Hawai‘i is a spectacular place—not just visually exciting, but also located above incredible geological forces and beneath amazing atmospheric conditions. As a meteorologist who reports on earth science news, I call the Aloha State home because of the multiple scientific processes that come together here every day to create a true paradise.

The casual joke shared among locals is that we live on an island that is actively trying to kill us. Hawai‘i has a long history of epic natural disasters and will be a home for earthquakes, tsunamis, flash floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions for thousands of years to come. But the wildfire tragedy on August 8 on Maui has turned the joke on its head, leaving my neighbors and me to wonder whether it’s more than just nature that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Why don’t leaders take better advantage of our vast scientific knowledge to prevent future catastrophes?

I live in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawai‘i’s west coast, which the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization declared one of the communities most at-risk of fire in the state. Here, down-sloping, east-to-west trade winds tend to warm and dry the air, leading to an abundance of warm sunny days year-round. But when the atmospheric pattern is just right over the Pacific, as was the case when Hurricane Dora passed well south of Hawai‘i on August 7, 8, and 9, those winds can be fierce, potentially damaging, and extraordinarily dry. The same is true for many other leeward (downwind) communities in Hawai‘i in the shadows of old volcanic mountains that blunt most precipitation away to the windward (wind-facing) side.

Waikoloa Village, a community of about 7,400 people sitting about 900 feet above sea level, is also uniquely situated on ancient lava flows from two volcanoes. Over time, invasive grasses introduced by ranchers and landscapers have spread on what was once a completely barren landscape, coming to life in infrequent rainy periods, and going dormant or dead for most of the year.

The community is packed tightly together in a mix of one- or two-story homes of wooden frame construction, with larger parcels and condominium complexes here and there. It is essentially a giant cul-de-sac, with a single road leading in and out. During a 2021 evacuation event in which fire threatened the village, many were trapped in traffic for hours. Fire fighters successfully fought that battle, but we cannot rest peacefully knowing they may not prevail next time.

Maui’s Lahaina, like Waikoloa Village, had previous experience with wildfire threats. Yet in both places, there have been few policy changes or necessary investments in recent years: no substantial changes to building codes, evacuation programs, communication systems, or land use issues where flammable invasive vegetation runs rampant. Many utility lines, including several that run on poles through the grassy regions upwind of Waikoloa Village, remain exposed to the elements, as was the case in Lahaina, where electrical sparks ignited the recent tragedy there. On Hawai‘i Island, government officials make promises for Waikoloa Village, but have done little beyond permitting new construction and inviting in new residents. Commitments and deadlines to install emergency sirens, roadway improvements like traffic lights, and the construction of new roadways to improve evacuation routes come and go with the regularity of the trade winds.

The author’s backyard is surrounded by a tinderbox of flammable invasive grass. Photo by author.

There is a sincere sense of loss in our state after the August 8 fires. But in addition to missing hundreds of people, we’re also missing out on a sense of urgency, purpose, and intent to prevent the next disaster. This is inexcusable, in part because we have the forecasting technology and knowledge to make better broad policy decisions as well as to sound the alarm in advance of specific events, like the August 8 fire, as well as broader threats, like the current drought.

We are currently in the midst of ENSO, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Over an ENSO period ranging from about three to seven years, the surface waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean warm or cool by anywhere from 1°C to 3°C, compared to normal. This oscillating warming and cooling pattern directly affects rainfall distribution in the tropics and can have a strong influence on weather across the United States and other parts of the world. El Niño and La Niña are the extreme phases of the ENSO cycle; between these two phases is a third phase called ENSO-neutral.

While these phenomena impact the entire United States, Hawai‘i may find itself particularly vulnerable to bad weather this year, as a wet La Niña fades and a dry El Niño arrives. In May, Kevin Kodama, hydrologist at the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, shared their 2022-2023 Wet Season Rainfall Summary. According to Kodama, the October–April wet season in Hawai‘i was an unusual one, starting off with severe or extreme drought in portions of all four of Hawai‘i’s counties, which gave way to the state’s ninth wettest wet season over the last 30 years. The Big Island saw the most rain, with rainfalls recorded at 130–170% of average.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting an active 2023 hurricane season combined with severe drought by the end of dry season in October. Drought is most likely in the leeward areas, especially in Maui County and the Big Island—the two islands that saw fires break out on August 8. The bumper crop of invasive grass and scrub that blossomed earlier in the wet season is becoming a wasteland of drying fire fuels.

The forecast is crystal clear: Meteorological ingredients will conspire for ripe fire weather conditions in the months ahead. More lives could be at risk. And even as it is so obvious to forecasters and the public at large that more disasters are coming, the outlook on what the government will do, if anything, is cloudy at best.

Thus far, rather than capitalize on the loss, the media attention, and the tremendous amount of federal aid coming in, leaders here are digging their heads into the sand, doing what they did ahead of the Lahaina fire: hoping that disaster doesn’t happen. And because of that, the aloha spirit is being severely challenged, allowing a fog of anxiety and anger to rise. For this meteorologist, the overall outlook for Hawai‘i isn’t as sunny as it should be.

The post Will Hawai’i Succeed in Killing Me? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For years, I’ve told children, newspaper editors, and other credulous people that I’m the Joe of Trader Joe’s. That’s, of course, a lie. But it is true that the store and I grew up in the very same neighborhood.

As a child in Pasadena, I rode my bike the two short blocks from my house to the Trader Joe’s on Arroyo Parkway—the original store, first opened by Joe Coulombe, a San Diego native and Stanford alum, back in 1967. It was known for being a cramped and cluttered place, mostly good for sweet and salty snacks. So I’ve watched its growth—to 480-plus stores doing $13 billion in sales annually across 41 states—with the rapt wonder with which you might follow the transformation of the freckle-faced boy next door into a major movie star.

