Understand that this is mostly background, and not necessarily what I think, but what talking with different people in the Hawaii Sovereignty movement talk about when it comes to Ocean use/exploitation, and mainlanders attitudes towards it.
It's important to note that the issue of ocean access and use is a highly charged issue in Hawaii, and ocean usage for whatever purposes is a largely protected right with a very few exceptions of specific threatened species. (Green Sea Turtles, and Boat Maneovers near whales come to mind, as do bugs(lobsters) out of season, or shot with slings.) The state subsidizes boat marinas. There are plenty of people living in houses with dirt floors who nonetheless own boats in Hawaii.
There is for instance no such thing as a private beach in Hawaii, and no matter how rich the neighborhood, they have to designate and maintain direct beach and ocean access and allow street parking for anyone who want to come use the ocean. Interestingly, in an effort to protect local heritage, we have actually made the ocean more accessible than it was to all but the elites in Old Hawaii.
1. So there is a very strong "Don't tell me what to do in the ocean" vibe as a background.
Since in the end, no amount of fish hassling will matter as much as population pressure on the land, Mainlander's reactions to this come across as kind of weird to many locals. It's like someone buying a new Prius and saying they are doing it to help the environment. Buying a new
anything is bad for the environment. Take the bus. Ride a bike. Walk. Live nearer work. Don't buy a new car, and say that's helping the environment.
As we in Hawaii live on an island, we can see that the green movement in the US is window dressing on the world's leading per capita greenhouse producing nation, and that's with most of the manufacturing outsourced. (Islands have to import everything, and become colonial possessions if they export money to import fuel, so we see it a little clearer maybe.) And that consumption, and its massive toxic waste and pollution, does far more damage than a thousand fish hasslers could do, even if they did it 24 hours a day, and intentionally and wastefully.
A true environmentalist may say never, ever pick up trash, because then we will spend more time thinking about how we are creating so much stuff that we need a place to put things we are done using forever that we just made to put the things we wanted into for the trip home from the store. If we just stopped picking up trash, eventually we would realize that aing things whose only functions is to wrap the things we actually want.
While a shallow envronmentalist might schedule a beach cleanup to hide trash where the poor people live:
http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/blanca.html (which happens to be about nuclear waste, but they don't put dumps in Beverly Hills, even though that's where most of the trash comes from.)
2. So some Hawaii people are kind of skeptical about mainlanders who buy their food in a grocery store talking about the environment like it is something they actually deal with.
People shooting fish is about as environmental friendly a thing as can be. Yeah the American tourists don't like it, but we are not wasting thousands of sunlight days of energy transporting our food across the country. And there is a pretty much one-to-one shoot to eat ratio.
3. Since shooting fish is OK by most, merely hassling them to entertain visitors has to be OK.
(Peter Singer wants to talk to me, I know, and his objections are the only way to sensibly criticize fish hassling. But in a country that raises chicken in spaces just bigger than their bodies, it seems strange to complain about a few fish getting to live as fish until they die, or are bothered for a few minutes a day. When we have mechanized meat productions, and long line fisheries which throw out most of what they catch, direct interaction with one's food is the only humane choice.)