When wildfires tore through Maui’s west side in August 2023, killing 102 people, destroying 1400 homes, and incinerating over 200,000 trees, the future of tourism to the Valley Isle was thrown into question.
With over 50% of the island’s budget still reliant on the tourism industry, and floundering, Maui is at a crossroads. While Lahaina and Kaanapali resorts supported the community by housing 8,000 displaced residents in 40 hotels for months, many blame the fire’s quick spread on the calculus of clear-cutting for sugarcane farms and resorts, non-native resort landscaping, and a multi-year drought. Short term rentals continue to escalate the already limited real estate and rental markets. Local activist group Lahaina Strong has gained traction this year on legislation banning short term rentals, and, hoping to secure more resident housing, Maui’s mayor is trying to eliminate 7,000 short-term rentals by 2026, a bill which is currently being contested. In many ways, the sense locally now is that economic dependency on visitors must cease. But people the world over will always want to visit this slice of paradise.
So when Maui officially reopened to tourism in November, it leaned more heavily into a new type of travel that encourages visitors to support the islands: regenerative tourism. The idea is that visitors steward the destination through volunteering and making conscious choices to support locally-owned and environmentally sound businesses, with the aim of leaving the islands better because of their visit. Yet many visitors remain unsure of the best ways to help the island and its residents.
Maui Cultural Lands, one of the longest running indigenous-owned nonprofits in the Lahaina area, provides visitors hands-on ways to give back on their vacations. Since 1999, Maui Cultural Lands has been taking volunteers out to steward the largest concentration of archaeological sites in West Maui, not to mention tending to the forests and watersheds in Lahaina’s neighboring communities, Honokowai and Olowalu. MCL’s director Ekolu Lindsey, whose Lahaina house was destroyed, has been pleased to see that since Maui reopened to tourists, he’s had hundreds of volunteers. “The fires impacted the world–even if you’ve never been here–because everybody loves Maui,” he says.
On volunteer days at their two locations Mālama Honokowai (Saturdays at 9am) and Kipuka Olowalu (Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30am) people might pull invasive plants, extract and replant baby trees to reforest Lahaina, or plant native seedlings along the watershed.
“This is not eco-tourism. We are going to work,” says Lindsey. “We are opening people’s eyes to what they can do to make their communities more resilient. And it’s fun.”
Lindsey, a native Hawaiian, teaches volunteers about Hawaiian culture, where aloha means adding value to your presence. “We help people think of Hawaii as home,” Lindsey says, “Not your home, but someone’s home.”
After the fires, one of Lindsey’s board members, Duane Sparkman, approached him with an idea – he wanted to reforest Lahaina and Kula with native trees. Lindsey jumped into a partnership with Sparkman’s newly created nonprofit Treecovery.
Sparkman, chief engineer at Royal Lahaina Resort, founded Treecovery after colleagues talked about beloved ancestral trees lost in the fire. Sparkman started cataloging the thousands of trees lost that fateful August day, then marched into disaster recovery meetings and announced his plan to reforest Lahaina.
He didn’t take no for an answer – not from FEMA, not from the state government, not from naysayers who said he’d never be able to replicate beloved trees (like mountain apple or specific tasting mango species) growing in Lahaina backyards.
He plans to replicate precolonial Lahaina, when the town wasn’t (as its name informs) the land of the unrelenting sun, but shaded by native ulu and kukui nut trees. And he’s doing it all at no cost to residents.
“We’re bringing tourists in to help rebuild,” Sparkman says. Today, visitors plant baby trees (many sourced from Maui Cultural Lands’ work in the Honokowai region) in nurseries across the island – you’ll even see them growing in many Kaanapali resort lobbies. By 2025, visitors will be replanting on people’s property.
Other resorts have partnered with similar projects, like Fairmont Kea Lani’s partnership with Skyline Conservation, which visitors can donate to or volunteer with to restore native forests on the island. After a morning of physical labor, locals will tell you to bolster recovery further by dining at locally-owned restaurants like Lahaina’s recently reopened Māla Ocean Tavern and Aloha Mixed Plate, or Moku Roots (which relocated to Upcountry after the fires). Also reopened are Old Lahaina Luau, considered the state’s most authentic tourist-facing cultural performance, and Maui Ku’ia Cacao Farm tours and tastings. In June, the venerable Kapalua Food and Wine festival returned, showcasing heavy hitters in the foodie scene like chefs Charlie Palmer and Maneet Chauhan. In October, the state’s largest celebration of food, Hawai’i Food and Wine, returns to Ka’anapali.
Still, tourism on Maui remains fraught. While touristy areas like Wailea appear untouched, over 1700 Lahaina residents are still displaced, many of them residing in hotels while still paying hefty mortgages and home insurance. Signs in restaurant windows urge visitors to not ask workers about their experience with the fires.
How Maui rebounds might just depend on having a different, more sustainable, maybe more regenerative relationship with tourism. For now, visitors can do our small part by getting our hands dirty, then savoring loco moco whipped up with aloha.
Buy your copy of the World’s Greatest Places issue here