Maui: Lessons in Saving Diversity and Biodiversity

Ultimately, we’re all in the same boat

When one group dominates another, it is no gigantic surprise that the more powerful side usually benefits.

This is the very key to all justice and injustice.

But, no matter how much, or for how long, the most privileged people can prolong insulated, or even enact luxury lives within our world, sooner or later, their quality of life is threatened.

If, for no other reason, then feeling that “the peasants are revolting” those who find their value above that of their workers, food growers, cleaners, and security detail, will have to endure the over all losses of living with less diversity and biodiversity.

Diversity and biodiversity sustain all life.

In systems analysis, including biological systems, there is no such thing as one dominant force succeeding while all other systems fail. That is, at least not for very long.

Clearly, for our human tribe of sapiens, having unlocked the power of both agriculture, and then amplified agriculture with fossil fuels, we have been the big boss of our ship for a short blip upon our over all existence of over 200,000 years.

While a few of us are on luxury yachts, or cruises, most of us are in small water craft. Ultimately though, we will all be rocked by the same tidal forces and flooded by the cascade effects of tipping points.

Let’s talk about diversity and biodiversity

Our easy access to power — quite literally — as the species that transformed coal, oil, and gas in to eight billion people and much control of landscapes, has been our greatest gift. It is also our Achilles heel, because living for such short term goals has marginalized not just billions of people, but also many more billions of species, soils, and total eco-systems.

These concepts — and resources — are not just related. They literally create and sustain one another.

You may live on a luxury estate of hundreds of acres. You may have a thousand employees answering to your will.

Let’s say you are a high earning millionaire, or billionaire in Hawaii.

Beyond your lush estate it is hot and dry. A distant hurricane allows that high winds are intensified. This situation is not great for you. (Yes, this is exactly what happened in Maui in August of 2023.)

In Hawaii, where I lived for nearly two decades, diversity is hugely impacted by invasive species. The cane grasses that thrive in the driest areas are tinder for frequent fires. What lives and hides in these ten foot high grasses, is often destructive pigs and rats, both of which were tragically introduced into paradise by enterprising people.

Honestly, I did not set out to describe the privileged as “rats” and “pigs” but it is very understandable why these two particular species in Hawaii have come to be representative of invasion. And, as such they are resented.

Rats, and too a much greater extent, wild pigs routinely devastated our crops in Kona, Hawaii. Yet, it’ s not all about calling names, because many farmers were just as destroyed by coqui frogs, fire ants, coffee borer beetles, and many, many, seemingly ‘pacifist’ plants and animals.

Grass, prairie, woodland, and political fires

Dried grass, like suburbs in Paradise California, or woods in northern Canada, provide the fuel for a now prolonged and dangerous fire season.

In Hawaii, we often could smell distant smoke, but this is not to blame those without resources for allowing invasive grass to become fire fuel. Rather, a perfect fire storm requires not just that one species overtakes another, but that few people have means, resources, or people power to affect this tinderbox set up.

Those with huge resources, however, can take on huge projects. And they do. Many of those projects, however, are vanity projects such as adventure submersibles, or space rockets, or media take-overs.
These projects, like invasive grasses or out of control pigs and rats, gobble up the most desirable resources for themselves.

As it stands today, there are many people willing to invest in the possibility of taking over the blackened, charred remains of Lahaina town for future oceanfront venture capital and gentrification. Naturally, some locals are very wary of such investments.

Hawaii, has been colonized before.

Tinder such as this threatens to set off political firestorms around the world.

It is often said, but bears repeating, although the highest emitters of CO2 on the planet are rich, Westernized locations, the colonized and impoverished of the world — the most marginalized — pay the price up front.

And yet, a bill is waiting for the privileged as well.

For all of these reasons, and simply because of simple morality, it is vitally important that poor people, rich people, and everybody in between begins to realize that fire, smoke, floods, and more do not respect the boundaries of a gated mansion, nor do storm waves spare the captains of industry.

Or, at least, not in the long haul ahead.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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