In the process, Trader Joe’s, as one of California’s most successful ideas, has offered an ongoing rebuttal to the conventional wisdom about our state.

California leaders and businesses often say our state is great because of its size, infinite diversity, groundbreaking technology, limitless choices, and relentless competition. But Trader Joe’s provides none of those things, and yet it’s great too. This raises the question: Do we really understand the true source of California’s greatness?

After all, Trader Joe’s California-inspired vision is determinedly narrow. It eschews technology (it doesn’t do online sales, or even have a loyalty program). And its core business strategy is to limit our choices.

As other grocery stores become behemoths, offering 50,000 items drawn from a wide variety of companies and brands, the typical Trader Joe’s has fewer than 5,000 items, most under its very own brand. Supermarkets offer endless supplies of key items, but Trader Joe’s is proudly unreliable, often jettisoning my favorite offerings or shifting the items it sells with the seasons. Instead, it focuses on providing a small number of items at low prices—including beer and wine, frozen foods, vegetarian items, and, of course, those snacks.

“I think Trader Joe’s is the best example of how the world should be constructed,” Barry Schwartz, a prominent psychology professor at Swarthmore who has studied Trader Joe’s, once told an interviewer. “When you give people too many options, they get paralyzed instead of liberated.”

The rise of Trader Joe’s—from quite literally my neighborhood grocery store to officially “your neighborhood grocery store”—suggests that if you really want to make it big in California, it may be better to stay small.

It also points to the power of education: Coulombe, Trader Joe’s founder, saw his store as serving America’s growing class of overeducated, well-traveled, and underpaid people; he has quipped that his ideal customer was “an unemployed PhD.”

In realizing that vision, Trader Joe’s has expertly exploited a fundamentally Californian fantasy: that we can be both cheapskates and snobs at the very same time. Californians are desperate to live—or at least appear to be living—better, more pleasurable lives than other Americans. But, given California’s economic realities, very few of us, even our most educated neighbors, can really afford to do that. Trader Joe’s is beloved because—with its chocolates, its cheeses, its wines, its holiday selection, its paisley-shaped, matcha-flavored mints—it allows us to keep up appearances at low prices. In this context, it’s fitting that the Napa Valley winery of the real Charles T. Shaw, of Two-Buck Chuck wine fame, went bankrupt.

Trader Joe’s allows us to keep up appearances at low prices. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The cult-like attachment of Trader Joe’s fans is also grounded in how the stores let us have it both ways on healthy living. Everything from the novelty to the packaging to the newsletters at Trader Joe’s projects an image of health, even though not much of the “healthy food,” like the granola, is very good for you. In this, Trader Joe’s is a perfect reflection of a state more interested in appearing healthy than in actually being so.

At a local Rotary Club in the San Gabriel Valley, I once heard Coulombe explain his creation this way: having everything is nice, but it’s even nicer to make sure everything you’ve got is actually worth having. I have never heard a more perfect summing-up of California’s aspirational modern values.

Coulombe also said then that the real secret to Trader Joe’s is the employees. Workers at Trader Joe’s are friendly and knowledgeable because they stick around, and they stick around because of good benefits and pay. The stated goal of the company, which is relatively tight-lipped about itself, has been for full-time people to make at least the median income for a California family, which today is more than $60,000 a year.

The company, unlike a Silicon Valley startup, has grown slowly and carefully. It didn’t expand outside California until the 1990s, a quarter century after its Pasadena launch. Expansion has been made possible by international investment. The family behind Aldi, the German grocery chain, bought Trader Joe’s decades ago, but hasn’t changed its essence. And so, my favorite Trader Joe’s feature, the no-questions-asked return policy, remains very much in effect.

Of course, Trader Joe’s is far from perfect. It has encountered labor problems as it moved east. It has faced criticism about whether its packaging is environmentally friendly. It is infamous for its small parking lots—and all the traffic and backups they can create in nearby blocks.

But the biggest complaints about Trader Joe’s come from the places that don’t yet have it. People in Canada, Australia, and Europe have campaigned unsuccessfully for the company to open locations outside the United States. In recent years, a man in Vancouver even established a Pirate Joe’s store, with items he carried across the border from Washington state, before legal pressure from the real Trader Joe’s forced its closing.

But no place demonstrates the appeal of the Trader Joe’s idea more than Hawai‘i, albeit with a twist of unrequited love. Surveys suggest that Trader Joe’s is one of the favorite brands of Hawai‘i residents, who like to give the snacks as gifts. But there is no Trader Joe’s store anywhere on the islands, despite multiple recruitment campaigns by the state’s business and political heavyweights. The company reportedly hasn’t found a way to make its lower-cost, short-supply-chain model work for a place so far away from everything else.

Even without stores in Hawai‘i, Trader Joe’s food is ubiquitous there. Some Trader Joe’s stuff arrives via unauthorized online resales on eBay or Amazon. The rest is smuggled by residents who load up suitcases with items purchased near airports in L.A. or Las Vegas.

On a recent trip to Honolulu, it took me all of an hour to make contact with a local Trader Joe’s smuggling ring. I soon found myself walking through a convenience store and into a small storage space, which was full of Trader Joe’s branded butter, nuts, and other goodies. I bought a pack of Dark Chocolate Sunflower Seed Butter Cups, at a $1 mark-up.

They tasted just like home.

The post How Trader Joe’s Exploits a Fading California Fantasy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The panel discussion, titled “Does Hawai‘i Welcome Immigrants?” and held before a full house at Artistry Honolulu, drew together a Hawai‘i-born historian of immigration, a leading immigration lawyer, a refugee services professional, and the state’s former attorney general.

Under questioning from the moderator Catherine Cruz, host of Hawai‘i Public Radio’s “The Conversation,” the panelists said that, while Hawai‘i could do more to welcome immigrants, the recent actions of the Trump administration and the conservative U.S. Supreme Court make it a challenge simply to protect the migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers already here.

