For Kauai Online

Photo and story by Jan TenBruggencate In our age of headlong electronic wizardry, there is no better sign of our disrespect for the past than an abandoned graveyard. Kaua`i is littered with them. Leaning stones and weathering slabs on cracked foundations, lost in weeds, lifted over the decades by the roots of untended trees. What [...]

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Story by Jan TenBruggencate A friend new to paddling excitedly recounted one of the joys of being on the water in modern-day Hawai`i. They had encountered, at the entrance to Nawiliwili Harbor, a mother and calf humpback whale, as well as a pod of dolphins. The other day, I walked along the coast from Po`ipu [...]

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By Jan TenBruggencate A high school classmate the other day said that she goes nuts if she doesn’t get up to Koke`e at least a weekend every month. Away from the phones and the Internet, and the daily hassles of everyday life. Away from civilization and into a natural world. There is something healing about [...]

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By Jan TenBruggencate Visiting friends recently returned to winter on the Mainland, where this time of year provides snow, sleet and icy roads. Their visit was welcome, but their departure too, had its benefits. With visitors around the place, mornings are a great deal of preparing coffee, tea and toast for a crowd. And giving [...]

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by Jan TenBruggencate It’s a thrill to wander through any of Kaua`i’s many art shops, and see how our island’s artists interpret this singular place. I was sitting in the county’s Pi`koi Building recently, having a conversation about the debris field arriving from the Japan tsunami—when I noticed that one of the pieces of artwork [...]

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  Ecosystem Services by Jan TenBruggencate The voyagers who first arrived in the Islands had no problems about food. The ecosystem gave it to them. There’s a modern term for what they found here: Ecosystem services—the good stuff that a healthy environment provides. They found fat flightless birds wandering in the undergrowth, clear fresh streams [...]

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  by Jan TenBruggencate Does fish and poi taste different to the sounds of “Hi`ilawe” than it does to the sound of car traffic, or perhaps Janis Joplin’s “Summertime?” There is evidence that it does. Sound impacts taste. Not only whether you like it, but how it tastes, and how long you’ll linger over it. [...]

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  Nurturing Lessons from Failures by Jan TenBruggencate  Much of the environmental nurturing we’re doing in the Islands is the direct result of our earlier environmental failures—whether conscious failures or not. Take birds. We’ve lost many of the Hawaiian archipelago’s native birds due to such imports as avian malaria. Malaria only spreads through mosquitoes, and [...]

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by Jan Ten Bruggencate In martial arts training, you learn that there are life lessons even in things as simple as sweeping a floor. But there are lots of places where the lessons are clearer. In gardens, for instance. Here are eight things I learned in the garden. 1. Mom was right. If you hang [...]

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Column by Jan TenBruggencate Farming has gone in two fundamentally different directions in the last couple of centuries. It’s easy to simplify the argument into big farms and small. But it’s more than that. There are distinct agricultural systems. The newer form of agriculture is essentially outward-looking, both in its inputs and its exports. That [...]

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