Hawaii Has Always Been Paradise, But These Days, It’s Not So Sure – the-ethos.co

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“For some people, it’ll take months to get back to normal — and for others, they may never fully recover,” Hawaii’s State Representative Sean Quinlan said back in March after floodwaters swept through the North Shore communities of Waialua and Haleiwa on Oahu.
The March 2026 Kona Low — a series of consecutive storm systems that scientists say are growing more intense as ocean temperatures rise — brought some of the worst flooding Hawaii has seen in decades. Rainfall totals reached 15 to 25 inches across parts of Maui and the Big Island, with some areas recording more than 30 inches over two weeks. Close to 20,000 properties were damaged across four islands. Roughly 5,500 residents were evacuated. More than 200 people were pulled from rising water.
By April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had approved a major disaster declaration for the state, with total damage estimates exceeding $1 billion. The National Weather Service described “devastating flooding” in the North Shore communities of Waialua and Haleiwa, where countless homes and vehicles were inundated or swept away.
The water may have receded, but the islands’ reckoning hasn’t.
I’ve visited the Hawaiian islands more than a dozen times — I have genuinely lost count. It’s the only place in the world I return to again and again, often alone. I have been here for landmark birthdays, celebrating my own and those of the people I love most. I’ve gone there to grieve, to fall in love, and to report on the fragility of these precious little pieces of land facing unimaginable threats. This year, I came back for Earth Day to see for myself how paradise has become the front lines of climate change and environmental degradation — from the floods and fires to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch now knocking on Oahu’s door.
The road from Honolulu’s airport to the city is not the Hawaii of anyone’s screensaver. Tent cities line the freeway shoulders, close enough to traffic that the ground surely shakes when a truck passes. Makeshift shelters sit inches from the interstate. In the city itself, it’s not much different. Staff at my first hotel suggested extra caution outside — not the usual advice about valuables, but something more urgent: Hawaii now holds the highest per-capita homelessness rate in the United States.
To afford a two-bedroom rental without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing, a resident needs to earn $102,323 annually — in a state where the minimum wage is $16 per hour, and the median home price sits around $754,800. The housing wage, per the National Low Income Housing Coalition, is $49.19 an hour. The math does not work for most people who live here.
That tension — the idyllic exterior, the fractured infrastructure underneath — is a preview. As the islands become more vulnerable to flooding, wildfire, and rising seas, the cost of living here climbs, the housing supply tightens, and the most economically exposed residents are displaced first. The very climate pressures accelerating elsewhere in the world are arriving here faster, and the people least responsible for them are absorbing the most damage.
Hawaii has always been meteorologically complex, but scientists are documenting an acceleration in extremes. Sea level around the islands has risen five inches since 1970, driven primarily by human-caused climate change, with projections of an additional 3.9 to 5.6 feet by 2100 — enough to permanently redraw coastlines across the archipelago. The Kona Low storms of last month fit a pattern researchers have tracked for years: intensifying wet-season events that overwhelm drainage systems never designed to absorb them. Oahu alone sustained more than 12,000 damaged properties in the span of two weeks.
Hawaii is also home to more than 400,000 acres of coral reef — 85 percent of all coral reefs in the U.S. These ecosystems function as both biological archive and physical protection for low-lying coastlines. Warming ocean temperatures have triggered repeated bleaching events across the state; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has documented how rising water temperatures harm the symbiotic algae that sustain coral, ultimately killing the reef structures that protect shorelines from wave energy and surge. Healthy reefs prevent millions of dollars in flood damage each year. Degraded reefs accelerate the very flooding that emergency workers are now cleaning up.
“There’s likely a climate change signal in everything we see,” Clark University climatologist Abby Frazier said in the wake of the 2023 Maui fires — a statement that applied again, three years later, as rescue teams navigated waterlogged neighborhoods on Oahu. What was once a once-a-decade event is hardening into something that looks more like an annual reckoning.