Clare Hanusz, an immigration attorney, said she would give Hawai‘i a C+ or B- in its efforts to welcome immigrants. She noted that the state has created driver’s licenses for unauthorized immigrants, and guaranteed in-state tuition at the public university for all residents, regardless of immigration status. The state has not been a target for federal immigration raids, she added, and the state’s people have not erupted in an anti-immigrant backlash, as in other states. She suggested that the fact that native Hawaiians and other residents have their own experiences with discrimination may make them more open.

“I think that native populations understand that people get screwed all over the world, and so they don’t begrudge people who are trying to save their lives and find a way here,” Hanusz said.

But she also noted that Hawai‘i has not designated itself a sanctuary, and that the state government and localities don’t provide legal assistance for people in removal proceedings, as some other states do. She also said that people in the islands should be more vocal and more informed. She suggested the audience attend immigration court hearings in Honolulu’s federal building to see a “strange system” that is making it increasingly difficult for even law-abiding people who serve their communities to remain in the country.

“There have been victories in keeping families in Hawai‘i together, but they are getting fewer and fewer,” she said.

Yale University historian Gary Okihiro said he saw today’s immigration restrictions, which are tougher on nationalities considered undesirable for reasons of race and religion, as strong echoes of the past. He recounted in detail how modern Hawai‘i has been transformed into a multicultural place through immigration, from Europe, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Micronesia, and other countries.

But beginning in the early 20th century, Okihiro said, Hawai‘i had to live under restrictive U.S. laws that targeted people of Asian heritage. And Hawai‘i residents have often been split about welcoming migrants, who can be valued for their work but feared for their impact on land and culture. Today’s “dehumanization of immigrants has a long history,” he said.

Former Hawai‘i attorney general Doug Chin, who led the state’s legal challenges to President Trump’s ban on visitors from Muslim majority countries, said that today’s climate is especially difficult because the highest officials in the federal government, including a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, refuse to acknowledge the obvious: that new immigration restrictions are unconstitutional and based in prejudice.

The Trump Administration’s ban on U.S. travel by people from several predominantly Muslim countries was preserved by a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that saw the conservative justices defer to the president, and thus ignored Hawai‘i’s own preferences on immigration policy. “[The president] is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims coming into the United States … and the five people in the majority were able to gloss over that,” said Chin, who added that the case, along with his mother’s recent passing, had prompted him to have long conversations with his father about his parents’ experiences as immigrants from China.

Recently there have been cuts into the services available to refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants, said Terrina Wong, former deputy director of the Pacific Gateway Center, which assists refugees from overseas in resettling in Hawai‘i. Under the Trump administration, the number of refugees allowed to enter the country had declined from 75,000 annually early in this decade to just 18,000. And the federal funding that her center depended upon has ceased.

Wong also raised another issue, in response to questions from Cruz and from the audience: conflict between Hawai‘i residents and migrants from the “compact nations” of the Pacific, in particular, Micronesia. She said that “cultural misunderstandings” had led to difficulties, and she criticized the state government for, a decade ago, making them ineligible for the state medical services that many need.

“We could do a lot better with our Pacific neighbors,” she said. “We have talked about better preparing Micronesians before they come.”

During a question-and-answer session, members of the audience asked about economic exploitation of migrants, about preparations for future waves of migrants, and about how U.S. policy displaces people around the world.

One questioner asked plaintively why more can’t be done to stop the separation of child migrants from their families, as well as mistreatment of children by federal border and immigration authorities.

In response, Chin, the former attorney general, noted that immigration and international law is a slow process. And Hanusz, the immigration attorney, said that stopping such abuses may not happen in the courtroom, but will involve stronger protests.

“We should all be in the streets a lot more,” she said. “It’s criminal what the United States is doing. We’re all in a little bubble here in Hawai‘i, we’re away from the border … But it needs to get challenged.”

The post Profoundly Shaped by Immigration, Today’s Hawai‘i Chafes Under Federal Restrictions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Molokai, there is not a single traffic light, and the only things that might be called traffic are a few pickup trucks waiting for a parking spot along the three-block-long main street of the island’s single sizable town, Kaunakakai, population roughly 3,000. Somewhat more than 7,000 people live on the island—about 0.5% of the state of Hawai‘i’s population of 1.4 million. There is just one hotel, and only a handful of restaurants more ambitious than burger shacks, spread over the island’s 38-mile length.

In often rushed and congested contemporary Hawai‘i, such a place seems nothing short of miraculous. But that emptiness also signals an extraordinarily deep malaise: For generations, Molokai has proven stubbornly resistant to broad-based economic development, as well as the stability that comes with it. Available work has generally been in low-level agricultural jobs for outside corporations running plantations here, subject to the fickle winds of the global economy—or for government, itself directed from off-island, as Molokai is a part of much larger Maui County (population 166,000).

Molokai is often associated with the leper colony that was founded on Kalaupapa Peninsula, a place chosen for its isolation. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Average incomes have long been well under the statewide figures, and unemployment numbers have often nearly doubled the statewide rate. Nearly a third of families use food stamps—twice the rate on Maui and triple that on Oʻahu. Because of its unusual level of welfare dependency, the island was one of a handful of U.S. communities granted exemptions to welfare reform laws during the Clinton administration. With few exceptions, young people looking for more than minimal prospects must leave for other islands or to the U.S. mainland.

Locally generated, smaller-scale, diverse businesses have long struggled. As Hawai‘i as a whole responded to the postwar demise of its sugar industry by shifting to tourism, Molokai was slow to follow suit, and faltered in the face of recessions, mismanagement by foreign owners, and determined local opposition. Now, everywhere you look, businesses are shuttered, storefronts empty.

