Maui has wildfire cycles as part of its typical ecosystem. They just tend to be very small, temporary brushfires.

Hawaii went from an isolated island with mostly quite unique flora to an agrarian paradise pretty fast. Now, the farm economy there has significantly collapsed. A lot of land was cultivated for crops – almost entirely nonnative ones – and pastures. Native plants were wiped out in huge swathes of land. The pastures, in particular, are a nightmare. Now many of those lands are fallow and poorly-managed, but the plants are still there. Non-native and now invasive grasses are taking over huge stretches of land. These grasses pull more moisture out of the soil. They dry out and burn fast and hot. So instead of mild, ground-level brushfires that clean up dead plants and allow native seeds to do their thing, you are instead seeing raging wildfires.

I expect in the coming years, you’ll see a huge investment from Hawai’i on native habitat projects, land management, and controlled burns. These organisms are just yet another population of foreigners not respecting the island.

The truth is, brushfires like this are a natural part of WAY more world ecosystems than you think. Human interventions – especially bringing in non-native grasses and aggressive pruning like keeping entire meadows mowed instead of full of native plants – are causing directly wildfires to become routine issues all around the world. And climate change is just a harm multiplier on top of it. Not to mention the threat it poses to the rest of the native food chain from pollinators to predators.

I live in a very wet part of the world where major wildfires don’t really happen. Even where I live, invasive grasses wiping out the native savannah meadows are causing major stress to the ecosystem and controlled burns are one of the best things we could be doing (and are relatively safe thanks to the wet climate). Even still, we don’t manage the land, and the debt for that will yet come due.