Since I drew this cartoon, the death toll in Maui from the wildfires has risen to 111, and it will sadly but undoubtedly rise more. There were serious failures in the emergency alarm system, so that residents and tourists barely had time to escape with the clothes on their backs and few could rescue their pets. Hawaiian Electric is now facing lawsuits for failing to maintain its electric grid. And not to let a disaster go wasted, real estate speculators are already trying to buy up property from devastate home owners. Which fits a pattern a pattern of resource exploitation and native displacement going back to the 19th Century. As Rebecca Watson explains — to debunk the latest antisemitic conspiracy theory blaming the disaster on Jewish space lasers — colonization and global warming have combined to create he conditions of drought, drained wetlands, and extreme weather to set the forests ablaze. Our nearly extinct friend the Hawaiian crow can tell you all about it over a bottle of rum.
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