the bedrock for bird conservation in the United States.

- Yes, it took a long time to get here.

Have we taken steps back?

Of course, we have.

There are people who are always fighting against these measures because they want money.

But you know, there's nothing like community organizations that, number one, start the fight and then continue the fight and bring it up to the federal level.

Like, it's just so impressive to me to see it happen over and over and over again.

[soft upbeat music] - Kirsten Kurtz is a scientist and an artist.

She first became fascinated with soil while working at a vineyard in New York.

Now it's become both her career and the medium for her art.

In our inspiration point, Colin Hare heads to the cliffs and gorges of the Finger Lakes to discover art that comes from the very ground we walk on.

[upbeat music] - Today, I am out in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and it is beautiful.

Stunning scenery, farmland, rolling hills, forests, vineyards, and of course, lakes.

I'm out here to meet Kirsten Kurtz, a soil scientist.

She works at Cornell University, and she paints using soil.

So I'm curious to see how that works, and, of course, what her location of inspiration is.

She said, wear my hiking shoes.

Maybe we're going to go digging.

We'll see what happens.

- Painting with soil really came from me feeling conflicted about being an artist and a scientist.

I didn't really want to tell anyone that I was an artist because I thought they wouldn't take me seriously, so I came up with soil painting during my undergrad as a way to bring those loves together.

I think it's beautiful to think about soil outside of the ground in a different way.

This location is something that, this is my art side talking right now, that my soul recognized.

We have these beautiful forests.

We have these really clean lakes, epic waterfalls, the farmlands, the wineries, the culture.

It's very rare.

[peaceful music] Here we are.

Stunning, right?

- This is amazing.

- I know.

- Is this the spot?

- It is.

I grew up spending a lot of time in the woods.

That was, like, really, really important part of my childhood.

Often I'll go for a walk, you know, think about my painting before I actually start it.

I kind of I'm always looking for those things in nature and in world and in art that are, like, going to bring me joy.

- From what I'm hearing is it feels very necessary for the art.

It's something that you kind of need to do to recenter yourself and that you only really get that when you're out here.

- Yeah.

All right.

What do you think about this spot?

- I don't know.

You tell me.

- Looks great.

The ground feels soft.

- Yeah?

- It's all I need.

- Let's do it.

Let's do some digging.

So I have so many questions.

How much we collect, how deep do we dig?

- Well, for soil sampling, we typically go 0 to 6 inches.

- Oh, really?

- But for painting, we don't have to be so precise.

- Yeah.

- We're just looking for the color.

All right, so first of all right away, I'm seeing-- this is, like, the science side I can't help but, like, talk about for a second.

So this soil, especially because it's a forest soil, is teeming with life.

We're talking more organisms than people on the planet, - Right there?

- Visible objects in the night sky.

- So we have, like, 6 billion people or something, or-- I don't know how many people-- - Yeah.

- On the planet right now.

- Exactly.

- More than there's-- - Billions.

- Really?

- Yeah.

It is more likely than not the most diverse ecosystem on the planet.

- Soil?

- Soil.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

- I'm getting a little science lesson here.

It's great.

- I'm inspired by soil.

Like, how many people can say that?

[laughing] You know what I mean?

So like, on the surface, it was a little darker.

Right away, it's getting into a lighter color.

I do typically try to look for, like, interesting colors, unusual soils.

I'll take, like, a careful note from where it came.

- Oh, so the location itself ends up-- - Yeah.

- On the piece.

- My paintings are not so much an illustration of a location, but an actual physical manifestation of a location because of the soils.

- So this is our sample, huh?

- Yeah.

And then of course, the next step in this process would be that I would dry it and sieve it.

- So this would last you?

- I would say, like, at least two paintings-- - Really?

- I could get out of that for sure.

- Wow.

Not a bad day's work.

Got two paintings worth of soil.

- [chuckling] Yeah.

- And we got to walk in the woods.

- Exactly.

- Not bad.

- Tough life.

- Yeah.

[chuckles] Look at this.

- Stunning, if I do say so myself.

- Holy cow.

What a view.

Unbelievable.

- I know.

- Look at this.

- Amazing.

- Wow.

[soft upbeat music] - The lake is so big, paired with the steep hills.

It's also a microclimate here, so it's very similar to the Rhine region in Germany.

- OK.

- So we grow really, really good Riesling, gewurztraminer, things along those lines.

It's like one more magical thing about this lake.

- All because of the lake, huh?

- Mm-hmm.

- That's amazing.

It's pretty excellent, and I think the only thing that we're missing is we've got to try some of that wine, some of that Finger Lakes wine.

- That sounds like a plan.

- Yeah.

- I'll show you the way.

- All right.

[soft upbeat music] - Sometimes a disaster provides a jolt that a community needs to protect its natural resources.

For one Colorado city, recent wildfires led to the launch of a long-term plan to keep their water supply safe and abundant.

Brad Hicks shares how it's going.

- There's no Rocky Mountain high in Greeley, Colorado.

The city is smack on the western edge of the Great Plains, but there is Rocky Mountain water.

- That watershed is the main source of our drinking water.

- But two huge fires in 2020 scorched those areas.

The city was about 40 miles away from the nearest flames, but ash washed into the rivers from which Greeley gets its water.

- And when that ash gets in these ponds, it doesn't settle out and we can't treat it, so we have to shut off our intake.

To have two fires in one summer affect all of our drinking water sources, that was a real wake-up call for us.

- And five years later, it's still an issue after storms.

- We're not out of the woods yet.

- Greeley is not alone.

- A lot of areas, particularly in the Western U.S., are quite vulnerable to these fires, and so water providers will probably need to be thinking about having multiple sources of water.

- Which is what Greeley has decided to do.

- We said, could we have many little reservoirs?

Could we have a different kind of reservoir?

And Terry Ranch was identified as an alternative, and it was an amazing alternative.

- Terry Ranch is an aquifer in Northern Colorado, a giant underground sponge of rock and sand.

Before the fires, Greeley was planning to expand the biggest of its six reservoirs, but even then, it would hold less than 5% of what the aquifer banks.

- It's big.

It's very, very big.

- When the rivers are sending down extra water from the mountains, this pipeline under construction will send it up to the aquifer for storage.

And if there's a drought or another devastating fire, they'll pipe the water in the other direction from the aquifer to Greeley.

Unlike the reservoirs, water in the aquifer is protected from drought and fire, giving Greeley the kind of resiliency that's needed with unpredictable climate and increasing fire danger.

[soft upbeat music] - Thanks for joining us for a celebration of nature, community, and recognition of the people who work tirelessly to conserve our natural resources.

And check out our website at EnvironmentNewsTrust.com or watch us on PBS Passport.

We'll see you next time on "This American Land."

- Funding for "This American Land" provided by the Walton Family Foundation.

[dynamic music]