Under the Sun
Popularity puts a price
on Hawaii’s wild placesFor just $20 a year, I get a whole park -- 209,695 acres of lava fields, rain forests, hiking trails rough and sandy, volcanic craters, jagged coastline, deserts, sulfur banks, cinder cones and steaming bluffs.
I can wander at whim through a museum, step past terrain pocked with petroglyphs, pitch a tent at the campgrounds, munch my lunch to the chittering of apapane and elepaio in a canopy of ohia and hapu'u and marvel at the sunlight gliding down from the summit of Mauna Loa at dawn.
Every year, I hand over my 20 bucks to smiling Ranger Sam at the entrance booth to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I do it gladly. So I don't know why it is that the fee the state charges at Diamond Head -- which will go up this summer -- gets on my nerves almost as much as having to pay to get to Hanauma Bay.
Maybe it's because climbing up Diamond Head and trekking down to the bay used to be free. Then again, it could be a local's clutching of old stomping grounds that have been retooled, refurbished and remade into major tourist attractions. Whatever the case, I have ceded these sites to the tourism industry. I seldom go to Hanauma anymore except to check out the progress of the city's fake-rock "nature center," and the last time I went to Diamond Head was to guide an SUV-load of tourists who had become lost in the underbelly of Kaimuki.
I don't mind sharing. It's just that there are so many to share with and, in the parceling, something is lost to all. The hordes of people who bring in the money that keeps Hawaii's economy rolling have become so overwhelming that enjoyment of some natural areas has been pared.
Tourists also lose. A mother and daughter visiting from Oregon last summer bypassed the crowds at Manoa Falls and Diamond Head and instead hiked Makiki-Tantalus trails. They fled the beaches in Waikiki for the sands of Mokuleia, even though it meant driving more than an hour from their hotel.
The tourism industry isn't unaware of this situation. At a "think tank" session at the University of Hawaii recently, the talk was about "sustainable tourism." The idea is that the industry cannot be sustained merely through the desire for profit, that more tourism ultimately destroys the "product," which in our case is the natural beauty of the islands.
In discussing the damaging effects tourism can have on natural areas, a speaker at the session raised the idea of limiting access by requiring fees, restricting parking, leaving roads unpaved and confining disruptive vehicles like Jet Skis to certain areas.
Of course, businesses that stand to lose money if such limits are put into place would howl. At Yellowstone National Park, a plan to ban snowmobiles has the snowmobile industry bellowing, even though the machines have forced rangers to don respirators to protect themselves from the carbon monoxide. Banning tour buses at certain sites in Hawaii would draw similar complaints. As for fees, they haven't reduced the number of people at Diamond Head or Hanauma significantly, unless you count residents.
Lines have to be drawn somewhere. If not, we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But paying for admission at Diamond Head and Hanauma feels wrong. It goes against the belief that everyone should have equal access to the ocean and the land. Besides, we've already paid -- through taxes.
This still doesn't explain why I'm willing to pay for the annual park pass. I think it's because the park remains mostly in an untamed state. The manmade facilities are few and are designed to have minimal impact on the wildness of the landscape. In the park, I can leave behind the harrying of modern life and find stimulation from natural sources, where not everything is planned or programmed or paved, where the pace on a trail is my own, where the price of admission isn't really measured in dollars, but in my ability to move on foot.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin for 25 years.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.