#Big Island | Hawaii Landscaping .

[skogens-sjel]

[rafefar]

Fleeting rainbow at sunset

[travelbinge]

By Emmett_Sparling

Big Island, Hawaii, USA

[mapsoffun]

Sunday was our first proper Hawaiian sunset--we witnessed it at an event at the next resort over, the Fairmont Orchid. It was definitely a hit among many of the attendees, as everyone was scrambling over to the beach from where the free food and drink were to get a shot or two on their phones.

[petri808]

A view from someone’s house posted on IG

There’s activity in Kilauea volcano’s caldera again. Such a gorgeous yet potentially deadly sight lol

[sakizm]

when i first saw iceland’s landscape you know what my first thought was??

“wow it looks like hawaii” of ALL places i thought of hawaii

must think me nuts to compare the warm tropical island with lush greenery to the chilly tundra island covered in scrubs & moss right??

i meant it in a sense that they both are volcanic islands with the similar jagged black rocks everywhere, black sand beaches, have active volcanoes, areas that have dangerous rip tide waves, have mountains, & many waterfalls

[thingsdavidlikes]

Beautiful Napali Coast Big Fantail Wave Sunset Ke'e Beach Kauai Ocean Art Seascape Blue Water Fuji GFX100s! Elliot McGucken Fine Art Hawaiian Islands Landscape Nature Photography! Nā Pali Coast State Wilderness Park Master Medium Format Fine Art by 45SURF Hero's Odyssey Mythology Landscapes & Godde

[hegdetravelphotos]

Umauma Falls

Umauma Falls, cascading Magic on the Big Island! Location: 31-313 Old Mamalahoa Hwy, Hakalau, Big Island, Hawaii, USA. Time and Date: Around 11:30 am on October 04th, 2016.

[melhorsemsutia]

Hawaii Landscape Image of a medium-sized tropical courtyard with stone landscaping and partial sun.

[hawaiilandscaping]

Kailua-Kona Landscape Design | Hawaii Island Lawn and Yard Design | Hawaii Landscaping

Full-service Kailua-Kona landscape designs, installation and maintenance. We provide the best landscaping designs Hawaii has to offer.

[rafefar]

Fire in the sky

Sunrise from Kohala Loke Lani, Hawaii

[queen-breha-organa]

I want to talk a little bit about Hawai‘i, because I have been thinking a lot about my people, and our lives.

The year 2023 marks 130 years since the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

On January 17th 1893, American businessman used their connections and military influence to dethrone Queen Liliuokalani by threat of force.

This annexation still impacts my people 130 years later. It still hurts us, it still haunts us,

For the last 130 years my people have suffered under America’s cruelty and indifference.

Unsustainable Tourism haunts us, causing a cost of living crisis, which turns into a rise in poverty, which turns into a rise in individuals experiencing homelessness. This cost crisis disproportionately effects my people, Kānaka Maoli. We cannot even afford to live on our on land. Our ancestral home.

And in turn, tourism then provides the most jobs. This industry pushes us off our land and into poverty, and then it turns around and sells us back our culture as a walking joke.

Our very identity is turned into entertainment. Our very culture is turned into entertainment.

And many of my people have no choice but to sell their culture so they can eat, so they can survive.

We have been put in a never ending cycle of misery and cultural destruction.

In addition, Military Involvement on our islands causes repeated incidents of ecological violence, and land disputes. The military take claim to land that belongs to my people, and they spill chemicals over and over, and poison the water we drink.

My people are suffering. Our culture is suffering.

And everyday more tourists come. Everyday more land is taken to build hotels. Everyday more culture is stripped and bastardized. Everyday more land is taken for military use.

I’m so tired of living this way. I’m so tired of waking up and watching the slow and agonizing death of my people.

I want us to live. I want us to thrive.

I want my people to survive.

I want to survive.

So please read up on the current issues that face Kānaka Maoli. Please educate yourself on my people’s history and current affairs.