On the West End, a golf course spectacularly sited above the ocean lies overgrown and abandoned, its once-expensive landscaping of coconut palms now leafless and dead from lack of irrigation. Former hotels and condominiums sit boarded up and rotting, their wooden staircases collapsing and disappearing beneath billows of vines. The only movie theater closed more than a decade ago.

There are pockets of comparative underdevelopment on all of the Hawaiian islands, but only Molokai is marked by a long-term, persistent failure to develop in step with its neighbors. This failure is more remarkable for its longevity. The pattern extends not only back through the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Hawaiian Islands—the most isolated major landmass on Earth—opened to the wider world, but reaches centuries further back into pre-contact, Polynesian Hawai‘i, when the island was similarly marginal to the larger islands of the archipelago. It is a very long durée of marginality.

Why is Molokai different? The answers lie both in the peculiarities of Hawai‘i, and in the nature of marginal places generally.

For most Hawai‘i residents, Molokai defines what is called “outer island” Hawai‘i—peripheral and rarely visited. For most of the world, it connotes remoteness. Its mere name conjures visions of the tragic leper colony founded in 1866 on the inaccessible Kalaupapa Peninsula, a place chosen for its isolation as a quarantine site for the thousands of people, most of them Native Hawaiians with little immunity to the disease, who were torn from their families and exiled there to die.

Yet Molokai isn’t remote. It sits dead center of the main Hawaiian chain, only 25 miles from Oʻahu, with its population of nearly 1 million, and just 8.5 miles from bustling Maui. On most days it is visible from both, as well as from Lanaʻi, and, on a clear day, even the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. On most nights, the bright lights of the capital city Honolulu stain Molokai’s sky yellow to the west, while those of Maui’s Kaʻanapali coast do so to the east. Nor is it especially small: 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, it is the fifth largest of Hawai‘i’s islands. It is nearly twice the size of neighboring Lanaʻi, with more than double the population, but shares with it many characteristics, including having long been mostly controlled by outsiders. Nearly 85 percent of Molokai is controlled by seven owners, all but one of them headquartered off-island.

Molokai boasts the longest fringing coral reef and the longest white sand beach in the state, and the tallest sea cliffs in the world. It has all of the things the other islands have that can be turned to profit: well-watered valleys good for traditional Polynesian agriculture, flat land suitable for modern farming, shorelines protected from waves (in the Polynesian period, the south shore sheltered 50 or more fishponds, the largest aquaculture complex in the Pacific), and all the lovely beaches, swaying palms, towering waterfalls, and rainforests to attract tourists.

Molokai’s trouble is that it has fewer of these attractive things than its larger neighbors—and many more unprofitable features. Much of the island is inhospitable. The entire north coast is girded by plunging cliffs and pounded by giant ocean swells. Most of the eastern half is made up of steep mountains and deep canyons. And most of the western half is typically dry. The entire island is raked by stiff trade winds. The places of abundance are, relative to its neighbors, few and small. It is this relative lack of resources that forms the backdrop to understanding Molokai’s history and its present.

In the Polynesian period, Molokai, close at hand and weaker than neighboring islands, beckoned powerful outsiders to conquer and exploit, often en route to larger battles elsewhere. For centuries, all the way up to King Kamehameha I in the early 1800s, Hawaiian armies moving between Oʻahu, Maui, and Hawaiʻi, stopped and fought over the island, often laying it waste. The island was known as a place easy to subjugate, but because so much of its land area is inaccessible—steep upland forests, sheer sea cliffs girding wave-blasted, rocky coastlines where small, dispersed communities held out—it’s proven difficult to fully subdue and rule from outside.

These smaller populations and places cultivated a reputation for strong spiritual practices used to resist outsiders. One was famed for a type of poison trees, kalaipahoa; another for its anti-chief sorcery. Indeed, the island was called O Molokai i ka pule oʻo, “Molokai of the powerful prayer,” a place of sorcery and poisons used against outsiders, and misty, remote places of refuge beyond their grasp. (Kamehameha’s invaders were said to have been killed en masse by pule oʻo—though at least one local informant insisted that the warriors were not prayed to death but were fed sweet potatoes mixed with ‘auhuhu, a common fish poison.)

Inter-Island Airways Sikorsky S-43 in flight past Molokai, around 1935-1940. Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons.

Where outside chiefs did achieve control, they bent the people and the land to producing a surplus, mostly of kalo (taro) and hogs, for their own aggrandizement—a process anthropologists call agricultural “intensification.” In a landscape where water is as unevenly distributed as Hawai‘i, the key to this intensification was control of water, used for the irrigation systems that underlie Polynesian farming. With it came control of land, of people, of wealth, and of the very structure of society. As all over Polynesia, what developed in these fertile places was a pyramid, with a hereditary aristocracy ruling, through its monopoly control of water, over a highly class-stratified society.

And, as happened elsewhere in Hawai‘i and in Polynesia, agricultural intensification had serious environmental side effects. Expanding irrigation systems farther up watersheds into steeper, more erodible topography was achieved by the felling and burning of forests to clear land, all of which increased erosion, thereby damaging soils. The effects were cascading. Increasing portions of an already fragile landscape were deforested, eroded, and desiccated by Polynesian Hawaiians over the centuries after their arrival in the islands, roughly 1,000 years ago.

Though seemingly paradoxical, environmental degradation was “good” for those at the top of the social pyramid. First, it directly converted complex natural ecosystems into simplified factories for surplus production. Second, degraded landscapes stressed or destroyed the subsistence communities that had thrived outside of the fertile areas, forcing more people into the system of monopoly control by ruling chiefs.

