It’s a sunny morning on the hillside above Lahaina. Volunteers have gathered to spend their Sunday watering more than 4,000 native plants and trees in a lush, 2-acre area. Around it, hundreds of acres are brown and barren. Less than two years ago, this flourishing plot was no different.
“So you guys are part of the first time native plants have been actually physically planted and tended to on this ʻāina in over 200 years,” said Jeremy DelosReyes, a Lahaina fire survivor who started Kaiāulu Initiatives in November 2023.
It was just a few months after the wildfires that burned his hometown — fueled in part by a landscape of unmanaged, invasive plants.
“That's all haole koa around there, cane grass, buffalo grass, and it's the fuel that burnt down our town, burnt down my house, and so I was tired of looking at that,” he said. “So after the fire, I don't know — ‘we just plant one tree.’”
He didn’t realize then, the impact it would have.
“We planted, I think 50 trees that day, and everybody thought that was it. ‘They going to die, and we're done.’ And lo and behold, this is where we're at,” he said. “The reason for the plants was to recharge our aquifer.”
West Maui experiences regular drought conditions and water shortages. Forested areas can help create more rainfall.
Long before the wildfires, Lahaina’s landscape was dominated by sugar and pineapple plantations. Pioneer Mill Company, established in 1860, played a significant role in the economy for over a century.
“All our lives growing up, this was all sugar cane field,” DelosReyes recalls of the area.
Black plastic scraps and irrigation lines are still littering the ground — evidence of plantation era practices. Restoration of the environment is part of Kaiāulu’s goal.
But the project isn’t just for the ecosystem.
“We found out that this place now restores and heals equally as much as we restoring the land — it restores us,” said DelosReyes.
“Kaiāulu has been such a big blessing for all of us — most especially, they call it the mental health of our people, but really it's mauli ola, and mauli ola is the mauli that you have inside of you,” said Shannon Iʻi, who helps lead the nonprofit. “It's not just the organs that work inside of us, but it's the spirit that lives within us.”
Careful tending
Kaiāulu Initiatives has created an oasis on this parcel of state land. Thousands of volunteers from around the world have come to contribute.
Regular volunteers like West Maui resident Poppy Hudson drive up the bumpy dirt road several times a week to tend it.
She held the hose to the base of banana and kukui trees.
“This is kukui over here. Look how big this tree is! Can you believe, like a year and a half ago, this was one tiny, little keiki, like, maybe this tall,” she exclaimed, motioning to her knees. “In the beginning it was literally bringing up jugs of water on a pickup truck and watering the few trees. But look at it now. I mean, this baby is about as tall as me!”
Volunteers still haul water up the hill, but now it’s in huge tanks to refill gravity-fed watering stations.
DelosReyes said they go through more than 2,000 gallons of water each week.
The work is paying off — many of the native species are blooming for the first time.
“There's our first kou flowers!” exclaimed Iʻi.
She walked along the hillside, looking for spots of color among the green leaves.
“These are the gifts, right? That's how we get paid, through the fruits and flowers that will show up, and eventually, our keiki and their keiki will be able to make lei with them,” she said.
There’s aʻali’i, ʻōhiʻa, milo, pohinahina, native koa, ʻulu, banana, and many more.
“So this is maʻo. It's Hawaiian cotton, and it's just is this, like highlighter yellow,” said I’i, her voice excited as she cupped the bright flower in her hands. “And then we've got ʻilima over here. I mean, our flowers are just thriving.”
Towards the bottom of the plot, Riley Bond worked to shore up the soil around the base of each plant.
“I am building a water well. So especially for these ones here, kind of on the slant, we make like a little circle around the plant so that when we water, it stays right here on the root ball, instead of just flowing down,” she explained.
Bond grew up in Lahaina and has been volunteering at Kaiāulu since its inception.
“We would fill up buckets of water, and we would walk with the buckets at our sides, and get bruises on the sides of our legs,” she recalled. “It's crazy how far we've come in such a short amount of time with very minimal funding, also working full-time jobs — it's definitely a beautiful thing.”
"I tell my kids — we tend to these babies now, but we'll sit under the shade of them one day," Bond added.
“This is going to be a forest eventually,” said Iʻi. “And that's so exciting, because we can see that visually. Because we remember when we were in just the haole koa trees, trying to get through the freakin' bushes, watering them with the water bottles. Holy moly, look at where we're at now.”
A break from daily struggles
DelosReyes said that though Kaiāulu brings hope, daily life in Lahaina is still a struggle, two years after the fire.
“For me, I come up here and all the ugliness that I got to deal with down there with the lawsuit, trying to get my insurance, trying to make sure I get my permits,” he said. “Dealing with all of that, and you come up here, it just allows you to breathe.”
He said for some, the project has been life-saving.
“Seven suicides that I know of, we had helped prevent. I don't say it was just us, but one gentleman had a gun to his head and called me up. I said, ‘Just give me one day, come up here,’ and he's still with us.”
DelosReyes and his wife, Gracie, are working to rebuild their home, but, like for many survivors, it’s been a struggle — and they didn’t qualify for FEMA assistance.
“I had a 2,200-square-foot house. At $500 a square foot, my house is going to cost me $1.2 million,” said DelosReyes. “I have $400,000 of insurance. I pay $4,000 a month in rent. I got to come up with $6,000 just to cover my mortgage and rent, not living expenses, not gas.”
For Iʻi, their work is planting seeds for the future — the trees her grandchildren will sit under.
And one day soon, I’i plans to rebuild her family’s burned home. She’ll harvest seeds from Kaiāulu to grow in her own yard.
But for now, being here is healing.
“I can go water a plant. I can go huli ka lima i lalo, put my hands in the dirt, and lomi that dirt to feel of the soils of the kūpuna, the emotions start to feel less heavy,” she said.
You can learn more about Kaiāulu Initiatives here.
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