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On Feb. 28, two environmentally consequential events occurred, both with momentous significance to all residents of Hawaii.

The first was a calculated warning originating in Berlin: the release of the International Panel on Climate Change’s “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” occurred while most of us here in Hawaii were yet asleep.

The second took place right here on Oahu, also while most of us were fast asleep: the home at 58-181 Ke Nui Road fell off of its tofu-block foundation and fell onto the beach and into the surf zone at Rocky Point, becoming as far as I can discover, the first coastal building on Oahu to fail in the global heating era.

All in Hawaii Nei, if we are realistic about our circumstance, will accept and mark this as a warning every bit as critical as provided by IPCC 2022.

I am a documentary photographer whose work often focuses on issues of climate change. The year 2019 was a busy year for me. I photographed the Camp Fire burn zone 100 days after the megafire ignited, and wrote of its long-term and often under-reported consequences. I took this fire as a dire warning — 87 dead, almost 19,000 buildings destroyed, the town of Paradise, Calif., annihilated and its 26,218 residents turned into climate refugees.

I spent time documenting the Youth Climate Strike protests in Los Angeles where thousands of school-age children took to the streets in well-organized demonstrations to alert society to their concerns about their future in the face of global heating.

My last assignment of the year was making portraits and interviewing personnel at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, one of the nation’s premier climate research facilities, as they spoke to me of their concerns for the future as atmospheric temperatures moved closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. That level is a threshold that scientists have defined as a hard limit for safe human habitation of the planet Earth.

The year 2020 brought us the pandemic and I spent the year at home, helping to organize a climate speaker series at Iolani School as the world shut down. I spoke to the Iolani community, along with Dr. Chip Fletcher and many others, about our climatic situation, its urgency and what it might mean to us here in Hawaii.

These last two years have shown us, in painful detail, what a global pandemic is like. As the world warms and we humans increase our pressure on natural ecosystems we can expect more such pandemics in the decades to come and our position at the crossroads of the Pacific puts us squarely in harm’s way.

Difficult Questions

Today I am working at producing a coastal survey of the island of Oahu, the island that is my home and as much raised me as my parents did as I dove, surfed, swam and hiked, drinking in a paradise that was flawed even in the 1970s and 1980s, but nowhere near as impacted and in such danger as it, and we, are today.

Our situation presents us very difficult questions that we must answer quickly and together, just as the family who owns the fallen home on Ke Nui Road is wrestling with their own unimaginable questions in the aftermath of this last northwest swell.

While at Ke Nui Road making pictures I was told that the owners of the house are a Hawaiian family who has kept the property in their family for five generations. I was told that they are woven into the fiber of their community on the North Shore.

I didn’t have to be told that they are a family that has done nothing wrong, even as today they are paying the price of our society’s easy embrace of an extractive, petroleum economy and our state’s willingness to countenance damaging coastal armoring.

This is a family that is answering tangled, interwoven questions it did not seek to ask and which face all of us as a contractor works to stabilize their fallen building in preparation to drag it back up the sand bluff with an excavator and determine if it might be salvaged or must be dismantled. The contractor’s work is labor I can’t help but seeing as metaphoric.

The IPCC 2022 report provides crucial warnings: that questions of recovery from disaster, retreat, and the reconfiguration of our societies away from fossil fuel burning and towards environmental conservation and equity are as urgent as removing 58-181 Kenui Road from the beach where it otherwise would soon be broken apart and loose its hazards into the surf; that climatic dangers are increasing and becoming more menacing than predicted a decade ago; that the threats we face will increase if we don’t maintain plus 1.5 degrees Celsius as our final warming threshold; that worldwide we have not done enough to adapt to the consequences ahead, let alone remain safe in their face; that human and ecosystems’ ability to handle increased warming become diminishing prospects as the world warms every tenth of a degree toward and surpassing plus 1.5 degrees Celsius. And it reminds us that the poorer one and one’s society might be, the worse the outcomes in a heated climate.

A single Hawaiian family’s experience with a North Shore house that slipped into the water is Hawaii’s canary in a coal mine. It is every bit as shrill a warning as IPCC 2022. Their experience, and all of ours as we head into the conditions that we have repeatedly been enjoined to address, is one that can’t possibly be undertaken alone. Their and our circumstances are so onerous that it will take the full weight of the state, City and County of Honolulu and community to face, and doing so will require re-evaluating old paradigms that our country and state have been built on; the unassailability of private property, infinite growth, instant gratification.

The owners of 58-181 have been forced to respond under duress to the failures of society at large, they are innocents in the larger climatic picture. Our society on Oahu, knowing what we have been reminded of this week by the IPCC and have seen at Rocky Point, will not be innocents when large local populations are left to their own devices as sea levels rise and subsume coastlines, storms continue to flood us, wild fires increase and threaten, and days with high heat indexes kill.

We must start our work today, there is no opportunity to turn back the clock.

We knew our fossil fuel dependence to be a loaded gun pointed at the health of our atmosphere, that it would raise sea levels, and watched it enrich a select few and serve to buttress the inequality that prevents many Kanaka and local families from owning their own homes in a land where indigenous and local ties lose out to a real estate paradigm that rewards only the wealthy.

We must start our work today, there is no opportunity to turn back the clock, and we must be prepared to speak openly, honestly, and kill golden cows — there will necessarily be substantial, difficult compromise and readjustment. Our politicians and business leaders must start thinking differently, in a more pono manner, about the state’s many vested interests and broken paradigms. They must think imaginatively and involve community members whose voices they have not necessarily been accustomed to hearing.

If we are not able to quickly, thoroughly and justly complete the tasks ahead I will be forever documenting disaster and suffering as the climate warms and I will not have to travel far at all to do so.