Homogenocene Landscapes and Seascapes in the Pacific World: Transimperial Hawai‘i

Imperial rhetoric often portrays the Hawaiian Islands as “the Crossroads of the Pacific” and as inevitable additions to the United States. Hawaiian landscapes and seascapes tell a different tale—of Hawai‘i and the Pacific World as transimperial environments. The Homogenocene is a concept first used by conservation biologists back in 1999, just before the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene.’ It recognizes the intense biological homogenization that the world has been undergoing in recent decades and centuries. The colonization of the Hawaiian Islands by new organisms is one of the most visible and historically significant examples of this process. This case study of the transformation of Hawaiian landscapes and seascapes over the longue durée examines the impact of Native Hawaiian colonization on endemic birdlife, the formative influence of settler colonist Francisco Paula Marín (aka Manini, 1774-1837) and Mexico on Hawaiian agricultural landscapes, and the involvement of transimperial networks linking the USA, British-ruled Australia and Fiji, and Japan in transforming the ecology of Hawaiian estuaries and wetlands. Pearl Harbor, for example, was once a rich producer of marine resources for Native- and Japanese-Hawaiian aquaculture (thus its name), but by the 1970s had become a polluted dump dominated by introduced species. The Quarantine Station on Sand Island, while ostensibly preventing the spread of invasive microbial disease, provided a propagation ground for one of the worst invasive organisms in Pacific history: the cane toad (Bufo marinus).