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It sits dead center of the main Hawaiian chain, only 25 miles from Oʻahu, with its population of nearly 1 million, and just 8.5 miles from bustling Maui. Its mere name conjures visions of the tragic leper colony founded in 1866 on the inaccessible Kalaupapa Peninsula, a place chosen for its isolation as a quarantine site for the thousands of people, most of them Native Hawaiians with little immunity to the disease, who were torn from their families and exiled there to die. For most of the world, it connotes remoteness. Why is Molokai different? The answers lie both in the peculiarities of Hawai‘i, and in the nature of marginal places generally.įor most Hawai‘i residents, Molokai defines what is called “outer island” Hawai‘i-peripheral and rarely visited. The pattern extends not only back through the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Hawaiian Islands-the most isolated major landmass on Earth-opened to the wider world, but reaches centuries further back into pre-contact, Polynesian Hawai‘i, when the island was similarly marginal to the larger islands of the archipelago. This failure is more remarkable for its longevity. There are pockets of comparative underdevelopment on all of the Hawaiian islands, but only Molokai is marked by a long-term, persistent failure to develop in step with its neighbors.
#RISE OF NATIONS WONDERS MOVIE#
The only movie theater closed more than a decade ago.
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Former hotels and condominiums sit boarded up and rotting, their wooden staircases collapsing and disappearing beneath billows of vines. On the West End, a golf course spectacularly sited above the ocean lies overgrown and abandoned, its once-expensive landscaping of coconut palms now leafless and dead from lack of irrigation. Now, everywhere you look, businesses are shuttered, storefronts empty. As Hawai‘i as a whole responded to the postwar demise of its sugar industry by shifting to tourism, Molokai was slow to follow suit, and faltered in the face of recessions, mismanagement by foreign owners, and determined local opposition. Locally generated, smaller-scale, diverse businesses have long struggled. With few exceptions, young people looking for more than minimal prospects must leave for other islands or to the U.S. communities granted exemptions to welfare reform laws during the Clinton administration. Because of its unusual level of welfare dependency, the island was one of a handful of U.S. Nearly a third of families use food stamps-twice the rate on Maui and triple that on Oʻahu. Molokai is often associated with the leper colony that was founded on Kalaupapa Peninsula, a place chosen for its isolation.Īverage incomes have long been well under the statewide figures, and unemployment numbers have often nearly doubled the statewide rate. Available work has generally been in low-level agricultural jobs for outside corporations running plantations here, subject to the fickle winds of the global economy-or for government, itself directed from off-island, as Molokai is a part of much larger Maui County (population 166,000). But that emptiness also signals an extraordinarily deep malaise: For generations, Molokai has proven stubbornly resistant to broad-based economic development, as well as the stability that comes with it. In often rushed and congested contemporary Hawai‘i, such a place seems nothing short of miraculous. There is just one hotel, and only a handful of restaurants more ambitious than burger shacks, spread over the island’s 38-mile length. Somewhat more than 7,000 people live on the island-about 0.5 percent of the state of Hawai‘i’s population of 1.4 million.
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On Molokai, there is not a single traffic light, and the only things that might be called traffic are a few pickup trucks waiting for a parking spot along the three-block-long main street of the island’s single sizable town, Kaunakakai, population roughly 3,000. It seems a throwback to an older, simpler Hawai‘i, before mass tourism, high-rise hotels, crowded beaches, and traffic gridlock. From the approach of the propeller-driven airplane that brings you from bustling Oʻahu or Maui, you see mile after mile of beaches with no sign of people, and square mile after mile of scrubland marked by nothing more than occasional red dirt roads. The first thing that strikes a visitor to the Hawaiian island of Molokai is how empty it is. A small but vocal group of Molokai residents has aggressively opposed plans for economic development, including cruise ship visits.