These patterns on Molokai were continued, and amplified, after contact with the outside world, beginning with Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778. Investors and speculators, including newly dollar-minded Hawaiian kings from Oʻahu, came to Molokai to squeeze a profit out of it. Sugar growing, which dominated Hawai‘i for 100 years, was attempted at several scales, but failed for lack of sufficient water. Pineapple, well-matched to the climate, was successfully grown by two outside corporations, Dole Food Company and Del Monte Foods, for much of the 20th century, until competition from larger, lower-wage competitors in Latin America and Asia drove Molokai out of the business.

One business did succeed, seemingly paradoxically, because of environmental limitations: livestock grazing. A perverse law of resource development states that even badly degraded land, if there is enough of it, can support big operations, if the right commodity can be produced in sufficient quantities. The scale of the effort then abets itself, setting up a destructive feedback loop. Soon after cattle, sheep, and goats were introduced to Molokai in the 19th century, they quickly helped to destroy what was left of the native flora, leaving much of island nearly barren but for alien, introduced grasses—therefore useable only for more grazing.

Outsiders bought larger and larger pieces of land, many of the parcels purchased cheap from Native Hawaiians who lacked cash and investment capital for the enterprise. More intensive grazing in turn drove more degradation—more deforestation, desiccation, and erosion. Traditional subsistence options were disrupted. Springs dried up, fishponds filled in with mud washed down from the uplands, reefs were likewise smothered, and communities were forced to retreat or breakup, their members scattered to work in the wage economy elsewhere.

Dirt road along Hawaiian homesteads, Ho‘olehua, 1973. Photo by Charles O’Near. Courtesy of National Archives at College Park/Wikimedia Commons.

One terrible example was the coastal hamlet of Palaʻau, whose people had once done well with fishponds, fishing, and farming. Then grazing animals owned by a large ranch on the West End chewed up the surrounding landscape. Eroded silt covered their spring, ponds, and reef flats. This actually pushed the shoreline a quarter mile out to sea. The people of Palaʻau, with little left to exploit, were accused of cattle rustling. And soon the entire town was arrested and packed off to Honolulu, where its people were forced to build the prison in which they would be incarcerated. Today the site is an empty scene of tangled thorn trees and gullied dirt roads, with no sign anywhere of its former inhabitants or their works.

In the 20th century, cattle ranching dominated the West End and the far East End, while two large, vertically integrated pineapple plantations laid claim to much of the center of the island. Both sectors were intensive and extensive, monoculture producers of cash commodities for export, with the profits expatriated to outside owners. All were racially stratified, with a small number of white owners and managers supervising a nonwhite workforce.

Maunaloa on the West End, for five decades the headquarters of a large, California-owned plantation, was laid out according to a strict racial hierarchy. Filipino town, for the field workers, with wooden dormitories, lay at the lowest point on the slope. Japanese town, for the lunas, or field bosses, with wooden, shared houses, was adjacent and slightly uphill. “The Hill,” for the whites, had American-style, concrete-block houses complete with plumbing and electricity. All of these enterprises were outside-owned and reliant on near-monopoly control of water and land. All were possible due to previous environmental degradation, and all caused more of it, especially erosion, with the added heavy use of chemicals such as fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Residues of these substances still linger in the soil, posing a challenge to those now attempting to make a go of small farming on the island.

Molokai has long served as a literal and figurative quarry for outside economic interests. Sand was exported from the West End, starting in 1962, from Kanalukaha Beach, near Hale o Lono Harbor, and from Papohaku Beach, to build up the lucrative tourist strands in Waikiki, Honolulu, and in Santa Monica, California. The sand mining operation was outlawed by the state legislature in 1975, but its legacy of diminished beaches at those two sites remains a stark reminder of the destructive logic of the exploitation of marginal places.

The Mediterranean historian Fernand Braudel wrote that, in the development of the world economy, foreign demands impose “an intrusive monoculture, destructive of local balance.” Molokai’s story, while expressive of this rule, also adds a cultural dimension that amplifies the trajectory of outside domination.

The adversarial relations between small, dispersed subsistence communities and larger outside forces seen in the Polynesian era were repeated in the modern era, taking the form of livestock poisonings, arson, and even one murder, when a Molokai Ranch manager was blown up in his car in 1923.

Former hotels and condominiums sit boarded up and rotting, their wooden staircases collapsing and disappearing beneath billows of vines. Courtesy of Wade Graham.

In recent decades, this dynamic has continued, as a small but vocal group of Molokai residents has aggressively opposed plans for economic development, protesting and successfully blocking proposals for hotels, condominiums, golf courses, cruise ship visits, inter-island ferry service, and wind energy (the notably windy island remains powered by expensive, imported diesel generation). A long and bitter standoff over proposed residential development between activists and the island’s largest landowner and employer, Molokai Ranch, resulted in the closure of all the ranch’s operations in 2008 and the loss of 120 jobs. So fragile is Molokai’s economy that the unemployment rate jumped from 6.2% in 2007 to 13.7% in 2009 as a result.

Recent attempts to ban genetically modified crops have put the island’s current largest employers, Monsanto and Mycogen Seends, in the crosshairs. Both companies test GMO seed corn there, in an uncanny echo of Molokai’s former vocation as a site of quarantine. If the companies go, they will take another 240 jobs—roughly 10 percent of the island’s workforce—with them. As with the Molokai Ranch closure, the cascade effects on small, local businesses would be extreme.

The character of the opposition is notable: While the activists as a loose group are not without diversity, the core members are people of Native Hawaiian descent. Their commitments, tactics and goals are rooted in the Hawaiian Renaissance movement of the 1970s, which revived traditional Hawaiian culture, language and ritual, and demanded recognition of sovereignty for Native Hawaiian people.

In Molokai, local activists used federal and state laws protecting archaeological remains to block, slow, or minimize development and to assert the rights of contemporary Hawaiians to hunt, fish, and gather on private lands. They were also successful in stopping sand mining on the West End, and, ultimately, the U.S. Navy’s bombing of tiny Kahoʻolawe island, off of Maui.

