How can Maui survive future wildfires? History offers some clues.

Charred roofs. Carcasses of vehicles. Ruins of homes. These are gone now from Lahaina’s burn zone. A year after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century killed 102 people and destroyed 3,000 structures, this flattened terrain beneath the West Maui Mountains is a landscape of gravel, dirt, stray slabs of stone walls, and orange blockades.

But across Lahaina, once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii, there are subtle signs of a potential return to its lush lands of long ago. A sprout, a bloom, a fertile swath of dirt. Traces of a time when canopies of trees blanketed this region and kept it nourished.

On Maui, there is serious talk of rebuilding for climate resilience. “If we don’t do things right now,” says Kekai Keahi, 51, a local taro farmer, “it’s going to put us right back in the same situation before the fire.”

But is there time?

Fire season in Hawaii is here again. Damning reports about what caused the 2023 inferno have piled up, pointing to decrepit power lines, flammable overgrown weeds, limited escape routes that became deadly bottlenecks, and years of unheeded warnings. Recently, Maui wildfire survivors reached a $4 billion settlement, resolving more than 600 lawsuits, and covering a portion of the estimated $12 billion in damages. Yet if you combine the ongoing treacherous conditions with an above-normal risk of dry conditions this summer, wildfire threats in Hawaii remain near the highest in the nation.

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Keahi, a longtime fixture and community voice in Lahaina, has spent the last year advocating to rebuild its infrastructure into a more fire-resistant, drought-defiant model, shaded with trees, and rich with natural resources, especially water.

Keahi and other Native Hawaiian activists are leading the way in reimagining the future of Maui in the wake of its destruction. Much of these ideas are about undoing the damage of exploitation that began hundreds of years ago, rebuilding a Lahaina that values its cultural history. Keahi draws lessons from his own ancestors. “We look backwards,” he says, “to go forward.”

How colonization left Lahaina vulnerable to wildfires

This land wasn’t always prone to wildfires. Lahaina was once known by natives as “the house of the ‘ulu trees,” abundant breadfruit groves that blanketed the land long ago.

“What the trees would do is catch the mist, or morning dew,” Keahi says. Sitting beneath the canopy of ‘ulu trees, “it’s just dripping all over you.” The trees’ leathery leaves crawled along outstretched branches, providing canopies of shade in the dry, hot climate. This natural system “keeps moisture in the ground,” Keahi explains, “so it doesn’t evaporate because of the sun, which keeps the grass green, and not dry.” 

Early Polynesian immigrants who arrived by canoe introduced sugarcane, or kō, to Maui. They planted it on the borders of taro fields, and chewed on the stems, sweetening their food and medicines with the juice. But the arrival of sugarcane came with a hitch: By the early 1800s, missionaries and U.S. businessmen began investing on Maui to build the first commercial sugarcane plantations. They ripped out the breadfruit groves to make room and dug massive irrigation ditches, diverting water from the mountains and wet regions to their plantations. 

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When Native Hawaiians tried to stop them, plantation owners dumped their bagasse—the dry, crushed remnants of cane stalks—around the base of the ‘ulu trees, and set the debris on fire. Noa Lincoln, an assistant professor of indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, points to one response published in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1887, which read: “This reckless burning of our indigenous and other trees should be at once stopped.” 

“Deforestation, in all of Hawaii, was at the hands of the plantations,” Keahi says.

Colonialism also provided the kindling for last year’s wildfires. When European cattle ranchers moved to the islands in the 18th century, they brought non-native plants and shrubs for their livestock, like molasses grass. These weeds with feathery pink tips and a syrupy scent are filled with flammable oils—and they thrive on ashes, surpassing other plant growth after a fire.

Even as Lahaina’s sugarcane plantations began to shutter in the late 20th century, there was no respite for the island’s natural resources. Instead, a newly flourishing tourism industry meant that most of West Maui’s water—controlled by plantations for decades—now flowed to hotels, gardens, pools, and golf courses. Local residents, meanwhile, were put under water restrictions and fined $500 for overuse.

