Maui Wildfires: Elite Origins, Grassroots Response
Photo: “Maui community of Lahaina burned by wildfire” by State Farm, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Andrea Brower is an activist and scholar from Kaua‘i. She is an assistant professor in the Solidarity & Social Justice Program with Gonzaga University's Department of Sociology. Her research, writing, and teaching on capitalism, colonialism, the environment, food, and agriculture is embedded in social movements for justice, equality, liberation, and ecological regeneration.
In a recent article, excerpted below, Prof. Brower traces the roots of the disaster in Maui to “empire, capitalism, elite power, and their ravaging of the planet and people” and, equally importantly, highlights the transformational cooperative alternative future embodied in the grassroots mutual-aid response — also rooted in long historical tradition — that has abounded in the Maui wildfire’s aftermath.
The full article can be found at:
https://portside.org/2023-08-21/empire-and-capital-set-maui-ablaze
Empire and Capital Set Maui Ablaze
Andrea Bower
August 21, 2023
The human-caused roots of the Maui atrocity have everything to do with empire, capitalism, elite power, and their ravaging of the planet and people. But what has emerged from the bottom-up in response to the disaster—ordinary people collectively and creatively organizing to generously and selflessly care for one another—shows us the alternative to the world that imperial capital has compelled. It is also the world that the vast majority of us long for so deeply.
In Hawai'i, “tinderbox” conditions were created by appalling land and water management for benefit of the elite. Major water diversions—first for plantation agriculture and then for tourism and gentlemen estates—have radically altered ecosystems. Landowners and water diverters like the old sugar barons Alexander & Baldwin may bear some direct culpability for the death and destruction on Maui. The company has a long history of ferociously and corruptly fighting Kānaka Maoli [Native Hawaiians] and environmentalists over restoring diverted water to its natural watersheds.
Some of the very same players diverting water, like Alexander & Baldwin, left broad swaths of land covered in highly flammable invasive grasses, despite abundant warning that they were creating a potentially catastrophic fire hazard. Fire-prone vegetation like guinea grass, brought to Hawai‘i by sugar oligarchs to feed livestock, has been left to cover over a quarter of Hawai‘i’s land in the transition from monocrop plantations to tourism development.
The growing threat was largely ignored because it was inconvenient and expensive to the powerful.
When last week’s fires broke out, the occupying U.S. state—which ideologically justifies its presence through appeals to “protection”—failed in its emergency response. Not a single alarm siren was activated. Power lines stayed on despite fire hazard warnings from the National Weather Service. Firefighters and disaster response teams were radically under-resourced, and remain “overwhelmed” in the days after. A week later, despite the immense resources held by the U.S. military and settler elites in Maui, ordinary people are still without food, fuel, and water. Mutual aid efforts led by Kānaka Maoli have proven far more effective at delivering disaster relief.
The proximate causes of the horrific Maui tragedy—a rapidly warming climate, land “primed to burn,” and lack of preparedness—share the same underlying roots. Capital and empire, or more specifically, a social system violently forced upon most of the world, that is premised upon unending extraction and exploitation of people and environment for accumulation of private wealth. In Hawai‘i, imperial capitalism has dispossessed most of the Native population, consolidated power and resource control to a remarkable degree, created a society of lavish wealth alongside extreme poverty, ravaged the ‘āina (“that which feeds,” or land), commodified Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture, and increasingly delivered huge chunks of “paradise” into the vacation home portfolio of the elite. These are the conditions that created water diversions, denuded land, and neglect of potential disaster that always hits hardest at the bottom of social hierarchies. As Kaniela Ing succinctly put it, “colonial greed is burning down our home.”
For over a millennium, Hawai‘i’s peoples lived in steady balance with the rest of the web of life. While evolving Indigenous Hawaiian society was not free from class hierarchy, it was defined by beliefs and structures of collectivity, human freedom, reciprocity, and redistribution. Systems of production and distribution were designed to ensure that all had enough and that careful stewardship and reverence for the Earth were maintained. It was a society in which the logics of capitalism—of unabated exploitation of land and people for personal gain, extreme individualism, absolute private ownership, accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake, and the deprivation of many alongside excess riches for very few—would have been structurally impossible and culturally unintelligible.
As the interests of sugar capitalists increasingly collided with the Hawaiian Kingdom, white oligarchs secured the backing of the U.S. military in overthrowing the Indigenous government. By the early 1900s five sugar corporations—descended from four missionary families—controlled virtually the entirety of the economy and the government that served it. Sugar production thrived for decades because an antidemocratic, illegally occupying state secured the industry’s elite minority interests, maintained extreme class and ethnic inequalities, and delivered the land, water, and laborers that it demanded.
Today, Hawai‘i is entirely dependent on a vertically integrated corporate tourism economy. It provides cheap labor, natural resources, infrastructure, and other government support in exchange for low-wage jobs and an inflated cost of living—a change in form but not in function from plantation days of past.
Pre-colonial Lāhainā was a place of wetlands and extensive food tree forests. In the 1960s sugar capitalists started cashing in for land development, which continued to require water diversions and further “denuding” of the land. West Maui is now choked with hotels and tourism infrastructure that services 2 million people who visit every year.
The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of crisis: the forces of disaster capitalism versus the people attempting to build a paradise out of hell. Capitalism compels a grotesque search for profit wherever it is to be made—even in desperate times, the system knows no morality.
But even at this apex, the future is not a foregone conclusion. The social relations that have existed since time immemorial in Indigenous Hawai‘i remind all of us that a world beyond the prisons of capital and empire are possible. The ways people are mobilizing to care for one another in the wake of Maui’s disaster illuminate our deepest human selves—generosity, compassion, cooperation, interdependence. Both show us the alternative to systems premised on hierarchy, exploitation, and greed. They show us that humans are absolutely capable of constructing far more utopic futures that are structured to incentivize, inspire, and cultivate the best of our human capacities rather than the worst.
Read the full article at:
https://portside.org/2023-08-21/empire-and-capital-set-maui-ablaze
Photo: “Free food & water!” by Kahunapule Michael Johnson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.