This article was updated on September 2, 2025.

Hawai‘i isn’t often at the forefront of national policymaking, but its 2018 ban on a widely used but controversial pesticide set the stage for other states, the federal government and even the European Union to follow suit.  

With much fanfare, then-Gov. David Ige signed the bill into law in June of that year after a heated public debate in Kaua‘i. Residents there had raised alarms about seed companies spraying the pesticide chlorpyrifos on fields near schools. 

Now, a soft-spoken Kaua‘i pediatrician who helped focus state lawmakers’ attention on the health risks of chlorpyrifos back then is again sounding the alarm. 

This time, the showdown is over a seemingly innocuous 71-word section of the appropriations bill that the U.S. House of Representatives will take up this month following their summer break.  

“It’s a sleeper poison-pill,” says Dr. Lee Evslin, describing the provision that opponents argue could prevent Hawai‘i and other states from again setting their own pesticides restrictions.  

“Hawai‘i’s children and families live closer to pesticide spray zones than most Americans,” Evslin wrote in an appeal to the state’s congressional delegation. He urged them to scrutinize the measure, warning that it “would lock in outdated federal determinations, preventing timely updates that could save lives and protect vulnerable populations.” 

Opponents of the provision say it would also shield chemical companies from lawsuits by people harmed by pesticide use and would limit research that might document hazards posed by chemicals already on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s approved list, such as glyphosate, the prime ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides. 

“It’s so much under the radar,” Evslin says of the section of the bill, which has been overshadowed in Washington by higher-profile debates involving tariffs, tax cuts, immigration enforcement and Jeffrey Epstein files.  

“Tilting at Windmills” 

With lawmakers returning to Washington, one of the first orders of business will be to debate and vote on the appropriations bill. From his island outpost in one of the western-most reaches of the country, Evslin is hoping his single voice can add to a roar that is heard in Washington. 

He has sent letters to Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation, written articles and talked with those in his profession, hoping to convince anyone who will listen. 

“It’s huge, how [the health risks] can be so well documented, and there’s so little publicity out there,” he says.  

U.S. Representative Jill Tokuda, who represents the Neighbor Islands and much of rural and suburban O‘ahu, strongly opposed the measure. “This provision is a blatant giveaway to powerful pesticide manufacturers, shielding them from accountability while leaving families, farmers, and workers to bear the harmful consequences of toxic exposure,” says Tokuda, a Democrat, ahead of the vote. 

But the math is against Democrats in the House, where Republicans outnumber them.  

Evslin, who seems more at ease combing through academic journals or giving measured medical advice to a patient, muses at how he keeps getting pulled into the political arena despite his natural tendency to shy away from the limelight. 

“To some degree I feel like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills,” Evslin says with a chuckle. “There’s a part of me that’s unbelievably passionate about it, and there’s a part of me that looks at myself from a distance.  

“It’s a battle that I think is vital, and I understand that it’s daunting, and I tell myself, just do your best, take one step forward at a time.” 

Evslin’s work to raise public awareness caps a career that included roles as CEO of Kaua‘i Medical Clinic and later Wilcox Hospital, Senior VP at Hawai‘i Pacific Health as well as private practices as a general pediatrician and sports medicine/wellness clinic physician.  

He has drafted testimony for the American Academy of Pediatrics, has written columns for local newspapers and was a keynote speaker at the 2022 U.N. General Assembly Science Summit. 

Evslin says he tried to pull away from medicine during a stint as a small-scale farmer on the Garden Isle after he retired, but science kept pulling him back. He says he was drawn to an increasing number of studies that showed medical hazards from chronic exposure to chemicals that are used in Hawai‘i at much-higher levels than on the mainland. 

That’s when he bumped into less familiar territory of politics, where even the immutable laws of science are often treated merely as cards that can be traded in fungible transactions for personal, professional or partisan gain. 

“At times I say to myself, ‘Am I nuts? I’m happily retired and have nine grandchildren. Why am I even doing this?’ But it feels so right to me, and I’ve become moderately knowledgeable. I feel that I should speak out.” 

Evslin says he was at first a reluctant traveler in the campaign to ban or restrict certain uses of pesticides. He didn’t focus on pesticides – a catch-all category that also includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides – until reading two papers in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reported on the health threats of chronic low-level exposure to pesticides. 

“I’ve always been interested in why some people are healthy and some are not,” Evslin explains. “That’s been a thread of my career and looking at what you can do about it.” 

“So, when these papers came out, that was a game-changer to a certain degree to pediatric thinking.” Up to that point, he says, pediatricians were taught to treat acute poisoning – accidental spray exposure or consuming a pesticide.  

“If someone called me and said they took something, the first thing I would do is call the poison control center because they had the data at their fingertips” and could most quickly treat the immediate symptoms. 

He adds: “The idea of chronic, low-level exposure to pesticides being dangerous just hadn’t been something I or most pediatricians thought about.” 

That was about to change. 

Three Growing Seasons a Year 

Hawai‘i has played a critical role in the development of crop seeds that are sold by major companies around the world and become, literally, the source of much of the food consumed on the planet. That’s because those multinational seed companies – through complicated genetic engineering and hybrid techniques – need to test their creations before receiving regulatory approval. Currently, that means they need to show the seeds have performed through three growing seasons.  

Because of its geographic location and benevolent climate, Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States that offers seed growers such favorable conditions. Companies such as Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF Plant Science were drawn to the ideal farmland on Kaua‘i to develop new seed strains, while Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, concentrates its farming operations on other islands. 

In 2012, the companies operating in Kaua‘i “were reportedly spraying or applying 18 tons of restricted use pesticides in a relatively small footprint,” says Evslin. “It became a huge issue with activists on Kaua‘i.” 

Evslin says the seed companies explained they had to use large amounts of pesticide because insects in the tropics were worse than on the mainland.  

“So, if you compare our usage of chlorpyrifos, which is a very toxic insecticide, with the usage on the mainland, we ended up using about three times” mainland amounts, he says. 

Shortly after Evslin had shifted his focus to chronic, low-level pesticide exposure, members of the Kaua‘i County Council introduced legislation to limit the use of chemicals in the fertile fields of the island’s west side. 

“I wrote testimony for the hearing,” Evslin says. “At that point in my career, I was in my practice on Kaua‘i, which had a lot to do with wellness, so it was in my alley.” 

About 15 other physicians and medical practitioners on the island signed the testimony he read to the hearing, which was packed with hundreds of people representing both sides.  

Not comfortable in front of big crowds, much less emotionally charged ones like this, Evslin remained clinical, explaining that from a scientific perspective, it was important to think about the health risks from long-term, low-level exposure to the chemicals that were being sprayed in the community’s fields. 

“All they were asking for was that they wanted no-spray zones around schools, they wanted stronger right-to-know language so that people would be informed about what was being sprayed where,” Evslin recalls.  

Long story short: The council approved restrictions, the seed companies won a legal appeal that said only the state could impose such limits, and the state Legislature later followed up with its own law imposing a phased-in ban on chlorpyrifos on state agricultural lands. 

Other states followed suit. Federal government attempts to bar the use of the pesticide followed a similar on-again, off-again pattern as the issue – and control of the EPA –bounced between shifting political camps and agendas. 

Today, long after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the EPA’s effective ban on chlorpyrifos, use of the pesticide still faces restrictions but is not banned at the federal level.  

New Evidence of Harm Emerges 

Coincidentally, a study published this month in the journal JAMA Neurology links prenatal exposure to the insecticide with enduring widespread molecular, cellular and metabolic effects in the brain.  

Researchers for the study, from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, and the Keck School of Medicine at USC, also linked the chemical exposure to poorer fine-motor control among youth. 

“A study like this is a powerful argument for the ban that Hawai‘i enacted in 2018,” says Evslin, who had served on a state-county joint fact-finding task force on this issue, and it provides evidence about “the danger of the federal government saying that even a blockbuster study like this could not even be analyzed [under the pending legislation] until the next formal review of the chemical,” a process that occurs about once every 15 years. 

That’s why he says Section 453 in the appropriations bill is so potentially dangerous.  

“What they’re saying is that if new data comes along, they can’t spend money reviewing it to see if they should modify” existing rules, Evslin says. “So theoretically what that would mean is only every 15 years could you do research and point out issues and make a difference about the danger of one of these chemicals.” 

Section 453 as Political Strategy 

Environmental and other non-governmental organizations advocating for restrictions on certain pesticide uses have ramped up efforts to block section 453, which opponents say plays into the strategy of chemical companies. 

After losing heavily in recent court cases, companies like Bayer/Monsanto have sought relief from state legislatures and courts, with limited success, according to Jay Feldman, executive director of one such group, Beyond Pesticides. Next, they turned to Congress. 

“They do it in a very circuitous route,” he said. “They do it through an appropriations bill, where they basically say to EPA, ‘you can’t change the label [on pesticides] unless you do an extensive health assessment,” which can take over a decade. “So, they’re not directly saying you can’t sue manufacturers, they’re saying the EPA cannot allow a change in a label without these tremendous hurdles that are very time-consuming. 

“The manufacturer then goes to the court, and says ‘Judge, we couldn’t change this label [to provide better warnings to consumers], because this is the label EPA gave us and Congress has precluded the change in label, so we can’t be held responsible for failure to warn.” 

The sort of Catch-22 routine blocks the last avenue for litigants seeking relief for damages, he said. The irony, Feldman adds, is that the pesticide companies are the ones who helped write the language in the bills. “Whether that would even hold up in court, it remains to be seen, but it’s been done before,” he said. 

In a statement, Bayer responded: “We agree that no company should have blanket immunity and, to be clear, the language in section 453 of the appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior would not prevent anyone from suing pesticide manufacturers. Anything to assert otherwise is a distortion of reality.

“As part of our multi-pronged approach, we support federal legislation alongside more than 360 agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products – determined safe for use by the EPA. Other measures include the support of legislation at the state level and a Supreme Court petition.

 “Legislation at a federal level is needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority….”

In court filings, Bayer unit Monsanto has argued that because the EPA has approved glyphosate-based product labels without cancer warnings, plaintiffs cannot sue under state laws for failure to include such warnings.

Even so, with the application of Roundup on farm fields around the country, lawsuits alleging health damage from exposure to the chemical also began piling up. After initially winning some of the lawsuits by claiming research showed the chemical was safe, Bayer started losing, big-time, and the losses and legal costs piled up.

As of August 2025, Bayer had settled about 100,000 Roundup lawsuits for about $11 billion, but another 61,000 cases remain active.

In a statement on glyphosate, Bayer said it “stands behind the safety of our glyphosate-based products which have been tested extensively, approved by regulators and used around the globe for 50 years. The EPA has an extremely rigorous review process which spans multiple years, considers thousands of studies and involves many independent risk assessment experts at the EPA.”

Political Twilight Zone 

After the Kaua‘i hearings, the fact-finding recommendations and the County Council vote to restrict pesticide use around schools, Evslin says, he was stung by the seed industry representatives’ comments that he was “fear-mongering” and “unscientific” – the antithesis of his self-image. 

“And that’s when I was struck by this kind of Twilight Zone. It was as if they weren’t looking at the same scientific information at all.” 

A representative of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, which represents the seed companies, did not respond to Evslin’s assertion but in a statement said it supports the House measure.

The section, it said, will “help ensure that our hard-working agricultural producers across the country can rely on consistent agricultural labeling based on well-established and thorough scientific protocols.” 

Peter Adler, a conflict resolution consultant and chair of the joint task force charged with finding common ground among the feuding sides, recalls the role played by Evslin. 

“He did a lot of careful rounding up of studies,” Adler says of the task force debates. “It wasn’t just an opinion jamboree. It was much more based on trying to understand what the data was [concerning] the use of some of these pesticides.” 

Adler says the task force sought to sort out which claims were real and which ones were exaggerated or imagined, what could be confirmed, and what couldn’t. 

Evslin “was really good about pulling in a lot of data and groups of studies,” he says. “It was bringing evidence to the table. We’re not in a court of law, but we’re trying to work out [a solution in] a highly charged political environment. He was very fact-centered.” 

Evslin’s concerns intensified when he later started digging into the scientific studies on glyphosate, the active pesticide ingredient in Roundup and many other herbicides. 

“It was so obvious that the scientific literature had so much data about how dangerous it was, and all you hear from these industry places was, ‘no, it’s safe, it’s one of the best studied ones in the country, no regulatory agency has banned it, and on and on,” Evslin says. 

“I began to babble about it to my wife, and she said, ‘stop talking about it and write a book’.” 

So, he did, published in July 2021: “Breakfast at Monsanto’s: Is Roundup in Our Food Making Us Fatter, Sicker, and Sadder?”  

While conducting research for his book, Evslin said, he came across what he said was convincing scientific evidence that glyphosate was pervasive in our food supply and was causing damaging health effects. 

Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Changed Seed Science 

If chlorpyrifos proved a moral victory for Hawai‘i advocates hoping to limit chemical exposure that can cause developmental delay in children, the presence of glyphosate in food posed a greater challenge.  

In plant and crop genetics, one of the most profound changes in agriculture has been to genetically alter seeds so they become resistant to toxic chemicals in glyphosates. That is the primary ingredient used in Roundup, which is produced by Monsanto and has become the world’s most heavily used herbicide in history.  

By using seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, farmers can spray their fields with the pesticide, killing everything but the intended crops, and saving millions of dollars on weed control.  

After that discovery, use of Roundup and related glyphosate-based pesticides spread like, well, weeds.  

“We in the United States use 30-40% of the glyphosate in the world, and we have much less restrictive guidelines” on it, Evslin says. So, everything from soybeans to corn to canola to wheat – many of the ingredients used in our highly processed foods – are often sprayed with glyphosate herbicides and leave traces in the resulting food products that we consume.  

Tests, meanwhile, have shown that 80-90% of Americans have glyphosate in their bodies, which dissipates over time but can also be replenished if a steady diet of food and water contain the chemical. And pesticide opponents say they do. 

