The other day at windswept Baldwin Beach in Pāʻia I found a cowrie shell at the edge of the waves. A whole shell, no broken pieces — a rare find. It had a brown halo around the bottom, the curved hump was gleaming purple. Underneath, the ribbed edges were polished bright by the sand and sea. I grasped the small treasure in my hand, excited to bring it home to my 8-year-old daughter, a nature-lover who wants to be a biologist when she grows up.
When I got home and showed her the shell her eyes brightened. Then, taking it in her hand and turning it over, they dimmed. It’s empty, she said. Where’s the snail? I shrugged. I guess it died. But isn’t the shell pretty? She nodded, but looked thoughtful. Pretty on the outside, yes. But empty. She handed it back, disappointed, and went back to reading her book. Perplexed, I put the cowrie shell on a bookshelf beside my other shells — my collection of carcasses from the sea. Instead of beachy and beautiful, the collection now looked a bit sad.
I’ve collected shells all my life — each one is a reminder of an experience, a moment in time, a story. My story. But I hadn’t thought much about the creatures that built those shells, who or what they were, their lives and their stories, how they fit into the bigger picture. Somehow my 8-year-old daughter understood all this with a wisdom that seems beyond her years.
She was right: The shell in my hand was so much more than decoration — it was once a living creature adventuring on a thriving reef. Now it was just a hollow object sitting on a shelf, a small trophy to boast of our dreamy Hawai‘i life. We claim the empty shell in an attempt to claim the living essence that it represents: golden sand, living reef, rolling sea. Mine. But can we really own the sand and the sea? It turns out, many have tried.
Just down the beach from where I found the shell is an area called Baldwin Cove. During the early summer it’s a sandy hook, a protected cove perfect for swimming. But by fall it’s carved away by the waves and becomes a pocket of eroded shoreline with old metal pipes and skeleton trees sticking out of the sand. The entire arc of Baldwin Beach suffers from constant erosion. To the west of Baldwin, the collapse of the coastline is alarming: Beachfront condos are balanced precariously near a disintegrating sandy cliff.
Sand exists not just to create pretty pictures and beach walks for humans — it protects coasts from being battered by waves. It washes up where it is needed most, moving around in a natural ebb and flow of beach that at times seems mysterious to us. But what has happened here is no mystery.
Thirty-foot high dunes once anchored the shoreline here, stretching from Pāʻia, through Kahului, all the way through Wailuku, Waiehu, and out to Waiheʻe Point. Giant mounds of sand, bits of coral and shells — some as tall as 200 feet. An early visitor traveling through the area from Wailuku to Haʻikū in 1873 described it as a “mini Sahara desert.” You can still see remnants of that dune system down near Baby Beach, and especially at the coastal preserve in Waiheʻe out west. The Sand Hills neighborhood of Wailuku is built on top of hardened or “lithified” dunes and still carries their name.
Like sand itself, dunes also play an important role in coastlines, protecting them from storms, tsunamis, erosion and inland flooding. Protecting us. Long ago, Native Hawaiians considered many sand dunes sacred enough to use them for burials — the remaining dunes at the west end of Baldwin still contain many iwi kūpuna. Back in the day, locals called that section “Bones Beach.”
The Hawaiian name for this beach is Kapukaulua — translating as the fishing hole for ulua. This stretch of coast once provided food for several villages. The beach was later renamed for the son of Henry Baldwin, co-founder of Alexander & Baldwin, one of the Big Five sugar companies that ruled the islands politically and economically for more than a century. The sugar era is over — A&B closed Maui’s last plantation in 2016 — but many of its legacies remain. A&B is still one of Hawai‘i’s largest private landholders and has since pivoted to commercial real estate.
This stretch of coastal land, along with vast acreage upcountry and across central Maui, was acquired first by a man named Claus Spreckels. He built a massive plantation that stretched from the north shore across central Maui, and a mill to process his cane. A housing camp for plantation workers was built just behind the dunes down near Baby Beach.
A&B eventually took over Spreckels’ company, consolidating much of Maui’s sugar industry. Because Hawaiʻi’s volcanic soils were acidic, a processed “lime” was needed to amend the fields and increase yields. And what does one need to make lime? Sand with bits of coral and shells — mountains and mountains of it.
