Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
beach. We encourage people to move away from the beach or to get a reverse mortgage
for the homes you know will disappear.”
The study covers the Kailua Beach, which includes a park and a stretch of sand where
home prices are in the millions of dollars. President Obama routinely spends Christmas
holidays on Kailua. The dunes are lovingly protected with scratchy native plants meant
to hold the sand in place and in season, the waves are brisk. I walked half the length of
the pure white beach one early morning and met only six people running or walking their
dogs in the exclusive enclave.
The charts are unambiguous. While Kailua Beach is used to “an extremely dynamic
coast system; a result of the variable wind and wave forces,” it will require more dune res-
toration efforts, fencing, more plantings, and pulling back from the shoreline. Even then,
the first blocks by the sea will be wiped away at the turn of the next century if nothing
dramatic has been done to stall climate change.
Mike McCartney, the CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, said his role is to balance
the need to promote tourism which brings in 18 percent of the gross state product, with the
need to protect the state and the environment. Only the military is as important—Hawaii
can safely count on $1 billion a month from tourism and $1 billion from the military.
McCartney is a native-born Hawaiian of Irish and Japanese parents who speaks about
the “aloha spirit” without self-consciousness. “Hawaii and the Aloha spirit are the future
of the United States and the world, integrating peoples from around the world; that is the
future.”
He has set his sights on increasing the number of Chinese tourists and was on hand
when the first charter airplane landed in Honolulu. At the same time, he worries that
the island may lose its identity with too much development. “You can't just have growth,
growth, growth.” The prospect of beach erosion, threats to the ocean, a catalogue of things
that can and are going wrong, bother him, but he refuses to be deterred. When a study
showed problems with marine life in Kaneohe Bay, he banned jet skis there. “There were
protests outside my house.” And he ordered the study of climate change because he needs
information to plot how to navigate that impossibly large crisis.
“You have to get used to the notion of crises in tourism and learn to work around it. I
think that is Hawaii, finding the balance,” he said. With Barack Obama, son of Hawaii, as
the president of the United States elevating the significance of tourism, McCartney said
he is confident that somehow the state will muddle through.
On the other hand, the balance could disappear. He has a nightmare of hordes of tour-
ists flying in and out of Hawaii while the waves rise, eating away the sand.