Speak up and speak out. Talk about unsustainable tourism, and speak up about how harmful a “vacation” to Hawai‘i can be. Talk about the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and it’s injustice.

Hawai‘i is Hawaiians. Hawai‘i is our history. Hawai‘i is our home. Hawai‘i is the very blood that runs through our veins.

So please do not forget us, and please speak up with us.

Support Hawaiian Sovereignty. Restore Hawai‘i to Hawaiians.

Resources & Education:

[mapsoffun]

Took a drive into Kona to ship some stuff from FedEx and to get some local fare, and the drive was absolutely glorious in terms of views.

[harrisonarchive]

‪Photos: David Matheson; excerpts from an Architectural Digest article by Paul Theroux, published in 2007:‬

"[George and Olivia Harrison] planted the property [on Hamilton Island] with dense tropical vegetation. 'George always had a major conflict between the trees and the views,' says Olivia Harrison. 'Every few years I would persuade him to cut back some foliage to reclaim the views.' [...] 'George sketched his ideas for Roger Parkin, the architect, and together they designed the house,' says Harrison. Waterfalls feed into the organically shaped pool. 'We swam a lot in the natural ponds in Hawaii and tried to create that feeling.' [...] The musician worked closely with landscape designer Malcolm Hunt on the gardens and pool area. 'George handpicked the big boulders from around the island,' says Harrison. [...] In the master suite, a low, curving stone wall separates the sleeping and meditation areas, which look east toward the Coral Sea. [...] A place for family getaways and for welcoming friends, it was called 'Letsbeavenue,' a pun on a line by British comedian Tommy Cooper, 'Let’s be having you.' [...] 'George was always on a quest to get as far away as he could,' Harrison says. 'We found Hawaii and built a house there. But he wanted to keep going. We went to Tasmania, New Zealand, Australia. I had the feeling that he maxed the planet out, looking for solitude. It was about "How far away can I get?"' [...] 'Our final visit to Letsbeavenue was in the year 2000,' Olivia Harrison says. 'It was the last of our big journeys together, before an even bigger journey for George.'" (x)

[tropichalys]

Hawaii, Big Island

[mariacallous]

Rescue crews are still searching Lahaina, Hawaii, for survivors of the catastrophic wildfire that obliterated the town last week on the island of Maui. It’s the deadliest blaze in modern American history, with 99 people confirmed dead, surpassing the 85 that perished in 2018’s Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Crews have only searched a quarter of Lahaina, so the death toll is expected to rise higher still. At least 2,200 structures have been destroyed.

During the 19th century, it made a kind of terrible sense that blazes like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 could burn swaths of a city almost totally unchecked. Fire and building codes were lacking. So were firefighting forces and robust water infrastructure. By the early 20th century, those things had been upgraded. Cities and towns were safer—for a while. But now expansive urban fires have returned, and they are burning with startling frequency and intensity.

“We thought urban fires had gone away, that San Francisco in 1906 was the last. And now they’ve come back,” says fire historian Stephen Pyne. “It’s like watching polio come back. We fixed this. But you have to maintain the hygiene—you have to keep up the vaccinations.”

And the Lahaina fire shows that they can burn in places where nobody expects a catastrophic wildfire: a modern town on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, whose ecosystems only rarely saw wildfire in prehistory.

It’s not the only recent example of fires ravaging surprising places. In 2021, a freak wildfire ignited in late December—way outside of typical fire season—in Boulder, Colorado, burning more than 1,000 buildings. In 2017, the Tubbs Fire ripped through Santa Rosa, California, and its surrounding communities, destroying 5,600 structures and killing 22 people. “Those aren’t fire areas—they’re just the burbs,” says Thomas Cova, who studies wildfire evacuations at the University of Utah. “They’re modern streets, modern sidewalks, manicured lawns. It’s really become, in this changing climate, much more difficult to map where fires are going to occur and what time of year and how bad they might burn.” 

