, West Maui councilwoman Tamara Paltin urged tourists to go elsewhere. “We don’t want to be seeing people on vacation when we’re trying to pull our lives back together,” she said. “We don’t want our roads closed because tourists can’t follow directions.”later apologized on its website and Facebook page
Still, some residents feel the trip was insensitive. “When West Maui residents see tourists snorkeling or vacationing [right now], it’s triggering,” Tiare Lawrence, a Native Hawaiian community organizer who was born and raised in Lahaina, tellsLawrence’s family home, as well as the houses and apartments of other family members and friends, burned down. It took her several days to determine that her brother had survived. “PTSD is settling in,” she says.
“When I first started looking at disaster capitalism, it was in the context of warfare and counterterrorism and how that was sort of an extension of the military industrial complex. But after the tsunami, what we started to see was that it was happening in the aftermath of natural disasters,” Klein told.