One Year After Maui's Wildfires, Meet the Locals Ensuring Travel Helps the Island Heal

15.07.2024 - 19:10 / cntraveler.com

Early one Saturday morning in April, I find myself beneath a dense tree canopy in Maui's Honōkowai Valley. The air is still. Sparrows and mynahs chirp cheerfully. A wild pig, one of thousands that roam the mountain ranges of the Hawaiian Islands, darts in front of me. It's hard to believe that the crush of resorts along Ka‘anapali Beach, on Maui's western shore, are just a few miles away.

I've come with Puanani Lindsey, a former Maui Police Department dispatch officer who in 2002 cofounded Maui Cultural Lands, a trust to preserve the island's cultural inheritance sites, with her late husband, Ed. The organization was a response to the huge swaths of land the couple were seeing bought up for development, with ancient dwellings and religious grounds often destroyed in the process. Ed, who had hiked all of Maui's major valleys, found Honōkowai the richest of them all.

Sunset over Mokapu Beach, seen from the Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort

Wendy Tuivaioge, director of Hawaiian programs at the Four Seasons, has been instrumental in connecting travelers to local experiences

Tan and fit from a life spent largely outdoors, Lindsey now runs the trust with her son, Ekolu. Every weekend she comes here with a group of volunteers, including travelers like me, to rid the area of invasive species and repopulate it with native flora like pōhinahina and Hawaiian ti leaf. Today I help them pull Guinea grass and koa haole under the hot island sun.

Removing weeds and planting native flora within this more-than-300-acre patch of land may seem like an inconsequential act on an island that spans 727.2 square miles. But the efforts of Lindsey and her volunteers lie at the heart of Maui's ecological health. “Our goal is to open people's minds, make them more aware of their cultural surroundings, and to leave the land better than when they got here,” she says.

Though the cause of the wildfires that last year tore through historic Lahaina, Maui's tourism hub and largest town, remains uncertain, it is widely accepted that they were fueled by non-native grasses. The blaze changed Maui almost instantaneously. Two thousand buildings, most of them homes, were destroyed. Hundreds of businesses burned down. More than 100 people died. And the effect on tourism has been significant. Visitors to the Hawaiian archipelago dropped by almost 4% year over year, driven by loss of travel to Maui.

Celebration of the Arts festival director Daryl Fujiwara at the Maui Historical Society

Mala Ocean Tavern, a cheerful Lahaina restaurant, was significantly damaged but survived the fires.

Although I live in Brooklyn, I was born on Oahu and grew up coming to neighboring Maui. For years I have observed the island's increasingly complicated relationship to