After examining hundreds of scientific studies on glyphosate and glyphosate formulas, Evslin says it became clear to him that there was powerful evidence suggesting links to cancer and other detrimental health effects.  

Glyphosate’s Role as an Antibiotic 

Amid piles of studies, Evslin thinks he’s found the regulatory Achilles heel for glyphosate. 

“It’s definitely an antibiotic,” Evslin says, “And it affects the microbiome – the bacterial content of our intestines and our skin and our respiratory tract. The vital role that it’s playing is only beginning to be fully understood. 

“We have more bacteria cells in us than we have human cells. They are an unbelievably integral part of everything – how we think, how our immune system works, how we digest foods.” 

Studies, he says, are showing links to obesity, inflammation, DNA changes and liver disease, among other disorders. 

But regulatory agencies don’t consider chemicals’ effects on the microbiome, he says.  

“What I’ve been trying to do with that is say, yes, I understand,” he says. “But we do regulate antibiotics in food and it’s an antibiotic, and we need to accept that fact. It seems to me it’s an Achilles heel, because it is an antibiotic, we regulate antibiotics, and that should be a short way to get it out of our food.” 

Prospects for Section 453 

What are the chances that Section 453 of the appropriations bill will be approved? 

Rather likely, it turns out. Few Republicans have gone against the party line in any recent votes. 

Hawai‘i congress member Tokuda stood firm in a statement ahead of the vote: “Hiding dangerous information on pesticides endangers everyone but especially workers, pregnant women, keiki, and vulnerable communities. It is another win for corporate interests and their priorities and yet another reckless, shameful, and immoral effort by Republicans. No corporation should be above the law, especially when lives are at risk.” 

The state’s other representative, Ed Case, also opposed the bill. In a letter to Evslin, he wrote that section 453 and other parts of the bill “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing environmental and public health regulations related to clean water, clean air and hazardous waste and pesticide laws.”  

He said he also opposed a 23% cut to the EPA’s budget, “which severely impacts its capabilities to protect human health and the environment.” 

Says Evslin: “In terms of what will happen with the bill, my guess is that the House will pass it, and there may be more of a fight in the Senate if it crosses over. The provision is so buried, though, that I don’t think it will get defeated unless there is a dramatic increase in public awareness.” 

Either way, after the vote, Evslin will glance out at the tropical land where he once considered gardening, and then he’ll turn his attention back to the latest medical studies examining health effects from long-term exposure to pesticides.   

But the state is planning and building a new network of opportunities and support intended to reinvigorate Hawai‘i’s agricultural sector.

“It was generally thought that when sugar and pineapple plantations shut down, former plantation crop land would be cultivated with numerous smaller crops,” wrote UH economists Sumner La Croix and James Mak in 2021. “Instead, much of it lies fallow.”

So true, but after decades of decline and stagnation, conditions may be ripe for a rebound in diversified agriculture.

The department’s back

The state Department of Agriculture was renamed the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity on June 27, marking a new era for the agency, with new responsibilities and increased collaboration with other state agencies. Director Sharon Hurd says the legislation that passed this year prioritized biosecurity and the deterrence of agricultural crimes, like theft of crops, livestock and equipment, and increased access to capital for agricultural entrepreneurs.

The department’s kuleana is massive. “All those readers at the supermarket, we check those. We check gas [pump] meters. We check taxicabs. We check scales at the farmers markets. Any measuring device is under our purview, in addition to biosecurity, land and water for agriculture, loans, marketing.”

Last year, Gov. Josh Green signed Act 231 to create 44 positions for entomologists, plant quarantine inspectors, environmental health specialists and others. It was one of the most significant expansions of the department in 30 years.

The increase was driven by increased public awareness of invasive species statewide. “Biosecurity was less important when it was only impacting agriculture,” explains state Rep. Kirstin Kahaloa, former chair of the House Agriculture & Food Systems Committee. “As soon as it started impacting families in their yards, when it impacted schoolkids on their playgrounds, and now the beautiful landscape of our coconut trees across our street, now it has elevated to the level that we’ve needed for many decades.”

Ironically, these positions existed over a decade ago, but the 2009 Legislature reduced the Department of Agriculture’s budget by 19% and devastated institutional memory and expertise. As a result of the reduction in force order, 96 of the department’s 214 general-funded positions were eliminated.

Following the 2009 layoffs, the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, Ulupono Initiative, UH’s Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response team and Ant Lab, and other organizations, struggled to fill the void.

But the crippling of the department’s biosecurity functions continues to reverberate. “We’re still coming back from that,” laments Hurd. “These 44 positions that the Legislature was so kind to give us last year just bring us back to where we were in 2009. Now we have a chance to build from there.”

Among the species the department needs to target are the coconut rhinoceros beetle, coqui frog, little fire ant, rose-ringed parakeet and two-lined spittlebug.

But, Hurd declares: “The department’s back. We’re back to where we were.”

A two-legged stool

“There is an old saying that beginnings are delicate times, and with the pace of our modern world, that statement is even more valid,” wrote Bart Jones in 1994, when he was a member of the Honoka‘a Farmers Cooperative of East Hawai‘i Island. That was when the Hāmākua Sugar Plantation went bankrupt and closed, part of the overall decline of sugarcane in Hawai‘i.

Jones knew establishing a new agricultural regime would prove harrowing. “It is very easy to kill a seed, and it is easy to destroy a seedling, and it is very difficult to establish and maintain all the elements that are necessary to develop a new crop,” he wrote at the time.

1994 was also the year the state Legislature declared: “Within the next decade, 75,000 acres of agricultural lands and 50 million gallons per day of irrigation water are expected to be released by plantations. The downsizing of the sugar and pineapple industries will idle a valuable inventory of supporting infrastructure including irrigation systems, roads, drainage systems, processing facilities, workshops and warehouses.”

Transferring fallow agricultural lands and their infrastructure to new uses was the primary mission of the Agribusiness Development Corp., which was established that year.

However, multiple reports have criticized the ADC, including research reports issued by the Legislative Reference Bureau in 1997 and 2007 and a scathing performance audit in February 2021. “More than 25 years after its creation, we found an agency that is generally unaware of its unique powers and exemptions, and has done little – if anything – toward achieving its statutory purpose,” the state auditor reported in 2021.

When longtime ADC Executive Director James Nakatani died in April 2023, the beleaguered agency was at a critical juncture. Four months later, Wendy Gady got the job.

Gady exudes a dogged, collaborative and transparent attitude. Since September 2023, she has publicly released weekly reports, which function as briefings on the ADC’s work. (Find them at dbedt.hawaii.gov/adc/reports.)

Furthermore, the ADC has made efforts to address historic sources of criticism. In November 2024, the state auditor’s office found the ADC had fully implemented 30 of the 36 recommendations in its 2021 audit. The other six were no longer applicable.

Gady says the agency’s agenda is to find partners who align with its mission of building a new statewide food system: “We’re looking for radical collaborators. We’re looking for talent. We’re looking for farmers. We’re looking for food entrepreneurs.”

To much of the general public, the Agribusiness Development Corp. – part of DBEDT – appears at first glance to duplicate the role of the Department of Agriculture, but Gady explains the difference. “They are regulatory, so they handle everything from plant quarantine to invasive species.”

The Department of Agriculture also works with small, beginner farmers. Its “agricultural parks are designed for people that are just starting out.”

Once a farmer is more firmly established, the next step is the ADC, Gady says. “When you’re ready to graduate, you’re graduating to ADC. And that creates new room in the agricultural park for a new entrepreneur to come in and hopefully get birthed into the ADC.”

To use a business term, much of ADC’s mission today is to bring fledgling agricultural businesses to scale. Providing long-term licenses to operate on ADC lands – up to 35 years – provides stability for farmers who may be working on month-to-month leases under private landlords.

And stability for farmers means stable food systems for consumers and a foundation for Hawai‘i’s food security. “We have to make things work here. We can’t count on the white horse to come in on a ship,” Gady says.

Much of ADC’s current focus is the maintenance of irrigation infrastructure on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu – infrastructure that creates the capacity for irrigated agriculture. The Kekaha ditch system supplies the East Kaua‘i Irrigation System and the Waiāhole water system on O‘ahu feeds the Wahiawa Irrigation System.

“The future of agriculture consists of infrastructure facilities around application and irrigation,” explains Dane Wicker, deputy director of the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, which includes the ADC.

“All of those are high-cost [investments] that no farmer alone – or collectively – can support financially. If the state is going to be serious about food security and resiliency, then the state needs to make investments in land acquisition,” and then plan, design and build those key facilities, Wicker says. “That’s the future of agriculture.”

The vast majority of ADC’s portfolio is focused on O‘ahu and Kaua‘i. Kaua‘i alone accounts for about 80% of the ADC’s inventory of land, though there is interest in expanding capacity on Hawai‘i Island and Maui. It’s a matter of time, money and available parcels suitable for cultivation, acknowledged Wicker and Gady.

The state’s budget for the fiscal year 2026 sets aside $39 million to buy 1,000 more acres on Kaua‘i. There are also plans to spend $17 million to build a small animal processing and storage facility on O‘ahu, which would lead to more Hawai‘i-raised meats for consumers.

Two relatively new facilities help turn ag produce into sauces, snacks, jams, cookies and more: The Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center, opened in April 2024 on O‘ahu, and the Maui Food Innovation Center, opened in November 2022 in Kahului.

The Local Food Coalition, an alliance that includes the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, UH’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, the Ulupono Initiative, Hawai‘i Farmers Union United and the Hawaii Food Industry Association, emerged as a key proponent for this network. “Value-added manufacturing plays an indispensable role in bolstering both our agricultural sector and the broader economy,” testified the coalition to the Legislature on April 1. “Establishing a network of open-access food and value-added product development facilities is not merely an aspiration but a necessity in our quest for agricultural and economic sustainability.”

Among the coalition’s goals is to add incubators on other islands, like those in Wahiawā and Kahului.

“These spaces are where small businesses can safely and affordably produce value-added products, like jams, jellies, sauces, pickles, dry goods – anything coming from local agriculture and something that can now have shelf life,” says Kahaloa, who represents the Kona district of Hawai‘i Island. “There’s been a lack of access to certified kitchens. It’s very expensive for agriculture to be able to create their own facility for one value-added commodity. What this does is really break barriers, especially in our rural communities and former plantation communities across Hawai‘i.”

The state is trying to increase demand and generate a market for local ag products, beginning with vendors across government departments. A 2019 law committed Hawai‘i to doubling food production by 2030. In 2021, a farm-to-school program was established within the Department of Education; it mandated that 30% of all food served in public schools consist of “locally sourced products” by 2030. Another law set goals for every “principal department” in state government to procure a certain level of locally sourced products when it contracts for services.

The future of local agriculture appears heavily contingent on sustained government investment. As Gady explains, “ADC was created to step in as sugar and pineapple stepped out. We were a three-legged economic stool [in the past]: We had ag with sugar and pineapple, we had tourism, we had the military. When you take sugar and pineapple out, your stool is really unbalanced. You only have two legs.”

Restoring the stool’s third leg would still require agricultural interests to navigate competing demands for agricultural lands, including solar projects.

Most Ag Lands Are Pastures

The Hawai‘i State Data Book estimates that 1.93 million acres of land is zoned for agricultural purposes. That’s a lot – almost half of the land in Hawai‘i. The landmass of all the Hawaiian Islands together, except for Hawai‘i Island, totals only 1.54 million acres.

The 2020 Update to the Hawai‘i Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline found that only 886,211 acres of land – less than half of all agriculturally zoned lands – presently are used for agriculture.

Most of that land is set aside for pastures. Only 120,632 acres – less than 7% of all agriculturally zoned lands in Hawai‘i – were under crop cultivation, according to the land use update. With so much agricultural land unsuitable for cultivation due to soil quality, lack of water, isolation and unsuitable terrain, there is a natural question: How do we effectively use all of Hawai‘i’s agricultural lands?

While agencies like the Agribusiness Development Corp. are working to bring more agricultural land into cultivation, solar energy facilities have been permitted on agricultural lands that meet certain classifications.

That pits agricultural projects against solar projects and clean energy goals. House Bill 778, passed this year by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor, calls for an integrated land use study to inventory all of the grand goals set by the Legislature through the years.

The new law states that “multiple climate and sustainability statutory targets have been enacted in the State, including developing at least 22,500 affordable rental housing units, doubling food production, increasing food exports, requiring the Department of Education and University of Hawai‘i to become net-zero in energy use, requiring that all of the electricity generated in Hawai‘i comes from renewable sources, sequestering more atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gases, requiring all state and county facilities to use reclaimed water, and requiring the mandatory upgrade of all cesspools.”

It is a daunting list of targets. For the next two years, the law requires the state’s sustainability coordinator, Danielle Bass, to facilitate conversations and collect “data-based estimates on the amount of land required” to meet the needs of these competing uses within agricultural districts. To do so, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development must compile and analyze existing data while working with farming groups, counties, community members and state government entities.

The goal is to “clearly define and prioritize the protection of productive agricultural lands to prevent further encroachment from nonagricultural developments, including developing measures to ensure agricultural lands designated for agriculture production are not compromised for short-term development needs.”

Balancing the state’s multiplying mandates is a crucial overdue conversation for state planners. “We have our urban growth boundaries. We have our general plans. We have our sustainable community plans,” explains Bass. “But what are we doing? We’re still being reactive instead of being proactive in terms of land use.”

The Office of Planning and Sustainable Development’s study could set the trajectory of any agricultural resurgence, says Wicker, the DBEDT deputy director. “Until we know what lands are critical for food production, we cannot piecemeal and say ‘OK, solar farm you go there,’ or ‘Biofuel, you go there,’ because [these uses] may not be able to coexist with the land we’ve identified for crop production.”

Coordinating competing uses is the goal, Bass says. “When I see these three big buckets of housing, energy, agriculture, it’s less about the competing uses of the same land.” Instead, coordination among stakeholders is key. There could be enough land to balance these competing needs and even rezone certain agricultural lands for conservation, but such work would have to be coordinated.

