The Hawaiian Islands have long been a tourist destination for people from both North America and Asia. What can we do to help protect and preserve its beautiful and fragile environment, even with increasing tourism, land use, and population growth?
Because the Hawaiian Islands have such beauty and picturesque quality to them, they tend to attract people to themselves, but particularly to the island of Oahu, where the capital, Honolulu, is located. The population of Hawaii has been growing at a rate of 15%, which, even though it is less than the growth rate of several other states within the United States, because of the fact that this is a set of islands, makes it all the more harmful. Even more, the fact remains that most of the population growth that happens in the state of Hawaii is focused on the island of Oahu, particularly the Honolulu metropolitan area, which, according to the 2000 census, has a population of over 800,000 inhabitants, many of which are packed in areas that have a population density of 60,000 people or more, rivaling that of Chicago’s downtown or New York City’s Manhattan Island.
Some of the deteriorating quality of life because of the mass infusion of people on the island of Oahu can be seen in the fact that there is much vehicular congestion on the roadways, particularly H-1 and H-2, Hawaii’s equivalent of the mainland’s Interstate Highway System. There is also the fact that the increasing population size in Hawaii has increased the burden on welfare costs.
In other states, when the population increases, and the state doesn’t have the resources to take care of all those people’s needs, whether in food, building material, and other things, they can usually ship them from other states, since they are contiguous and connected to the other states. In fact, since there are many places in the contiguous United States, and Canada, for that matter, that have low population densities, but have a large amount of resources available, either because they have large amounts of land available to grow large amounts of food that they then send to other states, or because they have natural resources available, from the lumber made from their forests, or from the minerals and ore that can be extracted from the ground in mines. They then send the materials they don’t need to other states, making money in the process for their businesses. Since Hawaii needs more resources than they can supply themselves, either for food, or for building materials, or other needs, they then have to get those resources from other places, except in the case of Hawaii, resources cannot be shipped easily on connecting roads, but have to be shipped in, usually by boat, and occasionally by plane, meaning that the cost of these resources is much higher than they would be if they were easily connected to other states.
So, what more can be done about trying to control land use and population growth? One thing, first of all, needs to be understood, and that is that Hawaii is not in a place to be self-sufficient in terms of providing all their food needs, and so food, as well as building materials and other goods, need to be brought in from elsewhere. From this perspective, in order for Hawaii to carry its own weight, and not be a burden to others, at least from an economic perspective, this means that they need to produce enough money, have enough economy in place, to pay for goods, materials, and foods, from outside, particularly the North American continent. With this understood, what more can be done to control land use, and make life better for the people on the islands?
- We can create better public transportation systems, especially in the Honolulu corridor, to allow for people to get around better, and faster, while at the same time reducing the congestion on the roadways.
- We could control population growth, so as not to cause the population of Hawaii to become even larger than it already is. Perhaps we could do this by having a system of approval before someone is allowed to have a full-time residence. There is something else we could do on top of that. If we do a cost-analysis to determine that it cost X dollars to take care of a resident, perhaps we could pay people X dollars to leave the state for the North American continent, thus saving Hawaii some money – this is similar to what the water czar did in Las Vegas when they paid people to replace their lawns with zeroscape, except in this case people would be paid to leave rather than to replace their lawns.
- We could do what is done in already in South Korea. If you’ve ever been to South Korea, you know that most people live in high-rise apartment buildings. This could reduce the amount of land needed for residential purposes, even in areas that are agricultural or rural. South Korea has about the same amount of land as the state of Indiana, but with a population of 50 million people compared to Indiana’s 6.5 million people, and the fact that 70% of South Korea is mountainous compared to 90% of Indiana being farmable, the system in place in that nation has worked for them, while allowing its citizens to have a high quality of life and a good standard of living. Couldn’t we do something like that in Hawaii, and make the space affordable by making sure there is enough supply to keep rental costs low?
- We could create desalinization plants to provide irrigation water to allow presently marginal lands to be used, in the future, for intensive agricultural purposes, such as found in parts of Central Valley in California, including some land that is presently used only for ranching purposes. Some of this water could allow us to use some of the mountainsides to grow fruit and nut trees, without fear of erosion if done right, to allow even more of their food needs to be met.
- We could develop some artificial reefs out in the open seas, perhaps fifty miles out, in order to increase the population of wild seafood, which could be caught through some systems of baits and traps. Or, we could grid off, with netting and barriers, portions of the ocean, in order to be used for a Hawaiian version of a fish farm, where fish are grown rather than caught.
These are only a few of the ways we could control population and land usage, while increasing Hawaiian agricultural yield to allow them to provide for all their people. There is much to do to mitigate the problems of population and overuse of land in the beautiful island state of Hawaii.
