Alan McNarie

Serial Diseases: Why Sequels Get Worse

2011-07-10T12:36:00.001-10:00

I saw Kung Fu Panda 2 last night. It wasn’t bad, but I liked the first one better.
Jeez, how many times is that the verdict on a sequel? But no one spends much time, it seems, analyzing the forces and temptations that cause that result. Kung Fu Panda 2 is such a clear example of some of those forces at work, some of those diseases that infect the soul of a sequel, that it’s a good laboratory for examining them.

First to repeat: Kung Fu Panda 2 isn’t bad. It’s got a decent plot, it fleshes out (pun intended) the central character a little bit, and it retains many of the qualities that made its predecessor successful: appealing characters, beautiful composition (as with The Lion King, you can freeze-frame Kung Fu Panda nearly anywhere, and find a beautiful picture), and spectacular, state-of-the art CG work. It’s worth seeing. BUT.....

It’s also suffering from the first signs of several progressive diseases that have done in other successful movie franchises. They include:

Higher conceptivitus. I’ve always hated to term “higher concept,” anyway. I really think “lower concept” would be more appropriate, or “Central Joke”: the whole film reduced to a single idea that can be pitched to a producer in a single simple sentence. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are long-lost brothers. Small-time enforcer becomes a movie producer. Sleazeball becomes a department store Santa. Pudgy panda becomes a kung fu master. Higher concept films, at their worst, are a single joke endlessly recycled. The first Kung Fu Panda overcame that problem by rising above it: it wasn’t just about the joke. As in King Lear, even the most minor characters had their own back-stories, motivations and internal conflicts. The idealized Chinese landscape was lovingly detailed and achingly beautiful. The CG wizards pushed their crafts to new heights, creating characters with both fur and clothing, and taking them through wildly complex kung fu battles. The actors threw themselves into their parts, exploring and improvising in character and, in some cases, exceeding themselves. (Free of the limitations of his beetling evil eyebrows, Jack Black actually created a lovable version of himself.) The central characters, especially Black’s panda and Dustin Hoffman’s Master Shifu, grew and changed. And the writers and director refused to let the special effects and the Central Joke overwhelm the plot.

That’s all true, to some extent, in the sequel. But that damned Higher Concept is becoming an impediment. Po the Panda is now the Dragon Warrior. But the Central Joke depends on him being an overweight klutz and a poseur, so to still work it, he has to have relapses that seem out of character. The higher concept is now holding him back. The writers need to abandon that old Central Joke, and embrace the new one that emerged toward the end of the first film: the ways in which he turns his roly-poly-ness into a weapon.

FXia. The Star Wars disease. In the original star wars, George Lucas used special effects to create a convincingly realistic and grungy universe in which to tell his story. But then he got so obsessed with topping his own special effects in each successive movie, so preoccupied with his toys, that they started to overwhelm his storytelling. In Episodes I and II, especially, hundreds of vehicles or warships clutter up every frame; the plot seems warped to get in this or that spectacular sequence, rather than the sequences chosen to advance the plot.

Likewise, in KFP 2, the desire to top the first movie’s considerable CG achievements sometimes seems to overwhelm the movie makers’ good sense. Lord Shen, the peacock emperor, is prima facie evidence. He’s an incredible achievement in animation: all those hundreds of individually moving feathers, and a bird beak that you can actually lip-read. But come on: a peacock? Thai Lung, the snow leopard of the first film, was a physically credible threat. But how do you take an evil peacock seriously?

Creeping Shrekism, or multiple characterosis: Aside from its strong Central Joke (Ogre as Good Guy), the original Shrek succeeded in great part because of some brilliant character acting by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz, and some wonderful bit parts by various actors perverting various fairy tale characters. Shreks II expanded its repertoire by adding a second higher concept: Fairy Tale Land as Southern California. But it also piled on more bit parts by more fairy tale characters, while still trying to find finding something to do for all the previously introduced characters. By Shrek III, this had all gotten entirely out of hand: there were so many characters that the plot, what of it there was, was hopelessly cluttered and nobody got decently developed. And with two aging high concepts to carry on, there was no room for a third.

KFP 2 isn’t overwhelmed yet, but it’s showing some alarming symptoms. One of the problems with the first installment, already, was that the Furious five was about two too many: decent comic actors such as Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan simply couldn’t get enough lines to bring out the potential of their characters. In the sequel, they get even less, because they have to share the screen with new characters such as Master Croc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Master Storming Ox (Dennis Haysbert). The problem is aggravated by the fact that much of the voice acting talent is coming from the martial arts milieu, and frankly, Jean Claude Van Damme can’t act when he has his own body to work with. Fortunately, Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson went with veteran human chameleon Gary Oldman to do evil Lord Shen, and Oldman does about as a good job as anyone could to make a peacock scary. (Actually, a chameleon would make a pretty good villain for this series. Just think of the possibilities of sneaky Lord Ptui and his kung-fu tongue.)

These diseases aren’t necessarily fatal. Both Star Wars and Shrek bounced back with decent movies for their final installments. But I hope the DreamWorks people don’t allow the problems to creep so far. It’s already obvious that there’s going to be a Kung Fu Panda 3. But I hope Po’s reunion with his family isn’t going to be marred by the advent of Master Bullfrog and Master Horny Toad, voiced by Stephen Seagal and Chuck Norris.

On Losing Luigi

2011-03-06T06:56:00.005-10:00

First, a note on where I've been. Last June, my son finally arrived in Hawai'i permanently, after the death of his mother. I've been busy learning how to be a full-time father and trying to earn enough to feed two mouths, so I've had to concentrate on writing that pays -- which this blog, frankly, doesn't. Someday I may get back to this, perhaps on a different platform that's friendlier to local advertising. But I'd rather write and let someone else sell the ads. Those who want notifications when I have a new article out can still follow me on Facebook.

Meanwhile, the Big Island Weekly didn't have room to run the following little tribute, so I'm posting it here.

I missed Louis "Luigi" Lichtenstein's memorial service because of deadlines. I feel very sorry about that. Luigi deserves remembering and thinking about.

I wasn't that close to Luigi; I wrote a couple of articles about his restaurant, Aloha Luigi's, and about the artists he patronized, and I ate a lot of Sicilian slice and Caesar salad specials, but that was about the extent of our relationship. But Luigi always made me feel like a friend. He knew me by name and greeted me with a friendly comment and a big smile whenever he saw me at the restaurant, and there was nothing false about that smile and greeting. Luigi radiated his own special Brooklyn style of aloha; he seemed genuinely happy to see people enjoying themselves in his restaurant.

And we customers had good reason to be happy. For about the price of a combo at McDonalds or Jack in the Box, we could enjoy a genuinely tasty lunch in a restaurant that oozed homegrown charm, with its bright hand-painted walls, its ceiling painted like a sky with puffball clouds, and it rotating exhibits by local artists -- or in recent years, we could dine al fresco in his lush garden court. I suppose the food was, technically, "fast food" — much of it was served on plastic foam plates or in paper-lined baskets, and we bussed our own dishes — but it didn't taste "fast"; I'd put some of Luigi's pasta dishes up against those served in restaurants that charge three or four times as much, and that Caesar salad was without peer. Luigi obviously did what he did because he loved to do it, and it showed.

That's the essence of local dining at its best: a chef opening his own place so he or she can do what he or she loves to do. In recent years, downtown Hilo, like Pahoa before it, has bloomed with such establishments: Akmals, Chiang Mai, Le Magic Pan, the Surf Break, and numerous others, where chefs have taken advantage of the relatively low property values to create their own hand-made visions of what a restaurant should be. Those restaurants are win-win-win-wins for the community; the owners get to live their dreams, downtown's empty spaces get filled, more money stays in the local economy, and we local consumers get to eat lovely, tasty food at reasonable prices.

I admit, as a poor freelancer with a son to feed, I sometimes patronize fast food franchises; even Luigi's doesn't have a dollar menu. But more and more, I'm discovering, there's a good alternative within walking distance. In Kea'au, for instance, I needed lunch the other day after a doctor's appointment. I considered Micky D's, but decided to walk across the street to the farmer's market. There I discovered a lovely, polite young lady who'd set up a Vietnamese food stand; I got an absolutely ono plate of fragrant key lime chicken and vermicelli noodles served on a bed of lettuce for about $6.50, and dined to the music of some local musicians who were playing at the market. It was, in short, a fine dining experience, even though I sat at a table made from a cable spool. I'll be back there again. And I hope that young lady eventually follows in Luigi's footsteps, finds an inexpensive property, renovates it and opens her own restaurant.

