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Climate change was the spark, invasive grasses were the tinderwood in Maui.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-swaths-of-invasive-grass-made-mauis-fires-so-devastating-180982729/Pretty simple actually... after more than 2 centuries of sugar/pineapple plantations using the land around Lahaina... the land was abandoned and allowed to become a dense tangle of invasive grasses... combine the wet winter with a summer drought and add in a dash of hurricane force winds and POOF big fire.
WHO is responsible for land management there? Evidently need to clean things up...
For nearly 200 years, Hawaii’s economy was highly dependent on sugar cane and pineapple agriculture. But plantations began declining in the 1990s as the state transitioned to a tourism-dominated economy, report Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski for the New York Times. Vast swaths of farming acreage were abandoned, and in 2016, Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation shuttered.
Without farmers tending that land, nonnative brushes such as guinea grass, molasses grass and buffel grass moved in. These species are native to Africa and were introduced to Hawaii in the late 18th century by European ranchers who wanted a steady supply of drought-resistant livestock forage. Today, almost a quarter of Hawaii’s land cover consists of these invasive shrubs. They run amok on the tens of thousands of acres of plantations on which sugar cane and pineapple plants once flourished. Hardy, voracious and opportunistic, they invade roadside shoulders and encroach on urban housing areas.
“Those fire-prone invasive species fill in any gaps anywhere else—roadsides, in between communities, in between people’s homes, all over the place,” Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, tells Wired’s Matt Simon.
Without farmers tending that land, nonnative brushes such as guinea grass, molasses grass and buffel grass moved in. These species are native to Africa and were introduced to Hawaii in the late 18th century by European ranchers who wanted a steady supply of drought-resistant livestock forage. Today, almost a quarter of Hawaii’s land cover consists of these invasive shrubs. They run amok on the tens of thousands of acres of plantations on which sugar cane and pineapple plants once flourished. Hardy, voracious and opportunistic, they invade roadside shoulders and encroach on urban housing areas.
“Those fire-prone invasive species fill in any gaps anywhere else—roadsides, in between communities, in between people’s homes, all over the place,” Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, tells Wired’s Matt Simon.
Link to tweet
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Hence the general lack of interest in, y'know, trying to fix things.
