Hawaii Fast Facts
Area
28,311 square kilometers
(10,931 square miles)
Population
1,257,608
Capital
Honolulu; 378,155
Per Capita Income
U.S. $30,040
The North-East coast of the island is its most rugged, with several sections not easily accessible by road. The East end is the part which receives the most precipitation on the island, several hundreds of inches of rain, which sustains a lush tropical vegetation, and many orchid farms. Precipitation has also limited development, and Hilo ("America's rainiest city") has remained the last Hawaiian city unaffected by tourism.
More than six million vacationers, most of them from the continental U.S. or Japan, spend close to 11 billion dollars a year in this tropical archipelago. Defense, centered on U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor, is the second largest moneymaker. Descendants of Asians, who immigrated in the 19th and early 20th century to work on sugar plantations, add to the mix of people in this only state with no ethnic majority: Caucasians constitute 24 percent; Japanese, 18 percent; Filipino, 12 percent. The remainder includes ethnic Chinese and those of Hawaiian ancestry. Ecologists estimate that 89 percent of Hawaii's flowering plants and 97 percent of its land animals—among them the world's only predatory caterpillars—exist nowhere else on Earth. ECONOMY
Industry: tourism, trade, finance, food processing, petroleum refining, stone, clay, and glass products.
Agriculture: sugarcane, pineapples, nursery stock, tropical fruit, livestock, macadamia nuts.
Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition, 2004 |