My understanding is that Luigi's, meanwhile, will remain open under its former sous chef, Thomas Aiau, who's absorbed Luigi's brand of aloha as well as his recipes. I'm very glad. Luigi may be gone, but his Caesar salad and his good will live on.

Hamakua Land Tour: Ag Land? Really?

2010-03-22T11:00:00.002-10:00

I'm still pondering West Hawaii Today's story last Thursday, about the two prospective buyers who toured the Hamakua properties that the county wants to sell. Members of the Kenoi administration have repeatedly told me that the land is expected to remain in agriculture, since it was zoned that way -- though finance director Nancy Crawford did say that it depended on one's definition of "agriculture."

"Is a gentleman farmer a farmer?" she asked.

But the two prospective buyers, Marc Mishkin of Ka'u and Joe Steinbach of Colorado, don't exactly sound like farmers. To quote Nancy Cook Lauer's article, for instance:

"Steinbach and Mishkin were more interested in the smaller parcels than the more mauka larger ones, and they seemed satisfied that some of the smaller ones offered ocean views that made the land desirable..."

Huh? Since when did an ocean view make a parcel more desirable as farmland? Do orange trees produce better if they can see the ocean? Do dracaena or mac nuts or coffee trees or corn grow taller so they can peer over the heads of their neighbors at that gorgeous blue water?

At least, according to Lauer, the prospective buyers did as "question related to what kind of fruit trees or crops the land would support." But they also asked "when the ocean-view blocking eucalyptus trees would be harvested."

A farmer would have been more concerned with whether the trees blocked sunlight from hitting his soil in the early morning or late afternoon.

Kenoi and his minions have argued that one reason to sell to sell the lands, which have been nothing but weeds since the county acquired them, is to get them back into production. But if at least one of the two prospective buyers has the winning bid, it's apt to stand idle for quite a while longer.

"We're looking at holding onto the land a couple of years, at least," said Mishkin, according to the article; he admitted to Lauer that "Investment is his primary interest."

In other words, Mishkin is a land speculator, pure and simple: he wants to buy the land cheap from the county and sell it at a big markup, as other speculators have done in the past. As Councilmember Dominic Yagong has pointed out, the county sold one such parcel, adjacent to Mud Lane in Hamakua, for $1.3 million. Then the county improved Mud Lane, substantially increasing the land's value.

"Within a few months, that thing was on the market for six or seven million dollars," Yagong said.

The taxpayers were out the cost of a major road job, and the speculator was in the black by an five or six hundred percent.

And there are no covenants in the County's Purchase And Sale Agreement for the lands that would restrict the new owner from rezoning the property to put in another subdivision, once the price of real estate starts going back up.

Is anybody else's shibai alarm going off?

Susan Decker, 1952-2010

2010-03-15T15:31:00.006-10:00

My ex-wife, Susan Decker, passed away from cancer last week. She is survived by her parents, Wayne and Jane Decker, and our son, Aidan John McNarie, 13.

Susan came with me to Hawaii 21 years ago, when we were a promising young "power couple": I'd just gotten my PhD in English and had been hired by UH-Hilo, and she was a new-minted attorney. She got a job at the prosecutor's office here, and got a quick lesson in racism and realpolitick, island-style: her boss there told her she needed to be "more Japanese," and her brash, direct style didn't set well with the local bureaucrats and secretaries. I well remember going to Christmas parties at the prosecutor's office where de facto segregation was the unspoken norm: in one room would be gathered attorneys with Japanese last names and a few token Caucasians (usually with Japanese-American spouses), while in another room, a smaller group would collect consisting of everyone else: Portuguese, Hawaiians, women.... Of course, Susan didn't last there. So she decided to open her own law office.

Meanwhile, over at the university, I wasn't doing much better. For the first time in my life, I was getting bad reviews from my superiors on my teaching. I wouldn't learn, until later, some of the politics behind those reviews.... But I kept at it for five years, because Susan and I had both fallen in love with this island and its people and I wanted to give her time for her law office to get established. When the handwriting on the wall at the university was clear, I worked out a deal with Susan, where I would work half-time as a paralegal at her independent law office and spend the other half on my writing.

Susan had decided to specialize in family law, especially family violence cases: a branch of law for which, unfortunately, there was an enormous need on this island. I'd already become aware of that need when I was a professor; I'd had to deal with students who couldn't complete their assignments on time because their significant others had come home drunk and forced the family to flee the house. And I'd seen the scourge first-hand as well; at the first apartment we'd rented in Hilo, the woman next door would go into screaming rages at least twice a week and start throwing dishes at her spouse; we could hear the impact of them shattering against the walls. At the next house where we lived, I was home writing one day when I heard shouting; I looked out the window and saw a man drag his spouse from their pickup truck, knock her to the ground and begin kicking her while their young son ran away down the street. I called the police. An officer didn't arrive until a half-hour later, when the incident was already over. He went up and knocked on the door; the abuser answered and spoke briefly with the officer, who then left without ever seeing the victim.

I've never seen a robbery, a burglary, a car theft or a murder. But I've personally witnessed at least six cases of domestic assault.

I quickly found out that my job at Susan's law office could not be done half-time. There was always an affidavit to fill out or an emergency restraining order to file, and it had to be done right and done right now, because somebody's life was potentially at stake. I became very good at helping battered clients tell their stories to the court through affidavits. I never became good at some of the other skills required by the profession. But the jobs all had to be done. We'd spend 8-12 hours a day at the office, and then go home, where I'd often work until 3 or 4 a.m. on my writing.

The stories that had to be told in those affidavits were often horrifying. I documented the sodomizing of children and the breaking of women's bones. Sometimes, after recording a particularly gruesome affidavit, I'd have to go out on the lanai of the law office building and mentally put myself back together. And those stories were still going on, even as the affidavits were being filed. Abusers did not let go easily; they continued to mess with their victims all through the divorce process, and even afterward. And some local attorneys, unfortunately, were gleeful participants, prolonging the fights and milking both parties for every penny of their assets.

Susan wasn't anywhere near the top of her class in law school, but she plunged into that battle with everything she had. We lost some heartbreaking cases, but we also extracted children from the clutches of a stepfather who'd been "sharing" them with other pedophiles, and helped a woman recover a daughter from an abusive ex who'd fled the state with the girl, and helped many women to just get out of nightmarish situations. Sometimes those clients got involved with other abusers; old mental habits are hard to break. Sometimes the abusers continued to stalk their exes. Sometimes, after the divorce, the abuser would charm his (or her; abuse isn't always a male thing) way back into his ex's life, and the whole thing would start again. But every once in a while, everything would go right, and the circle of abuse was broken. We couldn't win the war, but sometimes we could help an individual to escape it.

Unfortunately, those most in need of help were often the least able to pay, and Susan ran her law office more like a crusade than a business. The war eventually claimed nearly everything we had. The law office went broke. We lost our house to the bank I suffered a physical breakdown (I'm glad it wasn't mental as well). And the stress of fighting a war that could not be won, but was so important that it demanded everything be subordinated to it, finally claimed our marriage as well. Susan returned to the mainland with our infant son, leaving me here to liquidate our remaining assets. I'm still attempting to pay off some of the debts left from those years.

On the mainland, Susan opened another personal practice specializing in family law. She kept at it until bone cancer forced her to stop.

The monster that she fought so valiantly is still out there.

We Need a Shibai Tax

2010-03-13T08:47:00.007-10:00

I just read the article in yesterday's Star Bulletin, re the feuding between Governor Lingle and the legislature over budget cuts. Each is accusing the other of "shibai."

Shibai was originally a Japanese word meaning a theatrical performance. In Hawaii, it's come to mean any display or hypocrisy; in practice, it's pretty much interchangeable with the word "bullshit."

The legislature is accusing Lingle of shibai for, among other things, withholding our tax refunds until next year in order to balance the budget until she's safely out of office. Lingle is accusing the legislature of shibai for making budget cuts it can't legally make: "For instance, Lingle said the House took out budgeted money from her office to fund required vacation payouts for workers who will leave the Governor's Office with her in December. It also removed $100,000 in transition funds from the governor's budget.

