would you suppose that the fields represent an improvement
do you think they smell better than they did before
what is your opinion of those square miles of black plastic
where do you think the plastic goes when the crop is over
what do you think becomes of the land when the crop is over
do you think the growers know best do you think this is for your own good
--from "Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field" by W.S. Merwin
In the public imagination, Hawaii is a tropical paradise--perfectly warm, with dazzling beaches and lush landscape, the rainforest trees bathed in sunshine and yet wet with the morning mist. That carefully fostered image made the horrors of the past week especially bewildering.
A perfect storm of dry wind and heat led to a perfect storm of consequences: all-consuming fire engulfed and destroyed a town as well as its surroundings, while cell service and 911 collapsed, and the water system failed. People were literally driven into the sea to escape, a situation eerily similar to the opening disaster in K.S. Robinson's novel, Ministry of the Future. The dead are still being counted, while many survivors watched their homes disappear into ashes.
El Nino and the vagaries of a passing hurricane were proximate contributors, but more long term effects made this apocalyptic. Since 1990, Hawaii's annual rainfall has decreased by 31% in the wet season and 6% in the dry. This part of Maui has been in drought for some time. Clouds have been thinner (less moisture, more sunlight gets through) and storms that normally brought rain have drifted northward. Climate distortion is largely responsible for all of this.
That's why this catastrophic fire was not really a forest fire: what burned were non-native grasses in miles of abandoned sugar cane fields, weeds grown as high as five or six feet tall and dried out by the drought. It was this tinder that gave the fires their speed and ferocity.
Hawaii may have been an exception in our imaginations, but it is not an exception in the combined effects of generations of ecological destruction meeting climate distortion. Rainforests throughout the world, weakened by clear-cutting, are endangered by drought, and once they collapse, it's a long way back. Many if not most municipalities in the United States, with inadequate and highly vulnerable infrastructure, and general lack of preparation, are unprepared for such catastrophe.
Somewhere, some official or headline writer is going to call this Hawaii disaster a "wake-up call," if someone hasn't already. But of course we've had hundreds of such wake-up calls and as a society always manage to hit the snooze button. Republicans deny these realities, while it seems to me that the Democrats' strategy to address the climate crisis and these related environmental catastrophes-in-waiting is to do so indirectly, incrementally and almost secretly, for fear of waking up the rabid opposition. Maybe that will work. But I have my doubts.