The Challenges Ahead

Perry Philipp, a UH College of Tropical Agriculture professor, wrote in 1953: “It is evident that many of Hawaii’s diversified agricultural industries show promise for expansion and that such expansion would materially strengthen Hawaii’s economy. To bring it about [Hawai‘i needs people with] vision, enterprise, venture capital and capacity for hard work.”

As Governor Green signed several pieces of agricultural legislation into law on June 27, Philipp’s attitude returned to my mind.

“Farming and ranching are a tough business,” Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau, said at the event. “Land use, water, labor, energy, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters: These are issues that our farmers deal with every single day.”

True in 1953, true today and true, undoubtedly, into the future.

Lahaina – On Maui’s bustling west side, life has returned to normal. Traffic is dense between Lahaina and Kapalua, with people flocking to hotels and businesses. The parking lot of the renovated Lahaina Cannery, about a mile north of the ruined harbor, is jammed with cars. In the hills mauka of the highway that hugs Maui’s leeward coast, new homes are rising on empty pockets of land.

But nothing is really normal here. Nearly two years after wildfires destroyed Lahaina’s central historic and commercial district and leveled neighborhoods stretching into the foothills of the West Maui Mountains, residents still struggle to find stable ground.

They’ve endured long months moving from couches to hotels to rentals while hanging on to work, scrambling to find child care and plowing through reams of applications for assistance and reimbursement. Through it all, the terrible memories of Aug. 8, 2023, still haunt the survivors.

“7,000 Stories”

“Everyone has a story,” says Wilmont Kahaialii, a Hawaiian cultural expert, teacher and musician who lost his home in the fire. “There are 7,000 different stories. Some of them are more dramatic than others, and some are more devastating than others.”

Here are a few of those stories, including a homeowner who was one of the first to rebuild, a small business owner who’s reopening after losing a Front Street store, a noted artist who kept his clientele but not his studio, the leader of a historic foundation who’s planning complicated restorations, and the management team of a resort that longs for more visitors.

They mostly live or work near the old historic and commercial district, the heart of town that’s played a central role for centuries – as the seat of the Hawaiian monarchy, as a provisioning port in the whaling era, as a hub through the missionary and sugar plantation eras, and in more recent years, as a tourist mecca.

“In all my research, I cannot find another town in Hawai‘i that was a significant place during every era of Hawai‘i’s history,” says Theo Morrison, executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation. Waves of people and commerce have shaped this small stretch of land that borders the protected harbor, a point of contact with the world beyond.

And in 2023, Lahaina entered a new chapter in its history: the fire era.

Sales are underway at Lahaina Shores | Photography: Jeff Sanner

The Historic District

Historic Lahaina is still largely a ghost town.

Much of the district is charred and gray, with patches of gravel marking spots where structures once stood. Remnants of buildings poke up through the rubble like broken teeth in need of pulling.

Handmade street sign by Ke‘eaumoku Kapu | A stone marks the Hawaiian sacred site of Moku‘ula | Photography: Jeff Sanner

On a visit in mid-May, only a few vehicles traveled the vacant streets, including patrol cars. Occasionally, a fully intact structure came into view, a reminder of the zigzagging path of the fire, which ultimately destroyed about 2,200 structures.

The unscathed Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, for example, on the corner of Dickenson and Waine‘e streets, was open, with people milling about – a tiny pocket of normalcy amid the rubble.

South of the church and on the waterline is the stately seven-story Lahaina Shores condominium, which stands uneasily next to the bare foundations of neighboring properties. In late May, four of its studios were listed for sale at prices from $410,000 to $650,000, and vacation rentals were expected to restart this summer.

The main Front Street shoreline had recently been cleared of 237 concrete pilings and metal beams and bolts, and on Memorial Day weekend, the harbor area was opened to surfers. At the start of June, construction was scheduled to begin on a new project to replace the railing and sidewalk along Front Street.

Thick coral-block walls of many of the 19th-century buildings – “the anchors of town,” says Morrison – are still standing throughout the district: at the Old Lahaina Prison, built to hold rowdy sailors stopping over on whaling expeditions; at the Seamen’s Hospital on Front Street; at the Baldwin Home, the compound of the Rev. Dwight Baldwin and his large family, and once the oldest existing home on Maui.

Old walls of the Seamen’s Hospital | Photography: Jeff Sanner

All of these historic structures, and others that were gravely damaged or destroyed, will be fully restored or rebuilt, says Morrison. Artifacts have been recovered and debris removed from the 13 sites in the Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s care. A draft reconstruction plan, based on detailed drawings housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., has been finished.

The next step is to decide which projects to start first. About 90% of the restoration funds will come from a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the rest from county grants, private philanthropy and other sources, Morrison says. While the Lahaina Long-Term Recovery Plan, released by the county in December 2024, estimates the restoration of historic structures will take at least six years, Morrison expects it to be completed much sooner.

The plan also calls for reviving Hawaiian cultural sites along the shore. Known collectively as the royal complex, the sites include the island of Moku‘ula, where King Kamehameha III lived from 1837 to 1845. The island was surrounded by a huge pond called Loko o Mokuhinia, long considered a sacred site. By the early 20th century, the pond had been filled with dirt and turned into a park.

Redevelopment on the makai side of Front Street is contentious | Photography: Jeff Sanner

The Golden Mile

On Aug. 7, 2023, Lahaina’s main shoreline strip around Front Street was packed with restaurants, bars, art galleries and museums, local jewelry stores and mainland clothing chains. Boats ferried visitors on snorkeling and fishing excursions, and oceanfront vacation rentals delivered the drama of a Maui sunset.

The next day, all of that was gone, along with about $70 million a month in revenue and 8,500 jobs, according to a UH Economic Research Organization report. The state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism put the number of shuttered businesses at 834.

And it’s still gone as rebuilding on Front Street has stalled, and the question of what can be built at the waterline is being hotly contested. But there are stirrings of revival, thanks in part to two recent rule changes enacted to kick-start both residential and commercial rebuilding.

The first, most significant measure altered the permitting process to make it much easier for property owners mauka of Front Street, or outside the erosion zone, to rebuild. Before the change in February, owners had to go through a lengthy, complicated process to get what’s known as a Special Management Area building permit.

Maui County officials estimated that relaxing the SMA rule would help 103 commercial and 533 residential structures get permits a full year faster than before.

The second change was an update to Ordinance 5780 of the county code. As of March 24, owners of “nonconforming structures” – those legally constructed before the wildfires but not compliant with current zoning standards, such as setback rules — can get permits to build similar structures.

By late May, the county saw a sudden jump in the number of nonresidential permits submitted for processing: 152 of them – for both commercial properties and housing with four units or more – were being processed, according to the county’s rebuilding dashboard. Before that, only 16 nonresidential permits had been issued and nothing had been built.

Residential permitting was even higher: 180 permits were being processed, 396 permits had been issued, 265 houses were under construction, and 23 homes were completed. About two dozen of the residential permits are for projects in the historic core of town, says John Smith, administrator of the county’s Office of Recovery.

Maui County’s Department of Finance found that, based on mailing addresses, only seven sales of wildfire-destroyed properties were made to out-of-state buyers, according to an email from the county’s Office of the Mayor.

Smith says relaxing the SMA rules was the main reason for the bump, as it “provided a level of certainty that allowed people to move forward.” He notes that even though SMA permits are waived, owners still have to follow design guidelines set by the historic district zoning code.

The Lahaina Front Street Recovery group, made up of 73 landowners, helped advocate for the rule changes, with the goal of bringing the old town back to what it was before the fire.

“The property owners on Front Street, almost unanimously I would say, want to rebuild what they had. Nobody’s talking about skyscrapers, nobody’s talking about Disneyland. Nobody wants to do any of that,” says Morrison.

Kaleo Schneider, who leads the Front Street coalition, agrees. “Lahaina was its own island unto itself,” she says. “It was beautiful, kitschy, fun, exciting, busy, and you could shop and mosey around. It looked like it had been there for a long time, and no one I’ve met doesn’t want to re-create it as it was before.”

She’d also like to see the commercial waterfront rebuilt, and has skin in the game. Schneider is president of an old kama‘āina business that owns five of the nine parcels on the makai side of Front Street, as well as the commercial buildings there. All but one of her buildings were destroyed in the fire.

The Lahaina Front Street Recovery group is pushing to rebuild “steadily and without friction,” she says, noting that 95% of the land and commercial property along both sides of Front Street are locally owned, even if lessees were mainland chains.

Schneider fears that adding delays and onerous rules to rebuilding the shoreline can create loopholes that mainland corporations could exploit. Delays might also make the commercial properties that trickle onto the market extremely valuable, she says, and far out of reach for local companies wanting to lease space.

This makai area still needs Special Management Area permits, which require an extensive review. Some landmark establishments that extended over the water have leases with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, though whether those will be renewed is unclear. And the county is now trying to purchase other parcels of land on the makai side.

For the mostly commercial properties that could be turned into public spaces, the county’s Office of Recovery has sent letters of interest to see if owners would sell, says Smith, and a few transactions are underway. For private houses on the waterline, he says his office is helping owners navigate the SMA permitting process.

“We heard through conversations with the community that there was interest in having additional ocean access throughout Front Street,” says Smith, which motivated county efforts to buy property.

But some Lahaina residents would like more of the shoreline to remain open as a public space and a buffer from rising seas and storm surge.

“It’s an interesting chess match,” says Kahaialii. “You’ve got people who can afford the lawyers versus the county, who really can’t.” He hopes the county can get landowners to concede that the shoreline is an inundation zone and shouldn’t be redeveloped.

“It should never have been permitted, but it was,” he says.

Hope and Hardship for Businesses

While the historic core languishes, much of Lahaina’s commerce has moved to the edges of the burn zone. But the loss of Front Street – with its steady foot traffic and well-known sights – can make the transition hard.

Maui artist Ronaldo Macedo had to move his studio into a bedroom at his Puamana townhouse, which survived the fire. He’s holding a giclée print of Front Street; macedofineart.com | Photography: Jeff Sanner

For Ronaldo Macedo, one of Lahaina’s most successful artists, known for his street and harbor scenes, the loss can mean painting a place that no longer exists, based on memories and photos. He’s lately turned to painting the area’s scenic shorelines.

Macedo says he’s burdened with survivor’s guilt but considers himself lucky. His coastal townhouse at Puamana, at the southern edge of Lahaina, was spared. Ninety-five of the complex’s 230 homes were not.

He and his family were some of the first residents to return, just seven months after the fire. But their unit had been covered in ash that left a sticky sludge on everything, explains his wife, Jennifer Macedo, and they spent months cleaning it up before moving in. She describes the quiet, solitary nights back then as eerie and unsettling.

In February 2024, just as he was moving back home, Macedo was ejected from his large studio in Emerald Plaza to make way for a bicycle store willing to pay many times more in rent. He moved all of his inventory and painting and framing supplies to a small bedroom in his townhouse.

“I can keep working and selling, which is great, but there’s no more space in Lahaina to rent,” he says. “There’s lots of demand and no supply.”

In a stroke of luck, his primary gallery, Lahaina Galleries, had relocated in 2020 from its pricey Front Street location to a smaller, less expensive spot at The Shops at Wailea in Kīhei. The Kīhei location remains open, but dozens of galleries located in Lahaina’s historic district are now gone.

Macedo has held on to a roster of clients who pay well for his work, but he says the fire took a toll on his outlook and ability to work. It was a year before he could paint again.

Lopaka Wilson by his new store at Lahaina Cannery, expected to open this summer; he and his wife lost their Front Street location | A new Bank of Hawai‘i and the Cannery’s updated food court | Photography: Jeff Sanner

West Maui Sports and Fishing Supply sold ocean gear from a central Front Street shop for decades. In 2022, Lopaka and Katie Wilson bought the business, complete with an old cash register and pen-and-paper records.

The next year they lost everything, including the records they needed to receive fire-relief funds, which poured in from federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations and private donations.

While they got some insurance money, the couple is “still fighting the insurance companies for loss of income,” says Lopaka Wilson. They were also offered a loan from the Small Business Administration but declined, since they’re still paying off a COVID-era loan.

To survive, the couple opened an online store while they searched for a brick-and-mortar location.

“We couldn’t find a place to rent,” says Lopaka Wilson. “We put in 20 different offers in different places and got shot down.” The competition was fierce as everyone was searching, he says, including doctors and banks. “As a small business, we were on the bottom of the list.”

Finally, in late 2024, they landed a temporary store at the Ka‘anapali Shores Hotel north of Lahaina, where there’s some visitor business but few local customers. “It’s just nice to be open and operating. It’s like a glimpse of hope,” he says.

The Wilsons also signed a lease in May 2024 on a permanent store at the Lahaina Cannery, just north of the burn zone on Front Street. They’re still waiting for a permit to build out the store’s interior and hope to be open this summer.

With two locations, the Wilsons are shouldering an unnerving amount of risk. “Actually, my house is on the line for this spot at the Cannery,” says Lopaka Wilson. “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll be hopping around.”

Many businesses are putting their hopes in this shopping center near the ocean, which serves as a gathering spot and event space, and in the commercial centers mauka of Highway 30. Its anchor stores, Safeway and Longs, reopened shortly after the fire and helped keep survivors afloat.

Storefronts of open shops and coming-soon signs line the Cannery’s interior spaces. In the airy, air-conditioned food court, new food trucks are serving customers, and a new Bank of Hawai‘i branch recently opened in the parking lot outside, replacing the one that was destroyed.

Tara-Lynn Kahaialii Diego’s Kahoma Village townhome near Baby Beach survived the fire but had heavy smoke damage | Photography: Jeff Sanner

Finding a Stable Home

Ann Williams barely escaped the wildfire that raced along Lahainaluna Road and destroyed nearly everything in its path.

Her own house, about halfway up the hill, burned to the ground. Forty of the 102 people known to have died in the wildfire lived in the cramped Kuhua Camp area, just down the road.