Tens of thousands of acres of former farmland sat dormant and neglected—and over time became overgrown with non-native weeds. “We knew that it would be a fire hazard,” Keahi says. “We knew it was going to happen one day.”

Making trees, water, and housing top priority

As wildfires raged across Lahaina on August 8, 2023, Paele Kiakona biked and then ran 13 miles into the inferno, battling embers, flames, and harsh winds to rescue his grandmother. He found her sitting inside of her home as fire surrounded it. He convinced her to flee before it burned to the ground.

Kiakona, 29, is an environmentalist and community leader, deeply influenced by his uncle, Keahi, who instilled lessons about the land. Both believe that a return to Native Hawaiian ways is the most sustainable future for Maui’s wildfire recovery.

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Much like his ancestors, who were among the first habitants of the islands, Kiakona lives off grid, a 30-minute drive away from Lahaina. His home is powered entirely by solar panels, and he draws his water from the river through a pump, collected in a catchment tank, and sends it to his house through a filtration system. “Before Western contact,” he says, “we were able to feed ourselves.”

The road to recovery starts with reclaiming the land, he argues. Since the wildfires, Kiakona has been working to secure fair long-term housing for Maui’s survivors, including 8,000 who were sheltering in hotels. His group, Lahaina Strong, is pushing to turn West Maui’s vacation rentals—which account for 66 percent of non-residential housing units—into long-term housing for survivors and locals priced out of the community. Lahaina Strong’s efforts have received support with new proposed legislation.

Water is another resource that’s essential to rebuilding. Keahi and other Native Hawaiian leaders have testified at hearings, mocking up plans to foster a more sustainable water supply that would flow into renewed wetlands and help restore a once fertile Lahaina. “Two aquifers in Lahaina out of five are already depleted,” he says, “we’re in a real bad situation.” He has proposed rebuilding aquifers and modeling them after reuse and reclaimed water systems in places like San Diego.

Finally, residents also know that trees must be a top priority in rebuilding. Replanting native ‘ulu trees and others can provide not just shade and lock in ground moisture, but they could also become food sources for residents to grow, sell, and trade their own produce. “We can actually start our farms, diversify our economy,” Keahi says, “and not be so dependent on tourism.” 

But it’s unclear whether this vision for a newly sustainable Maui will become a reality.

The Maui Planning Commission is taking testimonies from residents as it works on community rebuilding plans. However, Keahi says so far his ideas have been met with a familiar response: “It’s going to be expensive.” This is the same response he received after a 2018 wildfire, when he and other residents asked the government to bury dangerous power lines underground.

Kiakona says rebuilding can’t be met with an attitude of: “We’ll fix it later, because that never happens. It never gets fixed.”

No longer once in a lifetime

For survivors like Kiakona, memories of the fires still haunt. Never before had he experienced the Kaua’ula winds that blew that day, causing trees to snap and ricochet across roads and even carry his family’s 4,000-pound dumpster up a hill, discarding it like a lunchbox. 

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The Kaua’ula winds used to come maybe once in a lifetime. “But now, as climate change and global warming are becoming more prevalent, we’re starting to see storms that happen every hundred years happening every five to 10 years,” he says.

Kiakona believes his own life was spared so he could keep working on the mission his uncle taught him, drawn from the lessons of their ancestors. “My biggest fear,” he says, “is that we're going to rebuild, and everything thinks it’s fine. And then five years from now, we get another windstorm that comes through, and just flattens our town again.” 

Some days, Kiakona pauses to stare at the empty lots. Patches of green grass have sprouted in cracks of razed land. Leafless, blackened trees fleck the burned landscape. But one street away, healthy trees that survived the blaze brim with mangos, and white or pink plumeria blossoms.

It is painful to see, he says, but also breathtaking. “Growing up in Hawaii, you always hear of how beautiful it used to be, prior to all these buildings being put up.” The first homes have started to be rebuilt. There is progress, Kiakona says, there is hope. “It is healing.”