This screenshot is from the Hawaii Business article, "Toxic Waste in Hawaii", detailing sites of heavy contamination in the islands. There are three Superfund sites in the islands: Del Monte Corporation, Pearl Harbor, and Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Pacific. The islands are framed as being less polluted than the mainland in the article. However, given that disasters like the Red Hill spill were years-in-the-making and are made known to the public after much effort, we can anticipate that there would be many more sites of environmental injustice in the Hawaii. An important site missing from this map is the Waimānalo Gulch Landfill, that has been continously expanded despite community protests of run-offs and flooding.
Read more about Red Hill and other disasters: https://guides.westoahu.hawaii.edu/alohaaina/redhillfueltanks
This map shows the distribution of jet fuel storage tanks/shafts/wells in the Red Hill military facility that have continued to leak for over 50 years, contaminating Hawai'i's aquifers. The heat map shows the density of complaints received in the surrounding areas.
This image shows The Board of Water Supply and Oahu Water Protectors do a peace march to ask for accountability from the military to clean up the Red Hill facility.
Read more about the march and the O'ahu Water Protectors:
https://www.khon2.com/local-news/hundreds-march-to-demand-accountability...
https://oahuwaterprotectors.org/
This image from Wikimedia Commons shows Chinese contract laborers on a sugar plantation in Hawaii in the 19th century. Even though sugar cultivation was practiced by Native Hawaiians, commerical plantations did not begin until the mid 19th century with land leased off by monarchs to sugarcane companies that eventally came to be called as the "Big Five". Several factors drove this transition: American settlement, shutdown of Louisiana's sugarcane plantation-industry after the Civil War, collapse of the Pacific whaling trade, and closing of the missions.
Sugar plantations have contaminated the land with pesticides. Agrarian issues continue on the island with biotech companies using various sites on the islands as experimentation stations for GMO crops using new pesticides with unknown environmental/health effects. One estimate states that over 5,000 open-field tests of pesticide-resistant crops have been conducted on 40-60k acres of land.
According to McLennann (1997) "At the heart of this transformation was the plantation center. Unlike the commercial sugar mill, which drew on existing communities of Hawaiian workers, the plantation center represented a new clustering of population and technology. Specifically, it was characterized by a sizable increase of foreign population, government recognition of the area as a vital economic region with distinct political needs, and by public and private investment in a shared physical infrastructure (e.g., stores, wharves, harbors) established specifically to trade with the West. An important development in Hawai'i's history, the plantation center created new social institutions of dependency."
Read more:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/02/prince-kuhio-and-king-sugar-the-powerf...
https://intercontinentalcry.org/aole-gmo-defending-hawaii-from-the-world...
This image from Civil Beat Honolulu shows the proposed West Kauai Energy Project, an integrated hydropower, solar and battery energy project that purports to reduce energy bills for Kauai residents.
Read more:
https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/adamsj-hawaiis-setting-threaten...
This map was archived by the Ava Konohiki project started to educate young Native Hawaiʻians to be land stewards of the islands. The website has uploaded many maps from the Hawaiʻi State Archives. This map shows the land divisions in O'ahu from before the Mahele event in 1848 when the land title switched from the erstwhile feudal land to an allodial land title system that divided land into Crown lands, Government lands, and Konohiki Lands. O'ahu had total six moku or land divisions that were further divided into many ahupua`a.