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al Resources as the state began the painful process of imagining life when no amount of
preservation efforts will hold back the sea.
Samuel J. Lemmo is the administrator of Hawaii's Office of Conservation and Coastal
Lands which oversees 2 million acres of public and private land within the Hawaiian con-
servation district as well as the beach and marine lands out to the seaward extent of the
state's jurisdiction. He is the man who watches the sand disappear.
“The thing is, in Hawaii we take access to beaches very, very seriously,” he told me in
his office in downtown Honolulu. “For us it is the highest tide of the year at the highest
wash of the highest wave. Like access to Waikiki—this is a fascinating question especially
now when we're staring sea rise in the face.”
Tourism is Hawaii's number-one industry; tourist spending has risen to $1.01 billion a
month following the slow recovery from the 2008 recession. The future of Hawaii depends
on tourism and those seemingly endless beaches on multiple islands in the blue Pacific
Ocean. Everything in Hawaii derives from planeloads and cruise ships of visitors—the ho-
tels, restaurants, shops, and real estate firms. The only other game in town is the U.S. mil-
itary, which owns prime territory, including Pearl Harbor (known to every schoolchild),
Fort Shafter, Schofield Barracks, Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Wheeler and Hickam Air
Force bases and the headquarters of the Pacific Command, which is the forward base with
responsibilities for an area of roughly half the globe north to south from both poles and
east to west from the western coast of the United States to the west coast of India.
“Sometimes it freaks people out when I talk about the erosion,” said Lemmo, who
speaks in the low-key style of the island and ends his emails with “Mahalo” a Hawaiian
expression which literally means “in the presence of the divine” but is used as a familiar
form of “thank you.” He also wears aloha shirts and sandals to work.
“People want to know what this talk does to the value of their property, their inherit-
ance, their business—it's a touchy subject. All I can tell them is if you're on the shorefront,
you'll be the first to go.”
What the state can do is inventory the beaches and plan for triage, he said. Waikiki will
be saved. The state has spent millions of dollars, with contributions from the hotels, to re-
store the beach by pumping sand in from offshore. “It's a man-made beach to begin with.
It was marshland until people came in and filled and heavily engineered the south beach.
From the 1930s to the 1960s they brought in at least 400,000 cubic yards of sand from oth-
er parts of the island. Now it supports prime real estate.
Lemmo helped initiate an economic study of beaches with the tourism authority to cal-
culate future costs, knowing some of the shoreline had to be saved. “It doesn't matter how
much beach restoration costs—if we don't do it, we undermine our vitality,” he said.
There is little the state can do for locals who own stunning modern mansions on the
beach. “We would advocate strategic retreat. First, we tell them to stop building near the
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