Remembering Lahaina: What I Learned about Tourism, the 'Aina, and Myself during Twelve Years on Maui

The August 8, 2023, Lahaina fire was the worst thing to happen to West Maui since the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the late nineteenth century. The fire was a tragic disaster, but it didn’t simply happen due to random chance. The conditions that made West Maui ripe for destruction by uncontrolled fire date back more than a century. Anthony Pignataro knows this because he spent a dozen years reporting about politics and society on Maui, which often impacted West Maui, for one of the last alternative newsweeklies in Hawai‘i.

A Southern California resident since 2018, Pignataro watched the fire unfold on social media and television news. He then spent the next two months remotely reporting almost nonstop on the aftermath and immediate recovery of Lahaina for MauiTime, his old paper. After watching Hawai‘i’s governor shame West Maui residents into going back to work in luxury resorts just a few months after the fire robbed many of them of their homes, pets, jobs, and even family members, he realized he needed to write this book.

From going undercover at an Olowalu gathering to learn more about land-developer marketing plans to walking through Kā‘anapali parking lots to see how resorts were keeping residents from the coastline, Pignataro immersed himself in West Maui political life. Along the way he wrote about the redevelopment of the old Pioneer Mill plantation, the controversial West Maui sewage treatment plant that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the endlessly seductive ways multinational corporations used to lure ever-greater numbers of tourists to the island.

His memoir is filled with valuable insight into not only why the 2023 fire happened, but also why Lahaina’s recovery will be so difficult and time-consuming.

This is not a conventionally structured memoir, but rather a series of essays, each centered on something Pignataro learned and why Maui is the way it is: politically, socially, and economically. But as he began writing this book, Pignataro realized something else—his time on Maui had also changed him, teaching him about culture, history, racism, misogyny, and his own biases, which he also recounts here.