Lahaina, What We Know

They have not yet identified who struck the match. In the horrific fire that has burned the town of Lahaina, killed at least eighty, and destroyed buildings more than a century old, the cause of the blaze has not yet been identified. The New York Times has posted a picture of the destruction and provided lengthy coverage which includes the category: What We Know.

In the Paradise fire, the deadliest fire in California history, it was PG&E’s errant powerlines that sparked the 2018 conflagration that wiped out a town which had no warning. A man in Arizona was charged for starting a wildfire by burning toilet paper. A woman had left a campfire unattended. We like to find accountability, the “single neck to choke” as the business people say. It’s better if a single person or company can be found at fault. But, for Maui, we have to go upwind to understand cause and effect. We have to go back to find causes in stages, to the resorts, the developers, the bombing, the ditches, the plantations, and the money. We have to follow the money, if we want to follow the fire.

Intended Consequences: Climate, Drought, Tourism

The cause of the fire, according to the latest news being disseminated was Climate Change. A hurricane nearby was sending unusually high winds, and Maui had been suffering under an extended drought. “Brush fires” were the cause, though inspectors may still go back through the debris to find an origin zone. It is easy to chalk everything now up to Climate Change, that anonymous boogieman that is lurking under the bed. Where could he possibly have come from? Absent from the phrase is the modifier “Human-Caused,” since this is not the work of any boogieman.

What We Know is where Lahaina was just weeks ago. In a knock-down, drag-out water dispute between tourists, resorts, people who live there, indigenous, and corporate interests, and a government that doesn’t want to deal with the controversy or its own sordid past. Negotiations had deteriorated, which happens when there isn’t enough to go around any more.

Just weeks ago, the media was running stories about the fight for water on the west coast. Maui, like much the rest of the world, has been reeling from years of extremes–in this case, extreme drought. The leeward coastline of Maui, where all the beaches are lined with resorts, wanted water for the tourists. But the coast is dry and pipes its water in from the center and the east part of the island, places where residents are asked to reserve.

Maui had taken a pause from tourism during the pandemic, when no one could go in or out, to breathe a little and hope the aquifers could top up. They had asked outsiders even to stop coming to Maui in 2021, knowing that the water was running out. Maui was an emergency even before the high winds and the anonymous boogieman caused the disaster of the day.

The Developers and the Ditches

But it wasn’t just a recent hurricane and years of drought and drainage from resorts the created the issue. The ditches across Hawaii have been dug for years. Way back when, the natives cultivated taro, breadfruit, and other crops, enough to sustain themselves. But the sugar plantation owners saw the land as pure opportunity. There was money to be made. What Carol Wilcox Knew was enough to write an entire book about all the capital projects to siphon water from part of the land to the other part, the part where the plantations went.

Climate change and the tourists are part of a long line of development that has slowly and mercilessly wrecked Hawaii. The developers had been fighting with the indigenous people for decades, hemming them into smaller and smaller zones, dividing the land up into “lots,” as if there were natural boundaries to be observed. In one scholar’s story of the fight over the “map” of Maui, she describes how a developer’s attorney in court flourished a bucket of dirt that had rocks in it. “Do you consider this good farmland?” he asked.

In this revealing moment, the attorney had reduced land to its most isolated molecular state, dirt held in suspension, isolated away from the histories, stories, material practices, and people of the place from which it was taken… The logic of subdivision eviscerates the land in order to characterize it as a “wasteland” devoid of any kind of meaning or significance.

From “Mapping Wonder in the M¯aui Mo‘olelo on the Mo‘o‘¯aina” by Candace Fujikane

In contrast to the way that “climate” might belong to one, the water and the dirt must be seen to belong to someone and to someone who would use it to best way, i.e. to Produce Something, be it sugar or happy tourists.

But even the harsh dry climate of these southwestern shores can be traced back further. Sure, Maui is getting amorphously hotter because the world is heating up. Yet just a century ago, the weather of that part of Maui was not even dry and sere.

