Centenarian recalls a life of love for trees

Claudia Stearns is a "tree nut."

That’s the way she says it, just like that, with the straight-forward honesty and bluntness that come with being 100 years old.

"I’m a tree nut. Trees are better than people. They grow up straight and true and they never talk back to you," she said.

Stearns, a doyen of Island beautification efforts, now lives in Idaho but was back in Honolulu recently visiting with friends, reliving old battles and lending her considerable support to a new environmental issue, the fight to save Irwin Park, the historic, tree-shaded area in front of Aloha Tower Marketplace, where developers want to build a four-story parking garage.

Stearns planted her first tree, a golden weeping willow, when she was 9 years old in California and joined the Save the Redwoods organization in 1916. In recent years, she has personally and defiantly planted 3,000 trees on her northern Idaho ranch, which is surrounded by clear-cut logging operations.

She has turned down several lucrative offers to harvest her trees, preferring to "make at least one big statement in my life."

During a three-hour luncheon interview at the Outrigger Canoe Club last week, her wit was sharp and her observations astute. She was reluctant to talk about herself, but enjoyed sharing observations on changes she has seen in nearly 80 years in the Islands and talking about the value, both aesthetic and economic, that greenery brings to life here.

For nearly all her life, she has been a champion of trees, open space and good urban planning. "Some of the trees I’ve planted are now 85 or 100 feet high," she said. "I’ll admit it, that’s my one conceit, seeing those trees grow so big."

Stearns earned a degree in art and landscaping from the University of California at Berkeley and got her professional start designing window boxes for wealthy apartment dwellers on Russian Hill in San Francisco, receiving the "enormous sum of $5 in return for each one."

Her first visit to Hawai‘i came in the 1920s where she remembers thinking, "I’ve died and gone to heaven" as she passed under a tunnel formed by blooming gold trees, now long gone from O‘ahu.

It was the beginning of a lifelong romance with the Islands. A few years later she met and married geologist Harold Stearns, creating a union of rock and tree that took the couple around the world, including work trips to Japan, the Philippines, Italy, the Pacific islands and all over the American west.

Among other things, Harold Stearns is credited with systematically mapping nearly all the early geology and hydrology of the Islands, proving the existence of an adequate supply of water that could be tapped in the Ko‘olaus.

In 1924, while mapping the Kilauea area on the Big Island, he witnessed the first eruptions of Kilauea in 100 years; he reported seeing 10-ton rocks exploding out of the crater and landing half a mile away. He is credited with writing more than 150 scientific papers, articles and bulletins. The state library credits him with more than 35 published titles.

The Stearns were married as Quakers, and repeated the ceremony over and over again as they traveled and grew older. "We have been married on many spectacular mountaintops throughout the world and on strange occasions on land and sea," Harold Stearns wrote in his 1983 autobiography "Memoirs of a Geologist."

"Rocks always came first with him," Claudia Stearns said. "Then it was me and, way down the line, trees."

After Harold died in 1986, Claudia decided to return to the family ranch in Idaho. She sold her Kahala home and quietly donated the proceeds to the Outdoor Circle, and gave another large donation to establish the fledgling beautification efforts of Scenic Hawai‘i.

Although she insisted on anonymity, the Outdoor Circle’s book "Majesty II: Exceptional Trees of Hawai‘i" is dedicated to her without further explanation. Friends in both organizations say Stearns never was an activist in the sense of blocking bulldozers or shouting slogans, but preferred to offer support from behind the scenes.

She returns frequently to the Islands and isn’t always pleased by what she finds.

"I’m tired of these people who only talk about progress," she said. "The worst thing we can do is compress the ocean, sky and air all around us. The human race must be losing all its marbles if we value parking more than trees."

That’s why the fight over Irwin Park makes her so angry.

The space, filled with coconut, monkeypod and banyan trees, was donated to the Territory of Hawai‘i in 1930 by Helen Irwin Fagan, who wanted it used as a gathering place and landscaped entryway to Aloha Tower. Even though automobiles and parking spaces have steadily encroached on the site, it remains one of the last green spaces near downtown Honolulu.

The Hawai‘i Historic Places Review Board has recommended the park be placed on the state and national registers of historic places and a plan has been developed to return it to its original park status.

The Aloha Tower Development Corp. is challenging that designation and fighting the plan, saying it needs the parking garage to make the development more economically viable. They had proposed a plan that would preserve a green space atop an underground parking garage, but the proposal met with opposition.

The Outdoor Circle and Scenic Hawai‘i also fear developers will try to overturn the terms of Irwin’s will, which requires the space to be used as a park or revert to the family.

"If we don’t stop all this so-called progress pretty soon, we’re going to sink into the ocean," Stearns said. "They say they need more parking, but that is stupid. More parking just means more people are going to drive and add to the congestion we already have. Pretty soon nobody will go down there at all. It’s counterproductive to good economic sense. It’s just cutting off our noses to spite our faces. These people aren’t susceptible to aesthetic arguments. They can’t even spell aesthetics. Even a freeway needs greenery to make it look good."

Yet she isn’t discouraged by years of overbuilding on O‘ahu or ready to give up the fight.

"One thing you learn after living for 100 years is this: It’s never too late," she said. "If we just stop all the mindless building right now, it would bring such an infusion of intelligence into our society that we’d be making a great leap forward for the next 50 years."

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