Adding to its troubles, Hawaii sits directly in the path of the North Pacific Gyre — the vast clockwise current system that sweeps marine debris across the Pacific and deposits it, relentlessly, on island shores. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which the currents feed, spans an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers — roughly twice the size of Texas — and holds an estimated 100 million kilograms of plastic made up of as many as 3.6 trillion individual pieces. It does not stay out at sea.
An estimated 15 to 20 tons of marine trash arrive on Hawaiian shores every year, 96 percent of it plastic. As far back as 2018, Kamilo Beach — known locally as “Plastic Beach” — the Hawaii Wildlife Fund once documented a single pile of derelict fishing nets estimated at 40 tons, the largest accumulation of ghost gear ever recorded in the islands. Since relocating its processing facility in June 2024, the Center for Marine Debris Research has hauled in and processed more than 227,000 pounds of marine debris — largely derelict fishing gear — in less than a year.
Ninety-four percent of the patch’s plastic pieces are microplastics: fragments invisible to the naked eye that have entered the water column, the food chain, and the bodies of the animals that live here. Researchers studying Laysan albatross chicks on Oahu and Kure Atoll found that roughly 45 percent of their wet body mass was composed of plastics ingested from the surface waters of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The patch is not somewhere else. For Hawaii, it has arrived.
Spending time with the Parley for the Oceans team on Oahu, I saw firsthand how startling the accumulation is up close. The sheer volume of what washes in — and the speed at which it returns after a cleanup — reframes the beach as something other than a beach. Parley has a partnership with the Twin Fin hotel in Waikiki, where it encourages guests to help collect and repurpose ocean waste. Along the lobby are wall installations dedicated to Parley’s work and art projects made from the collected waste.
On the day I visited, Manny Pantulinen, also known as Manny Aloha, was running the art activity. A New York skateboarder in his former life, Pantulinen now spends his days trying to protect Oahu from the deluge of plastic. If he’s not leading beach clean-ups, he’s poolside — half DJ for the afternoon, half art director. Guests sift through tubs of plastic waste and glue it onto fish-shaped cutouts. I fiddled around with my colorful trayful of debris while Pantulinen explained the magnitude of the issue.
Operating with support from organizations including the NOAA Marine Debris Program, Parley runs what it calls the AIR Station in Hawaii — a hub for its Avoid, Intercept, Redesign strategy — alongside Ocean Stewardship Clinics and beach cleanups designed to reach more than 30,000 individuals across the islands. Working with partners, including Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, the organization has already shipped a container’s worth of debris intercepted from Midway Atoll and surrounding islands for upcycling.
Parley’s partnership with Twin Fin Hotel has a goal of repurposing at least 2,500 pounds of plastic through the Hawaii initiative alone. The concept that a tangle of netting pulled from a Waikiki beach could end up reimagined as a surfboard graphic or a sculptural work is both provocation and proof of concept — evidence that the loop can be closed, even if it never should have opened.
But time is key. That giant floating patch of plastic is inching closer to Hawaii’s shores every year. The Parley team cannot clean the beaches fast enough before more plastic washes ashore. Afternoon art projects help move the needle on education — a Florida couple stopped by while I sat making my design, and had never even heard of the microplastics issue. “What can we do?” they asked. The short answer: so much.
To understand the full scale of what climate change is doing to these islands, it helps to return to August 2023, when a wildfire swept through Lāhainā on Maui’s west coast and killed at least 100 people — the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century. The fire moved with a speed that stunned emergency responders, fed by a convergence that fire scientists had been warning about for years: severe drought, hurricane-force winds generated by a storm system sitting offshore, and something that rarely makes the headlines but shapes nearly every fire in Hawaii — invasive grass.
The grasses are one of the biggest factors contributing to this particular fire. About a quarter of Hawaii’s total land area is now blanketed in non-native, highly flammable grasses and shrubs — species that did not exist here before Western contact and that have fundamentally altered the islands’ fire ecology. “When you have dry fuels and you have the high winds, and then when you burn into the community and you start getting structures on fire, then you have lots of embers and it’s just a firestorm,” Craig Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San José State University in California, told NBC News in 2023.