''This is not possible; it is shibai,' Lingle complained."

I think both sides are guilty as charged. But the real losers aren't Lingle or the legislators. They're us.

The state gets to keep our tax refunds until next year? Do we at least get interest while they're using our money?

And we have to pay former Lingle Administration members for their vacations after they're out of office? That really grates, personally. A few years ago, when I left the University of Hawaii, I was told I wouldn't get paid for my accumulated vacation and sick leave unless, at some future date, I was employed again by the state of Hawaii. I think the legislature should immediately pass a bill making the same true for all state employees, including Lingle's patronage employees.

And I think they should pass another law, making it a crime to commit shibai while in public office, with fines of $5,000 to $100,000, depending on the severity of the offense.

With such a law in place, we'd solve our budget deficit in no time.

New Rules for Green Homes

2010-03-13T08:35:00.003-10:00

I have a new article out in the Big Island Weekly, re the freshly-enacted "International Energy Conservation Code of the County of Hawaii." The code, which requires insulation and other energy-saving measures in new structures and in major rehabilitations of old structures, is well-meaning and should save energy, but will add a fair amount to the cost of each home, spell bad news for some existing plantation-era homes, and just doesn't always make sense for our climate....

Kapulena Ag Park Article Out

2010-03-01T09:12:00.004-10:00

'Sorry about the dearth of recent postings on this site. I've been busy writing articles for people who pay me....

The current Big Island Weekly features an article article of mine about Mayor Billy Kenoi's proposed Kapulena Ag Park in Hamakua, for instance. It turns out that when Kenoi announced that the Kapulena lands were "generally considered the best of the county-owned lands for farming purposes," the county hadn't even gotten back its soil surveys for those lands. Now the surveys are in, and the results aren't the best they could be....

Corporate Emancipation!

2010-02-28T16:10:00.006-10:00

I’ve been pondering the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same rights of free speech as human beings, and therefore can put unlimited amounts of money into election campaigns. I’ve decided that maybe the Supreme Court is right, so long as corporations are given all the constitutional rights of human beings. They already have the right to bear arms, as is evidenced by Blackwater (sorry, Xe Services LLC) and countless security guards. I suppose they can exercise freedom of religion, though I’ve never seen one in church. But what about the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery?

“Slavery,” according to Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, is defined as “1: DRUDGERY, TOIL. 2: Submission to a dominating influence. 3 a: the state of a person who is chattel of another. b: the practice of slaveholding.”

I assume that 3a is the type of slavery that the Thirteenth Amendment refers to, since it was passed in the wake of the Civil War. “Chattel,” for those who don’t know, means any property that isn’t real estate.

Someone should immediately mount a Supreme Court challenge to emancipate the corporations.

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits the ownership or “involuntary servitude” of human beings, unless they’re convicted of a crime. But even unconvicted corporations are routinely held in stocks and kept in bondage. You can’t buy or sell human beings. But corporations are bought and sold daily. Corporate families captured by corporate raiders are often torn apart and their individual companies and sold, never to be reunited. Sometimes a brutal new owner will even vivisect them, cutting out or transplanting whole departments and excising employees who were members of the corporate body. No human being, whether homo sapiens or homo corporatiens, should be treated this way.

It’s time to acknowledge that Wall Street is a slave market, trafficking in corporate human misery. It must be shut down. Corporations must be free to earn their own way, without fear that someone else will buy them, strip away their assets and take the fruits of their labors.

A final argument for corporate emancipation: if we can’t own them, they can’t own us. This breach of the Thirteenth amendment works both ways, after all: corporations may not own our souls, but they own our jobs, our food supply, a percentage of our houses -- even our genes. They already own huge numbers of politicians and at least five Supreme Court justices. If they don’t hold us as chattel, then they at least hold most of us in drudgery. When we allow a privileged class to exploit human corporations, we all lose our freedom.

I don’t expect change to happen overnight. Just as with slavery, the supporters of corporate trafficking will argue that it’s an economic necessity -- that the nation cannot survive without it. They will argue that corporations don’t know how to survive by themselves without the enlightened guidance of their masters. Some may even take up arms to support their “right” to own corporations. But justice must eventually prevail. We must get a writ of habeus corpus so that Microsoft can appear in court and tell us if it really wants to work for Bill Gates. We must prohibit the sale of any more shares of Bank of America unless it has been indicted by a grand jury, read its Miranda rights, and tried and convicted for its alleged crimes by a jury of its peers. We must sever the bonds of tyranny that hold Chrysler in thrall to Fiat, 20th Century Fox in servitude to Rupert Murdoch, HBO in captivity to Time-Warner, Random House in the yoke of Bertelsmann AG, ABC in peonage to Disney, NBC in bondage to General Electric, and Spartina in foul grip of Stephen Colbert..

But I don’t think corporations should be allowed to vote or make campaign donations, at least for now. They’re not ready for that, just as uneducated, rapacious corporations are not ready to sit on juries. They must first learn to be good citizens, a job for which their bondage has not prepared them. They must understand, first, that they are truly free, and learn the responsibilities that freedom entails.

Otherwise, corporate votes are controlled by their masters, who can use them to oppress the rest of us.

That must not happen. We shall overcome.

Trash Outside the Transfer Stations

2010-01-31T17:27:00.004-10:00

The Jan. 20 issue of the Big Island Weekly ran a story of mine called "Trash Talking," about the new restricted hours at the island's outlying transfer stations. I reported that a number of household trash bags had been pitched along the roadside on Volcano Highway. After the story ran, I got the following report from Rene Siracusa of Malama O Puna, about the state of things along the highway to Pahoa:

"On the 2 mile stretch between Pahoa Village Rd. and Kaohe Homestead Rd., there were 26 dump sites that began with the new reduced hours of 8 to 4. Included are 4 pig carcasses in varying stages of ugh.... [Solid Waste Division head] Lono Tyson says they are working on a plan to change the hours again, but that in the meantime the dumping is expected until people get used to the new hours. When I pointed out that the 8 to 4 hours are prohibitive for people who work, he replied that they go shopping on weekends so they can go to the tranfer station on weekends too. There goes your day off!"

Two Personal Appeals

2010-01-12T11:04:00.004-10:00

Aloha all,
As you may have noticed, there haven't been a lot of blogs here lately. That's because, quite frankly, I'm broke, and I've had to concentrate on stories that I could get paid for, so I can keep the phone and electricity on. This blog hasn't earned me a dime since my first post. Google's marketing strategy of basing advertising placement on key words just doesn't work very well on a locally-oriented blog such as this; I've even seen adds from Mall Wort here just because I wrote a blog critical of them.

So I'm putting out an appeal for sponsors. If you'd like to see more stuff here, get in contact with me. I'm going to go over the fine print of my Google contract, but I believe I can post my own ads as photo attachments. I'm thinking $15 for an ad on one blog would be appropriate.

Second appeal: If anyone out there has any news or anecdotes about the new transfer station hours or increased littering and dumping since the hours began, please post a response here. I'm working on a story about the issue for the Big Island Weekly.

Saddle Road Hearings This Week

2009-12-07T17:19:00.002-10:00

There will be hearings for the final phase of the Saddle Road reallignment in Hilo and Kona this week. This phase of the project might be somewhat less controversial than some earlier phases--it will essentially take the road on a more southerly, pointing more toward Kona than Waimea and skirting the land that the Army recently acquired from Parker Ranch as a maneuvers-training ground for its Stryker units.

There may still be some fireworks, however. I got an e-mail from antimilitary activist Jim Albertini, suggesting that Depleted Uranium may be made an issue a the hearings.

"As part of the EIS, possible depleted uranium contamination was suppose to be addressed. One independent geologist reviewing the data said DU presence may be understated in the EIS draft, and he questions the kind of testing done. We are awaiting other comments from independent scientist," Albertini wrote.

Hearing times and places:

Wednesday, Dec. 9, 5 p.m., Aunty Sally's Luau Hale, 799 Piilani St. Hilo (near the Kanakaole Tennis stadium/Merry Monarch festival.)
Thursday, Dec. 10, 3:30-7:30 p.m., Natural Energy Lab of Hawaii Authority, Gateway Energy Center, 73-4460 Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, Kailua-Kona

White Rocks, Black Tires and Green Shoulders

2009-12-02T14:09:00.008-10:00

Warning: this blog is going to be of interest mainly to Volcano residents and visitors.

