HAWAII.
Spectacular golden beaches,
the best surfing place in the world.
Palm trees whispering in the wind.
Bliss beautiful Hawaii!
Come feel the warm spirit of Aloha.
Hello.
I’m Richard Chamberlain and Hawaii is my home.When most of us think about Hawaii, we think of the ultimate tropical paradise. There is something magical in the air, the sky, the sea and the earth itself.
But there is another side of paradise and it isn’t pretty!
Many more of the ten thousand unique life forms of these Islands, found no where else on earth, have been lost for ever.
Rampant development is threatening the very paradise six million tourists seek each year. Hawaiian culture hangs in balance.
What we do in the future, what we do right now will effect Hawaii for all time to come. Tourism is the main business in Hawaii, it used to be sugar cane and pineapple.
When I first came to Hawaii, paradise is exactly what I
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thought I’d found. I felt such a warmth and gentleness from the people here. Hawaiians call it the aloha spirit.
Aloha: the moment you arrive and the sweet smelling leis
around your neck.
“Aloha”, they say to welcome you. “Aloha!”
Hawaii welcomes visitors from all over the world.
Islands of Aloha, Islands of Love, I thought.
But it’s taken me a long time to begin to find out what Aloha really means.
I have lived here 15 years now and I still can’t believe how amazing this place is.
A few tiny specs of land in a million square miles of ocean.
The most isolated Islands on our planet.
And until the Hawaiian ancestors discovered the Islands there was not a single human being to be found.
Imagine traveling with those first Polynesian voyagers 1500 years ago, navigating across a vast uncharted ocean in a simple hand carved canoe. What a brilliant feat of courage and skill.
Now you and I can hop on a plane and be sunning ourselves on a beach in four or five hours. And we do that by millions!
But living here I began to learn the other side of paradise.
It seems to me that there are two Hawaii’s.
The Hawaii of beaches, resorts and care free good times and the Hawaii of unique natural beauty, which is under a serious threat of destruction from the very people who came here to enjoy its loveliness. People like you and me.
One of the most visited places on the Islands is Hanauma Bay,
just outside of Honolulu.
And I love spending time there.
Ever since I was a little kid I have been deeply moved by nature.
I used to spend hours waiting along rivers, watching the incredible
teaming …… of life.
Hanauma Bay like the Islands themselves has come to mean more to me
than just a place to play.
Here I feel the same kind of aha and wonder I felt when I was a child.
In this underwater world time seems to change.
You feel the millions of years it took these Islands to form.
Pulsing up to a hot spot on the earth’s crust.
We humans speak of time passing.
But under the ocean I feel that it is time which watches us pass.
Unlike many journeys I have taken in my life, where I knew where I was going and what I’d do when I arrived,
my travels in Hawaii have taken me to undiscovered places in myself and have drawn me to people, who’s love and knowledge of the Islands have
affected me deeply.
My companion at Hanauma Lisa King also loves the Bay and teaches
people how to protect it.Richard:
Looks like an awful lot of people who come here!
How many people come on an average day?Lisa:
Average day is it between 4 and 6 thousand people.Richard:
That’s incredible!
Now does that have an adverse effect on the bay, on the fish and on….
Whatever what is here that’s so beautiful?Lisa:
It has tremendous impact. Now 90 % of the coral reef is dead, because
people have been trampling all over the reef for years and years and years…..Richard:
As a tourist, when I first came here I fed the fishes peas and all that stuff,
because I thought that’s what you did.
I didn’t know that it was bad for them. I didn’t know it was bad for the place.Lisa:
Right, when you fish feed you’re incurving the coral to be trampled on,
because people want to find a nice soled place to feed the fish.Richard:
Why do you care about the reef?Lisa:
I really love this place, because to me it’s really, really special.Richard:
Aha, aha.Lisa:
And I want to spread the word about what a wonderful place this is.
Richard:
Yeh…Lisa:
But I also want to spread the word that if you come to the bay.
Please, educate yourself!! So you won’t love the Bay to death.When you have Islands beautiful as these and as few and as special and as small, there is a big problem in figuring out what the maximum number of people is who can come and enjoy this place.
You can’t have a lovely garden and then invite a million people to trample over it and still have a lovely garden.
It just doesn’t work that way!
What has happened at Hanauma Bay is a warning to the rest of Hawaii about over development.
The damage may not be obvious but it is profound.
It’s hard for me to believe that much is wrong, because the Islands
still look so beautiful, deceptive and dangerous!
All over the Islands tourism has already brought many kinds of changes:
hotels, golf courses, shopping centers.
Each attemp to seduce tourists in to spending their money seems to spin more and more the same serious threat to Hawaii’s natural diversity and beauty. There is a blessedness, a sweetness a healing quality on these Islands. That’s why we all want to come her, of course.
And that’s why there are problems.