Ann Williams’ home on Lahainaluna Road was destroyed by fire; her new house is one of the first to be completed | Photography: Jeff Sanner

Williams, a real estate agent with Keller Williams Realty Maui, fled to a friend’s house, then rented a small apartment in Ka‘anapali. When her daughter moved with her family to a FEMA-organized house in Kula, Williams decided to move too.

“I didn’t want to be there alone,” she says. “My granddaughter and my daughter – that’s my whole family right there.”

She was paying the mortgage on her ruined house and insurance covered much of the rebuilding, which she’s completed in stages. But getting that insurance, she says, was “a fight, every little step of the way.”

In May, the charming, cozy house with an expansive back lānai was nearly done. Electricity, water and sewage are working in the area, but Williams’ old mango, citrus and avocado trees are gone, leaving the place exposed and hot.

Williams is anxious about moving in and says she’ll probably rent out the house until the semblance of a neighborhood emerges. The streets still feel like a wasteland, though intact houses and new construction dot the landscape.

Across from her house, a mammoth two-story home has been framed and roofed. Beyond that, in the hills, severe drought has dried out the wild grasses, the very fuel that threw all of their lives into chaos.

Among the many fire-mitigation efforts underway, Hawaiian Electric is installing high-resolution cameras that monitor fire-prone areas and send data directly to Maui fire stations.

Back near the shoreline, Tara-Lynn Kahaialii Diego says it was “bittersweet” to finally come home in January. She was one of the last owners to return to Kahoma Village, near the entrance to Pu‘unoa, or Baby Beach.

While most of the townhouses in Kahoma Village survived, four buildings did not; the homeowners association hired an attorney to get a Special Management Area permit to rebuild them before the rules were relaxed. Across the street, Diego’s former affordable rental complex is gone.

In the 17 months between the fire and her return, Diego bounced among her husband’s family in Hāna, a condo and a hotel offered through the Red Cross relocation program, then on to Kīhei, with other stops along the way.

Through all of that, along with dealing with ceaseless paperwork for temporary housing, financial assistance and child care for their young daughter, she and her husband were able to keep their clothing business – Unconquered Hawaii – alive through pop-up events.

And there were other complications. She was diagnosed with cancer and underwent two surgeries and six months of treatment. “I can only handle one thing at a time mentally,” she says. “I wanted to be done with my treatment, but I also wanted the debris gone.”

In addition to all the debris, her home had severe ash and smoke damage. She gutted the unit’s interior and, worried about toxins, threw away most of her family’s possessions.

“Now I’m just so glad to be back,” says Diego. “A big part of it is the connections, seeing the people, seeing businesses come back that went away.”

After losing his home, Wilmont Kahaialii and his family moved from place to place before securing a futurist temporary home at Ka La‘i Ola | Photography: Jeff Sanner

Life in “The Fishbowls”

Far up in the hills above Lahaina, where the ruined subdivisions along Wahikuli Road meet the bare, red-dirt Mars-scape of the West Maui Mountains, Wilmont Kahaialii lives with his wife and two sons in glass-lined pods.

“It’s kind of like I get to live in ‘The Jetsons’ house,” he says with a laugh, referring to the futuristic 1960s cartoon.

After the fire destroyed their home, Kahaialii and his family spent six months at a friend’s house, then about a year in a home that FEMA found for them in Kīhei. In March, they landed a place to live at Ka La‘i Ola, a collection of temporary homes, which he says some residents affectionately call “the fishbowls.” The more traditional tiny houses there are known as “the chicken coops.”

The development is a huge undertaking for local nonprofits HomeAid Hawai‘i and the Hawai‘i Community Foundation, and will include 450 units on 57 acres when completed.

Kahaialii’s unit has nearly 600 square feet of space, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. He says one of his sons is so tall that “he’s walking with a hunch” in their new home, made up of two adjoining pods produced by the Hawai‘i-founded company NanoNest.

But it’s comfortable too, with air conditioning, a small lānai and garden, community picnic areas and sweeping views of the ocean. He says his wife is happy there.

Starting in August, rent will be based on household income, he says. His family plans to stay at Ka La‘i Ola until their lease is up, which he says is in three years. After that, he hopes to finally get off the Hawaiian Home Lands waitlist, which he’s been on for 28 years.

Though Kahaialii likes to laugh and tell jokes, there’s a seriousness beneath his lighthearted demeanor when he says that if the 30-year mark comes with no homestead lease, “I’m going to start a revolution.”

The Sound of Hammers

These stories of displacement match survey data collected by UHERO and reported in the Hawai‘i Housing Factbook 2025: The tumult of moving from place to place has slowed, but people remain vulnerable.

About three-quarters of respondents said they had stayed in one place for at least six months, a measure of stability. But the report noted that “displacement remains a significant risk” given that half of the respondents were in temporary housing of some sort, such as staying with friends and family.

By early June, 180 residential permits were being processed, 396 permits had been issued, 265 houses were under construction, and 23 homes were completed | Photography: Jeff Sanner

When those arrangements fall apart, more trouble can await in the form of low inventory and high prices. Median rental costs for small one- and two-bedroom units have inched down since the fire, but the median rent in Lahaina is still $2,099 and the median asking rent on Craigslist is $3,300, according to UHERO’s Factbook.

More than half of renters in Lahaina pay over 30% of their income for rent, and a quarter pay more than 50%; the latter is considered severely rent burdened. The median rental price in Maui County as a whole is about $250 cheaper than in Lahaina, and asking prices are $750 less.

Buying real estate is even tougher. The median price for a single-family home in Lahaina is an eye-popping $1,697,500, about half a million dollars more than the county’s median price. The median price for condos is $975,000, more than $62,000 higher than in Maui County overall.

“All of Maui is ridiculous right now. A lot of people I know tell me they can’t pay Lahaina prices, and can barely afford Kīhei,” says Diego. “People are still commuting from other parts of the island for work. You do whatever you have to do to make it work right now.”

One proposal moving through the Maui County Council is to phase out about 6,000 of the island’s nearly 11,000 short-term vacation rentals. These condo units are on 2001’s so-called Minatoya list of properties that are allowed to operate as short-term rentals.

Many owners won’t be happy if their units are phased out, and even some residents are skeptical it would help much. “Just taking them away from the visitor industry does not make it more affordable to live here,” says Diego. “It’s a step in the right direction, but we still need more, whether it’s rental caps or something else.”

Some people are taking matters into their own hands and erecting houses without permits. Smith, from the county Office of Recovery, says the government actively pursues such violations with stop-work notices to “make the owner or contractor come into compliance. That has happened a few times, but it’s not pervasive,” he says.

In other cases, the huge homes emerging on plots where single-story houses once stood are actually legal. “What I think people are a little shocked by is what the zoning code allows,” Smith says, including homes up to 30 feet tall.

These new, bigger houses are often better suited for Lahaina’s multigenerational households than the old, tiny cottages with rooms that are added on later, explains Erin Wade, Maui County’s deputy managing director.

“Folks are coming in and making a big investment [in rebuilding], and it’s often a two-story house that now has a garage, which it didn’t before,” she says. “I think the proportionality is surprising for people.”

With the rising number of permits and new construction in progress, Laksmi Abraham, the director of communications and government affairs in the mayor’s office, says Lahaina is “at a critical tipping point” in its transformation.

“When you walk through the neighborhoods where they’re rebuilding, you hear the hammers and the heavy machinery. It’s so encouraging, there’s so much hope.”

More Visitors, Please

Travel just a couple of miles north of the burn zone, and the landscape dramatically changes to lush vegetation and long, golden beaches. This manicured, well-watered stretch of the arid coast is as calming as the advertisements promise. It’s also a sore spot among residents who are frequently asked to conserve water.

At the Royal Lahaina Resort & Bungalows, wind flows from the ocean through the open lobby. Yachts are anchored in the ‘Au‘au Channel that separates Maui and Lāna‘i, a handful of visitors sunbathe by the pool and guests browse in the newly opened Mana Up boutique.

The management team at the Royal Lahaina Resort & Bungalows, Duane Sparkman, left, Yvette Kitagawa and Nicholas Kuhns. At left, a Mana Up store just opened at the resort. | Photography: Jeff Sanner

The resort reopened to tourism in June 2024, after 10 months of hosting fire survivors. Yvette Kitagawa, the hotel manager, says at least 1,500 survivors stayed at the resort.

“Two days after the fire, we put people up, and with no contracts yet from the Red Cross or FEMA. No one was vetted, so it was nerve-wracking,” Kitagawa says.

She says she told her staff, “I want everyone talking to people and making them feel at home.” In turn, the new guests treated their rooms well, like their own homes, she says, and the resort encountered very few problems.

Now tourists are back but business remains slow, at about 50% occupancy, says Nicholas Kuhns, general manager of Royal Lahaina Resort & Bungalows. Group travel is down, Japanese visitor numbers remain depressed, and many Canadian tourists are boycotting the U.S. after President Donald Trump imposed tariffs and threatened a national takeover.

And for travelers to Hawai‘i, the warnings to stay away from Maui that circulated shortly after the fire may have stuck. In the first three months of 2025, the island of Maui had 58,574 visitors, compared with 65,287 in 2022, a 10% drop. Other islands saw increases.

“Three out of four dollars on Maui come from tourism,” says Kuhns. The businesses that are open in West Maui need visitors, he says, and the people living there want to get back to work.

The Lost Trees

On the outskirts of the Royal Lahaina Resort’s large property is a collection of trees growing in pots. When they’re sturdy enough to plant in the ground, they’ll be given free to residents who want to replace their fire-ruined trees.

The project is the brainchild of Duane Sparkman, the resort’s chief engineer and the founder and president of Treecovery Hawaii. He estimates that 21,000 trees burned and 24,000 need to be planted.

So far, 14 resorts as well as the Kahului Airport and other places have devoted space on their properties for the trees, which were purchased through donations. About 6,000 have been planted, including ‘ulu, persimmon, fig and coconut trees.

“We live in two worlds – the corporate world and the cultural world,” says Sparkman. “This project brings them together. It’s healing so many people in so many ways.”

One of his most visible tree-saving projects is also the most emotionally fraught: the old banyan tree on Front Street, planted in 1873. The tree once stood 60 feet tall and covered two-thirds of an acre.

After being scorched in the fire, the only living tissues were found in the lower trunks, and the tree’s fate was uncertain. Arborists and volunteers kept the tree alive, and while it’s still fragile, it’s growing.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation oversees the park where the tree lives. Morrison, the group’s executive director, says the Treecovery team is using an air-layering technique to create “baby banyans,” which are cared for in pots. When the grafted branches are planted in the ground, they’ll grow upward and join the original tree.

Like everything about Lahaina two years after the fire, the banyan tree’s recovery is an inspiring story of resilience, but also frustratingly slow and tentative – and triggers so much pathos it brings tears to the eyes. If the tree had a message for the town, it might be to keep moving forward, branch by branch, building by building.

“You have to have hope that we can rebuild,” says Morrison. “It’s slower than people want it to be, of course, but we’re a real strong community and we will rebuild. You just can’t really sit down and think about it too much. You’ve just got to keep going.”

Rebecca Brooking helped in the reporting of this article.

Remembering Lahaina: Places, People & Culture

Carleton’s “Pioneer Morning,” villagegalleriesmaui.com/roster/carletonkin.htm

Special thanks to Maui artists Ronaldo Macedo, Carleton and Macario Pascual for granting permission to use images of their paintings in this story. The paintings are included in Remembering Lahaina, a large-format art book produced by the Maui Arts League and Legacy Isle Publishing.

The book gathers 251 original paintings from 87 artists worldwide, all of which were created during Maui Plein Air Painting Invitational events. The

Macario Pascual’s “Palms of Malu‘ulu o Lele,” pascualfinearts.com (right)

term “plein air” comes from a French phrase for “outdoors.”

Net proceeds from sales of the first release of Remembering Lahaina will benefit Maui artists and their staff who were affected by the August 8, 2023, wildfires.

To order a copy, visit Legacy Isle Publishing or the Maui Arts League store.

“There were only two people who showed up for the audition of ‘Hawaii Skin Diver,’ me and Cathy.” That was Cathy Nakamoto, the editor of the TV show, who Garma says didn’t want to be on camera but came to ensure there would be at least one candidate. “So I kind of got the role by default.”

Highlights: Since it debuted in 2004, the TV show on Spectrum OC16 has taken viewers on freediving and spearfishing adventures around the world. It airs weekdays at 7:30 pm, with new episodes premiering on the first Tuesday of each month.

Garma enjoys meeting divers and their families and seeing the pride they have in their catches. She’s also loved working all these years with the show’s tiny crew: Nakamoto and her producer/husband Kyle Nakamoto, who are occasionally supplemented by Garma’s husband, Shae Grimm, and son, Ansel.

“It’s always been just a skeleton crew, and it’s just reflective of Hawai‘i in general. It’s very family-oriented and that’s what I love about the show – meeting families and working in this hānai family.”

What It Takes: Hawai‘i-born Garma was not an avid diver before she joined the show, but has learned a lot from the people who appear with her on camera.

“Being around these divers who are super experts, you learn fast.” In an experience that she says points to how connected Hawai‘i is, one of those especially helpful divers was married to a woman that Garma danced Tahitian with.

Challenges: Garma’s calendar has been especially full since becoming a deputy public defender in 2015 and later a mother.

“As soon as I became an attorney and as soon as I became a new mom, scheduling our times to film was the most challenging part.”

Importance: She says she is grateful that the show has showcased and revitalized the important local tradition of spearfishing.

“Little girls and boys will come up to me and say, ‘I want to be a diver,’ and I’m like ‘Fantastic! You can do whatever you want.’ It’s encouraging to see that other generations are following in their footsteps and are still perpetuating this sport.”

Nothing seems particularly remarkable about camelina, a small, wispy plant that flowers in meadows across North America and Europe. Yet it’s full of surprises.

