Environmental Justice, Native Rights, Tourism, and Opposition to Military Control: The Case of Kaho'olawe

Mansel G. Blackford

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, pilots of American F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers training for the Vietnam War repeatedly swept down on targets placed on Kaho'olawe, the smallest of the eight major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago and the only one being used as a bombing range. Between 1968 and 1970, the warplanes dropped twenty-five hundred tons of bombs on Kaho'olawe; in the latter year alone, they bombarded the island for 315 days, solidifying its reputation as "the most bombed island in the Pacific." The American military had used Kaho'olawe as a target range since the 1930s, and even earlier, goats, sheep, cattle, and horses introduced by westerners had overgrazed the island, degrading its environment. The ground was severely eroded, and with much of its original vegetation gone, Kaho'olawe became home to alien plant species. Unexploded bombs made traveling on the island and fishing in nearby waters unsafe. Sediment carried to sea in runoffs killed nearshore reefs.1	1
Beginning in the 1960s, returning Kaho'olawe to its circumstances before Western contact became an important goal for environmentalists, native Hawaiians, and politicians. For native Hawaiians especially, restoration also represented cultural renewal. George Helm, a major native Hawaiian leader, claimed that it was his "moral responsibility to attempt an ending to this desecration of our sacred aina [land] ... for each bomb dropped adds further injury to an already wounded soul." Similarly, Dr. Noa Emmett Aluli—like Helm an important native Hawaiian leader—observed, "The work to heal the island will heal the soul of our people. Each time we pick up a stone to restore a cultural site on the island, we pick up ourselves, as Hawaiians." As native Hawaiians rediscovered their culture in the 1970s, the restoration of Kaho'olawe became a burning topic and a major catalyst for the native Hawaiian renaissance.2	2
Kaho'olawe, just eight miles southwest of Maui, is the eighth largest of the Hawaiian Islands. Reprinted from Mansel G. Blackford, Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959–2000 (Lawrence, 2001), 8. Courtesy University Press of Kansas.
This article looks at how disparate issues fused in the movement to halt the environmental degradation of Kaho'olawe. The essay begins by briefly discussing the environmental changes that ranching and military usage brought to Kaho'olawe and then investigates how and why some Hawaiian residents began to oppose those alterations. Initially unconcerned with native Hawaiian rights, ranchers, environmentalists, and local politicians mounted the first challenges to the military for reasons ranging from their dislike of federal government authority to their desire to use Kaho'olawe as a park and finally to their hope that the island could be preserved as a pristine alternative to the nearby island of Maui, which was experiencing a tourism boom. In the mid-1970s, native Hawaiians became the most important, though not the only, group who advocated changing the status of Kaho'olawe. For native Hawaiians, restoring the island physically and using it as a site for cultural renewal went hand in hand. Ultimately, they desired the removal of Kaho'olawe from American military control, its restoration to the state of Hawai'i, and a state pledge to give them the island when they established their own sovereign nation. How they succeeded in convincing other Hawaiian residents to support their goals in the face of opposition from the U.S. Navy is an informative story of intergroup dynamics.	. . .