In 1907, the company built a lime kiln at what is now Baldwin Cove, which was then a sandy point. Kapukaulua’s sand dunes and beaches were then mined — for decades — more than an Olympic-sized swimming pool of sand was hauled away every year. Later sand was also used for road-building and cement, and the amount of sand mined from that area was roughly multiplied by three. This devouring of Maui’s north shore coastline went on for more than 40 years. Most of the sand dunes were flattened, the shoreline carved away.
To protect the lime kiln, a rock wall was constructed as a breakwater. Other breakwaters were built throughout the 1900s — including large walls to enclose Kahului Harbor. Many piers were built for ships to dock, including very large piers for U.S. Navy ships during World War II.
These rock and cement structures “harden” the shoreline, preventing sand from moving around to protect the areas where it’s needed most. A single hard structure affects all the surrounding beaches by pushing waves off to the sides — amplifying erosion. Property lines mean nothing to the ocean. The actions of one owner affect many others. We are all connected through this environment that we share.
The plantation worker barracks were eventually torn down and an exclusive country club and golf course were built in roughly the same spot. Now multimillion-dollar estates and condos sit on former sugar plantation land, where massive sand dunes once protected the coast. The new residential neighborhood was named Spreckelsville, after sugar baron Claus. Most of this neighborhood and the surrounding coastline are now considered a tsunami hazard zone.
In the middle of Spreckelsville are the beachfront condos of Sugar Cove. One of the old Baldwin family estates still sits on the rocky point. Seawalls protect several residences — fortifying those properties at the expense of the rest of the shoreline. Mine.
To try to preserve this once-pretty beach, the condo owners have spent millions over the course of two decades to import more than 20,000 tons — about five Olympic-sized swimming pools — of sand from other places, some of it shipped all the way from Oʻahu, mined from other ecosystems to replace what’s been lost here. The imported sand is consistently carved away by the waves and must be replenished every few years. Locals complained that some of the inland dune sand that was shipped in was too fine and silty and suffocated reefs and shoreline habitats — fish and octopus suffered.
These kinds of “beach nourishment” efforts are controversial, and some coastal scientists say they are short-lived. With sea level rise already happening, many believe retreat from the shoreline is inevitable. The process could be orderly and “managed” or it could be a desperate scramble — we can decide — but in this battle, the ocean will eventually win.
My kids like to boogie board at Sugar Cove. When we visit I sometimes sit perched on the edge of the sandy shelf, plastic fencing at my back, a crumbling edge disintegrating at my feet. That place always makes me uneasy. Something feels off. It’s a pretty view. There are pretty homes. I watch pretty people take pretty pictures of their pretty lives to post online. But like the cowrie shell I brought my daughter, it all seems pretty on the outside, but empty.
We spend so much time building up the hard exteriors of our lives for others to see that we forget we are also soft, living animals inside. We forget that we are part of a larger ecosystem, part of a larger story that is not just about us. We collect objects — luxury houses, fancy cars, designer clothing and diamond rings — to try to capture this life and contain it in material items we can touch and see. Mine. We take, take, take, trying to fill our internal sense of disconnection from life on this planet, but it’s never enough. Because that hole can’t be filled by taking. It can only be filled by giving back.
Last year a county pavilion built near the water at Baldwin Beach Park collapsed. Sand had already filled much of the interior, then the supportive posts toppled, then the roof caved in. The county came and hauled it away. One day it was there during my beach walk; a week later it was gone. Now volunteers gather there to plant native vines, grasses and succulents to help stabilize the sand, to promote the formation of natural dunes. Giving back.
Shells and coral help stabilize coastlines, too. They are the basic materials from which sand is made. They provide habitats for creatures, and are anchors for algae, seagrass and sponges. Every time we take a shell or bit of coral from the beach, we are contributing to the damage and erosion of the shoreline. It might seem silly to think that way: It’s just one shell — it can’t hurt if I take just one shell, right? Said the roughly 10 million people who visit the Hawaiian Islands every year. And thousands more residents, like myself, who walk the beaches every day. What one person does affects many others.
The cowrie shell sat on my bookshelf for several months, beside other shells I’d collected on that same beach. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my daughter had said, and about everything I’d learned about what’s been taken from this place. One day I gathered them all up and drove down to Baldwin Beach. I took my collection of shells and gave it back to the sea.
Mahalo nui to Scott Fisher at the Hawaiʻi Land Trust, Heidi Sherman of the Baldwin Beach Study, and Kaimana Brummel for background information and insights on this stretch of Maui coastline. Learn more about Baldwin Beach sand dune restoration efforts and volunteer opportunities here.
