When I first began working in Hawai‘i nearly two decades ago, I learned an essential truth from Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners: Hawai‘i doesn’t have a water problem — it has a human problem. For Native Hawaiians, land is not a resource to use. It is an ancestor to care for. Long before Western conservation terminology existed, Hawaiians practiced a highly sophisticated land stewardship model called the ahupua‘a system, an interconnected approach to caring for the land from mauka to makai, mountain to ocean. What happened at the summit influenced the health of the reefs; what happened in the watershed shaped the ability of communities to thrive.
In an ahupua‘a, the forest is the heartbeat. Healthy forests means healthy water. Healthy water means healthy people and communities. Today, organizations like Skyline Hawai‘i, Kula Community Watershed Alliance, and Haleakalā Conservancy are restoring what Native Hawaiians always knew: When the forest is cared for, the water will return.
On the slopes of Haleakalā, Skyline Hawaiʻi is proving what happens when tourism becomes a partner to regeneration. Since 2002, the team has been replanting native forests in an area long stripped of its ecological identity. What was once a landscape of invasive species and eroding soil is now an emerging native forest — koa and ʻōhiʻa seedlings stretching toward the sky, birds returning to the habitat they once lost. Travelers who join our Skyline Conservation Zipline experience aren’t just zipping over native forests; they’re investing in the regeneration of this natural ecosystem, and planting into the heartbeat of the watershed.
You press the koa seedling into the soil, and the guides talk about how native forests act almost like magnets — capturing moisture from passing clouds, slowing rainfall, pulling water back into the ground. In that simple act of planting, the story of the ahupuaʻa becomes visible. With the forest’s return, water returns. When water returns, life returns.
But regeneration is not only happening where the land remains lush. It is happening where the land burned. In August 2023, wildfires tore through Kula, a place where families had lived for generations, where the slope still held stories of ranching, farming, and old homesteads. After the fire, while ashes still smoldered, neighbors gathered together and formed the Kula Community Watershed Alliance. They didn’t wait for someone else to save their land, they stepped into stewardship themselves, guided by hydrologists, conservationists, and cultural advisors. Their mission was clear: stabilize the soil, heal the watershed, and rebuild the native forest so that what burned does not burn again.
In Maui, this ahupuaʻa system becomes a blueprint for resilience. Native trees shade out invasive grasses that act as fuel. Roots hold the land in place so that rainfall doesn’t rip away the remaining topsoil. The watershed becomes a sponge again, not a slide. Each planting, each cleared invasive, each shaded green break is a quiet declaration: this land will not be lost twice.
Further upslope, at the summit, Haleakalā Conservancy, the philanthropic partner to Haleakalā National Park, funds projects that protect the park’s most vulnerable species and sites. Their work ensures that the native birds returning to Skyline’s forest have a protected habitat, that the watershed that Kula Community Watershed Alliance is restoring continues to flow, that sacred cultural sites are preserved for future generations. This isn’t just conservation — it is continuity.
What ties these three efforts together is simple but profound: they restore balance.
Balance between people and place.
Between past knowledge and future responsibility.
Between adventure and stewardship.
When you walk through a reforested section of Haleakalā, you begin to see what balance looks like. The air feels wetter. The earth holds moisture instead of shedding it. The wind moves differently through native foliage than through invasive stands of grass. With restoration comes transformation: clouds linger, rain slows, water sinks back into the mountain. The aquifer — Hawaiʻi’s silent lifeline — begins to refill.
This is what regenerative travel looks like. Not extraction, but reciprocity. Not consuming a place, but participating in its healing. Travelers who plant native trees with Skyline, who donate or volunteer with the Kula Community Watershed Alliance, who support the Haleakalā Conservancy, aren’t doing something symbolic. They are becoming part of a hydrological cycle, a community that cares, and a future for land and people.
Native Hawaiians have always known:
When you care for the land, the land cares for you.
He aliʻi ka ʻāina; he kauwā ke kanaka.
The land is chief; the people are its servants.
Today, Maui’s forests are calling us back into that relationship. Not as spectators, but as stewards.
