Will Hawai’i’s Last Wild Coast Be Saved or Lost to Development?

In the late summer of 2024, eleven-year-old Kaikoʻo swam out in his blue camo wetsuit from the black sands of Punaluʻu beach on the Southeastern shore of the island of Hawaiʻi for the very first time with a proper speargun. In fifteen feet of clear water, with his dad close by, a good sized nenue swam so close he had to back up to square the shot—his first ever. A couple hours later they were back at the house, all smiles, cleaning that fish when mom, Nohealani Kaʻawa, came home.

“The funny thing is, his dad’s first fish when he was a boy was a nenue too, a rare fish around here that only gets blown in with certain currents,” Nohea tells me. “There’s a difference between hunting a fish and those times when a fish offers itself to you. Some people call those rubbish fish, but we take whatever gift the ocean gives.”

Nohea traces her family line backwards in Kaʻū, the southernmost and largest district of Hawaiʻi’s Big Island, “a multitude of generations.” This was one of the six original ancient districts of the island. “Punaluʻu is where it all begins for my family, the Kaʻaʻawa, here in Hawaiʻi,” she says. “All of our kapuna—our ancestors—are buried there. It is our one hanao—the sands of our birth. When your family is buried in that land, the land itself becomes your family.”

Nohea and her family—like many other local families rooted in this place—have long relied on Punaluʻu as a primary food source. They net and spear fish. They dive for lobster and octopus. They gather seaweed. “When a place nourishes you, you become the embodiment of that place. It becomes part of your DNA.”

She keeps a close eye on the tide to collect a specific sea urchin, the spines of which adorn her hula clothing. Nohea is a kumu hula, a revered teacher of the dances that go back a multitude of generations. At Punaluʻu, often with her daughter, she collects ili’ili—smooth round stones perfect for percussion. She comes here for inspiration, to compose songs for weddings and funerals, baby showers and birthdays.

Punaluʻu is one of just a few accessible beaches along this craggy, lava crusted 80-mile stretch of undeveloped coastline. Follow the streams inland that feed the freshwater fishpond here and you will find yourself in the vast Kaʻū Forest Preserve, the source point of clean drinking water that has long sustained local people. Mauka to Makai—the upcountry to the sea—it’s all interconnected and codependent.

The story of Punaluʻu beach and the 400 some acres that hug it took a sharp turn in the late 60s when Honolulu-based developer C. Brewer & Co.—whose history dates to Captain James Hunnewell’s sandalwood and subsequent sugar and macadamia nut empire—dreamed up “Sea Mountain at Punaluʻu.” Directly above the bones of Nohea’s ancestors, they built an 18-hole golf course, condos, and a restaurant. As something of a consolation to the local community, they also built the Kaʻū Center for History and Culture. The Aspen Institute even got in on the action and built a “Humanistic Studies” retreat center.

Years of tee times and sun salutations later in 1975, a 7.2 earthquake off the nearby coast sent a 25-foot wall of water towards the forest and Sea Mountain was no more. The Great Kaʻū Earthquake and Tsunami of 1868 was even bigger; it wiped out a small fishing village at Punaluʻu and left the town of Kaʻū in rubble. The property changed hands of moneyed developers once or twice, and in 2006 a proposed plan for 1,800 residential and vacation units pitted the developer stepson of Jacques Cousteau against Cousteau’s widow who voiced concern over the environmental impact. The plan fell through. In 2020, a woman named Eva Liu bought the property, including that black sand beach that is Nohea’s one hanao. So began yet another struggle between the forces of development and the local community.

In addition to 76 existing condos, Eva Liu’s Black Sand Beach LLC would build 225 residential and short-stay units, a commercial center, and retail shops. It would rebuild the golf course, clubhouse, and driving range. “Here’s a place that Eva found in a state of neglect and abandonment,” read an issued statement. “Disturbed by the lack of local initiatives to revive the area, Eva felt an undeniable duty to intervene.” As it happens, many folks in the local community are uneasy with her sense of duty.

Back in the spring, when the county held a public hearing for Black Sand Beach LLC’s application for a special management area permit, hundreds of residents packed the room to testify. Scores stood out in the courtyard. Three hundred more joined virtually. They had to schedule a second meeting to hear from everyone. The vast majority voiced vehement opposition over eight hours of testimony. The Environmental Impact Statement the developers had submitted hadn’t been updated since well before the ill-fated Cousteau misadventure. There was no plan for upgrading the wastewater treatment system to accommodate the larger footprint. Authentic, engaged community consultation hadn’t happened. Some voiced support—it will bring jobs, they said.

