Hawai‘i is growing a deep-rooted movement to restore native streams and end plantation-era water diversion and waste. We are shedding the injustices of the past and restoring a shared natural and cultural resource for the future.
**Call to action to support Maui Komohana’s Water Resources**
In Hawaiian culture, wai (water) is more than a resource. It’s the economy (waiwai, meaning wealth), it’s society (kānāwai, meaning the law), it’s family and deity (the embodiment of the ancestral god Kāne). It’s life itself!
Despite long-standing legal protections for wai as a public trust resource, many of Hawai‘i’s life-giving rivers and streams have been drained for over a century by sugar plantations and their successor companies seeking to maintain their stranglehold on our most precious resource. But the communities that have been starved of water all these years are standing up for justice.
A wave of change has been building to uphold the public trust and restore the flow of freshwater from ma uka to ma kai (mountain to sea) and the ways of life that depend on this connection. Now spanning several generations and communities across the pae ‘āina (archipelago), this movement combines legal action and “taro-roots” community power to return the waters to the people and revitalize the living Hawaiian culture.
**Call to action to support Maui Komohana’s Water Resources**
In Hawaiian culture, wai (water) is more than a resource. It’s the economy (waiwai, meaning wealth), it’s society (kānāwai, meaning the law), it’s family and deity (the embodiment of the ancestral god Kāne). It’s life itself!
Despite long-standing legal protections for wai as a public trust resource, many of Hawai‘i’s life-giving rivers and streams have been drained for over a century by sugar plantations and their successor companies seeking to maintain their stranglehold on our most precious resource. But the communities that have been starved of water all these years are standing up for justice.
A wave of change has been building to uphold the public trust and restore the flow of freshwater from ma uka to ma kai (mountain to sea) and the ways of life that depend on this connection. Now spanning several generations and communities across the pae ‘āina (archipelago), this movement combines legal action and “taro-roots” community power to return the waters to the people and revitalize the living Hawaiian culture.
Restoring ma uka to ma kai flow sustains our native stream life, wetlands, and estuaries, traditional farming and fisheries, and drinking water supplies.
Communities across the islands rise up for their values and ways of life, driving this movement for change both in the law and on the ground.
Upholding the public trust is about justice: redressing a century of wrongs from the past, and realizing a vision of stewardship for the future.
We unite around our kuleana to protect our waters—and hold private diverters and government trustees accountable to that same kuleana.
Community leaders from across the pae ‘āina o Hawai‘i nei are speaking up in support of the Water Commission taking decisive action to reinstate the ousted Deputy Director of the Water Commission, Kaleo Manuel, and…
Pōʻai Wai Ola and Nā Kiaʻi Kai call the “midnight rubberstamp” a violation of Hawaiʻi’s protections for streams and the environment On February 6, 2023, kalo farmers and subsistence fishers from West Kauaʻi filed suit…