For many in Molokai, subsistence strategies such as fishing, hunting (mostly non-native axis deer), and small-scale farming have become economically essential. Furthermore, these strategies have come to represent Hawaiianness. The desire to preserve culture has taken on a posture of resistance to the market economy in general and to specific proposals of economic “development,” even if they might benefit the community.

The divisive climate on the island is palpable, and visible. On leaving the airport, visitors see a hand-painted sign: “Visit, Spend, Go Home.” It has had an undeniable effect. The number of visitors to “the friendly isle,” as tourism promoters once dubbed it, slid from 103,477 in 1990 to 59,132 in 2014—a decline of 43 percent. Even the Kalaupapa mule ride, an iconic tourist stop, has closed.

History is still too often explained by looking at powerful, central, dominant places. Yet most of the world is not a center, but a margin—by definition the periphery is larger and more extensive than the core. Molokai, Hawaii shows how such places can become caught in cycles of degradation, exploitation, and marginalization. In this unfortunate context, Molokai is at once exceptional, and typical.

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Alone and unsure of what was happening to her, she feared illness and anxiously rose from her bed, searching for the comfort of her Bible. The sensation continued to well up inside her, forcing its way out, yielding a voice that spoke as clearly as if its source was standing in front of her. She heard five words: “He wants to come home.”

The “he” in Debbie’s spiritual visitation was her seventh-generation cousin, Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, who was the first Native Hawaiian to become Christianized. Born in 1792, his parents were brutally slain before his childhood eyes by Kamehameha I’s warriors, and he contemplated leaving the Big Island in the first decade of the 19th century rather than remaining there as an orphan. While training to become a kahuna, a Hawaiian spiritual leader, at the Hikiau Heiau, a traditional place of worship in Nāpo‘opo‘o at Kealakekua Bay, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia secured passage onboard an American merchant ship, sailing halfway around the world hoping to replace pain and memory, attempting to outrun his survivor’s guilt, and seeking peace from the violence he experienced in his youth.

Portrait of Henry “Obookiah,” undated frontispiece in Memoirs of Henry Obookiah. Courtesy of Eleanor C. Nordyke/Wikimedia Commons.

Fatefully, his journey took him to Connecticut, where he was introduced to Christianity and experienced a revelation that led to him accepting Jesus as his personal savior. He studied the Bible in hopes of returning home as a missionary to convert his fellow Hawaiians to the Gospel, but he never fulfilled his wish. He died of typhus fever in 1818 and was buried under the frozen New England sod.

And there his journey stalled, far from his homeland, until 174 years later when Debbie Lee heard of his desire in the still of the night. Soon, she launched the effort to bring cousin Henry home.

As the Connecticut State Archaeologist, a position I held for almost 30 years, I had the responsibility of supervising the disinterment and forensic identification of the surviving physical remains of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia per the request of his genealogical descendants. We worked closely with the Lee family and a team of funeral directors, forensic scientists, archaeologists, historians, and church officials to conduct the exhumation and prepare ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s remains for the final leg of his repatriation to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, the isle of his birthplace.

To fulfill my duties in a professional and appropriately respectful manner, I learned more about ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia from reading his Memoirs, published posthumously in New England by his tutor Edwin Dwight. He descended from a family of Hilo chiefs on his mother’s side, distant kin to Kamehameha I. He developed into a resilient, intelligent boy with a sense of humor and the ability to mimic village members. He eventually made his flight by swimming out to the Triumph, an American merchant ship anchored in Kealakekua Bay and was taken aboard as a sailor. Captain Caleb Brintnall wrote the Anglo appellation “Henry Obookiah” into the ship’s logbook, which would remain the name he would be known by during his sojourn in New England.

Arriving in New Haven in 1809, “Henry Obookiah” was introduced to Christianity by the educators and religious families with whom he resided, including the Rev. Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale College and a leading light in the Second Great Awakening. At first, Henry did not accept the new religion into his heart; he only accepted it in an intellectual sense in his great desire to learn. His full conversion came about when he had a revelation in a woodlot while working for the Rev. Samuel Mills and his family in Torringford, Connecticut.

Once converted, “Obookiah” immersed himself in the Gospels, memorizing every story and miracle, while absorbing his English spelling book so he could write and read the Bible more proficiently. He made rapid progress in his religious training, translating Hebrew chapters of the Bible into a phonetic Hawaiian alphabet he had developed. His new purpose in life was to bring his learning and the Gospel home with him to Hawai‘i. The intellectual and spiritual example of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia led the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to develop the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, to prepare young indigenous men to return to their homelands with the Christian Gospel in hand. Henry was their first and leading student.

In the midst of this time of great intellectual energy, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia contracted typhus fever in the winter of 1818 and was soon in critical condition. According to Edwin Dwight’s moving account of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s death, when Henry was asked if he was afraid to die, he cried, “No, I am not. Let God do as he pleases.” Then again, he so desperately wanted to live. Live to be a powerful witness to the one, true God. Live to bring salvation to his people. Raising his hands heavenward, Henry lamented, “Oh, how I want to see Owhyhee!” His approaching death was peaceful, and he seemed free of pain for the first time in weeks. With his compatriots beside his bed, he spoke in his native language, “Aloha oe,” “My love be with you.”

Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia died on February 17, 1818, and was buried under a table-topped granite monument, which was the largest and most elaborate shrine in Cornwall Cemetery at that time, demonstrating the love the New Englanders of the Foreign Mission School had for this young Hawaiian man.

As Henry “Obookiah’s” mortal remains reposed beneath a hilltop cemetery in Connecticut, a ship christened the Thaddeus set sail from Boston harbor on October 23, 1819, en route to Hawai‘i. In fulfillment of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s missionary promise, the brig carried a company of two ministers, two teachers, a doctor, printer, farmer, all of their wives and children, and four Hawaiians.

