I’ve detected in the 2024 New Year a rising up, a strong push for Solutions, for addressing the climate crisis with real tech, lots of it, and smart passion, what Amory Lovins called “Applied Optimism” in last week’s Hot Globe.
But what excites me this week is that in Lahaina, Maui, there is renewal and beauty, even after the terrible firestorm created by a century of colonial mismanagement from Big Sugar which repurposed the original Hawaiian ecosystem, with the help of some nasty winds from a climate-change-boosted typhoon far out to sea. Now’s the time to revisit the situation with the irrepressible Dr. Janet Six, Maui’s official archeologist—always encyclopedic—and see what she is thinking, which is that
the town could be restored to a vision of ancient Lahaina, eventually, perhaps, into a World Heritage Site to celebrate all the iterations of its long past, this time centered in Hawaiian culture.
DR. JANET SIX: Lahaina’s green, Steve, because the four wells that were sucking all the water out of the town melted in the fire. So now it looks like they're watering the grass. The grass in front of the Baldwin house is green. The downtown subterranean parking garage has 12ft of water. That's why the name Lahaina means "flowing water!" When the first explorers came, they called it the "Venice of the Pacific." And now I get it!
So I went in a month ago from the Jodo Mission end of town by the "Jesus is Coming" sign towards Kaanapali, and I’m welcomed by the National Guard. I wanted to wait three months till it's not smoking but the fried cars are out of there. They've done a lot. It was the most perfectly blue sky. With all these burned buildings. And mostly what's left are some cement storefronts. And then these charred trees with all these lime green shoots coming out of them. The trees were scorched, but they're still alive.
It's a juxtaposition of this burned out, Death Star looking Pompeii landscape with bright green lawns and water,
because you forget about all this subterranean water. In the 1970s, they called it Hydro-Mania because the Pioneer Mill sucked all the water out of Lahaina for sugar cane.
But they got out of control and then they started diverting it. They ran a two-mile pipeline down to Launiupoko to the south so they could put in gentleman farms. And, you know, these houses that are like $40 million with a pool and they have like 7 papaya trees to pretend they are "farms." We have the Pu’u Kukui watershed, one of the wettest places on the face of the earth, if not the wettest. It rains up there constantly, 600 inches a year, and it percolates down. Very acidic soil, and it hits that calcium carbonate of the karst, which is the old limestone formation of the ancient reefs. Then it makes sinkholes, cenotes like they have in Florida or Belize. So we have this kind of Swiss cheese that allowed all these springs to come up in an area that gets 13 inches of rain a year,
Who wouldn't want to live there in ancient times? It never rained, but it got a ton of fresh water, 17 acres of wetlands.
You could canoe around town and then they sucked all the water out.
They broke the nine-mile canal that brought the water from Kauaula Valley. And then, because of the newly introduced mosquitoes in 1826, they backfilled the wetlands in 1917.
HOT GLOBE: The mosquitoes came in on a whaling ship that didn't get any whales?
DR. JANET SIX: The HMS Wellington. They had just a little bit of water in their casks. I think the sailors didn't even know they had larvae in there. They go to the Wailuku Stream to get some water. Boom. We got mosquitoes, right?
HOT GLOBE: Nine mile canal. That's a long conduit for an older civilization.
DR. JANET SIX: Let me tell you. So the Kauaula Valley, which is above Lahaina. up in those valleys there's some monumental architecture, major shrines and heiau. And so that was a source of water. I forget the Hawaiian name, but the mountain means “the scorched back of the lizard,” referring to the [shape-shifting] goddess Kihawahini or the mo’o and so
the sugar plantation literally drilled into the head of the deity.
There are two pipes that make like a triangle on the mountain, so they call it Christmas Tree. The plantation went up there and diverted the ancient sources.
DR. JANET SIX: Water from this valley filled the wetlands. It was paradise. Then we came, the Europeans came, and within 200 years we trashed the place.
So what I see is a chance for a new Lahaina, and I gave a presentation to EPA and FEMA, about a cultural landscape.
I'm trying to deal with a lot of people coming from the East Coast with good intentions and they want to talk about natural resources and cultural resources.
And I'm constantly going, Hawaiians didn't do that dichotomy. The water is the personification of kihawahine. That sugar cane over there is the kino, the lower body of the god Kane.
DR. JANET SIX: They could take many forms, right? Pele can be a dog. Pele can be an old hag. Pele can be a beautiful woman. So
we have to take a look at nature and culture in a different way and not force it apart. They're like, well, we have to look at the natural resources. I'm like, what some people call resources, other people call relatives, right? So you have to get your head around that.
Like they want to do all this testing. I said, if you want to get along with people, you should have someone ask permission for you to test that water. You should take a kahuna with you, a priest or a kahu, someone that could actually ask if it's okay that you take this water, because that's the correct way to treat it. Don't talk about pollution and wastewater. Because the pre-contact word for wealth was vivi, fresh running water. That was what was of value. There was no monetary system in Hawaii. It was water. You got water, you got taro, you got life, you got food. Right? Yet we look at water as like, oh, it's wastewater and it's runoff.
DR. JANET SIX: And it's like, if you have runoff, then you're not managing your water correctly, right? You should be catching that. It's an abundance. So Hawaiians had fish ponds and you could take water out from the stream into your taro patch and some would evaporate, but you had to put it back for your neighbor downstream. So there was an idea what they call the ahupua’a, where what you did upstream affected your downstream neighbors. Well, when we look at ancient Sumeria, you had towns of ore and a rock and all a sudden people just leave because upstream at Nippur, they put a dam in there like, buh-bye, because you can't live in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, if somebody dams that water. The term is hydrological despotism.
HOT GLOBE: Hydrological despotism is a new word even for me.
DR. JANET SIX: The plantation stole the land to steal the water. Water was managed. Earlier, the Kanaka people moved throughout the Pacific, over-fished, over-farmed, ate all the birds and we get Rapanui Easter Island. They brought rats. The rats ate all the coconut, the little nuts. The trees disappeared. Lost the topsoil. By the time they get to Hawaii, which is one of the last places they ever colonized, they have a pretty intricate resource management system, the kapu or taboo system. And so the water is personified by the mo'o. The god Kane takes his digging stick and he pokes his holes and out comes the water. And then he makes pigs, dogs. And he makes the mole, the half-dragon, half-women. And they are the deities, that travel through the caves and pop up, and they're like sirens. They can seduce you by combing their hair by the pond. And you would come and they would eat you. And so when I was living out in Hana at what they call Venus Pool, you're supposed to throw a ti leaf in, and if the mole is in residence, the ti leaf will suck down. If the if the ti leaf stays floating, you can go in. And it kind of makes sense from a scientific perspective. If the tide's going out and there's a suction, it might be dangerous to get in there.
DR. JANET SIX: But Kihawahine she's one of the few that could go across saltwater, so she has a big presence. I think we talked about it over here on the Big Island, where she and her sisters got together, drooled and tried to put out Pele's fire up at Halema’uma’u volcanic crater and that didn't make Pele [the volcano goddess] very happy. So when a lot of the new age folks reach out to me and say we need to bring Kihawahine back, I'm like, be careful what you ask for. She's not going to like what you did to her place. And she's kind of, you know, she's kind of a badass.
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