Climate Change II: The Bombing

The small island to Maui’s southwest is Kaho’olawe. As recently as 1909, an indigenous Kanaka ‘Oiwi woman who came from Maui described how the forests on Kaho’olawe attracted clouds in the morning, clouds which would then–laden with moisture–pass over to rain on those leeward slopes of Maui. Maui was lush from the rain that came from its sister island.

Ranchers went into Kaho’olawe at the turn of the century and cut down the forests, looking for an opportunity. Unfortunately, they couldn’t quite grow enough or forage enough cattle for it to be profitable. The U.S. Navy took over. They began using Kaho’olawe–an “unowned, unoccupied, unusable” [my words] for target practice. The U.S. had established a naval base on Oahu, put a fleet way out in the Pacific to help create an American presence far from the continental mainland. Ignore for the moment whether it might have provoked other Pacific seafaring nations; ignore whether the attack on Pearl Harbor had no warning.

After the fleet at Pearl Harbor was destroyed, the U.S. upped their naval exercises around Kaho’olawe. Throughout World War II, they bombed it, systematically and steadily. And when the Korean War began, they repeated the bombing; during the Vietnam War, Operation Sailor Hat created 260 foot craters. Jet fighters were still bombing the island up until 1990, at which point Bush Pere ordered it to stop. Congress decided to give the island back to the state, and let them clean it up.

What We Know is that Kaho’olawe was not the same, and neither was the weather on the lee side of Maui. Where the fires are.

What We Know About Sugar, Money, the American Civil War

Why Hawaii in the first place? Why not, of course? Ever since Captain Cook rowed ashore in 1779 with a crew full of guns to claim the land for Britannia, since the missionaries made their way out to the natives, flanked by those looking for plantations in the west to match the Caribbean plantations in the east, Hawaii has always appeared ripe for picking. If you’ve been to the Big Island, then you can see the spot where Cook made a fatal error, assuming that opening fire on a horde of angry indigenous people armed only with machetes would scare them into submission.

The Americans, much closer, managed to press their troops on to the land in numbers sufficient to scare away the Brits and other countries. There was a Civil War impact. When South was blockaded, their sugar crop wasn’t available. The Union needed more sugar, so land owners began buying Hawaiian land for sugar cultivation from the “Hawaiian government.” Of course, the Hawaiian government at that point was a joint operation between indigenous Hawaiian royals and the troops that brought a lot more guns than Captain Cook. Sugar plantations were created on Maui, the first mills went up in Lahaina, and they started digging the ditches. Sugar needs a lot of water.

The sugar plantations have finally closed. There likely isn’t enough water left for them, and labor is cheaper in Brazil and Thailand. The resorts moved in and the tourists towns built up.

Lahaina is lost. Or swept clean by two hundred years of sucking it dry. It’s a concentrated pilot program for how climate change, aka human-caused weather alterations and large-scale water diversion, can devastate towns. It will likely be rebuilt, and likely without sufficient regard to the lack of water to sustain it. This won’t be the last time.

The Island of Lanai is also across the channel from Lahaina. It was once “owned” by Castle and Cooke, the sugarmen, but it’s been sold to Larry Ellison, the Oracle tech-billionaire. He’s let the Four Seasons and the resorts fill the island with golf courses to replace the pineapples and sugar plantations that are gone. The land is once again subdivided into 18 holes, leased away. There’s been no fire on Lanai yet, but it may only be a matter of time. I suspect that they would be sure to run the sirens for the golfers and the guests at the Four Seasons, faster than they did for the folks of Lahaina, who had almost no warning. The intricate siren system, created after the last deadly fire, was never activated.

What We Know, of course, is that the real sirens have been going off for a hundred years, across the developer court cases and land meetings dominated by resort owners, next to the navy bombers and the sugar plantation construction equipment. Somehow, no one has heard them either.