When the ship arrived in Kailua-Kona on April 4, 1820, Hawaiian society was undergoing great changes, and many native people had died since the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778. By 1853, 90 percent of all Kanaka Maoli had perished of Old World diseases for which they had had no exposure and no immunity. Within four years of the arrival of the Thaddeus, over 18,000 Hawaiians, 20 percent of the native population at the time, had converted to Christianity. While ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s corporeal journey home would take another 175 years, his formidable influence had transformed Hawai‘i forever.

After she was awoken that night in 1992, Debbie Lee spent ten months polling family members until she gained their consent to exhume Henry’s remains from Cornwall Cemetery and bring him home to Hawai‘i. She resolved to give Henry’s life contemporary spiritual meaning by returning his physical remains, his iwi, back to Hawai‘i in fulfillment of his deathbed wish.

Our mandate as the state archaeologists was to remove for repatriation the physical remains of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, so we commenced excavations below his granite stone monument in Cornwall Cemetery. While moving my trowel gently over the soil, leveling the head region of the coffin at a depth of five feet, I heard a dulled tone.

Immediately thinking I had encountered a small stone or coffin nail, I put my trowel aside and grasped a small, fine-haired paintbrush. The material encountered felt hard, too hard for bone that had been in Connecticut’s acidic soil for almost two centuries, but as my brush swept the granular sand aside, uncovering a one-inch diameter circle, I recognized the rounded structure of the forehead and realized his skeletal remains were firm, unusually well-preserved for a grave of this time period. In fact, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s skeleton continues to be the best organically preserved we have ever encountered in a historic New England cemetery. I remember thinking to myself, “Henry will return home.”

Debbie Lee, wanting the very best for ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s return to Hawai‘i, arranged an itinerary that would be a lasting tribute. The two-week, two-island journey began with a farewell ceremony at the United Church of Christ Congregational in Cornwall, where I, along with our archaeological team, were honored to serve as pallbearers. This was followed by services on O‘ahu at Honolulu’s Kawaiaha‘o Church, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Memorial Chapel, and Kaumakapili Church.

Then ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s remains were flown to the Big Island of Hawai‘i. There, Henry’s casket was lashed between two outrigger canoes at Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau, “the Place of Refuge.” Among the canoeists paddling northward to Kealakekua Bay, was Henry Ho‘omanawanui, first cousin to Debbie Lee and namesake of the Christian martyr he was accompanying home. When the outrigger rounded the southern point into Kealakekua Bay, Ho‘omanawanui searched the wooded hills above the harbor for the white spire of Kahikolu Congregational Church, soon to be the site of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s final resting place. Debbie had instructed Ho‘omanuawanui to swim toward the shore once the steeple came within sight. Spying the church, he dove into the cool waters, recreating in reverse ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s outward swim to the anchored Triumph, metaphorically completing Henry’s return home.

The final segment of the welcoming home tour brought Henry to Kahikolu Congregational Church and Cemetery in Napo‘opo‘o. After church services attended by over 200 family and friends on the afternoon of August 15, 1993, Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s casket was lowered by ropes beneath a beautiful, black volcanic stone monument overlooking the harbor from where he had set out on his journey to find peace and self-fulfillment. This was part of a ceremony called “kao he olahou,” “the bamboo lives again.”

Bringing Henry home grew beyond immediate family interest, extending across the entire Hawaiian community, and emphasizing the significance of repatriation. Facilitating the completion of his long journey developed into something beyond the return of an individual ancestor.

The “Island Boy” who had left Hawai‘i searching for peace and purpose; who came to Connecticut and received a scholar’s education and converted to Christianity; who had found love in God and translated the Book of Genesis into his phonetic Hawaiian alphabet; whose martyrdom inspired Protestant missions throughout the world, had finally come home.

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I am one of many in this long diaspora who still refers to Hawai‘i as “home.” And if you ask me what it means to be from Hawai‘i today, the question is tough to answer. It’s especially hard if you were influenced by the transformative period—sometimes referred to as the Hawaiian Renaissance—that began a little more than a decade after the arrival of U.S. statehood in 1959.

Members of the diaspora cling to a set of beliefs about our identity—as Hawaiʻi “locals” shaped by the islands where we were born in raised—that are increasingly removed from today’s realities.

I was born in Honolulu in 1965 to parents who had recently emigrated from Korea for graduate studies at the university. My family then lived in a dingy apartment in the headquarters of the Korean National Association (KNA) on Rooke Avenue. The Mediterranean Revival compound had once housed a prominent island Portuguese family, and some still knew it as the “Canavarro Castle.”

The KNA’s roots dated back to 1909, when exiled Koreans in Honolulu and San Francisco organized to raise funds and strategize for Korean independence from Japan. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KNA became a local community organization. By the time we were living there in the 1960s, the headquarters building had become a convening spot for occasional weekend festivities for local Koreans. Along with our family, a couple other units were rented to elderly former plantation laborers who had been among the first Korean immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s.

By the time I started kindergarten in 1970, my parents had divorced, and my mother, brother, and I had moved to another modest apartment, this one a low-rise walk-up in the Mōʻiliʻili area of Honolulu across the canal from the new high-rise hotels at Waikīkī.

I attended Ala Wai Elementary school, which was, then and now, a gateway for many families who had recently arrived from another country or state. I remember sometimes beginning our pickup football games with a raucous Samoan chant and seeing new kids arrive from places like Taiwan and Texas.

Yet the legacy of earlier agricultural immigrant waves from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico surrounded us. There was judo and sumo in the community center. For about a year, an ancient “manapua man” sold steamed pork buns from pails suspended from a wooden pole slung across his shoulders. His industrial age competitor sold his treats from a white Volkswagen beetle. When the original manapua man no longer made his rounds, the kids swore they had seen the VW manapua man run him down; it was a childish tall tale, but contained some truths about the force of modernity.