It's the week after the Volcano Artists' Hui's annual Open Studios event, and the evidence still remains around the village. On Haunani and Kilauea and Lehuanani and Wright Road -- wherever there was an open studio -- formerly grassy road shoulders have been turned into a morass of muddy ruts where visitors parked along the roadsides.

It happens every year. The Artists' Hui has tried to limit the damage, (and neighbors' complaints of noise and traffic snarls) by limiting the number of participating artists, by having more than one artist at a site, and by using sites on major streets instead of the one-lane trails by which many local residents reach their homes (hardly any of the official "open studios" are actually held in real artists' studios any more), but a number of other artists continue to hold "unofficial" sales at their houses on the same weekend.

Some neighbors put up obstacles such as construction-scene tape to keep vehicles off the shoulders near their homes. But that reduced the areas where cars could park, concentrating the damage and causing some drivers to pull off in really soggy places they might otherwise have avoided.

It's probably a small price to pay, in the long run, for the economic boost that the event gives the Village every year; not only the artists, but the local stores, restaurants, lodges and B&Bs all benefit from the flood of visitors. And the fault isn't wholly with the artists: it rests in part on the people who permitted and built the village's substandard roads.

And rutted road shoulders are not just a one-weekend-a-year problem. The cops were up here a couple of weekends ago, ticketing cars parked on the shoulders of Wright Road during Farmer's Market (another runaway success story, which keeps outgrowing its facilities despite the bulldozing of several acres of rain forest for parking lots.) And just day-to-day, the village's one-lane roads occasionally force cars onto the shoulders to avoid head-ons, though most of us long-time residents have become quite adept at pulling off on driveways when we see another car coming.

Which leads me to what I really want to talk about. A number of residents (and vacation rental owners) have taken to protecting the grass in front of their houses by placing rows of large rocks or stakes on the shoulders. Sometimes the rocks are painted white to make them more visible; sometimes not.

I'm sorry, but that practice is dangerous and illegal. Road shoulders, soft or not, are a functioning part of the right of way, not part of someone's lawn.

No resident in his right mind would pull off on a soft shoulder and risk getting stuck, if there's a viable alternative. But sometimes you have to. I was approaching a blind intersection of two one-lane lanes in the village a few days ago, when another car suddenly pulled into the intersection and turned toward me. The house next to the intersection apparently had guests, one of whom had parked on the shoulder opposite the house -- because the shoulder beside the house was lined with rocks. Had I been going a little faster or been a few feet closer to the intersection, I would have faced a split-second choice between head-oning the moving car, running into the parked car, or ripping off my exhaust system on the rocks.

Many residents would argue that our substandard roads and grassy shoulders are part of the Village's charm, and part of the price we pay for living in such a rustic and beautiful setting. The narrow lanes have imposed a sort of etiquette of consideration, with drivers pulling off and giving each other a friendly wave as they pass, that are part of the joy of living here. If people use a little common sense and common courtesy, the roads are not that big a burden. But rocks on the road shoulders are not charming at all.

If you live in a rain forest, there's going to be mud. But if you live in a rain forest, the grass will grow back really fast anyway. So visitors, please, if at all possible, don't pull off on the grass if there's an alternative. And residents, please cut it out with the rocks already.

Solar Water Heater Story at Big Island Weekly

2009-11-18T18:46:00.000-10:00

I've been down with a respiratory infection for the past couple of weeks, so I'm afraid I haven't done much work -- just a couple of stories for the Big Island Weekly. One of those should be on the newsstands now: a piece about a new law that ends the state's subsidies for solar water heaters, but requires most new homes here to have them.

Ding, Dong, the Dobbs is Dead

2009-11-12T08:37:00.009-10:00

Lou Dobbs has resigned from his anchor position at CNN, saying he wants to "go beyond the role" of a television journalist.

Good riddance, in my humble opinion. Dobbs has always been something of a boil on the butt of CNN's news reputation. I say this not because Dobbs is a conservative. In fact, I'm not sure he is a conservative, in a traditional sense, or even what a conservative is, for sure. Conservatives, increasingly, seem to be defined not by a consistent central principle, but by a cluster of dogmatically held views that don't necessarily make sense as a whole. Dobbs is most (in)famous for his opposition to immigration, for instance, which is certainly contrary to the general conservative support for the free market these days (but in the late 19th century, if I remember my history lessons, conservatives in this country favored protectionism because young American industry couldn't compete with the industrial juggernaut of the British Empire).

No, the reason I dislike Mr Dobbs so intensely is because he's been "going beyond the role" of a good journalist for years. He's more of a propagandist than a journalist. That doesn't mean that he didn't break important stories; his single-minded pursuit of the evils of immigration and NAFTA sometimes lead to some real revelations. But I couldn't trust his stories, because he wanted them to come out a certain way and he tailored the facts to suit his views. The Washington Post's story on the Dobbs resignation, for instance, noted that Dobbs had vastly exaggerated the number of young Latinos in U.S. prisons. Dobbs questioned Barack Obama's place of birth even after the birth certificate was made available to the public; he ran a series of stories about "global cooling" based on scattered and anecdotal evidence that shouldn't have convinced anyone, much less a veteran news anchor.

I firmly believe that constructive journalism must start out even-handed; it's okay to develop an opinion, but only after examining the most reliable facts available on both sides (or all sides) of the controversy. This is a very pragmatic view; it's been working ever since the time of the ancient Greeks.

We've just had a horrendous eight-year-long example of what happens when facts get bent to support preconceived opinions. We ended up fighting a war to suppress weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, and ignoring the mounting evidence of global warming because scientists were being muzzled, and watching New Orleans disintegrate while Bush officials discussed free market methods for dealing with a disaster. Bush wasn't a bad president because he was a conservative. He was a bad president because he cherry-picked facts to fit his beliefs, instead basing his decisions on the preponderance of the evidence.

Likewise with Lou Dobbs, and even more so with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They're bad not because they're conservatives, but because they're propagandists who don't give the facts a fair playing field. When Keith Olbermann does the same thing on the left, it's also bad. And when Nancy Grace prejudges defendants on national TV night after night, based one whatever sensational facts leak out of an investigation, it doesn't serve justice. All of this stuff is entertaining; it gets the emotional juices going, the same way pro wrestling and "documentaries" about Bigfoot and Noah's Ark do. But when you try to base real-life decisions on that stuff, it's disastrous. You just can't run a country on the same principles as the World Wrestling Federation.

So I applaud Lou Dobbs for resigning. If he realized that what he wanted to do didn't fit within the bounds of journalism, that's good, because it didn't. But if, as he hinted, he plans to go into politics, then the modus operandi that helped him get his CNN ratings is not going to be a good thing in that field, either. A propagandist who goes into politics is not a good politician; he's a demagogue.

School Gardening in Action at Paauilo

2009-10-26T13:20:00.015-10:00

As I remarked a couple of days ago ("Living it up on the Hotel Golden Princess"), while I was a bit taken aback to see a fund-raising dinner for school gardens and sustainability set aboard a cruise ship, I strongly support school gardens and sustainability. Last weekend, while attending the Hamakua Alive! festival at Paauilo, I got to tour just such a garden .

The garden at Paauilo School is actually more like a mini-farm; it includes not just fruits and vegetables, but chickens, geese, milk goats and hair sheep -- all interacting in much the way they would at a traditional family farm. And the kids at the school play much the same roles in this process that I used to play when growing up on a family farm in Missouri -- starting with weeding. But whereas I had to weed the garden because I was told t0, the adults supervising the school garden have found ways to make the weeding fun. As soon as a kindergartner fills up a bucket with pulled weeds, said an adult volunteer named Susan, "You can go out and feed the chickens (the weeds)."

In addition to looking winsome for the kids, the goats are a secret weapon for turning one of the garden's toughest adversaries -- Guinea grass, a particularly pernicious weed, which grows over head high around the garden's boundaries -- into goat milk. Goats are browsers: instead of nibbling grass at ground level, they prefer head-high shrubbery -- but the tall Guinea grass seems to work just fine as goat provender; I saw them munching away at it as we walked past the pen. But where the goats can't be, the kids take over. When some of the older boys dug out the Guinea grass in the goose pen, they got to hold a "Guinea grass parade" through the school, bearing the bundles of grass in triumph like hunters home from the hunt.