“We took three and a half years to get to the point where we felt comfortable enough to file this application,” says Daryn Arai, Black Sand Beach LLC’s planner. “We heard there was a lot of opposition, but this is not a popularity contest. A significant amount of those testimonies [are] from people who are not from Kaʻū and many of them are not even from the island.” Setting aside the specious suggestion of outside agitation, the resistance from the community of Kaʻū is undeniably overwhelming.

As for concerns about the water treatment system and overall environmental impact, the Black Sand Beach LLC team waves those aside. “The project that's being proposed right now doesn't fit any of the specific triggers for a new environmental review as determined by state statute,” says Arai. “This project will not have a significant adverse effect on coastal resources, and we're doing our homework to see what needs to be done to upgrade and modernize the wastewater treatment system.”

With seed funding and ongoing support from Big Island born-and-raised “regenerative global sustainability” venture capitalist Kalika Lawrence, a local grassroots non-profit, ʻIEWE HĀNAU o ka ʻĀINA, emerged with the primary goal of stopping Black Sand Beach LLC. On top of her day job as the Hawaiʻii Island Forest program coordinator with the Nature Conservancy, Nohea serves as the President of this upstart advocacy non-profit, alongside a group of locals—native and non-native. Meanwhile the Center for Biological Diversity has partnered with Lawrence’s Delphi VC to file a legal intervention in opposition to Black Sand Beach LLC’s plan, citing harm to the local community, and the impact on threatened and endangered species, including Hawaiʻian monk seals and green sea turtles.  

On any given day, hordes of tourists find their way to Punaluʻu. Tour buses drop off 60 at a time. Most respect the signs that implore visitors to stay well away from the turtles. Many don’t. Nohea’s sister not too long ago found herself face-to-face with an irresponsible tourist. The woman had been drinking all afternoon and began taking pictures of her little boy, climbing up onto a turtle’s back and jumping off like a toddler at the playground. Nohea’s sister couldn’t bear it, and the interaction quickly turned physical—a scrum of locals and tourists, hair pulling, fists flying, and a drone buzzing above, capturing it all.  

“We see this with our own eyes,” says Nohea. “People and their water bottles and chip bags, filling them up with plants and black sand to take home for a keepsake.” The footprint of tourism here is deep—even without a glittering new resort with a refurbished golf course to lure them in. There’s a global reckoning underway around the adverse impacts of tourism. Occasionally, Nohea and her family have a front row seat to the worst of it.

John Replogle, who works alongside Nohea with the non-profit, graduated from the local high school in 1968 and remembers a gentler age of tourism. “They used to come in big black Cadillacs, and there might be two to four tourists in the car,” he says. “They would get out and look, get back in the car, and go back to Kona.” When they put in the golf course, along with a new road, things started to change quickly.

The Center for Biological Diversity’s Hawaiʻi and Pacific Islands Director, attorney Maxx Phillips, grew up near Honokaʻa on the island’s north side, and was the first in her family to graduate from high school. Her work now takes her not just to all the Hawaiʻian Islands, but as far as Guam, Samoa, and Okinawa. “It’s extra trippy for everybody that this is what I get to do with my time,” she tells me.

Like in a lot of places, the months of COVID-19 lockdown helped shift perspectives on how people and place intersect. “For Hawaiʻian people, it became a time when we could imagine our landscape without tourists,” says Phillips. “We had never been in a place in three generations where we haven't had that pressure. It started to make us think differently about land management and our sacred spaces—new realms of possibilities to move forward.”

Aina Akamu, an educator and administrator in the local high school, comes from many generations of teachers. His grandmother was the historian and curator who worked in the Kaʻū Center for History and Culture built in the era of “Sea Mountain at Punaluʻu.” As a preschooler, Akamu often sat with his grandmother and taught tourists traditional Hawaiʻian games. His mother managed the restaurant. “But it was a different time,” he says. “The whole conversation has changed and our whole connection to the land is different now. Tourism is different now. In the 80s, it was more like people came, they saw, and then they left.”

A piece of art hangs on a wall of my apartment in San Francisco made by dear friends, Keith Tallett and Sally Lundburg. They too are from the Big Island, like Maxx Phillips, near Honokaʻa, up on the north side. They are artists and educators, surfers and parents, Native and non-Native. 

They too have special places that nourish their souls—among them, the black sand beach of Waipiʻo Valley. It’s where their daughter Kiaʻi learned to respect the ocean. It’s where their parents took them when they were kids. The pressures of development, tourism, and the nuances of Native land stewardship and public access in recent years have made Waipiʻo Valley a hotbed of multi-layered community conflict. Through most of 2022, Keith and Sally and scores of other local surfers, subsistence fishers, and ocean people had no access to this place at all. That disconnect from a precious cultural practice was devastating.

