This article is co-published with Hawaii Business Magazine as part of our ongoing series: Hawaiʻi’s Water Crisis.
“Any successful voyage in the last 2,000 years was built on a good plan. Coming up with a good sail plan for the canoe of Lahaina is super important to the success of the next seven generations,” he said.
Over the past week, Lahaina and other parts of Maui experienced unprecedented rainfall, resulting in evacuations, devastation, and severe flooding — “a warning from Mother Nature,” Kalepa noted.
“As we begin to experience more and more climate change, global warming, we’re going to see in the future that what we were known to consider normal weather patterns are no longer going to be normal. I think that’s the reality of what we saw from the fire to these almost monsoon rains. The fact is that we live on an island, and we feel and see these things first,” he said.
Archie Kalepa in Kahoma Valley. | Megan Moseley
Currently, West Maui and Lahaina are at a vital tipping point — with funding slowly trickling in to support rebuilding efforts and homes beginning to be developed one by one, the question on many residents’ minds is how West Maui will be sustained for the future.
And at the center of the rebuild dialogue is wai — a sacred part of the ecosystem in Hawaiʻi.
Currently, county officials are looking to develop new water sources in West Maui, including wells planned in Launiupoko and Honolua, along with a $16 million federally funded Kahana Well project. Discussions focus on expanding recycled water in the area, as well as Lāhainā’s water infrastructure and firefighting capacity, all while officials work toward securing oversight of the area’s more than 100-year-old water systems.
Kalepa knows from experience — in Kahoma Valley, his ʻohana holds kuleana land. After a decade of community-led advocacy, streamflow returned to the area after almost 130 years of plantation-led diversion. There, the first kalo plant in a century was replanted in the old loʻi, with native life such as ōʻopu returning as well. The state Commission on Water Resource Management later set a formal instream flow standard.
And the story also carries a warning — with the stream reportedly running dry in 2019 after what advocates described as a lapse by a private infrastructure manager. That manager was West Maui Land Co.
For Kalepa and others, the lesson is twofold: stream restoration works, but only if there’s accountable, public stewardship first.
Number one – put the water into public trust, meaning managed by the county, not managed by private entities. All waters, from all islands, need to be put back into public trust.
The other issue with private ownership of public water infrastructure is accountability. Stream diversion causes long-term impacts on both the surrounding ecosystem and the communities that depend on it, and without accountability, change cannot be made.
“It’s when we begin to divert water from one place to another place – we’re living outside of our means,” he said.
He also said stream restoration is vital to ensuring the long-term health of the area’s aquifers.
“The natural flow of streams from the mountain to the sea keeps our aquifers healthy,” he said.
A strong stream flows after the recent rainfall in West Maui. | Megan Moseley for HCJ
For decades, water has been diverted in West Maui. From water infrastructure developed by Maui Land & Pineapple beginning in the 1900s for agricultural purposes, to expansion that grew in the 1970s, water has been tapped for commercial and real estate purposes, arguably beyond capacity.
And today, West Maui’s current water infrastructure managers are under criticism. From residents to homeowners and golf course operators, both West Maui Land Co and Maui Land & Pineapple are facing severe backlash for alleged mismanagement.
One such resident concerned with the current oversight is Eddy Garcia, a West Maui farmer who has been posting on his social media throughout the recent storm. Garcia shared footage of flooding on his land, which he says is a result of neglect from the current infrastructure managers.
In his efforts to farm and restore the Olowalu area, near the famous petroglyphs, he said he continues to struggle with the aftermath of alleged mismanagement and decay that were amplified during this recent storm. Runoff, trash piling up, and a lack of proper stream flow led to substantial flooding and damage, he said.
Despite continuous efforts to communicate the issues he has faced on his agricultural lot, he said he has received little to no support to help solve these problems over the years.
He also agrees that transferring oversight may be a viable solution to the ongoing problems he’s facing.
“Get it in the hands of the people,” he said. “If it’s in the people’s hands, there are experts and resources, and it can be taken care of.”
Garcia also agrees that returning to the old ahupua’a system is not just helpful, but wise.
“The Hawaiians had a perfect agricultural system. They had a system that went from the source of the water, all the way down to the reef system,” he said.
“These systems were perfect when they were intact,” he said. “The old agricultural companies drastically interrupted this. And when the old developers bought from the agricultural companies land that they didn’t actually own, that they were leasing, then they really didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They didn’t take into consideration that these systems were set up for the water flow.”
Kalepa said that moving forward in the rebuild, the county officials and decision-makers should also consider kūpuna knowledge and support a value-first mindset.
“You could have an engineer with a master’s in engineering, but you take that one kūpuna, and that kūpuna is a grandmaster in area knowledge. We have to put those together and come up with something better than the westernized way of thinking,” he said.
And instead of “building back better,” ask ourselves, “what is better?”
“Is it better for me or better for the place?” he said. “We have to get back to the original management methods that at one time allowed us to manage those lands within the ahupua’a system. The answers to the future lie in our ancestors’ past. We have to take heart and pay attention to what that is.”