The little kids do other simple tasks, such as gathering fallen mac nuts for shelling. In addition to tackling the Guinea grass, the older students help out in other ways, such as washing eggs, harvesting fruit, and selling some of the garden's produce at a stand in front of the school.

"The kids just love it," says Susan. "The kids are terrific. They surprise you with what they can do and with what they understand. And they're awfully proud of what they can accomplish."

The garden is currently planted with asparagus, salad greens, sweet peas, chick peas, magic beans, kale, sweet potatoes, mint, onions, pineapples, papaya trees, macadamia trees, fennel and yacon. And it produces some other valuable products: compost, earthworms and worm castings (in other words, worm dung), which cut down on the need for fertilizer.

That part of the operation is expanding. Garden director Donna Mitts proudly took me down to the school's latest venture into sustainability: a structure called "Wormville," where earthworms will soon be processing the entire output of scraps from the school cafeteria into valuable soil amendments.

Mitts says she could use six more regular adult volunteers to help supervise the kids. If you're interested, contact her at the school. Those who'd like to volunteer or lend other support can contact her at 776-7710, ext 235 (office).

For more details and lots of pictures, see Janice Crowl's "Hawaii Gardening" blog.

A Reminder to Anonymous

2009-10-26T13:08:00.002-10:00

For some reason, readership has been picking up here over the past few days, and I've gotten a number of comments, including some on old stories. Some of those were sent anonymously. I let them pass because they were fairly innocuous, but I need to remind people about the rules here. To quote from the Bio note that appears on every page:

"If you wish to comment, I ask only two things: that you refrain from ad hominem attacks (attacking the person, rather than the facts or the logic) and that you take responsibility for your comments by giving your name. The goal, here, is constructive dialogue, not shouting matches."

Anyway, that's Da Rules here, and I think they're reasonable. If you're anonymous, you're relying on my charity; I may or may not post your comments.

Living it Up at the Hotel Golden Princess

2009-10-23T10:55:00.012-10:00

Photo by Janice Crowl

Last Friday I had a rather surreal experience: my first time aboard a cruise ship. I'd written about the impacts of the cruise industry before, but I'd never had the opportunity to go on such a vessel.

The occasion wasn't a cruise, however. My love, Janice, is a Master Gardener who'd been active in fostering gardens in the schools; in honor of that, she'd gotten two free tickets to a luncheon called "Seeds of Hope," which celebrated the School Garden Network and publicized the need for food sustainability.

School gardens and sustainability are both causes that I heartily endorse. As a whole slough of local politicians pointed out at the beginning of the event, this state imports an estimated 80-90 percent of what its population eats; if the barges ever stop coming from California, we're in deep do-do. And the first step to changing that state of dependence is to teach people how to grow food. (For a fuller description of what was said at the luncheon, see "Planting the Seeds of Hope in the Future" in the current edition of the Big Island Weekly.)

Apparently Princess Cruises wants to be associated with those causes, too, because they offered to host the luncheon aboard the Golden Princess while it was docked in Hilo Harbor.

Still, it seemed a bit of a weird setting for such a luncheon, because cruise ships in general are pretty much the opposite of sustainability. A cruise ship's idling engines can easily churn out the exhaust equivalent of 10,000 cars (see previous entry, "A Lack of Cruise Control"). It burns thousands of gallons of fuel to push the equivalent of a 14-story hotel from port to port. (See previous entry) A paper in UH-Hilo's academic journal H0hono cited a state study that said the cruise ship industry had created "7,569 jobs with wages totaling $250 million for Hawai‘i workers" in 2004 ("Riding Tourism's New Wave") -- but the state study apparently relied on stats provided by the cruise industry itself, which is in direct competition with local hotels, so I'm not at all sure that the net gain is all that high. And certainly we saw no signs of direct employment while we were aboard. We saw Nepali security guards, Mexican and Filipino waiters, Aussie tour guides and a Croatian crewman, but not a single local person who was not a guest.

I'm not exaggerating when I say "14 story hotel." The ship has 17 decks, three of which are below water level and off limits. After the luncheon (featuring Alaskan salmon and vegetables that I strongly suspect were not grown locally), we were offered a tour of the ship. We took elevators up to Deck 16, which held, among other things, two swimming pools, a miniature golf course and a chess board big enough for life-sized pieces. Deck 17 was a split-level disco (I guess if you counted the upper level of the disco, it would be 18 decks). The ship also has a very hotel-like, multi-story central foyer, a casino (so much for Hawai'i's anti-gambling laws), a theater, a video arcade, an internet cafe, numerous bars and restaurants, and a decor that very much reminded me of the Hilton Waikoloa: a kind of luxuriously ostentatious chintziness, a celebration of excess without a lot of taste that featured lots of mediocre art work (especially paintings of Mediterranean scenes) and brightly colored carpets. But instead of a "Grand Canal," there was Hilo Bay. I must admit that the views of Hilo Bay from Deck 17 were splendid. But if this had been a hotel on land, it would have been too tall for the island's zoning codes.

In fact, the Golden Princess was so hotel-like that I had very little sense of being on a ship at all. Almost all the stuff that makes this a ship is hidden behind mysterious doors (sorry, bulkheads) marked "crew only." Our cheerful young Australian tour guides took us through the restaurants and casino and disco and past the swimming pools, but we didn't get to visit the bridge or to see the great diesel engines that drive this behemoth. The sides of the Golden Princess go pretty much straight up and down, like a land hotel's; instead of portholes, the guest rooms (sorry, staterooms) have balconies. After the tour, we went exploring on our own, and tried to get forward to the bow, but found no way to get there on a surface deck: the superstructure goes almost to the front of the ship. If Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to cry "I'm the king of the world!" on the Golden Princess, I think he'd have to do it from the front of the Deck 7 Promenade.

The Promenade, not featured in the tour, was actually the only place on the ship that did feel vaguely like a ship. We got to look over the rails at the water far below, and to walk beneath the hanging lifeboats and see the winches that held them in place. I think if I were ever condemned to take an actual cruise on such a ship, I'd spend a lot of time on the promenade. Not that I'm ever likely to find myself in that position. If I had the money, I'd find a better way to spend it.

And I'm sure tourists could find a better way to spend their money in Hawai'i, too. I didn't see anything aboard the Golden Princess that couldn't be had at a land-based hotel, except possibly gambling and seasickness. And the food we got on ship was good, but you could get a better meal at Cafe Pesto. Tourists would leave a lot more money in the local economy if they stayed at local hotel, ate at local restaurants and took the Hele On bus instead of tour buses. And they'd see a lot more of Hawai'i.

From the Archives: A Lack of Cruise Control?

2009-10-23T10:12:00.003-10:00

The following article appeared in the Hawaii Island Journal in December of 2005. --ADM

A Lack of Cruise Control

Is Hawai’i’s new cruise ship law worse than the agreement that it replaced?

“In 1993, I was on a Royal Caribbean ship. The cruise employees all had pins that said, ‘Save the Waves’...” mused Ross Klein, sitting at a sidewalk café table in downtown Hilo. “But I would watch every night, having a drink at the bar, as they threw garbage off the stern of the ship.”

Klein, a sociologist who teaches at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has authored two books on the cruise ship industry: Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry, and the just-released Cruise Ship Squeeze: The New Pirates of the Seven Seas, both published by New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC. He was in the islands last month to meet with various government officials and present a series of public addresses, sponsored by KAHEA, a coalition of environmentalist and native Hawaiian organizations that, among other things, actively promotes stronger environmental regulations for the cruise industry.

The night before his rendezvous with the Journal at Bear’s, Klein had given a public talk at a Sierra-Club-sponsored meeting in Kea’au. During that address, he had dropped a small bombshell: at a meeting with a state Department of Public Health official, he had learned the Northwest Cruise Ship Association was backing out of its Memorandum of Understanding with the State, in which the industry had agreed to limit its discharge of sewage and ash in coastal waters around the state.

At his meeting with the Journal, Klein produced a letter from NWCA President John Hansen to Gov. Linda Lingle. In the letter, Hansen claimed that Act 217, a new state law regulating cruise ships, had made the Memorandum of Understanding “redundant and unnecessary,” and that the industry would “transitioning out of the MOU as of December 31, 2005.”