When cultivated, camelina acts as a fast-growing cover crop that can be rotated with crops such as onions and watermelons. The plant’s rows of tiny, hard seeds are packed with oil, which has been used in lamps and kitchens for millennia. After the oilseeds are extracted from their pods and crushed, what’s left behind is a protein-rich seed cake for feeding livestock.

In recent years, another novel use has emerged: Camelina oil works as a feedstock, or raw material, for creating biofuels – a potential pathway to more energy independence and resiliency in Hawai‘i.

The oil can be processed into biodiesel to power electrical plants, renewable naphtha for gas companies and – maybe most surprising of all – sustainable aviation fuel for long-haul flights. And camelina-based biofuel has another unexpected advantage: It can be added directly into the fuel tanks of planes and vehicles, with no modifications required.

In September 2024, the first North American flight using camelina-based fuel – Delta 2732 –  traveled from Minneapolis to New York City, a milestone in the push to turn this low-carbon energy source into a viable alternative to petroleum-based jet fuel.

In Hawai‘i, the work of creating a camelina-to-fuel ecosystem is being led by the Par Hawaii refinery, the private land-management company Pono Pacific, and leaders of the newly merged Hawaiian and Alaska airlines. These large companies are joined by a growing coalition of farmers, ranchers and others.

“Biofuels have to be part of the mix here,” says Eric Wright, president of Par Hawaii. “They have to be part of the airlines decarbonizing, and they’re part of HECO’s integrated grid plans for getting to zero percent carbon. … This is really our best chance to have those fuels locally produced.”

At left, camelina plants have reached the flowering stage at Mahi Pono farm on Maui, where crop trials are underway. The plants’ oilseeds can be turned into renewable feedstocks. | Photo courtesy: Pono Pacific. At right, Eric Wright, president of Par Hawaii, in front of storage tanks for renewable feedstocks, which will be turned into biofuels when the plant’s $90-million hydrotreater conversion is completed. | Photo: Jeff Sanner.

The First Big Step

Work to add renewables and to decarbonize buildings, transportation and industries has steadily advanced since 2015, when Hawai‘i passed legislation that calls for all of its electricity to come from renewable energy by 2045. That was followed in 2018 by a first-in-the-nation bill that aims to reach 100% carbon neutrality by 2045.

Nearly 20% of Hawai‘i’s electricity now comes from solar power, for instance, much of it generated from rooftop panels. And by late 2024, the state had more than 34,000 registered electric vehicles, a 23% increase from the year before, according to the Hawaii EV Association.

Despite concrete steps to move away from fossil fuels, petroleum continues to dominate Hawai‘i’s energy mix. Petroleum accounts for about 80% of the energy consumed in the state, the highest percentage in the country, according to recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Hawai‘i’s transportation sector uses almost two-thirds of all petroleum consumed, with jet fuel accounting for nearly half of the petroleum products used in the state.

In 2022, a major step toward weaning the state off petroleum occurred. Crude-oil refinery Par Hawaii committed $90 million to convert a distillate hydrotreater at its Kapolei facility into a renewable hydrotreater that produces biofuels. The blessing ceremony for the renewable unit took place in late November, with a finish date anticipated in fall 2025.

This giant processing unit – a maze of undulating metal pipes and tanks encased in a web of scaffolding and stairs – will take organic feedstock, such as camelina oil, and alter it using hydrogen and a catalyst at high temperature and pressure. What comes out has a hydrocarbon makeup similar to petroleum products, making it an efficient “drop-in” fuel.

When the renewable hydrotreater is running, Wright says the unit will produce 60 million gallons per year of sustainable aviation fuel for airplanes; renewable diesel for ships, cars, trucks and power generation; and renewable naphtha, which can be blended with regular gasoline or used to produce synthetic natural gas.

When the least carbon-intensive practices are used – such as growing camelina feedstocks on Kaua‘i, refining them in Kapolei and pumping the fuel into planes at the Honolulu airport – products such as sustainable aviation fuel reduce greenhouse gases by up to 80% compared to petroleum-based jet fuel, according to global trade group International Air Transport Association.

Two huge, green storage tanks for renewable feedstocks have been added to Par’s facility, ready for the transition. The company plans to import cooking oils and fats as feedstocks while local camelina production launches and expands enough to offset imports.

The 60 million gallons of locally produced biofuels will add to the growing U.S. supply. At the start of 2024, refineries were producing 24 billion gallons of biofuel per year – a 7% jump from 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Much of the increase comes from growth in renewable diesel and naphtha production, along with a new push to produce sustainable aviation fuel.

All told, biofuels will make up about 5% of overall production at Par’s refinery, says Wright; for context, the facility can currently process about 94,000 barrels of imported crude oil a day. In the future, more areas of the plant might be converted to produce biofuels, he says.

Liquid biofuel has a distinct advantage over solar and wind power in that it’s a “firm” energy source that stabilizes the electric grid when the sun is obscured or the wind stops blowing, says Wright. As he describes it, a gallon jug of renewable diesel fuel can produce 20 times more energy than what’s stored in a similarly sized lithium-ion battery.

“The electric grid really needs firm renewable fuel that you can put in a tank and store, and it’s there when you need it,” says Wright.

In Honoka‘a on Hawai‘i Island, the Hamakua Energy power plant runs on both imported fossil fuels and renewable fuel supplied by Pacific Biodiesel, which processes discarded cooking oils at its Kea‘au refinery and produces about 6 million gallons of biodiesel annually.

By the end of 2030, Hamakua Energy plans to shift to 100% renewable fuels and create a “closed-loop system in Hawai‘i,” says Marcelino Susas, VP of strategy and business development at Pacific Current, a subsidiary of plant owner Hawaiian Electric.

Like Wright, Susas says biofuels make the grid more stable while also buffering the state from fluctuating crude-oil prices. “I think if you’re self-sufficient, you’re not so exposed to the shocks that you have with imported fuels, as we’ve seen in the last few years,” he says.

Crop Trials Show Promise 

At Pono Pacific’s Downtown Honolulu headquarters, a vial of thick, golden liquid sits on Chris Bennett’s desk. The bottom of the glass container is lined with bits of organic debris, the refuse left behind after crushing camelina seeds with a store-bought press. While the oil is just a sample, it could go straight to Par for processing when the new unit is ready.

Bennett is the VP of sustainable energy solutions at Pono Pacific, which works with conservation managers and landowners to improve their farming operations, protect ecosystems and watersheds, and manage conservation lands, among other services.

Since joining Pono Pacific in 2023, after practicing as an environmental lawyer, Bennett has been in charge of the camelina project, including working with landowners and overseeing crop trials.

With the help of researchers at the Hawaii Agricultural Research Center in Waipahu, Pono Pacific is testing dozens of varieties of non-GMO camelina at different elevations and conditions, mostly at the state’s largest farms: Mahi Pono, a 41,000-acre farm and ranch in Central Maui, and Aloun Farms, which has about 3,000 acres in ‘Ewa and Central O‘ahu and operations in Kaumakani on Kaua‘i.

So far, Bennett says the results are promising. On the mainland, camelina, known as a short-season crop that needs little water, has an average seed-to-harvest cycle of 80 to 100 days. In local crop trials, it’s 60 to 75 days.

“In Hawai‘i, you have the potential to do two or three rotations of camelina a year, instead of just one,” says Bennett.

Initial trials are generating between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds of oilseed per acre. The baseline yield needed to be economically feasible is 1,200 pounds per acre, says Bennett, with some test yields far exceeding that.

But there’s still lots of work to be done, says Kyle Studer, who, as the row crop operations manager at Mahi Pono, is in charge of about 1,000 acres, as well as the farm’s camelina trials.

The first trial in July using generic camelina seeds was disappointing, says Studer, as high levels of sunlight and heat caused the plants to flower too soon, stunting the oilseeds’ growth. The next round will be planted in cooler conditions, in December, and will use more selective varieties of seeds.

A former independent farmer in Hawai‘i and on the mainland, Studer says his “naturally skeptical” outlook helps him prepare for everything that could possibly go wrong. He sees a long road ahead before the team can pinpoint the most productive seed varieties, soils, climate, fertilizer and weed-management program to make camelina profitable, but he’s hopeful it can work.

Among the most enthusiastic camelina champions, says Bennett, are ranchers who struggle with the high cost of feeding their animals. Cattle owners generally rely on grass foraging, supplemented with hay that’s shipped in from the mainland, he says. The organic material left behind when the camelina seeds are extracted makes hearty animal feed.

He says camelina is also superior to the cover crops typically used by Hawai‘i farmers, such as sunn hemp, oats and barley. Rather than having to “plant it, grow it and mow it off,” Bennett says camelina is “a cover crop that you can make money off.”

For now, he says large operations with contiguous tracts of land would be best able to rapidly ramp up camelina production, and to reap its benefits. And these large farms often have marginal lands that could be productive again.

“They want to put the acreage back in use and they’re searching for the next big thing you can scale,” says Bennett. “If you can bring fallow land back on, and camelina is the driver for that, it’s also opening up that acreage for food production.”

For small farmers, he’s looking at “aggregation models” to give them access to harvesting equipment and crushing facilities for their camelina crops.

“Our plan, with Pono Pacific, is to demonstrate that this can be done,” says Par’s Wright. “If we can show that to farmers and tell them that we’ll buy all the oil they can produce, we think it can really blossom from there. … This could be an innovative way to kick-start the agricultural economy in Hawai‘i.”

Camelina, a cover crop, is harvested once the plant has dried. The tiny seeds extracted from the pods, bottom right, are made up of about 40% oil. The oil will be processed into biofuels at Par Hawaii and used to power vehicles, utilities and airplanes. | Photo courtesy: Pono Pacific.

From Seed to Skies 

Alaska Airlines says it has spent years on decarbonization efforts, including fine-tuning operations to use less fuel, updating its fleet with fuel-efficient planes, investing in new technologies, introducing a carbon-offset program and developing supply chains for sustainable aviation fuel.

At the moment, Ryan Spies, managing director of sustainability at the newly merged airlines’ Seattle headquarters, says sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is “a nascent industry” that accounts for less than 1% of the fuel used by airlines globally. Alaska is approaching the 1% mark, he says.

Though still a small factor, Spies views SAF as an increasingly important component in the aviation industry’s decarbonization efforts “for a long time, and maybe in perpetuity.”

As a drop-in fuel that’s blended with conventional jet fuel, “we don’t have to change out planes. We don’t have to change the infrastructure at the airports. It’s a jet fuel at the end of the day, so it’s safe, it’s reliable and it performs over long distances,” says Spies.

The airline industry as a whole has been clamoring for more sustainable aviation fuel, with the International Air Transport Association pledging to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. So far, demand for SAF far exceeds supply.

“Right now, it’s just not available in the quantities that we need or at the speed that we need,” says Spies.

But production is rapidly rising. In 2021, the federal departments of Energy, Transportation and Agriculture released a “SAF grand challenge,” with incentives to encourage companies to produce more fuel. Since then, SAF production and imports have grown from 5 million gallons in 2021 to 52 million gallons through the first six months of 2024.

The intergovernmental coalition says that, based on announced projects, between 2.6 billion and 4.9 billion gallons per year of SAF is projected to be produced domestically by 2030, which meets the SAF challenge’s near-term goal.

Wright says that when the conversion of its hydrotreater is complete, Par expects to produce enough sustainable aviation fuel to replace up to 25% of Hawaiian Airlines’ fuel demand to and from the Islands. Par has worked closely with Hawaiian for years to launch its SAF production.

For context, Montana Renewables in Great Falls produces 30 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel a year, making it the largest SAF producer domestically. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the only other SAF producer at the start of 2024 was the World Energy plant in Paramount, California.

Par’s expected SAF production will rival the Montana facility. But it faces a significant hurdle: The cost of producing sustainable aviation fuel, as well as other renewable fuels, is more expensive than petroleum products.

“We look at SAF as all-hands-on-deck because of the cost,” says Spies. “And any one individual airline, or even combined airline like us, can’t do it alone.”

To bridge the cost gap and help boost supply, which will eventually lead to lower costs, a reliable mechanism is being rolled out in states from Montana to Illinois to Nebraska: tax incentives.

Chris Bennett of Pono Pacific, right, oversees crop trials around the state to locate the most productive varieties of camelina for Hawai‘i’s climate, soil and other growing conditions. | Photo: Jeff Sanner. Once production ramps up, Par Hawaii expects to produce enough sustainable aviation fuel to replace up to 25% of Hawaiian Airlines’ fuel demand to and from the islands. | Photos courtesy: Hawaiian Airlines.

Incentivizing Biofuel Production 

When Par’s new hydrotreater begins producing renewable jet fuel, diesel and naphtha, the three products will cost an additional $2 to $4 per gallon over conventional fuels, says Wright.

“That’s a significant cost difference, and you want to make those fuels competitive so the customer doesn’t have to pay a big premium to switch to low-carbon fuels.”

Federal incentives vary from $1 per gallon in income-tax credits for renewable diesel to about $1.75 per gallon for producing high-quality aviation fuel that reduces greenhouse gases by at least 50%. That lowers the overall cost, says Wright, and “gets you about halfway there.”

What’s missing are robust state incentives needed to make up the remaining cost difference. At the moment, Hawai‘i has a tax credit for renewable-fuel production, capped at $20 million a year, that’s run through the Hawai‘i State Energy Office.

But “it’s very minimal and it’s not fully utilized,” says Nahelani Parsons, executive director of the Hawai‘i Renewable Fuels Coalition, which formed in 2023 to advocate for more significant incentives. Founding members Par, Hawaiian Airlines and Pono Pacific are joined by a growing list of others, including the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau, Kuilima Farm and Haleakalā Ranch.

The group’s first proposal in the 2024 legislative session failed, but it plans to return in 2025 with a revised bill that increases the cap in tiered stages instead of all at once, as originally proposed. In the bill’s current draft stage, the cap would increase immediately to $30 million in tax credits in 2025, rising each year until it hits $80 million annually in 2029, says Parsons. The draft proposal would also add per-gallon credits for locally grown feedstocks and fuel production, especially sustainable aviation fuel.

