In Maui, the earth spoke to us. Are we listening? Color Us Connected

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about the Maui fires.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Booker T. Washington’s mentor, Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute, was born on Maui, the “Venus of the Pacific.” He attended Barack Obama’s Punahou School 120 years earlier. Hawaii’s capital was in Maui’s harbor town of Lahaina, which means the cruel sun, even though it has breathtaking sunsets. This is where Kamehameha III built the first Pacific lighthouse. From 1830, for 30 years, 400 whaling vessels annually anchored there for provisions. It’s possibly where Herman Melville wrote "Moby Dick."

In 1860, the Big Five plantation oligarchs bought up land and ruled Hawaii: Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors, and Theo H. Davies & Co. Forests became sugar and fruit plantations. Laborers brought from China, Japan and the Philippines lived in segregated camps, which preserved their cultures and languages. Food was shared on a “mixed plate,” a combination of various cuisines on a single platter.

In 1891 Lili’uokalani became queen of the sovereign nation of Hawaii. She created Hawaii’s first hospital and a bank for women. She opposed the group of white businessmen who changed the Constitution to give only land owners the right to vote, and was viciously attacked and portrayed as a power hungry Black pagan queen.

In January 1893, a battalion of United States Marines forcibly replaced Queen Lili’uokalani with a provisional government of white businessmen. She successfully appealed to President Grover Cleveland but Congress overruled him, and on July 4, 1894, the sugar plantations' leader, Sanford Ballard Dole, declared himself president and placed her under house arrest for eight months.

In 1959, Hawaii became a military base and the 50th state. In 1993, Congress apologized for Queen Lili’uokalani’s overthrow.

On August 8, 2023, the Maui wildfire became the deadliest natural disaster in Hawaii’s history. During a century of corporation mismanagement, water resources were diverted to plantations, upscale housing and luxury hotels, producing arid spaces and prolific growth of grasses, creating a tinderbox.

Windshields and aluminum melted; the wind and the ground burned exposed skin. Children lost parents and parents lost children. The flames were intensified by a nearby hurricane, causing fire tornadoes. Lack of emergency warnings and poor first responder management caused more people to be trapped by the blaze. Many survived in the ocean for hours, watching others succumb to the smoke, heat and undercurrent.

Now the Hawaiians’ ancestral land is threatened by outsiders pressuring Lahainans to sell their land while they are still recovering from the disaster. And is $700 per household from the government enough to get back on your feet after such a tragic event?

Question: Pearl Harbor, where the USS Tuskegee YTB 806 was on active duty from 1970 till 2006, is only hours away from Lahaina, so why did it take two weeks for outside help to arrive for the fire victims?? Is this a repeat of what happened to Queen Lili’uokalani???

By Amy Miller

We want to point fingers. We want to say what went wrong.

Why are 115 people dead and 4,400 people in Maui without homes? Where are the more than 330 who are still missing? What caused the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century? And why wasn’t the fire controlled sooner? And the big question: why wasn’t more water available?

Water is suddenly a scare resource. And the one thing that is clear is that we as a nation are using more resources, including water, than our planet can keep providing.

This week, the New York Times told the story of groundwater depletion across the United States. We, as a nation, are using more groundwater than the skies replenish.

In Maine, we are happy to be far away from catastrophes. For now. As far as water depletion is concerned, our state uses about 32 billion gallons of groundwater a year, less than 1% of the 4 trillion gallons of rain and snow that goes back into the groundwater. Perhaps because of this, we are among the few states that basically lets property owners pump as much groundwater as we want, regardless of how it affects a neighbor’s supply.

But even if Maine is OK, our other food sources will suffer as the nation runs dry.

Increased flooding, the kind that fills basements, does little to help. The ground cannot absorb rain that quickly, and the water goes rushing into storm drains, rivers, lakes and oceans, often collecting oil and pollutants along the way.

For Maui, the depletion of water supplies for centuries has been a source of conflict between the indigenous people and the people who come to settle there. Starting in the 19th century, Maui natives saw their water sources depleted and diverted by sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Even after the plantations closed in the 1980s and 1990s, streams have been diverted for housing owned by development companies that continue to sop up supplies for lush gardens and swimming pools.

Besides emptying aquifers and turning verdant lands arid, this conflict has built up mistrust over the years and centuries.

Looking at the wildfires from far, far away, we cannot begin to untangle this knot. Pointing to past mistakes does little to tell us what could and should have happened differently for Maui as Lahaina, its historic town on the west end, was incinerated.

But looking from afar at the wildfires and the failure to respond adequately tells us in no uncertain terms - again - that our planet cannot keep giving at the rate we are taking.

Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Commentary: In Maui, the earth spoke to us. Are we listening?