But Klein contended that the terms of Act 217 were much weaker than those of the MOU. The MOU, for instance, had limited sewage and incinerator ash dumping by the big ships to waters four miles beyond the 100 fathom (600-foot) markers on depth charts of waters surrounding the Hawai’i Islands. Act 217 only prohibits such discharges within an area three miles off the coasts, opening some of the shallow waters around and between the islands -- areas also used by the states’ ocean recreation and fishing industries -- as potential dumping grounds.

Sewage in the Bank

Among these shallow coastal areas is the Penguin Bank, a long, broad shelf that extends over 20 miles southward and westward from the western tip of Molokai. The bank, shaped roughly like its namesake, is a traditional fishing ground, and is so shallow that, as marine biologist John Culliney writes in Islands in a Far Sea, “This whole broad extension of Molokai became dry land during the last Ice Age, easily doubling the size of Molokai proper.”

“In season,” Culliney notes, “its crest is often marked by a number of humpback whales.”

Klein’s Website, www.cruisejunkie.com, includes a page listing violations of the Hawai’i-NWCA Memorandum of Understanding in 2002-2003, first reported the Honolulu Advertiser on December 12, 2003. Among those violations were repeated wastewater discharges into the Penguin bank by ships belonging to Royal Caribbean Cruises Limited. On October 29 and November 2, 2002, the Royal Caribbean liner Radiance of the Seas reportedly discharged “blackwater” (treated sewage) and “graywater” (wastewater from laundries, dishwashers, bathing facilities, swimming pools, etc.) while traveling through the bank. Royal Caribbean’s Legend of the Seas did the same on November 27 and 30 and on December 2, 17 and 20, 2002, as well as on March 19 and April 5, 9, 23 and 24, 2003.

The Advertiser story stated that after these violations were reported, Royal Caribbean re-routed its ships to avoid Penguin Bank. But the incidents helped to fuel environmentalists’ calls for an actual state law regulating cruise ship pollution.

“The Cruise ships are not violating any state laws. THERE ARE NONE,” proclaimed one KAHEA pamphlet, which claimed that an average 3,000-passenger ship generated about 30,000 gallons of sewage and up to 255,000 gallons of graywater. The brochure also noted that the ships generated an average of 7,000 gallons of oily bilge water per day, and often discharged ballast water (water pumped into tanks to add weight at the base of the ships, stabilizing them in the water) that could release invasive marine species from elsewhere.

According to KAHEA Executive Director Cha Smith, the state’s waters host an average of about 16 cruise ships at any given time. “I think there are about 20 or so in the summer,” she adds, and notes, “It’s expected to even increase.”

In addition to wastewater effluents, the industry creates other pollutants as well. Smith equates the exhaust from a cruise ship’s diesel engines, idling in port, to the emissions of 10,000-12,000 cars. Solid wastes are often incinerated on board, creating more potential air pollution and contaminated ash. The MOU prohibits the burning of solid waste while the ships are in harbor.

“The MOU is a voluntary agreement,” the KAHEA brochure pointed out. “There is no mechanism for enforcement or requirement for compliance...Nor are any fees levied to cover the direct or indirect costs associated with this booming industry. There were no repercussions when the industry reported scores of violations in Hawai’i.”

Ironically, KAHEA and other environmental groups now find themselves arguing that the new state law regulating cruise ships may be even less effective than the MOU. The MOU and Act 217 appear to have equivalent requirements for fuel and air emissions. Klein points out that the MOU’s provisions for hazardous waste disposal are already “contained in federal legislation.” Smith notes that while Act 217 does have penalties for violations, it still essentially relies on voluntary reporting by the cruise ship companies themselves. And Act 217’s 3-mile limit gives it a much shorter reach than the MOU.

Because of that limit, the waste dumping that occurred in Penguin Bank would not be considered a violation under the new law. An industry representative pointed that fact out to the Journal as evidence that that the incidents weren’t that bad. Environmentalists point to it as evidence of how bad the law is.

“There’s zero incentive for the industry to enforce their own laws,” Smith contends. “There’s zero monitoring. The industry reports their own numbers. There’s no mechanism for the state to do onboard inspections. At the director’s discretion, they can request the reporting documents, but there’s no regular reporting schedule...

We need much stronger legislation.”

According to Tom Arizumi, who heads the State Department of Health’s Evironmental Management Division, the DOH was mandated by Act 217 to determine penalties for various violations of the law, and hopes to have to those penalty schedules in place by July of 2006. Until then, the state’s only recourse, in the case of a violation, is to go to court to seek “injunctive relief for them to stop the activities.

And what if a company was told to stop, and didn’t?

“Willful failure to comply with the injunction would infer criminal activity,” Arizumi replied.

Arizumi confirmed that the state would still be reliant on “self-reporting” by the industry to learn of any infractions, but he added “We can request the ship’s log from the cruise ship industry to verify their operational activities to ensure compliance with the statute. It’s a federal requirement to log all those things (discharges, etc.) in the ship’s log, and failure to do so is a federal violation.”

Federal Pre-Emption

Governer Linda Lingle allowed Act 217 to become law without her signature.

“The State of Hawaii presently regulates cruise ship discharges through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which is more comprehensive than this legislation, protects a wider area, does not conflict with federal law, and allows for greater flexibility to adjust to changing environmental and industry conditions,” Lingle wrote, in a letter to the Senate.

In addition to the problem of limiting protections to three miles from shore, she wrote, the bill’s “blackwater” regulations were possibly pre-empted by federal standards already in place, and that “the bill requires the Department of Health to set fines by rules. However, HRS 342D-30 already establishes penalty provisions for pollution violations.”

She also pointed out that the bill failed to regulate “the primary source of water pollution from passenger vessels, which is treated wastewater.”

Klein notes that, while the cruise ship industry has touted its “advanced wastewater treatment systems,” the processed effluent from those systems is not exactly tapwater.

“They (industry spokespersons) argue that it is virtually safe,” Klein told the Journal, but noted that such effluent can still cause problems with “nutrient loading”—discharging organic matter that could cause algal blooms or other disruptions of ocean ecosystems. The treated effluent may also contain other contaminants such as metals and ammonia.

But Arizumi maintains that the federal laws prevent the state from doing anything about treated sewage discharges anyway. He told the Journal that according to the federal statutes, “States cannot ban discharges from ships that discharge waste that is treated by an approved marine sanitation device.”

Playing by Two Sets of Rules?

Charles Toguchi has a similar explanation for why the Act 217 only prohibits dumping within three miles of shore: the state couldn’t legally go any further.

“The state jurisdiction just goes out to three miles,” he told the Journal.

Toguchi heads Charles Toguchi and Associates, which lobbies for the Northwest CruiseShip Association in Hawai’i. At the end of Klein’s presentation at Kea’au, a Toguchi associate, Patrick Shaw, had stood up and offered his card to anyone who wanted to hear “the other side.”

The Journal took Shaw’s card and called him two days later. But after the first question—a request for an example of “ambiguity and operational confusion” that might result if the cruise industry didn’t terminate MOU—Shaw said that his boss should answer that, and ended the interview. Toguchi called the next day.

In answer to that first question, Toguchi gave no examples, but offered a sports analogy: “You can’t play a football game with two sets of rules. It was for that same reason that we wanted to transition out of that set of rules (the MOU), and put all our efforts into implementing the intent of the recent legislation.”

On the other hand, he said, the industry would continue “honor the spirit” of the MOU, and would continue to avoid some sensitive areas such the Penguin Bank and the Humpback Whale Sanctuary.

Apparently, then, cruise ships entering Hawaiian waters will be told to observe one set of rules, but also to observe the “spirit” of another set of rules that have officially been rejected.

Arizumi confirmed what Toguchi told the Journal.

“They told us that they would continue to volunteer to abide by the operational provisions of the MOU,” he said. They wouldn’t be discharging in the Penguin Banks or in the Marine Mammal Sanctuaries.

What the cruise lines wouldn’t be doing, he said, was filing annual compliance reports for the MOU.

“So if there are any violations, we just won’t know about it?” this reporter asked.

“That’s basically it,” Arizumi said.