“The key is, if you look at other states, you have to have an economic incentive for the renewable fuels to stay here and be used here, which we have an incredible demand for. The airlines will use every last drop,” says Parsons.

The tax credit would be shared among companies buying the renewable fuels, such as Hawaiian and Alaska airlines, Hawaiian Electric, Hawai‘i Gas, and the Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative, says Parsons.

“Even though we’re asking the state for funds … there’s very few other areas where the private sector has already put in $90 million,” says Parsons. “The state couldn’t do it at all if there were no local partnerships to convert to renewable. … The refinery is already there. The airlines are already there. The farmers are saying, let’s grow it. Everyone’s on board. We just need the state to be on board too.”

Wright hopes to sell the biofuels in Hawai‘i, but says tax credits are needed to make the economics work. Without them, Par plans to ship the fuel by company vessel to a sister refinery in Tacoma, Washington, and sell it to West Coast markets using their incentives. Washington, for instance, offers a substantial tax credit – up to $2 per gallon – for sustainable aviation fuel.

“We’d much rather keep it here at home,” says Wright. “Our business is to supply Hawai‘i’s fuel needs, and so we want to sell SAF to the airlines here, and renewable diesel and naphtha to our utilities.”

Nathan Hokama, a communications specialist who works with Par and the Hawai‘i Renewable Fuels Coalition, says he hopes lawmakers will step up and treat clean energy as a top priority. “It’s one thing to say we’re going to get off fossil fuels by 2045,” he says, “but to really make it happen takes a lot of cooperation, political will and a shared vision of where we want to go.”

Will Federal Subsidies Last? 

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act triggered a wave of growth in the clean-energy sector. Nationally, $126 billion in investments have been announced, spurred largely by tax credits.

Nearly 60% of those clean-energy projects, representing 85% of the investments, are in Republican congressional districts, according to the nonpartisan environmental group E2. These investments and jobs won’t easily be unraveled.

Among the federal tax credits are incentives for renewable fuels, which helped launch the ongoing nationwide effort to produce more sustainable aviation fuel and contributed to the spike in renewable diesel. While federal credits for clean-fuel production are currently set to expire in 2027, there’s optimism they will be extended.

Spies, from Alaska Airlines, points to “a collective, bipartisan effort among fuel producers, oil majors, airlines and customers” to extend the credits, which would provide stability for major projects. “If you build a big production facility, you want certainty, and two years is not enough,” he says.

At Par, Wright says he’s not overly concerned that incentives for renewable fuels will change. “Incentives have survived several changes of administration and changes in control of Congress, so I think they’re pretty durable.”

If federal assistance does falter, Spies says he expects states to fill the gap. “While the federal government may be more hostile to climate action, you will see states step up and impose standards, challenges, investments and incentives to keep the ball moving,” he says.

At Pacific Current, Susas says his past experience with solar power makes him hopeful that prices for biofuels will fall as production scales up, but that incentives are crucial during the transition period. He hopes they stay in place.

“I was in the solar industry a long time ago when the cost was through the roof,” he explains. “When the U.S. Department of  Energy came out with their SunShot program [in 2011], no one thought you could get there. It was aspirational. But if you get the volume up, you get the cost down, and I imagine the same thing happens on the renewable-fuel side.”

“A Circular Economy”

The possibility of producing homegrown biofuels in the Islands has been researched for years. But never, until now, have the major private-sector players aligned to make it happen at a larger scale.

Susas sees it clearly from a newcomer’s perspective, having only moved to Hawai‘i two years ago for his position at Pacific Current. He says the state is uniquely positioned to become “the first ecosystem that’s going to go 100% renewables.”

It’s a small state, with fewer major companies than many other places, and everyone is moving in the same direction, he says. Like Hawai‘i’s solar buildup that he says is studied and modeled by energy companies on the mainland, “I see the same thing with our push to 100% renewables.”

Biofuels can play a critical role in renewable energy, including decarbonizing the transportation sector, stabilizing the energy grid, expanding the economy and boosting agriculture, advocates say, and when all the stages in the seed-to-fuel cycle come together, the benefits could be far-reaching.

“Our goal is to support a circular economy,” says Parsons from the Hawai‘i Renewable Fuels Coalition. “We are growing our feedstocks, which go to the refinery for processing and come out as renewable fuel. The fuel goes out to aviation as well as energy for utilities, for power generation and other outlets. And everyone gets to benefit from a much more sustainable world.”

The ‘Au’au Channel – running between Maui and Lāna’i, with Moloka’i and Kaho’olawe at its north and south ends – is a favorite spot for humpback whales that migrate from Alaska during the winter. Headquartered along the channel at Mā‘alaea Harbor, the Pacific Whale Foundation is dedicated to protecting and studying whales and other marine animals worldwide through its research, education and conservation programs.

The humpback whale population was at a low point when Greg Kaufman founded the nonprofit in 1980, with conservation and assistance as its primary mission.

“The number of humpback whales from the North Pacific population that traveled to Hawai‘i was estimated to be dangerously low, near 600-1,000 individuals. We are proud to report that number has increased to an estimated 10,000-12,000,” says MaryKate Rosack, PWF’s board chair.

But major threats persist against humpbacks and other marine animals, Rosack says.

PWF’s ongoing studies have identified five major threats: bycatch, marine plastic pollution, climate change, unsustainable tourism and vessel collisions. “Our marine animal research is vital” to mitigating those threats and ensuring the animals’ well-being and survival, Rosack says.

Dayna Garland, the foundation’s interim executive director, says PWF’s findings help shape resource management policies and protect whales and dolphins worldwide. Current research covers Hawai‘i’s spinner dolphins, false killer whales and marine plastic pollution.

Emphasis Also on Education

Three pillars guide PWF: research, education and conservation. Education topics include species identification, ecological conservation and oceanography.

Programs geared toward Maui’s youth include Ocean Camp, Ocean Career Quest and Keiki Whalewatch, each of which can lead students to becoming “ocean stewards.”

“Education plays a key role in our mission because we believe that awareness inspires caring, and caring leads to action and change,” says Garland.

The same philosophy can be found in the foundation’s beach cleanups and its Mālama Pono volunteer program, which focuses on the restoration of Hawaiian culture through environmental efforts. PWF also incorporates Hawaiian language, culture and practices in outreach programs, educational materials and research initiatives.

“We have deep respect for the areas in which we operate and strive to incorporate that into everything we do,” says Garland.

PacWhale Eco-Adventures Tours

Part of PWF’s education and funding comes from its for-profit affiliate, PacWhale Eco-Adventures, whose tours are led by marine experts with hands-on experience guided by PWF’s research.

Like many Maui organizations, PWF and PacWhale Eco-Adventures suffered immensely from the 2023 Lahaina wildfires. The loss of Lahaina Harbor ended the for-profit’s tours from that location, and today, ecotours operate solely out of Mā‘alaea Harbor.

However, with financial support from the community, PWF is finding stability. “We’re relying heavily on our dedicated network of passionate supporters to help us navigate through this tough time and emerge stronger,” says Rosack.

To donate to PWF, or to volunteer, visit pacificwhale.org.

Instead, he came back to Hawai‘i and pulled weeds in Kawainui, the marsh in Windward O‘ahu.

He co-founded Pono Pacific Land Management with his wife, Julianna Rapu Leong. Pono Pacific blends conservation services with revenue-generating projects focused on renewable energy, local food production, reforestation and more. John Leong is currently chairman and CEO at Pono Pacific; Julianna Rapu Leong handles business development and project management.

In 2007, they co-founded the Honolulu-based nonprofit Kupu, alongside friend Matthew Bauer, who serves as Kupu’s COO. Kupu fosters climate stewardship and leadership among young people through environmental education programs, paid experiences, on-the-job training in sustainabilityfocused professions and more.

“Kupu was named after the kupukupu fern,” explains Kepa Barrett. In 2011, Barrett was a 16-year-old team member in Kupu’s Hawai‘i Youth Conservation Corps summer program when he first met John Leong. Barrett kept returning for more programs, rose through the ranks and is now an external affairs officer for Kupu.

The kupukupu fern can grow in volcanic cinder, and is among the first plants to colonize areas after lava has flowed. It helps rebuild the ecosystem “so other plants can grow and thrive,” says Barrett.

And like those plants, Kupu itself is growing. “Kupu has now reached a point in its organizational life cycle where it’s not the only plant growing on that topsoil; we are poised to not only grow ourselves but also to grow and diversify Hawai‘i’s economy in the green job sector,” Barrett says. “I see the organization continuing consistent trends of growth but also reaching new heights. It’s exciting in so many ways – and there is a lot of work to be done.”

An Idea Takes Root

As a kid growing up in lush Nu‘uanu, Leong enjoyed exploring the trails and streams in the area but admits his family members weren’t particularly outdoorsy.

They were, however, strongly entrepreneurial and supportive of others. “My grandfather had a restaurant and I saw how a business can impact lives,” says Leong. “People would come back to visit the restaurant and talk about how they got their culinary start there. He really thought about how he was going to develop people and support them.”

As a teen, Leong participated in a youth conservation pilot program run by the Department of Land and Natural Resources. That’s when he really fell in love with the environment, he says, “with the watersheds that support life, with the endangered species that are here.”

Michael Wilson, a retired associate justice of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court and former director of the DLNR, has been a longtime supporter of Leong and has served as a board member and advisory board member for Kupu. He started the youth conservation pilot program, which is how he met Leong.

“John was a senior at Punahou, and did that summer program and the rest is history,” Wilson says. “He loved it. His goal system was so different; he has an interior moral compass that is … I would call it almost unmatched. He is driven by a sense of compassion for his community and really is focused on nature. It’s unusual and rather pure because it doesn’t come with an agenda or a need for recognition.”

Evolving Into a Leading Nonprofit

With the success of Pono Pacific, Leong could see a shift in Hawai‘i toward social enterprise, which means using a market-driven approach to address unmet needs or solve social or environmental problems, and also that being in environmental work “does not mean you cannot have excellence in how you operate your organization.” He also spotted an opportunity to get younger people involved.

“The bad news is that all the environmental problems we have are human related, but the flip side of that is that we will have human solutions, especially as we link arms together.”

Bauer, who first met Leong while on a Pono Pacific crew, has now worked alongside him for half of his life. “When you are doing actual on-the-ground conservation work, you realize how much you can do, and can’t do, as an individual or even as a small group of people,” he says. “There are so many environmental challenges we face in Hawai‘i. When we started Kupu, it was amazing to see what you can do when you add more people to the mix. And not just for doing the work, but changing a mindset, sharing how unique Hawai‘i is, how extraordinary it is, how much we have a stake in making it the place we want to continue for our children.”

Today Kupu has a dozen programs, including the Hawai‘i Youth Conservation Corps, Hawai‘i Youth Sustainability Challenge, Conservation Leadership Development Program, Environmental Education Leaders, Kōkua Camp and Nā Manu ‘Elele Stewards. Named a Best Place to Work in 2024 by Hawaii Business Magazine, Kupu has trained more than 6,000 teens and young adults. It currently has 400 people on payroll, and a core staff of 70 to 80 people, many of whom are themselves graduates of Kupu programs.

Kupu’s program members have provided over 3 million hours of service, planting more than 1.5 million native plants and removing 151,000 acres of invasive species. And Kupu has supported program members’ continued education, with $6.3 million in education awards. All told, Kupu has generated more than $229 million in socioeconomic benefits within the Pacific region, according to the organization.

For example, the Kupu ‘Āina Corps was created to support Hawai‘i’s economic comeback following the Covid pandemic and has since been deployed for recovery efforts in the wake of the Maui wildfires. That workforce development program has, to date, provided yearlong paid training positions for 560 people. Kupu ‘Āina Corps positions are structured as a cost share, and participants work on host sites that can include nonprofit organizations, for-profit businesses, and state and county government agencies. Its work involves agriculture, environmental technology, sustainability and other green job positions.

Another Kupu success story is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Ho‘okupu Center, which opened in 2019 at Kewalo Basin and boasts classrooms, a commercial kitchen and community meeting spaces. There, Kupu administers the Honolulu school district’s only off-campus alternative learning opportunity: the Culinary Social Enterprise and Community Program. It provides employment training to help get underresourced youths into the job market, GED instruction, life skills development and trauma-informed services. More than 100 youths have received alternative high school diplomas upon completing the culinary program, which also provides professional experiences in catering at over 400 events at the Ho‘okupu Center.

Students taking part in the alternative learning opportunity have shown an average GPA increase of 1.8 points after completing their first semesters at the Ho‘okupu Center. Bauer says it’s because young people see themselves in a different light when they realize they’re problem-solvers for Hawai‘i’s environmental challenges.

“It has motivated a lot of students,” Bauer says. “They see the importance of education and they see their own importance in the solutions we need for Hawai‘i.”

Opening the center was an important inflection point for Kupu and demonstrated its evolution “from a scrappy organization to a place that has roots, showing we can create a space where there were once drugs and gambling, and now there is instead a place for finding a future,” Leong says. “One of the kids had previously dropped out (of high school). He did our program and got a four-year scholarship to Menlo College.” A Kupu staffer personally helped to get the student to California and moved him into the college. “Those things make me really proud, what that symbolizes,” says Leong.

He hopes that Kupu can open more educational centers.

“What I’d love to see is where people can get certificates in a career pathway package, getting paid and getting an education at the same time. That’s a model we can provide for the 21st century.”

Young People Are a Natural Resource

Prior to Kupu, Hawai‘i didn’t really have “an organization that connected people – hands-on, and hearts and minds – into the issues that our Islands are facing,” Bauer says. “John’s leadership in creating Kupu provided that opportunity, bringing people together with common solutions and widespread support.”