Guinea grass — among the most aggressive of the invasive species — can grow six inches per day during the wet season, then dry into a tinderbox when drought arrives. Climate change amplifies each link in that chain: more intense droughts, more powerful offshore storms, more volatile fire behavior. Scientists describe it as a “threat multiplier,” which is a clinical phrase for a cascading disaster.
The night of August 8, 2023, Duane Sparkman, chief engineer at Royal Lāhainā Resort and Bungalows and founder of Treecovery Hawaii, did not evacuate. Leaving meant risking not getting back through the checkpoints, and the entire area had been flagged as hazmat. So he and his colleagues stayed on the property. “A lot of us were up on the roof of the building till about 4 o’clock in the morning, watching town burn,” Sparkman told me over breakfast on Earth Day at Lāhainā Noon, the property’s oceanfront restaurant. “And that’s all we could really do, and hope that the employees we had were able to go get their kids and get out of there.”
Most got out. But the losses within his immediate circle were staggering. One housekeeper lost nine family members. One of the resort’s accountants also lost nine family members from a separate household entirely. “She’s the only one left of the whole family,” Sparkman said. “In the United States.” She has since relocated to Las Vegas. Sparkman says he now struggles with heavy PTSD from the fires. “I never had anxiety before, and have it now because of it.” But he’s putting that nervous energy toward supporting those who lost their homes, businesses, and loved ones.
In the days that followed the fire, Sparkman was called into the burn zone in his role as chairman of the Maui County Arborist Committee — an unpaid advisory position. He went block by block, mapping the trees that had survived, assessing structural integrity, and making the call on which damaged trees could recover and which had to come down for public safety. Of the approximately 21,000 trees removed from Lāhainā after the fire, he estimates more than half were invasive species — the same fast-growing, highly flammable non-natives like the grasses and shrubs that helped the fire move so fast in the first place. “It kind of did us a cleansing,” he said. “And now we get to go back with trees that we want. Trees that will produce fruit, trees that are historically significant to Hawaiians. Trees that we talk about, but never see. We get to put those back.”
The nonprofit Treecovery Hawaii was founded in the months after the fire to provide free native trees to fire-impacted landscapes across Lāhainā and Kula. Sparkman incorporated it in November 2023 and had nonprofit status within six months, raising more than $1 million. In the more than two years since, it has planted more than 9,500 trees across 32 locations on Maui, working toward a goal of 30,000 — enough to address not just the trees removed within the official hazard zone but the full 25,000 or so that Lāhainā lost in total.
At Lāhainā Harbor, the organization recently planted nearly a dozen endemic loulu palms — trees grown for approximately 20 years in Kula from seeds originally collected on Molokaʻi, then placed in soil that had been ash less than three years earlier. Sparkman says that the fire created an opening, however painful: “After the fire, we have a chance to put in the native trees and really talk about the true native Hawaiian species. Greenery is people’s lives around here, especially in Lāhainā. If you can get shade and fruit and trees that will produce flowers so you can make leis, you are winning.”
Three years after the fire, of the 2,200 buildings that burned in Lāhainā, 187 have been rebuilt. “That’s one percent,” Sparkman said. “In three years.” Properties that were worth half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars before the fire have since jumped to $1.5 million. Much of what had been a working-class community has not returned.
Sparkman grounds the mission of Treecovery in a Hawaiian concept — Aina — which he describes as a full cycle of reciprocity between people and land. “When we plant a tree, giving that gift to the earth, we know that tree will give back to us,” he said. “As we heal the soil, the soil comes back and heals us.” One of the first sites where Treecovery planted trees was the Jodo Mission — the original location of Lāhainā’s farmers’ market, which also burned in the fire. The trees are there now. Sparkman hopes the market will follow.
The environmental damage to the Hawaiian Islands is not only atmospheric. Some of it has been applied, deliberately and repeatedly, directly into the soil. In 2012, I reported from Kauai on what was quietly happening on the island’s southwest coast, near the small town of Waimea — where Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, and BASF Plant Science had established GMO test fields and were applying restricted-use pesticides at a rate that was 17 times higher per acre than on conventional cornfields on the U.S. mainland (that story was republished in 2024). Between 2007 and 2012, DuPont Pioneer alone sprayed its Kauai fields with 90 different chemical formulations containing 63 active ingredients — from eight to 16 times per day, two out of every three days throughout the year.
