Hawaii is Dying: Here’s Why

Cogito (2025)

Film Review

The August 8 2023 Lahina fire, allegedly sparked by downed power lines, caused fifteen thousand native Hawai’ians to lose their homes and/or jobs. The drainage of wetlands (over the past 50 years) and replacement of forests with paved over tourist attractions and invasive wild grasses. The latter played a major role in the fire’s spread. Communities requesting that power lines be buried and that prior fire breaks be restored were told it was too expensive.

Community organizers call it ethnic cleansing by real estate. Survivors who lost their homes in the fire were pressured to sell their land to developers and the housing shortage led landlords to increase rents by 40%.

Of the 600,000 ethnic Hawai’ians in the US, only 300,615 can afford to live in Hawai’i. Those with jobs in the tourism industry are often homeless. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have evicted thousands of them for their vast estates, while while the US military controls 60% of Hawai’i. The state has the highest rate of plant and animal extinction in the US.

The Advanced Indigenous Civilization Built by Kanaka Maoli

Native Hawai’ians, known as Kanaka Maoli, arrived in Hawai’i 1,000-2,000 years ago. They came as farmers, as the islands had no large animals or crops to feed them. They brought their own pigs, dog, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, coconut palms, taro, banana, bread fruit and paper mulberry plant in the canoes and outriggers. Building canals and complex irrigation system, they built hundreds of fish farms and banana, palm and sugar plantations. Due to low child mortality, they became one of the fastest growing civilizations on earth, reaching a population of 500,000 by the time of their first European contact (Captain James Cook 1778).

By 1800 Hawai’i had become a hub for European and US traders. To protect the Kanaka Maoli from European greed and rapaciousness, King Kamehemeha I used the weapons the Europeans left behind to establish an army and unify all the islands in 1810 as the Kingdom of Hawai’i.

By 1873, the country had become a constitutional monarchy with a democratic electoral system and a strong emphasis on education and literacy. The king’s palace in Lahina had electricity before the White House did.

During this period, European diseases were the biggest threat to the Kanaka Maoli, who eventually lost 90% of their indigenous population. The second biggest threat were Calvinist missionaries, who persuaded King Makele to sell communally owned land to white immigrants. They, in turn, proceeded to divert water from native crops for massive sugar plantations.

How Protestant Missionaries Got Rich Destroying Advanced Kanaka Maoli Civilization

Eventually the missionaries and their sons controlled the big five sugar companies, and all the railroads and shipping lines, bringing in tens of thousands of indentured servants from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal and Puerto Rico.

In 1887 they stripped King Kalakaua of his powers with their Bayonet constitution, allowing the US government to build a military base at Pearl Harbor. This denied the right to vote to Asians or anyone with a net worth less than $3,000.

Refusing to be governed by the sugar and pineapple barons, in 1891 Queen Lili’uokalni rewrote the Bayonet Constitution and removed race and wealth based qualifications for voting. In response,the head of the Hawaiian League launched a coup with the support of US Marines, abolishing the monarchy and imprisoning the Queen. The founder of Dole Pineapple Sanford Dole subsequently declared himself the first president of the Republic of Hawaii.

Although President Cleveland refused to recognize Hawaii as a republic, he declined to reverse the coup. McKinley annexed Hawaii in 1898 (intending to use Pearl Harbor to attack the Philippines) after declaring war on Spain.