Bauer calls Leong optimistic. “When I’m in meetings with him, it’s interesting, I hear one thing but he always hears a solution or finds a way on how we can play a part in the story and how we can support another organization. My metaphor is he’s like the tide. He’s going to move forward. He’s not going to knock anybody over but he will continue to go around or go over. He has a force of nature about him that is impressive.”

While many in the younger generation might seem more interested in their smartphones than in pulling invasive plants, Leong says his goal is to engage people where they are. “We encourage them to get their hands in the dirt, their fingers in the limu. But everyone has their own passion and skill set. We’ve had Kupu grads go into design, into teaching. We had a program participant who wants to go into environmental law.”

It’s not a one-job-fits-all approach, and Kupu and its partners are involved in many fields, including geographic information systems, clean energy, food systems, wastewater, wildfire prevention and resiliency, forestry, trail management and native/ endangered species protection.

But no matter what interests the program members have, Leong says, they’ll learn to care about the community they are in. “They can have a calling that is higher than getting themselves ahead, and we can help unlock their calling.”

Barrett notes that Leong is a father of four and prone to telling dad jokes. “John’s leadership style is almost like a fun parent,” he says, but beyond that, he’s a leader with “confidence, firmness, vision and faith.”

“When I was in the programs, I saw someone who was well educated, who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. It is not what John says that necessarily inspires me. It’s what he does. He could have had another type of life and instead chose something outside the box, and look what it has done. John doesn’t evaluate his accomplishments off the GDP of his leadership. It’s about the impact: socially, economically, environmentally. We are better here in Hawai‘i because of his leadership.”

After completing the youth programs, Barrett went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental policy with a minor in economics. Many of Kupu’s professional staff are former program members, says Barrett. “In my own department, two-thirds of us were participants. It’s a very special thing because we clearly know the experiences and the value we are adding to the people who come through the programs.”

Leong is quick to credit his team for his success.

“We have the best team. We have such committed, caring, intelligent people. It’s changed a lot; in the beginning, we were willing to take anyone off the street who would sacrifice pay for passion. We were doing the work that was required, trying to find new work and funding, and doing it all. As we’ve grown and expanded, we’ve developed into a more professional organization. Traditionally in nonprofits, you see the front-line work and many of us start in that mission, but equally important is the recruitment, marketing, accounting, all the things that make a stronger organization. My hope is that we can be the type of organization that fills a hole in the entry-level work of conservation but also in professional levels and management, so we can as a sector provide a competitive environment for support, training and payroll.”

Shaping the Environmental Philanthropy Sector

As Kupu has become more established, it’s found new ways to support Hawai‘i’s communities.

Says Bauer: “We see ourselves as increasing capacity for the environmental and conservation and sustainability sectors in Hawai‘i. If we are able to bring in more resources from the continent, whether that be federal or philanthropic monies that can support and strengthen the overall industry, then that is something we want to do.”

For example, a new $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Service will help Kupu become a grantmaker itself, aiding other organizations around the state with tree planting and maintenance. This grant provides financial and technical assistance for workforce development and will help to cultivate Indigenous equity and mitigate invasive species, pests and diseases, according to the USDA.

Leong says Kupu is looking to reach out beyond Hawai‘i, too. “We can be a connecting tissue within the Pacific,” he says, sharing best practices and ensuring everyone gets a seat at the table.

Leong’s wife is from Rapa Nui; Bauer’s wife is from Guam. Pacific nations “are our cousins and our neighbors next door,” says Bauer. “We do what we can to support American Samoa, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Rapa Nui, Guam. We are a trusted entity that can help bring resources.”

Speaking of family, Leong’s oldest child just interned with Kupu before going off to college.

“We are careful and respectful that our kids have their own path and we want them to express themselves,” says Leong. “But they did grow up drinking the Kool-Aid.” He fondly recalls his daughter stepping into a leadership moment during a youth ropes course. “There she was, a little 6-year-old, telling the 18-yearolds what to do. She’d tell them, ‘This is how you make sure you are safe, this is how you build a team.’ ”

With Kupu, “John’s created a new model that allows for transformational change,” says Wilson, the retired Supreme Court justice. “It is the institutionalization of the ethic of taking care of our ‘āina and our kai, and to do it with aplomb and to do it with a sense of joy, and therefore attract every strata of society. John’s skill set means that he’s at another scale of ingenuity, creativity, compassion and commitment, and he has the best kind of leadership, because it’s the leadership that penetrates the people around him and makes them feel good about what they’re doing. It happens after they get to know him.”

The Hawaiian archipelago extends far beyond its eight main islands to include 137 islands, atolls and shoals stretching 1,591 miles, from Kure Atoll in the northwest to Hawai’i Island in the southeast.

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is a vast and remote area that encompasses the low-lying Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, atolls and surrounding sea.

“Most people don’t really know it’s even a part of Hawai‘i, let alone 75% of the length of the Hawaiian archipelago,” says Kevin O’Brien, founder and president of the nonprofit Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project.

Map: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

PMDP and its field team of 12 people are dedicated to the stewardship of Papahānaumokuākea, including removing marine debris and spreading awareness of the region’s importance.

Papahānaumokuākea became a marine national monument in 2006 and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010 for both its natural and cultural significance, making it the only “mixed” World Heritage Site in the U.S.

“It’s very integral to so many Native Hawaiian narratives, like the realms of ao and pō and the birth of the Hawaiian people in the Hawaiian Islands,” O’Brien says, calling the region “as close to an intact ecosystem, I think, as you can probably find on Earth.”

More than 7,000 species live in the area, a quarter of which are found nowhere else in the world except there and adjacent areas. Of those species, 23 are listed by the U.S. as endangered, including the Hawaiian monk seal, humpback whale, green sea turtle and Laysan duck.

Over 90% of Hawaiian green sea turtles nest at French Frigate Shoals in Papahānaumokuākea. Papahānaumokuākea Marine debris project disentangled nine sea turtles last year, but President Kevin O’Brien says far more die before they can be rescued. | Photos courtesy: Andrew Sullivan-Haskins

Marine Debris Mayhem

Though humans rarely set foot there, their impact can be found all over, with “enormous amounts of derelict fishing gear, specifically nets, all along the reefs within the monument and shorelines,” says Mark Manuel, who serves as the Pacific Islands regional coordinator for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program.

James Morioka, PMDP’s executive director, says commercial fishing is prohibited within the monument but that “doesn’t mean that people aren’t fishing right outside the boundaries.”

“These ghost nets, whether they’re abandoned from a commercial vessel or just kind of left adrift, they’ll continue to drift through the water column, and then they’ll land in Papa hānaumokuākea. … Animals will try to swim through and then they’ll get caught.”

Photos courtesy: Andrew Sullivan-Haskins

Derelict nets also kill coral by snagging or smothering it. Morioka says over time, these nets accumulate algae and other organisms. As a net gets heavier, it sinks and cements itself to the reef, which “prevents the coral from getting sunlight, or the nutrients they need from the water.”

NOAA led large-scale debris removal from 1996 to 2021, Manuel says, during which it removed “about 2 million pounds of derelict fishing gear.” O’Brien and Morioka, who were both working for NOAA at that time, realized the removal work was probably going to end because “funding had dropped away to almost nothing,” says O’Brien. So they left NOAA and started PMDP in 2020.

“Now, pretty much all removal efforts in the monument are led by PMDP,” says Manuel.

The biggest net found by the Papahānaumokuākea Marine debris project weighed 11 tons. Their team must cut the heavy nets into pieces before loading them onto their boats. | Photos courtesy: Andrew Sullivan-Haskins

The nonprofit has acquired its own boats, gear and facility. “We run it independently of our old group at NOAA, but it’s funded partially by them,” says O’Brien. The most recent support was in the form of a $1.4 million NOAA Sea Grant award for innovation; other money comes from donations, which can be made at pmdphawaii.org.

A major PMDP project the Sea Grant is being used towards is developing a tool made specifically for cutting through ghost nets, says O’Brien. Existing tools can take an hour or two to cut through the nets; the goal is a tool that will do it in a few minutes. It’s a project that’s so crucial, some members of the team work on it nearly full time.

“It’s going to be pretty amazing globally for helping with the issue,” O’Brien says.

PMDP is also working to develop sensors that, when mounted on drones, can detect nets in water faster than the current method, which involves people swimming miles a day to survey the reefs.

The Plastic Problem

About 90% of the marine debris they collect is nets, which are primarily made of plastic. But they also find and remove all other kinds of plastic. “Any kind of consumer product, plastic products, like plastic water bottles, shampoo bottles, anything you name, if it’s made of plastic and it floats, we pretty much probably found it,” says O’Brien.

Plastic is particularly alarming because it never fully decomposes. “They say that plastic doesn’t break down, it just breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces,” says Morioka.

Plastic pollution poses a huge hazard to wildlife. As an example, Morioka points to seabirds that eat microplastics in the open ocean and then fly back to the islands where they feed their chicks.

14 million seabirds breed and nest on the low-lying islands in the monument. Out of the 22 seabird species, 4 are endemic. | Photos courtesy: Andrew Sullivan-Haskins

“They’ll regurgitate the food plus the plastics into the chicks’ mouths. The chicks will then starve because they won’t be able to process the plastic in their stomach.”

The most recent PMDP mission spanned 19 days from mid-April to early May along the shores of Kuaihelani, aka Midway. The team gathered 70,080 pounds of marine debris from the area, which was taken to the H-Power plant on O‘ahu where it was incinerated to help generate power.

Over four years and eight missions, PMDP has collected 786,287 pounds of marine debris from the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

“One of our goals is to really highlight this place, because it’s incredibly special and more people need to know that it exists. Hopefully, we can build a grassroots stewardship community around caring for this place,” says O’Brien.

A pioneer and leader in the restoration of Hawai’i’s fishponds – Paepae o He’eia – is getting closer to the ultimate goal of sustainable fish harvesting.

The nonprofit founded in 2001 is dedicated to restoring He‘eia Fishpond at the edge of Kāne‘ohe Bay, says Executive Director Hi‘ilei Kawelo. Before 20th-century development, she says, there were about 30 fishponds in Kāne‘ohe Bay, “but many of them got filled in to make way for residential.”

He‘eia Fishpond escaped that fate; instead, it fell into disuse and disrepair after a 1965 flood destroyed parts of the wall and mangroves and other invasive species took over.

In the beginning, Kawelo says, the nonprofit was 100% focused on removing the mangroves because “you couldn’t see the horizon. You couldn’t see the fishpond wall, couldn’t see the water’s edge. It was just a wall of mangrove all the way around the pond.”

Staff and volunteers later started rebuilding the fishpond wall, whose skeleton was still there. “All of the wall has been restored. … We’re almost done with the mangrove. We’re not done with the other weeds or the invasive jellyfish or the invasive seaweeds,” says Kawelo. They are also working to reduce the carnivorous fish that live in the pond and eat the more desirable fish.

“One to two more years of restoration and then we’re done, and the focus has to shift to food production,” she says.

“One day, we’re going to feed people from the pond. I don’t know how many people. I don’t think we’re going to be feeding 6,000 people, like this pond fed historically. But … during Covid we were able to feed our volunteers meals that were 100% sourced from the fishpond.” Feeding those participants would be a good start, Kawelo says.

They are already harvesting Samoan crab, an invasive species that they sell for $10 a pound about once a month via phone orders. Occasionally, the crab is a special at some restaurants.

“We’re catching things like barracuda, pāpio and ulua that are predating on the more desirable fish that fishponds were built to grow, like mullet,” says Kawelo.

“We don’t sell those. It’s sort of just for staff (to eat) and we have fishing days that are open to the public, once a month, April through September.” The dates of their Lā Holoholo (family fishing days) and lottery sign-up are posted on their Instagram page, @paepaeoheeia.

About 2,000 Volunteers a Year

Paepae o He‘eia has eight staffers, seven interns in the summer and volunteers year-round. Kawelo estimates the nonprofit gets “maybe 2,000 volunteers” a year; most come from school groups, but it also gets help from individuals, families and companies.

“If you come to volunteer at a fishpond, it’s not going to be easy. But I think that people like that. They leave feeling good about their contribution, even if it was the muddiest thing they’ve ever done in their life.”

From 1200 to 1600, Native Hawaiians built and maintained hundreds of fishponds (loko i‘a) across the Islands. But colonialism, cultural suppression, urbanization, natural disasters and invasive species led to their destruction or deterioration.

“Fishponds had a pretty simple purpose and function, and that was to cultivate fish and supply our people with protein,” says Kawelo. In its heyday, the 88-acre He‘eia Fishpond “could supplementally feed a population of about 6,000.”

The pond wall is made of volcanic rock and coral and is 11 feet wide at the top. | Photos: Jeff Sanner

And it was sustainable. “Hawaiian fishponds are Indigenous aquaculture systems. Indigenous aquaculture systems are designed using ‘ecomimicry’ principles, which means that they enhance the existing environment, rather than detract from it as commercial aquaculture systems often do,” says Kawika Winter, director of the He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve.

He‘eia NERR co-manages the He‘eia Fishpond alongside its partners, including NOAA, UH’s Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology and Paepae o He‘eia. He‘eia NERR’s research helps to identify and remedy fishpond problems.

“What is clear from a scientific perspective is that it takes more than removing invasive mangroves to make a fishpond as productive as it was in ancient times. Fishponds need certain environmental parameters to exist in the larger system to function properly. These include things like freshwater inputs, water quality and fishery health,” says Winter.

Built Where Streams and Ocean Meet

Hawaiian fishponds are strategically located where freshwater streams meet the ocean, creating brackish water environments.

“The idea is that fresh water mixing with salt water creates the (right) habitat for the phytoplankton, which feeds the fish,” says Kawelo. This eliminates the need for people to feed the fish, a common practice at most commercial fish farms.

He‘eia Fishpond’s 1.3-mile wall is made of volcanic rock and coral and is 11 feet wide at the top. Interspersed along the wall are slatted gates, which allow small, young fish to enter the pond; those fish eventually grow so large they become trapped. The walls and gates also help maintain the right ratio of fresh water to salt water.