The chemicals applied most heavily included chlorpyrifos, atrazine, paraquat, and permethrin. Six of the seven most-used restricted-use pesticides on those fields were suspected endocrine disruptors, according to the EPA — compounds linked to hormonal and sexual development disruption in humans and animals. Four of the seven were flagged as suspected or likely carcinogens. A study published in The Lancet Neurology identified chlorpyrifos, the most heavily applied product on Kauai’s test fields, as one of a dozen chemicals commonly found in the environment that “injure the developing brain” of children.
Waimea is surrounded by those cornfields on three sides. In 2006 and 2008, students at Waimea Canyon Middle School were evacuated, and approximately 60 were hospitalized with dizziness, headaches, and nausea — symptoms consistent with pesticide exposure. A group of local physicians testified that the rate of serious congenital heart defects in the area’s newborns was ten times the national average. Residents filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont, seeking damages and an injunction against continued use of the chemicals. Hawaii eventually passed a law in 2018 requiring chemical companies to disclose when and where they apply restricted-use pesticides — a transparency measure that advocates had been pushing for years and that industry had fought at every step.
The Kauai story is not separate from the Maui fire, the March floods, the bleaching coral, or the plastic washing up offshore from Waikiki. It is the same story at different moments of an island ecosystem absorbing pressure from multiple directions simultaneously, from the atmosphere above and the soil below, while the industries generating that pressure operate largely outside the daily awareness of the millions of visitors who fly here and find it beautiful.
Before the pandemic, Hawaii welcomed more than ten million visitors annually to islands where roughly 1.4 million people actually live — a ratio of seven tourists for every resident that has shaped nearly every tension in the archipelago, from gridlock on the Hana Highway to the price of a studio apartment in Honolulu to the condition of the reef off a popular snorkeling site.
Research from Arizona State University and Princeton University identified a strong correlation between overtourism and coral reef degradation at Hawaiian sites. “Tourism is good for the economy, but overtourism is bad for the environment,” researcher Greg Asner said in a summary of the findings. Some reef locations absorb 300 visitors per hour across just ten acres of living structure. Certain sunscreen chemicals have been shown to cause bleaching of hard corals at extremely low concentrations — a reality that prompted Hawaii to ban oxybenzone- and octinoxate-based products years ago, though enforcement in practice is uneven. Soil on popular hiking trails erodes faster than land agencies can repair it. Native plants are uprooted or crushed; invasive species hitchhike in on the soles of visitors’ shoes.
A growing coalition of researchers and Hawaiian community leaders is pushing for what some are calling regenerative tourism — a model that funds ecological restoration, limits access at fragile sites, and centers the well-being of residents rather than visitor volume. The state has already introduced a daily cap at one 65-acre park, with nonresident reservation requirements and entry fees. It is a start, and it is almost certainly not enough.
Earth Day this year fell inside a state still working through its worst flooding in decades, still rebuilding from a fire that killed more than 100 people, and still reckoning with what the next century looks like for islands where the water is rising, the land is burning in new ways, and the people who have called this place home for generations are being priced out of it faster than the reefs can bleach.
I keep returning to Hawaii, and, like many of the guests at the resorts I visited, I probably always will. That is part of the complexity that this paradise cannot resolve. The question of whether tourism helps or hurts cannot be answered cleanly when you are on the beach watching a Parley volunteer untangle monofilament from the sand, or standing in Lāhainā watching loulu palms that took 20 years to grow being planted in ground that was scorched three years ago. Both things are true at once: coming here has value, and coming without consciousness is part of the damage.
“The more positive inputs we add to the land, the more positive inputs come back to us,” Sparkman says. He’s hopeful. That’s what a lifetime, or 30 years in his case, on the island will do. Sparkman raised his family here afer moving from Austin. He’s seen the island face crises before. And he knows intimately what’s at stake. “On an island, if we mess up, it’s on us,” he says. “There’s no getting out of that.”
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