The Maui Wildfires

• In Event: Climate Wreckage and Indigenous Philosophies

Abstract

On August 8, 2023, a devastating wildfire swept through the town of Lahaina, Maui. To date, 100 people are known to have been killed, 3,500 houses destroyed, 8000 people left homeless, and Lahaina has suffered $5 billion in property damage. This paper calls on the critical resources of Indigenous, anarchist, and critical political theory on climate catastrophe to come to grips with this destructive event, and to situate the Maui fires within a larger context of plantation capitalism, tourism, militarism, and local struggles to change the cruel terms of these occupations. Native Hawaiian understandings of the bio-climatic relations among the Hawaiian islands illuminate the damage done to Maui when its neighboring island, Kahoʻolawe, was demolished by overgrazing and by the U.S. military, which used it as a bombing range and live-fire training facility from World War II until 1990. Anarchist analyses of plantation capitalism and mutual aid shed light on both the complex of factors behind Lahaina’s burning and the enduring community and kin networks enabling the surviving people to care for one another. Legal efforts to redefine the dry invasive grasses that fuel the fires as micro-agents of ecological disaster offer the promise of re-thinking the danger of future wildfires. Determined community organizing, generous mutual aid, and novel legal strategies may be able to reposition the elements in wildfire assemblages so that conserving linkages can be cultivated and destructive ones can be severed.

Author

• Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawaii, Manoa