A Loggins and Messina song from the 1970s has the lyric, “In Lahaina, the sugar cane grow.”

For more than a century Pioneer Mill Co. cultivated thousands of acres of irrigated cane, including much of the land directly above Lahaina town. When you flew over Maui in those days Lahaina was bordered, mauka, by a protective layer of green. After the company shut down in 1999 the fields were abandoned; 10-foot high, well-watered cane was replaced by invasive grasses and brush. The slopes above Lahaina turned brown, the protection afforded by the cane operation disappeared, replaced by dry scrub that was a potential disaster sitting in plain sight for decades.

The tragedy we all witnessed on Maui — the loss of life, of a historic treasure, was a preventable, human-engineered event. It was, as Office of Hawaiian Affairs Chair Carmen Lindsey recently said, the result of “… western forces that … now threaten our survival with their destructive practices.”

The current landowners of the abandoned fields are liable in this matter. They must pay for what occurred.

Kevin O’Leary

Kalihi Valley

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