They made the piece that hangs on my wall—a text-based print from their “Local Knowledge” series—long before the current tension at Waipiʻo. It reads “HERE IS THE ONLY SPACE LEFT” superimposed over a hazy, liquid blur of greens, blues, and yellows, a reflection on their experiences with encroachment and exclusion on an island they’ve seen change quickly—or slowly. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Keith and Sally don’t remember how the phrase ended up in their sketchbook—a jumble of memories, references, and readings over the years. I found a Bishop Museum Press publication from the 80s that traced this phrase to a Hawaiʻian proverb, the story of the ancient priest Paʻao, referencing the moamoa, the sharp point at the stern of a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe. “Here is the only space left” was said when offering a small seat to someone, when every other space is occupied.

“When certain places are curated by certain people and then we can’t access them anymore—that space is gone,” Keith tells me. “Those are some of the fears I have when these things come up.” There’s also an acknowledgement of gratitude in the phrase, says Sally. “This is where I am in this moment—a place that feeds me.”

The Center for Biological Diversity has an impressive track record of leveraging the Endangered Species Act to construct novel challenges to development and extraction. It has helped halt logging projects in the Pacific Northwest and oil drilling in Alaska. It has bogged down extensions of the southern border wall. From a plastics factory in Louisiana to a U.S. Marine Corps construction project in Guam, the Center for Biological Diversity has wielded the 1973 law to pump the brakes on behalf of threatened critters—from butterflies to bottlenose dolphins.

The mainstream, white-led conservation movement that emerged in the U.S in the 60s and 70s is also undergoing an overdue reckoning, though. For far too long, “conservation” showed little regard for Indigenous land stewardship and sovereignty. Idealized and “pristine” landscapes “unspoiled” of humanity often meant a disdain for communities long intertwined with a place. John Muir’s conception of “wilderness” hinged on Native erasure, after all.

Phillips—a Native Hawaiʻian—was an environmental scientist before she went to law school in Honolulu, where she got her JD in both environmental and Native Hawaiʻian law. In her seven years with the Center for Biological Diversity, she’s helped gently reshape its perspective. “I’ve been able to push back when it comes to my involvement in Hawaiʻian rights, Indigenous policy, and water rights as those relate to traditional customary practices—things that are also outside of the center's traditional wheelhouse,” she says. “I’ve seen them move forward with that Indigenous science perspective where it's needed.”

Black Sand Beach LLC owns the access road to Punaluʻu and leases it to the county for $1 a year—the same arrangement as the previous property owner. A worry familiar to Keith and Sally on the other side of the island—a scenario that has played out in scores of other places across the Hawaiʻian Islands—also nags at some Kaʻū residents: There’s nothing stopping Black Sand Beach LLC from revoking that lease and effectively choking off public access.

Norman Quon, Black Sand Beach LLC’s project manager, agrees that Eva Liu has that right. “People are concerned about these things that could possibly happen,” says Quon. “They need to realize that we're trying to implement a plan to address those concerns.” Quon and Arai say that once the county approves the request for a special management area permit, Black Sand Beach LLC can assure the community that access will continue—a bit of a carrot and stick scenario.  

“Right now, we’re in a kind of holding process, which is fine for us—that means they can't develop,” says Phillips. “The community has been fighting improper development down there for generations now. The people don't want to be scrubbing tourist toilets and valeting their cars.”

Though Black Sand Beach LLC says it has no intention of selling, Nohea and Replogle with ʻIEWE HĀNAU o ka ʻĀINA and Phillips with the Center for Biological Diversity are hopeful for an alternate scenario—that funds can be raised to put the property into permanent conservation, managed by the community, for the community. Maka 'ainana in Hawaiʻian means “the common people.” The literal translation though is, “the people with eyes on the land.” Who better to steward this special place than those who have had eyes here for a multitude of generations?

If you walk a short while from the rundown golf clubhouse, over to where the jagged lava flow meets the roiling sea, you’ll get to a spot that once was called Nīnole Cove. It’s long gone—filled in with the rubble and debris from the construction of the golf course in the 70s. Indulging a bit of whimsy, Replogle wonders aloud how easy it would be to restore the place he swam as a boy. “It’s doable,” he says. “Pull it all out—it’s just rocks.”

Maybe Nīnole Cove could be where Nohea’s future grandson lines up his first speargun shot and brings home an offering of nenue. 

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