How Hawaii tries to save Haena State Park, a Kauai tourist hotspot that was loved to death

0

It used to be her favorite beach on the north coast of Kauai, but Mehana Blaich Vaughan hated taking her kids to the crowded Haena State Park. Like many Hawaiian families in the Hanalei area, she could never have imagined showing her children the Ke’e Beach of her childhood – a sacred strip of white sand filled with humuhumunukunukuapuaa, the Hawaiian state fish, with “crystal clear water and no cigarette butts.” in sand.”

“Haena is a pleasant place now [that it’s not overrun with tourists]“Said Blaich Vaughan from her home in Kauai in early December. And that’s not just due to Kauai’s strict 14-day quarantine COVID-19 protocols.

In 2018, a record 50 inches of rain fell on the North Shore within 24 hours. The road from Hanalei to Haena was closed for almost a year. “Haena State Park went from 2,000 visitors a day to none,” said Alan Carpenter, assistant administrator for the Hawaii State Parks Division, on a recent phone call. “The flood reset us to zero and then COVID-19 reset the entire state to zero. It is an incredible divine intervention to see what Hawaii looks like without tourists. “

As the country pauses and locals return to places that were once overrun by visitors, North Shore residents put in place protective measures to help both the Garden Isle and its people. The question that concerns everyone is: Would a regenerative tourism model be enough to save this fragile and dearly loved ecosystem?

While sustainable tourism preaches leaving destinations the way we landed them, regenerative travel takes a different approach. For visitors, it means leaving it better than when we arrived.

“It requires that we change our relationship with the natural world from dominance and extraction to one of care, contribution and responsibility,” stated Anna Pollock, founder of Conscious Travel, who is often viewed as the mother of this movement. “Travel can play a key role in enabling this change in relationships.”

But that’s not the only change in this new way of traveling. It also meant focusing tourism on the people who lived there. For decades, many Kauai residents have had to do three jobs teaching outsiders aloha rather than educating their own children about their heritage. Native Hawaiians with intergenerational ties to the North Shore have been excluded from the neighborhoods they grew up in and forced to leave sacred places overrun by travelers.

This frustration has deep roots. Fifteen years before the April 2018 floods, the North Shore Hawaiian Natives were already fed up with tourism. The current tourism model was an artifact from the 1960s when Pan Am arrived. The North Shore just wasn’t able to handle the flood of tourists clogging the two-lane road. Locals complained that visitors disregarded the etiquette of the one-lane bridges, parked illegally, trampled sacred spaces and left litter on the beaches. Something had to change.

Kauai’s tourism plan dates back to the 1960s when Pan Am Airlines opened flights to the area. The pandemic provides an opportunity to rethink tourism.

Getty Images

A master plan for Haena State Park has been developed, with critical input from Alan Carpenter’s Hawaii State Parks team, North Shore executives, and the Shore Hui Maka’ainana O Makana non-profit organization, consisting of families with ancestral connections to the Haena-Land.

“They had farmed it for hundreds of years,” said Carpenter, “their ancestors were buried there. They could have contradicted the parking plan, but instead they teamed up with us [with the goal being to] Restoration of the cultural landscape in the state park. ”

Together, this team created a plan to protect Haena and ultimately bring back to life this traditional Ahupua’a, a regenerative method of growing canoe cultures from ancient Hawaiian days.

Like so many best-laid plans, the master plan gathered dust for over a decade until the 2018 flood and its 12 landslides paralyzed the North Shore.
“One day after the flood,” said Joel Guy, executive director of the Hanalei Initiative, a shared workplace and training center for North Shore residents, “we had billionaires and local Hawaiians in the mud trying to make this place better. Locals were forced to have conversations with guides. The community has strengthened. “

Suddenly the Haena plan had worked. Community members worked with state parks to reduce the number of parking spaces from 300 to 100.
Guy and his team advocated a shuttle to take visitors to the park. For the shuttle, Vaughan, a professor at the University of Hawaii, helped young native Hawaiian scientists write and record narratives of the rich history of one of the most beautiful coastlines on earth.

The state and county of Kauai have increased penalties for illegal parking. The Hawaii Tourism Authority helped fund both enforcement of new park rules and educating tourists about the effects of their footprints.

Post-flood funding helped the state parks build a boardwalk through the taro pond field system so visitors could safely (and respectfully) traverse the restored Ahupua’a and experience an actively managed traditional cultural landscape. “The boardwalk gives people a magical experience when they go to the beach,” said Carpenter. “[We placed] first environmental and cultural sites, then the visitor experience. We invited the residents back to their backyard, where they felt they had been ousted for decades. ”

Sue Kanoho, executive director of the Kauai Visitors’ Office, said via email that the absence of tourists after the flood had reset the area. When it reopened, visitors were restricted by managed permits, which made the park a better experience for residents and visitors alike.

Ke'e Beach is considered a sacred place, but it is also one of the most visited places in Kauai.

Ke’e Beach is considered a sacred place, but it is also one of the most visited places in Kauai.

Seth K. Hughes / Getty Images

The collaboration at Haena State Park had barely nine months to be successful before the pandemic broke out. Without tourists, state parks don’t make money parking, and the locals hired to educate visitors and the North Shore’s tourist-focused businesses once again had to tighten their belts. The local economy turned. The community needed tutors and childcare, not waiters in posh resorts. They needed food, not boat tours to the Na Pali Coast.

Megan Fox, executive director of Malama Kauai, an organization that connects residents with affordable food and gardening, said they would have to abandon their voluntourism program. “We put on our oxygen masks,” she said, explaining how they distributed over 21,000 bags of free products to families. “We have to take care of ourselves first before we can take care of others.”

Jim Braman, GM of The Cliffs in Princeville, used this time to reconsider her messages to timeshare visitors. Braman’s team, now certified as a Hawaii Green Business, managed to green their property and encourage guests to support local businesses still recovering from the floods, like Hanalei Dolphin and local food trucks.

The Hawaii Tourism Authority also recently launched their new Malama Hawaii program, which rewards visitors with an extra night’s accommodation at participating resorts for tree planting and volunteering. Local shops, restaurants and hotels also participate in the Aloha + challenge, a promise to meet national sustainability goals.

Now that turtles are nesting again in resort areas, now dolphins can visit bays that were once filled with snorkelers, now the dozen of squatters who live along the Kalalau Trail have been removed and the trail is being cared for again, residents know what what to do is be done to protect their home.


You can’t yet control how many flights are arriving each day and how many remote workers are choosing to pay the big bucks for previous vacation rentals. But regenerative travel proponents like Pollock say the important conversations are a good place to start.

The residents of Kauai are willing not to allow outsiders to make any decisions about their island.

“We’re letting the North Shore people be part of the solution and educating them about cultural implications,” Guy told SFGATE. “We said we need to hear from you, you have been evicted for so long. But you can teach the visitor industry that walking on reefs isn’t cool because that’s how we eat. It’s worth sharing resource management with people. “

Michele Bigley is writing a book about her family’s global journey to find solutions to the climate. Follow their adventures: michelebigley.substack.com



Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.