Slatted gates like these allow young fish to enter the pond from Kāne’ohe Bay, but after the fish grow, the gate keeps them inside the pond. | Photos: Jeff Sanner

“It’s kind of like a recipe, right? More fresh than salt (water), I’d say. You’re trying to cultivate the kinds of phytoplankton that the fish you want eat,” says Kawelo.

She says fishponds were built “to cultivate primarily Hawaiian striped mullet,” commonly called ‘ama‘ama in Hawai‘i, “but it’s a “super diverse ecosystem.”

“You have the phytoplankton, but then you have all the little critters like the crabs and shrimp that keep things clean on the bottom. You have filter feeders, like oysters and clams. You have macroalgae that other fish eat, like ‘awa, which is another fishpond fish. And then there’s other kinds of herbivores and other kinds of seaweed. And then you have omnivorous fish that eat shrimp” and other things.

The Bigger Picture

Paepae o He‘eia is part of a network of fishpond caretakers across the Islands called Hui Mālama Loko I‘a. Its coordinator, Brenda Asuncion, says it formed “out of this idea that people working to steward and restore fishponds could learn from and support each other.”

The network covers about 60 sites, including nonprofits, family-owned fishponds, and private properties such as resorts that have staff members who take care of fishponds.

“Some of the sites that are in the network have just identified that they have a loko i‘a and they want to be a part of a network where they can meet and learn from other people. And then some sites have dedicated staff or have community efforts that work on them,” says Asuncion.

Paepae o He‘eia is seen “as a leader in the network. More and more are growing and starting to do amazing things, too. But everyone still looks at them as a kind of pioneer organization, for sure.”

Asuncion emphasizes that fishpond restoration is not only about reinstating a sustainable food source: “When people talk about the function of fishponds, it really was to increase the abundance and ability to get food, but at the same time, there’s this whole rich understanding of how loko i‘a feed us in non-physical ways.

“They’re opportunities for us as people and community members and Hawaiians to connect to our lands and waters and have relationships with places that are meaningful to our lives.”

Winter shares a similar sentiment: “Restoring fishponds is not only for Native Hawaiians, and it is not only about holding on to the legacy of our ancestral past. Restoring fishponds is about reviving a way of thinking and being in Hawai‘i that allows us to thrive together with our environment, rather than at the expense of it. Many of our kūpuna have said that Hawai‘i can heal the world. This is a part of what they were talking about.”

After last year’s deadly wildfires in Lahaina, Archie Kalepa returned to the smoldering ruins of his hometown and immediately set up an emergency center at his home. Since then, the legendary waterman has dedicated himself to the recovery of Lahaina and its people.

He has also been thinking about what’s needed for long-term recovery. In his view, it’s all about rethinking how we use our natural resources. “Twenty years ago, the most precious thing in Hawai‘i was land,” he says. “Today, the most precious thing on our islands is water.”

Famed Waterman Archie Kalepa, who has helped lead recovery efforts in Lahaina, says he is also committed to finding ways to reuse wastewater that will benefit the land, ocean and community.

Kalepa’s family has lived in West Maui for nine generations and once presided over large taro patches that helped feed Lahaina when it was the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom. Water had been the essence of Lahaina, and there were so many canals and wetlands that it was once known as the “Venice of the Pacific.” But that landscape was transformed over time.

Kalepa sees the increasing threats of wildfire caused by droughts, climate change and poor land management, and he believes that two solutions are needed: one based on indigenous wisdom and the other on modern technology.

The first involves bringing back the wise use of water that his Hawaiian ancestors practiced, which will help create local farms and restore the life of the land.

The second option involves the innovative reuse of treated wastewater. Millions of gallons of highly treated effluent are currently pumped into the ground via injection wells on Maui, without beneficial purposes. But a local lawsuit based in Lahaina that went to the U.S. Supreme Court is forcing counties to find more beneficial uses, such as fire suppression.

Together, traditional water management and modern wastewater reuse could help restore Lahaina and protect all of Hawai‘i, Kalepa says. But to understand why, he says, it’s important to understand how water resources were radically changed over the last two centuries and how treated effluent could help transform all of Hawai‘i’s future.

Rise and Fall of “King Cane”

The Pioneer Mill Co. was created in Lahaina in 1860, and the sugar plantation became one of the most successful and longest running in Hawai‘i (finally closing in 1999). Sugarcane was profitable, and plantations sprung up all over the islands.

With the rise of what author John Vandercook called “King Cane,” a network of sugar barons would transform Hawai‘i’s economy, landscape and culture, and lead to the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893. During that time, plantation owners used thousands of immigrant workers to build a massive network of dikes and canals to divert streams across the state to their plantations to feed their water-hungry crops.

The redirected flow of water caused many perennial streams to dry up, leading to the decline of traditional taro farming and the livelihood of many Native Hawaiians like Kalepa’s ancestors.

The gradual decline of sugarcane production during the late 20th century motivated many plantation companies to shift their focus to real estate development. Though no longer producing crops, they still retained the water rights. Streams that once fed taro farms were now irrigating golf courses, hotels and housing. Much of what was undeveloped was left as dry, fallow fields.

Threat of Unmanaged Grassland

Invasive grasses took over the fallow fields and became fuel for an increasing number of wildfires. According to Clay Trauernicht, a plant science and wildfire expert at UH Mānoa, wildfires across the state burned an average of about 5,000 acres a year for most of the 20th century. But in the last 20 years, that figure shot up to 15,000-20,000 acres per year and is still rising.

Nani Barretto, co-executive director of the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization, has seen the damage that wildfires have done. She says most housing developments in Hawai‘i were neither designed nor built with fire prevention in mind.

“We did not have fires like we do now back when most of our subdivisions were built,” Barretto says. Developers, architects and contractors in Hawai‘i weren’t focused on using fire-resistant building materials, landscaping or evacuation routes to reduce the risk of wildfires.

She says we need to retrofit old developments and design new ones to counter the increasing threat of fires, which costs the state more money than hurricanes, flooding and tsunamis combined.

Hawai‘i must also better manage the fallow lands that fuel wildfires. “Until we rethink what we’re going to do with them,” Barretto warns, “the risk is going to return.”

The state’s largest private landowner, Kamehameha Schools, recently announced plans to expand agriculture and forestry operations on roughly 960 acres above Lahaina. KS also committed to creating new residential, commercial and recreational developments on about 190 acres, parts of which border neighborhoods destroyed by the fires.

“Our vision is to see Lahaina flourish again as a place of abundance,” said CEO Jack Wong in announcing the plans.

The Rebirth of a Stream

Before the advent of sugar cane plantations and large ranches, there were many perennial streams, native forests and wetlands that kept land in Hawai‘i fertile and moist. To illustrate the effects of modern development, Kalepa shares a story about his ancestral farmlands near Lahaina.

“We have some family land in Lahaina, and the stream was dry for 130 years during this Westernized time,” he says. It turned out that Kahoma Stream was managed by Kamehameha Schools, and a coalition of community members approached the trust about restoring the stream. Kalepa advocated for restoring the water rights because he wanted to resume growing taro on his family’s lo‘i kalo.

After six years of negotiations, the community won the rights to restore the stream and, after much hard work preparing the land, it began flowing once again from mauka to makai for the first time in more than a century.

“Veins of the earth that are fertile with water, allow our earth to heal,” Kalepa said at a celebration with the community and Kamehameha Schools in 2017.

“That stream was dry for 130 years, but watching the transformation in the last six years blew me away,” Kalepa says now. What once seemed dead is now full of new life. He saw native fish come back and witnessed the coral reefs blooming again offshore.

“When you see the change come back from what was almost extinct, it really changed my perception,” he says. “I began to pay really close attention to the healthiness of the streams and the reefs.”

Restoring stream flows and water rights to local farms could transform the landscape and culture of Hawai‘i, Kalepa says. Along with reducing the amount of natural fuels for wildfires, he says, we also need to reimagine the ways we reuse our wastewater resources.

Lahaina Injection Wells Case

While working with his community to restore Kahoma Stream, Kalepa also became involved with a local water quality lawsuit. Environmental groups had formed a coalition to stop Maui County from injecting treated sewage into deep injection wells at its Lahaina Wastewater Reclamation Facility.

The group formed the DIRE Coalition – standing for Don’t Inject, REdirect – to get the County to stop injecting treated sewage into the ground but instead to use the treated wastewater for more beneficial uses like irrigation or fire prevention.

After Maui County rejected their requests, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of four nonprofits: Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club-Maui Group, the Surfrider Foundation and the West Maui Preservation Association. (The writer worked for The Surfrider Foundation at the time.) The groups said the treated wastewater was polluting the near-shore ecosystem and seriously threatening water quality at Kahekili Beach.

Kalepa supported the cause and joined a separate complaint against Maui’s mayor to settle the case. “What’s killing our reef is these injection wells,” Kalepa says. “This is about our future … about us having healthy reefs, a healthy community, a healthy environment.” The county was pumping 3 million to 5 million gallons of treated waste into underground injection wells each day at the Lahaina facility. They tried to argue that the effluent wasn’t affecting the near-shore ecology; and even if it was, they weren’t directly responsible because the pipes weren’t connected to the ocean.

The lawsuit gained national attention and would eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Earthjustice lawyer David Henkin argued the case in November 2019 and said the county’s logic was absurd. “According to Maui County, a polluter can avoid the law by taking a pipeline that discharges waste directly into the ocean and cutting it 10 feet short of the shoreline,” Henkin said.

On behalf of four environmental nonprofits, Earthjustice sued Maui County, alleging that its wastewater treatment system was polluting the near-shore ecosystem. Lawyer David Henkin argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the environmental groups in 2020.

In spring 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Earthjustice and the environmental plaintiffs.

“Because the county forced us to go to the Supreme Court,” Henkin says, “we ended up getting a ruling that applies broadly across the country and makes it clear that polluters cannot avoid the Clean Water Act by using things like injection wells that then use groundwater as a sewer to transport pollution into the ocean.”

The Maui County Council has since committed to upgrading its wastewater infrastructure to a higher level of treatment and to reuse the treated wastewater for golf courses, agriculture and landscaping. The council also worked with the new Mayor Richard Bissen to pass Bill 52, which requires that all of the county’s wastewater be disinfected to meet Hawai‘i State R-1 reuse water standards by Jan. 1, 2039.

Earthjustice recently won a similar lawsuit against Hawai‘i County, saying their Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant in Kona was polluting nearshore waters in Honokohau Harbor.

Thinking Outside the Box

The reuse of treated wastewater for fire prevention is a relatively new concept, but it’s gaining ground. A promising new pilot project is being developed in Mā‘alaea, the second most vulnerable area for wildfires on Maui after Lahaina, according to a 2019 report by the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization.

The harbor community, bordered by fallow lands that once grew sugarcane, has been repeatedly threatened by wildfires over the last 20 years.

Mā‘alaea has ten condo buildings, a few small businesses, a marina and the Maui Ocean Center. For decades, these buildings have been pumping millions of gallons of partially treated sewage waste into eleven injection wells along the coast. During that time, the water quality of Mā‘alaea Bay has deteriorated rapidly, and the EPA has listed it as an impaired body of water – one of hundreds across Hawai‘i.

The once thriving reefs off Mā‘alaea have declined from 78% coral coverage a few decades ago to a low of 8% currently. To visualize this decline, visitors can check out the Maui Ocean Center, which has the largest living tropical reef aquarium in the Western Hemisphere, to see what healthy colorful reefs look like. Then, a quick snorkeling excursion in Mā‘alaea Bay will reveal the gray rubblescape that remains. Without remediation, the area will continue to decline.

Healthy corals can be seen at the Maui Ocean Center in Mā’alaea, but most of the coral in the nearby Bay has died. | Photo: Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) / Tommy Lundberg, courtesy: Maui Ocean Center

Motivated by the Lahaina Injection Wells case, community leaders at the Mā‘alaea Village Association (MVA) proposed replacing the injection wells with a decentralized wastewater treatment facility. The new facility would then use the highly treated wastewater to irrigate a green belt of trees around the community. The green belt would also create a fire break, wind break and a way to reduce erosion and runoff into the bay.

Momentum and support for the project are growing under the leadership of MVA board members Peter Cannon, a longtime resident and businessman, and Tapani Vuori, the president and general manager of the Maui Ocean Center. Applying on behalf of the community, the MVA group has received state and federal funding to do engineering and site planning for the green belt design, which would be a buffer zone between the community and the fallow cane fields.

Tapani Vuori, president of the Maui Ocean Center, is one of the leaders of a proposal to irrigate a green belt of trees using highly treated wastewater.

“This could be a model for the rest of the state when we look at the cesspool situation for decentralized solutions,” says Vuori. “It’s probably four or five times less expensive than centralized treatment facilities. We feel this is a much more cost-effective solution.”

As an example, the nearby subdivision of Maui Meadows has more than 700 cesspools that are discharging over 440,000 gallons of untreated waste into their groundwater each day. Instead of homeowners paying $30,000 to $50,000 each to convert their cesspools, the community could work with the Maui County Council to create a more affordable, efficient and environmentally friendly solution.

Currently, local advocates John Laney and Caleb Harper, who live in the area, are working to create a sewer improvement district that could be financed by monthly payments. They are exploring decentralized wastewater treatment options, as well as a green belt to protect their community from future fires.

“We’ve got to think outside the box,” Kalepa says about the rebuilding of Lahaina. Along with restoring streams and converting old sugarcane fields into fertile farmland, he is also committed to “finding better ways to utilize our wastewater resources.” Reusing treated effluent for irrigation of green belts could be a key component in preventing wildfires.

The center can be seen among other buildings in the town of Mā’alaea. | Photo: Getty Images

Kalepa says Lahaina and the state need to come up with a new plan to guide us into the future. He believes that plan needs to be inclusive of all people but based on traditional Hawaiian values. “We live in a modern time, but we can still have these values that can keep our islands healthy and alive for the next 10 generations.”