On my recent trip to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, I could not help but notice the negative environmental impacts caused by humans.
I drove around the countryside to better experience Hawaiian culture. I would always come across signs with big red letters that read, “Keep the country the country!”
This phrase confused me because there was no other context. Did people want Hawaii to continue to be its own authentic country and not a busy city? The more I thought about this idea, the more I started to support it.
Places like Hawaii are big tourist hot spots. A total of 788,931 visitors came to the Hawaiian Islands in March of 2022. Most people go to these Pacific Islands on vacation and don’t really care about the effects that they leave on these places.
One day, I was hiking up Diamond Head, a volcanic crater. As I was taking in the beautiful sights, I also saw trash all over the place. There were medical masks, water bottles, socks – you name it. To see historic places like these being polluted and trashed by people was very upsetting.
Keeping landscapes beautiful is not
the only reason we should leave places like Hawaii as they are. It is also important to preserve the state’s culture. If you drive to the North Shore of Oahu, you can experience true Hawaiian culture and learn a lot about how it once was.
To this day, there are still WWII bunkers, palaces and villages you can visit to experience the island’s rich history. This part of Oahu was calm compared to the city, and it still felt like an old Hawaiian village.
It is so important to preserve this culture and not industrialize Hawaii or force it to be like the rest of the mainland. How else will people learn about the culture of the Pacific Islands? We don’t need more strip malls, big chain restaurants or big factories taking over these beautiful islands.
They need to be left alone. We need to stop turning places with rich histories into tourist places and be more mindful about how we are treating our Earth. In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, we should learn more about these countries and see what we can do to preserve their cultures.
When vacationing this summer, I urge all of us to be more respectful to the places we visit and stop turning every place into our own personal playgrounds.
