buzzworthy
A HAPPY ENDING IN HAWAII
good news
Last fall, The Trust for Public Land conserved another 30 acres in Utah’s Zion National Park, protecting a key site from development.
“You don’t think of national parks as places where you could build a vacation home. But people are now putting up McMansions in the middle of some of the most pristine places in the
United States.” —Ben Tracy, CBS correspondent
Tucked inside the protected lands of U.S. national parks are more than 11,500 inhold- ings—privately owned properties within park boundaries. As CBS This Morning recently reported, The Trust for Public Land works to conserve inholdings when they come up for sale, preserving the parks’ unspoilt beauty for all to enjoy.
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Heirs to a onetime pineapple plantation in Oahu faced a dif- ficult choice: sell the property to developers at a tidy profit, or conserve it as farmland, preserving its fertile soil for future generations. If this storyline sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen The
Descendants, the Oscar-winning George Clooney film with more than a few parallels to the debate over the 1,750-acre Galbraith Estate. We won’t spoil the movie, but we will share the outcome of our true-life tale: last December, after a long back-and-forth with the trustee for roughly 600 far-flung heirs to the property, The Trust for Public Land helped the community permanently protect the land for farming. The Galbraith Estate, named for Irish immigrant turned rancher George Galbraith, occupies one of the largest undeveloped parcels on the island. Its location just 20 miles from downtown Honolulu has long made it an attractive prize for developers eager to extend the capital’s suburbs. But the economic downturn created a window of opportunity to
revive the once-thriving agricultural community of Wahiawa—and ensure that the estate’s prime growing land is put to good use. Under a deal brokered and funded in part by The Trust for Public Land, the state has assumed ownership of the property and will lease parcels to independent farmers. They’ll grow food crops usually imported from the mainland, bucking a decades-long trend of the islands’ agricultural lands being developed for housing. The Trust for Public Land’s state director Lea Hong hopes the es-
tate’s return to production will boost Hawaiian food security. “Hawaii imports 85 percent of its food,” says Hong. “But a lot of people here are having a wake-up call. We have been growing houses instead of food, and that has to stop.”
26 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2013
christina aiu
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