On Maui, as with wildfires all over the world, there isn’t just one factor contributing to the blaze. Overall, climate change is making wildfires worse: A warmer atmosphere can absorb more moisture from the landscape. Climate change is also making droughts more frequent, longer, and more severe, so there’s less moisture to wet the landscape in the first place. 

Add high winds—gusts of up to 80 miles per hour drove the flames a mile a minute across Lahaina—and all it takes is a single spark to ignite a fast-moving blaze. “There’s no firefighting capabilities for structure-to-structure urban fire in winds like that,” says Cova. “Once one structure catches on fire, if the wind’s blowing like that, it becomes like a blowtorch against the neighboring home.”

These winds across Maui were dry as well, helping to suck the remaining moisture out of vegetation to turn it into fuel. That fuel seems to have been invasive grasses that European colonizers brought when they established plantations. When rains are plentiful, these plants grow like mad, then easily dry out once the rain stops. 

“Those fire-prone invasive species fill in any gaps anywhere else—roadsides, in between communities, in between people’s homes, all over the place,” Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, told WIRED last week. “At this point, 26 percent of our state is covered in these fire-prone grasses.” 

Not only has much of Maui been in a drought, but it’s also at the height of its dry season, so these plants have turned to tinder. “Feral landscapes fuel fires,” says Pyne. “Hot, dry, and windy, with lots of fuel, is the formula for big fires. And that’s what you’ve got here.”

In Hawaii, as in places along the West Coast, more and more people have been moving into the danger zone: the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. This is where nature butts up against human settlements or even intermingles with them. That’s why Paradise burned so quickly and thoroughly, destroying 19,000 structures, as the fire sped through pine needles and other dry leaves piled up around town. In Maui, the invasive grass acts as an accelerant. “Virtually every community in Hawaii is on a wildland-urban interface,” Pickett continued. “So we’re just like a WUI state, because we have developments that are all adjacent to wildland areas or surrounded by wildland areas.”

We don’t have to discover the vaccine against wildfires in such an interface—it’s already known. Massive urban fires waned in the 20th century because of better building codes, and infrastructure is still important today. When high winds kick up, they jostle power lines and can spark fires. Electrical equipment malfunctions were the confirmed causes of the Camp and Tubbs fires, among other recent blazes. While officials are still investigating what ignited the wildfire that consumed Lahaina, there’s speculation that it was also electrical wires. While it’s expensive to bury power lines, such an investment could go a long way toward saving structures and human lives.

And in the modern day, another big factor is managing potential fuels: In places like California, that means clearing dead brush. In Hawaii, it’s those invasive grasses. Because humans are such an unpredictable X factor in sparking fires—with a wayward firework or cigarette—it’s paramount that when people make mistakes, there’s less fuel to burn.

Protecting cities from supercharged wildfires also requires fundamental social shifts. If a tropical town like Lahaina can burn, which other cities are also at risk—and totally unready for it? “Normally we think of preparing for events that are within an envelope of historical, prior events,” says Cova. “This is unprecedented for Lahaina. And so how do you even begin to talk about preparing for things that no one's ever seen, including the people that manage fires?” 

One of the greatest risks of urban wildfires is that residents can get caught between fast-moving fires and the limitations of city infrastructure, like narrow, winding roads or a lack of evacuation routes. People died in their cars trying to get out of Paradise, and it appears the same happened in Lahaina. “We’ve known for a long time—even in hurricanes where you have way-advance warning—that evacuating cars sometimes is essential, but it’s really problematic, because you get congestion right away,” says Ann Bostrom, a risk communication researcher at the University of Washington. “Any city where you have a wildland-urban interface, and then you have any kind of complicated transportation, where you don’t have free egress, that’s problematic.”

Protecting other cities from Lahaina’s fate will require fighting a battle on multiple fronts: managing fuels to re-tame the feral landscape, minimizing ignitions with better electrical infrastructure, and rigorously communicating evacuation plans. “This is the kind of society we’ve created,” says Pyne. “And these are the kinds of fires that society will have to deal with.”