My walk home from school passed the ʻIolani School campus, where Sun Yat-sen, who eventually overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty to become the country’s first president, was graduated in 1882. (Sun had a brother in Honolulu who paid for his education.) My own brother and I liked to stop in at the 100th Infantry Battalion clubhouse to get a drink from their water fountain and gawk at the display case of World War II weapons, which, if my memory isn’t too hazy, contained a German water-cooled machine gun. We would learn later of the heroics of the Japanese-American soldiers and the role of returning veterans in democratizing Hawaiʻi’s politics and breaking down the caste-like plantation economy.

In the early 1970s, there was an idealized view of Hawaiʻi as a progressive, multicultural state that might be a model for a new, transpacific United States. At least, that was the pretty picture broadcast to millions on “Hawaii Five-O.” “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry said the multiracial crew of the S.S. Enterprise was inspired by what he saw in Hawaiʻi when he was based there as a pilot during the war. This “Paradise of the Pacific” image was pushed by the tourism industry and taught to us in school.

It was a flawed paradise. The rise of the upwardly mobile middle class was fueled by organized labor, federal defense, and infrastructure spending, and the growth of tourism. But many native Hawaiians were left behind economically, or actively displaced from their housing, by Americanization. Poverty and incarceration rates were alarming, and the indignity of suppressing the native language and culture would no longer be tolerated. Things fell apart.

By the mid-1970s, open revolt against Americanization and displacement had begun. The actions were both entirely peaceful and undeniably forceful. In Kalama Valley on Oʻahu, farmers refused to leave their leased lands to make way for residential real estate development. Activists began regular landings on Kahoʻolawe island to protest its use by the Navy as a bombing range. Hundreds of homeless native Hawaiians cleaned up the land around the Sand Island garbage dump to build a fishing village.

The physical protests and reclamations of land produced mixed results. Kalama Valley was turned into an expensive suburb in spite of the farmers’ protests. The Sand Island residents were evicted, their homes bulldozed. But military use of Kahoʻolawe ceased.

More important, these actions raised Hawaiian consciousness and galvanized a sophisticated critical mass of native leadership well-versed in law and public organizing. On a parallel course, a Hawaiian renaissance in language, culture, and the arts largely succeeded in establishing a distinctive regional identity.

By the late ‘70s, as I entered my teens, there was growing talk of Hawaiian sovereignty.

By the late 1980s, when I finished college in Los Angeles, Hawaiian sovereignty was still building momentum; today it is inseparable from any substantial discussion of Hawaiʻi’s political future.

At the same time, the high cost of living, especially for housing, meant many in my generation could not afford to make a life on the islands. The trend continues today, even more intensely. New homes on Oʻahu are routinely priced in the seven figures, and luxury condominium units actually sell in the eight figures. The market resembles that of California, where few can afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents settled in the 1960s or 1970s. Hawaiʻi continues to have negative net migration with the rest of the United States. Most newcomers are whites from other parts of the continental United States. So many native Hawaiians have left that the numbers of native Hawaiians on the U.S. continent far outnumber those in Hawaiʻi.

So what does it mean to be of Hawaiʻi today? The answer lies in an ongoing dispute over whether native Hawaiian ancestry is a requisite to being a Hawaiian.

For those without native blood, there has often been a belief that if you held certain values, or ate certain foods, or spoke the Hawaiian language to some degree and pidgin English fluently, you were “local.” In his 1986 book Kū Kanaka, George Kanahele noted that one answer given to the question, “Who and what is a Hawaiian?” was “someone who eats palu (a relish made of the head or stomach of a fish, mixed with kukui nut, garlic, and chili peppers).” Kanahele himself held that any Hawaiʻi resident with a “true understanding of the values of Hawaiian culture” was a Hawaiian.

But today’s demographic and economic trends in Hawai‘i are making that identity obsolete. The “locals” are dying or leaving.

What is then left? One answer comes from the diaspora itself, which is defining the values of Hawai‘i culture, even though they don’t actually live in Hawai‘i. Thanks to the diaspora, you can now find multiple hula hālau (schools teaching the ancient Hawaiian dance form) in several U.S. metro areas. Numerous Facebook groups for Hawaiʻi expats exist to answer questions like, “Where can I get luau leaf in Seattle?”

But such extensions of Hawai‘i identity to the continental U.S. don’t solve the tough questions that face the state. Can Hawaiʻi exist as a place where more children will grow up to move elsewhere than remain? Will the pattern of large-scale local and native out-migration become permanent?

Or will this large and ongoing diaspora inspire a backlash at home? Will those left in Hawai‘i seek to protect themselves in ways that force a dramatic upheaval in the demography and economy of the islands? For example, could native Hawaiians respond to the outflow of their friends, and the arrival of American strangers, by seeking some form of political sovereignty—including independence from the United States itself? And would such a rupture bring Hawai‘i locals and other members of the diaspora home?

George Kanahele, in that 1986 book, noted that the Hawaiian cultural resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s was tied to similar U.S. and global movements. The population outflow of Hawaiʻi today is also tied to broader U.S. and global trends.

Oʻahu shares its stratospheric housing costs with cities from Vancouver to Tokyo to Auckland, all of which have seen backlashes from locals displaced by wealthy new arrivals. Mass homelessness and stubborn wage stagnation are fueling frustration and reassessment in Honolulu and in other U.S. cities. Will Hawaiʻi’s still-distinctive culture yield homegrown solutions, like its current and innovative homelessness project? Or will Hawaiʻi be the first to act on a Brexit-like rejection of the American status quo?

The paths of Hawaiʻi’s people at home and abroad could well become a case study in the long-term viability of statehood and citizenship for many nations.

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