Toguchi maintained that the industry’s record under the MOU was “excellent.” Asked about the violations reported in the Advertiser article, he replied that the Advertiser story was an example of “how facts can be stretched to make it seem like there were violations.” He called the incidents “infractions,” and noted that they all took place beyond the Act 217’s three-mile limit, so “many of these infractions would not have been violations.”

He added that the crews had thought it was okay to release the effluent because it was their usual rule to allow such releases if the ship was than 12 miles from shore. All the incidents, Toguchi said, had involved treated effluent.

“Not one gallon of raw sewage had been spilled by the industry in state waters since the implementation of the MOU,” he maintained.

He attributed the incidents cited in the Advertiser article to normal adjustment problems in the early days of the MOU. One incident, for instance, involved a ship incinerating solid waste while in port. Toguchi said the burning happened the day after the MOU took effect, and the captain simply hadn’t been notified yet.

Since then, we’ve had an excellent record,” Toguchi maintained. “I think we’ve had two or three (infractions) since that time.”

Arizumi said that under the MOU, only ”minor” infractions, mostly involving treated effluent, had been reported.

When informed of Toguchi’s statements, Klein was skeptical.

“If they planned to continue to respect the prohibition on discharges in Penguin Bank and the Whale Sanctuary, then I am sure they'd have said it in their letter to the Governor rather than risk the criticism they are now receiving,” he responded by e-mai. He speculated that the industry was backpedaling to avoid criticism.

“Interestingly, the Act specifically states (342D-H) that it does not prevent voluntary agreements (such as an MOU) that extend beyond the marine waters of the State (i.e., beyond 3 miles),” he noted. “Thus, there is no inconsistency between the Act and the MOU, unless one wants to adopt the lower standards permitted by the legislation.... As for putting all of their energies into implementing the Act, I really don't know what he means. Implementation means training staff not to be as cautious as they are currently expected to be.”

What the Crew Didn’t Know

Much of what Toguchi told the Journal almost eerily followed a model of the industry’s behavior that Klein had verbally sketched two days before, as he sat at the café table on Keawe St.

“I think very often when there are accidents and spills, it isn’t a corporate decision, but corporate decisions are not being translated to the staff in the engine rooms...” Klein had observed. “I would think the incentive to cover it up is greatest on the level of the ship.”

Asked how corporate management generally reacted to such a violation, he replied, “The corporate side will minimize it.”

As an example, he cited the case of the Crystal Harmony, which was permanently banned from Monterey bay. Www.cruisejunkie.com summarizes the incident thusly:“Crystal Harmony, Crystal Cruises. Reported in March 2003 that contrary to a written promise to not discharge in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, the ship discharged 36,000 gallons of treated bilge, treated sewage, and grey water. The company stated that it didn't report the discharge because it wasn't illegal—it only represented that they didn't keep their promise.”

In the case of the Crystal Harmony, Klein told the Journal, the captain and chief engineer knew about the promises not to dump in the bay, but “The company disclosed that the message hadn’t gotten transmitted to the people operating the systems.”

Klein also cites a 1999 article by New York Times reporter Douglas Frantz, who discovered that ships had “alternative piping” that would allow oily bilgewater to be dumped directly into the sea instead of going through a filtration system.

“Engineers reported that they received an end-of-the-year bonus if they came in under budget,” summarized Klein. “They saved $80,000 a year by not using filters.”

In 2002, Norwegian Cruise Lines pled guilty to dumping oily bilgewater directly into the sea from 1997 to 2000. The company was fined $1 million and ordered to perform $500,000 worth of community services. According to www.cruisejunkie.com, “The company was given a lenient sentence because it reported its practices to the Department of Justice.” Norwegian Cruise lines is the parent to NCL-America, whose Pride of Aloha and Pride of America currently offer interisland cruises in Hawai’i.

Cruisejunkie.com lists dozens of other examples of cruise ship environmental violations, including an incident in early 2005, when the Honolulu Advertiser reported that the Pride of Aloha had discharged about 70 tons of treated effluent into Honolulu Harbor. In March of this year, West Hawaii Today reported an incident in Kailua-Kona, when the numerous people witnessed “brown water” boiling up around Holland America’s Statendam, leaving a “brown mark” on the ship’s side, shortly before it left harbor. According to the WH-T article, State and Coast Guard officials denied any knowledge that effluent dumping had occurred in this case, and one Department of Health official suggested that the “brown water” may have been bottom muck stirred up by the ship’s engines, although water in the area was 130 feet deep.

Holland America is a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, the line involved in the Penguin Bank incidents. The two companies have been cited elsewhere in numerous incidents involving bilgewater and effluent dumping, oil discharges, air pollution violations and falsification of records. In a Florida court in 2002, Carnival pled guilty to repeated oil discharge violations in exchange for a fine of $9 million and $9 million in community services.

Accidents and crimes happen in any industry. Toguchi and other cruise ship representatives argue that over all, their industry’s record is a good one. They contend that the violations recorded under the MOU pale in comparison with those of land based sewage plants such as Honolulu’s Sand Island facility. Environmentalists counter that that the land-based facilities aren’t operating on the honor system.

The activists generally seem to agree that stronger regulation of the industry is necessary. For them, the question becomes: how?

Learning What has Worked

Despite writing a book whose title calls the cruise industry “the New Pirates,” Klein maintains that he is neither anti-cruise ship nor an environmental lobbyist.

“KAHEA is a group that is advocating for change. I’m an academic. As soon as I become an advocate for one position only, it compromises my position as an academic.”

In addition to his two popular books, Klein as authored several more academic studies of the industry, including a major one for the Canadian government. His talk in Kea’au was framed as a report on the sociological history of the cruise ship protests. But he was also took his current audience’s interests into account. The value of the talk, he said, was that “it will give you insight...as to what has worked in the dealing with this industry.”

He related the stories of protests in Florida, California and Alaska. He talked about the industry’s efforts to “greenwash” its image and the methods it used to suppress critics, including himself. He discussed the relative merits of MOUs versus legislation, and found both to be lacking. Legislative and political routes, he said, were often unsuccessful because of the industry’s lobbying efforts. Court challenges, on the other hand, were often effective, as were “clear, strong grassroots movements,” such as the protests in Monterey that got the Crystal Harmony banned, or a shopkeepers’ strike that dissuaded a cruise ship from making an Alaska village its port of call.

“There are ways to make the smooth running of the shore excursions...quite difficult,” he noted. .

Klein’s analysis of how and when violations occurred may also suggest ways legislation might be made more effective. If violations and cover-ups originate on-ship, for instance, then effective legislation logically should provide for on-ship inspectors and create a funding method to pay for them. At the Kea’au meeting, Klein praised Alaska cruise ship legislation that set up enforceable standards, a monitoring program and a $1 per passenger tax to pay for testing and enforcement. But again, he noted that strong legislation such as Alaska’s was only possible with the “old style, hardcore grassroots” support.

KAHEA, the Sierra Club and other organizations are working to mobilize that support.

“I think in order to build that political will ... to adequately regulate this industry, legislators are going to need more examples of the problems that the cruise ships cause,” believes Smith. She also strongly supports a tough new federal cruise ship bill that has been introduced in Congress.

KAHEA has started a program called “Be the Eyes of the Ocean,” which supplies mail-in forms for reporting suspected cruise ship environmental violations. The forms are available at http://www.kahea.org/ocean/pdf/cruisereporting2.pdf, or by calling(808) 524-8220.

“Individuals whose documentation of dumping leads to fines against a cruise line may be eligible to receive half of any fine that is levied under the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships,” announces a note at the bottom of the form, which cites one case where passengers videotaped plastic bags being dumped overboard and got to claim shares of the $250,000 fine that was collected as a result.

Ironically, perhaps the people most able to influence the industry’s behavior may not be those standing on the shore, but the passengers themselves, such as the couple who reported the plastic bag dumping -- or like Klein, the self-professed “cruise junkie.”

“I started as a cruise enthusiast...” he told the Journal. My wife and I were taking up to 50 days a year of cruises.”

But with all that shipboard time, he began to “see things like some of the labor problems... After about 200 days on cruise ships, I reached the point where I wanted to start writing about the topic.”

For him, it was not a matter of stopping the cruise industry, but of making it live up to its own PR.

“How can I impact the industry,” he asked, “so that I can go on a cruise ship and not have those moral and ethical dilemmas?”

