ABSTRACT
Three major waves of human migrants mark the major alterations in the Hawaiian environment: Polynesians, Europeans and North Americans, and Asians, primarily from China, Japan, and the Philippines. This chapter explores the phases of landscape transformation produced by those immigrants and how the interactions among them shaped the modern environment. Around AD 900–1000 Polynesian navigators launched long voyages from the Marquesas and Society Islands in central Polynesia, settling Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui sometime between AD 1000 and 1200. The arrival of British explorer James Cook in Hawaiian waters in 1778 and again in 1779 where he met his death initiated a period of rapid contact between Hawaiians, Europeans, and North Americans. Hawaiʻi's plantation agroecosystem may have been designed by Euro-American capital which laid out fields, mills, railroad lines, and wharfs, but the work camps assumed their character with Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Filipino workers in successive waves of immigration.