When I fly over the Islands I can’t help feeling a sadness almost a depression, when I see these staggering changes development brings.
6 Million tourists descend on Hawaii each year and the largest Island is smaller than Connecticut.
More and more tourists want to come to the less developed Islands, which ironically means more than development.
Can we keep on paving paradise and still have paradise?
Is it really economical to keep on developing more and more resorts,
more golf courses? Now here is a hot issue!
Over 60 with 100 in the planning stage.
Many local people feel that the few jobs provided tending the greens etc. aren’t worth losing access on their land.
So this kind of development is being fought by native Hawaiians, who have their own way of looking at the land and its real value.
What may seem to be just a heap of stones on the golf course, actually has a great deal of significance to Hawaiian people.
Dana Naone Hall who works with other Hawaiians to save their native land from development, explains that stones are a part of Heiau a sacred side.
For Dana protecting this land is religious work. The thought of putting a golf course in this area between a sacred site by this Heiau and a sand containing thousands of our Hawaiian ancestors. Doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.
It’s really a sacrilege.Richard:
Can you explain to me why your ancestors and their resting place are important
to you?Dana:
You have the experience of many generations before you in a place to help you to know how to live your own life. We aren’t living here now separate from anything else that comes before, that’s a part of the continuous. It is really important for us, because so much that has happened in Hawaii, such as the culture has been destroyed out of
what I recall: ignorance!
If you have been able to fly over here a thousand years ago, you would have seen men and women planting taro for their dish: poi.
Children learning a hula dance on the beach.
Others building fires to cook fresh fish from the fish ponds they built along the shore line . People burying generations of their death in this land and worshipping nature which nourished them its bounty.
Now a golf course is planned right here where a Heiau stands.Richard:
What do you come to a place like this for? What do you get from a place like that you wouldn’t get from a golf course or tailored resort or managered resort?Dana:
Well, there is a difference between what is real and what is vague. No one can do something natural of this beauty. It is irreplaceable!
Just by the mere fact of its existence. So the sooner we recognize at the sooner we can make efforts to preserve.
For me when I come like a place Waihe’e, especially you know, when the moon is almost full, so that you can walk along the shore line and there is enough light and I feel wrapped in a kind of sweetness, that’s really everyone’s image of Hawaii.Richard:
Well, I feel that too! A breeze will touch your face in a certain way and it is almost like a personal communication from nature.
It’s really wonderful!Dana:
I should say Richard, that what we’re talking about and describing
this particular kind of gentleness and sweetness which pervades us in
Aloha Spirit. But it isn’t something that you can will and it isn’t something that you can control.
It isn’t something that exists no matter we do to a place.
In destroying the place we are literally destroying the Aloha Spirit that has made Hawaii so famous!Richard:
The world is changing so fast now and there is so much chaos, so much
environmental destruction. Really on a tremendous scale. I know you work so incredibly hard to save some places you love here on the Island.
Do you really have hope you’ll succeed?Dana:
I think everyone despairs, but ultimately, I think what is a feeling of hope we still have to do something and for me as an Hawaiian that doing
something is going back to the word aloha.
And that aloha is love and if you love a place you’ll do something to
protect a place.Discovering what is hidden under Hawaii’s deceptive beauty has really set my head spinning. Dana said something that I could not get off my mind. She talked about the difference between destroying something through ignorance and destroying with knowledge. Hawaiians have a saying: When you take from the land, you must give to the land! Well, it seems to me that I grew up in a culture which has acted consistently as though the earth were ours to own, control and bend to our will, no matter what hideous scars we might inflict on the land or it’s people.
We all have dreams.
Dreams help us make sense of our present and imagine our future and if we all dream the same dream, perhaps life would flow more smoothly……but of course we don’t! There’s more than one dream, more of one vision of paradise.
In the Molokai Family Health Clinic I met Noa Emmett Aluli, who practices Western medicine as well as traditional healing. Dr. Aluli is an activist, who organizes native people to fight for their land rights and encourages them to live according to their spiritual traditions.
Richard:
I know you have done a lot of work apart from your medical practice to help, to keep the Island of Molokai like it is and free from the kind of rapid development that happened elsewhere. Do you think there’s a way to balance, for want of a better word, a certain degree of development and sustain these wonderful traditions?Noa:
Well, you know we haven’t seen it yet, Richard!
We haven’t seen that happen in any place else that finding the balance.
I feel the natural world is vibrant with spirit and deserves to be treated as if it were a holy place.
It was easy for me to fall in love with Hawaii, but it is taking me a long time to begin to love it right, to learn the language of the land, to listen to it.
We have to live in harmony with the rest of nature, for as never before in our history.
We have the means to destroy our environment, our habitat.The question is :
Are we humans smart enough to change our ways, to preserve and cherish
our home?The Hawaiians may have a lesson for us all:
The earth doesn’t belong to us, we belong to the earth, whatever we do to it, we do to ourselves!