From the Archives: The Beginnings of the Tradewinds Debacle

2009-10-07T13:26:00.004-10:00

According to yesterday's Tribune Herald, the Board of Land and Natural Resources is considering a 10-year extension of Tradewinds Forest Products' timber harvesting lease, despite the fact that Tradewinds has yet to build the specialty plywood plant on the Hamakua Coast that it promised as part of its contract.

Given yesterday's headline, it's worthwhile to remember how this whole mess began. The article below appeared in the Hawai'i Island Journal in March of 2001. It's sort of a cautionary tale on the drawbacks of contracts awarded on the low-bid system, without examining the bidders' finances....
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A Plywood Plant for Hamakua?

Despite a depressed plywood market, a bankrupt backer and community skepticism, the state and an Oregon firm move forward with plans for a huge Big Island mill.

by Alan D. McNarie

A West Coast based company named Tradewinds Forest Products took a major step toward building a new plywood factory on the Hamakua Coast last month. The company has inked a 15-year contract with Prudential Timber for trees from its eucalyptus plantations on the Hamakua Coast and Parker Ranch to supply its proposed mill. But the company still faces serious community opposition and a gauntlet of regulatory hurdles – as well as uncertainty about the venture’s economic survivability.

Tradewinds’ project would be one of the largest single industrial facilities ever proposed for the Big Island. The main building alone would cover seven acres; the overall plant size, including a log yard, onsite wastewater treatment facility and wood-waste-fueled power plant, would require 60-70 acres. Tradewinds estimates that it will require 30,000-40,000 acres of Hawai`i-grown wood to run the plant, which would produce construction, industrial and architectural plywood, specialty lumber and wood chips as “primary products.” It would also import about 100 million square feet per year of softwood veneer to use in its plywood products. The company estimates that its plant would employ approximately 300-400 full-time workers, and another 150 contract workers, including truck drivers and loggers. It would add an estimated 90 trucks per day to traffic on Big Island highways, primarily between the mill, logging sites and the ports of Hilo and Kawaihae.

That is, if it is built and proves financially viable. As of press time for this article, the company’s financial backer had declared bankruptcy and the plant still has secured no alternative source of funding. But Tradewinds President Don Bryan believes that the contract with Prudential Timber will make securing that backing much easier.

The stakes in Tradewind’s Hawai`i gamble are huge, and involve some of the island’s biggest economic players. Kamehameha Schools, formerly Bishop Estate, has leased much of its Hamakua Coast holdings to Prudential Timber, which has committed at least 16,000 acres to tree plantations – mostly fast-growing eucalyptus. Prudential Timber recently leased another 10,000 acres of land from Parker Ranch for more eucalyptus plantations, and C. Brewer has leased thousands of acres in Ka`u for more tree plantations. Tradewinds first proposed its mill as part of a winning bid to harvest and replant 11,700 acres of “non-native” forest in the DOFAW’s Waiakea Timber Management Area (WTMA). The Waiakea timber management plan has been touted as model for other timber holdings in DOFAW’s 700,000-acre domain. The Forest Management Plan for WTMA projects "an aggressive yet attainable integrated forest industry initiative of 60,000 acres of forest plantations on the island of Hawai`i."

But some Hamakua residents worry that the plan could become another sugar industry in many negative senses: chemical pollution, erosion, and eventually a closed factory – only this time, with thousands of acres of eucalyptus trees to clear instead of cane fields.

“What is going to happen if they can’t make it in the world market with that plywood and veneer?” worries Ada Pulin-Lamme of the community organization Friends of Hamakua. “What is this plan going to turn into? It’s not something that’s going to sit there with that much of an investment. There’s going a joint venture partnership, and they’re going to make some demands...Is a pulp mill the next step?”

West Coast Plywood Woes

At one time, Tradewinds thought it already had financial backing for its mill. When the company first proposed the plant, it was a partnership of two other West Coast firms, The Timber Exchange and Quality Veneer and Lumber (QVL). The Timber Exchange, whose President is also Bryan, is primarily a forestry brokerage that buys and sells large blocks of timber and land in the Pacific Northwest. QVL, whose chair and CEO at the time was Gordon Boyd, was formed in 1998 with $30 million in capital and a $50 million credit line to buy and operate four lumber and plywood mills in Washington and Oregon; it was expected to supply the investment capital for the Hawaii venture, as well. But in the fall of 1999, Boyd abruptly left QVL, citing differences over “the way QVL should be managed,” and QVL pulled out of Tradewinds – events that Bryan describes as “simultaneous.” Boyd remains involved in Tradewinds, and Bryan says Boyd will manage the Hawai`i plywood plant if it is built.

“His skill is on the mill side and the marketing side. My skill is on the timber side,” Bryan told the Journal.

To alleviate some of residents’ fears, Tradewinds had invited a delegation of concerned residents and county officials in the fall of 1999 to tour QVL’s Omak plywood plant – only to cancel the tour at the last minute, when QVL pulled its funding. Within months, Omak had shut down.

Within a year of Boyd’s departure, QVL had closed all of its mills and declared bankruptcy. One mill had been closed and sold shortly after its purchase. The company cited a depressed plywood market in its closure of its Omak plywood mill on June 12, 2000. The Omak Mill closing cost Okanogan County over over280 mill jobs and approximately $5 million in wages. The company’s Mayr Bros. mill shut down in August. On September 25, QVL’s Hanel Lumber Company closed abruptly, locking out 120 mill workers and costing Odell County an estimated 100 additional jobs in supporting industries. The state finally intervened to pay the workers their last two weeks’ wages. On January 31, the bankruptcy court removed the company’s current management and placed its remaining assets under trusteeship.

QVL wasn’t alone in its misery. One Oregon statistical firm, Paul Ehringer and Associates, has estimated that between 1989 and 1999, 219 sawmills closed in five Western states. During the same period, at least 144 sawmills, veneer mills and plywood plants have closed in Oregon alone in the past decade. Last summer, according to U.S. Forest Service estimates, more than 160 softwood sawmills in the United States temporarily halted production, due to a glut of forest products on the market.

When asked how his company intended to keep the Hamakua plant from becoming another Omak, Bryan replied, “One way is, we’re going to keep Mr. Boyd on the payroll. When he left, QVL was in good shape.”

Newspaper court papers related to the bankruptcy, however, suggest that QVL may already have been in trouble before Boyd left. In October of 1999, only a month after QVL canceled the trip to the Omak plant, the Federal Register contained a notice that QVL had applied for relief in the form of “worker adjustment assistance” under the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) – and had been turned down. In its successful motion to remove the company’s current management, creditor GECC alleged that, while QVL made a slim overall profit for 1999, “all was not well with QVL and lumber prices continued falling precipitously during the fall of 1999....”

Some of QVL’s wounds, however, may have been self-inflicted – and the GECC filing gives credit to Boyd as a whistleblower, for passing on documents that indicated two other company officers had paid themselves $100,000 bonuses with money that should have gone for delinquent taxes and insurance. But GECC also questions the propriety of $172,582 in severance payments made by QVL to Boyd, when other creditors were waiting in line.

“Commodity plywood is soft right now,” admitted Bryan. But instead of commodity plywood – the common softwood plywood used, for instance, in house walls – Bryan said the Hawai`i plant would specialize in “various specialty products that target high strength engineering applications” such as “laminated veneer lumber” – extra strong plywood that could replace sawn roof beams in houses, for instance.

But QVL had pursued a similar strategy of specialization with its Oregon mills. When it bought the four mills in 1998, Boyd told the Portland Oregonian that the company would refocus “from commodity lumber and plywood to specialty wood used in modular housing and engineered wood products.”

The proposed Hawai`i mill would enjoy at least one advantage, however. One of the problems facing West Coast mills has been not only an oversupply of finished plywood, but a shrinking timber base, as old-growth forests disappeared and environmental regulations tightened to defend what remained. A stand of pine or fir on the West coast takes about 40 years to regrow. But Hawaii’s eucalyptus plantations can produce veneer logs for plywood in as little as nine years.

“They Can’t Export Raw Logs”

“We didn’t receive any other proposals that even came close to the level of Tradewinds’,” maintains DOFAW head Mike Buck, when asked why his agency stuck with Tradewinds instead of rebidding the contract after the QVL fiasco.

DOFAW was badly burned in 1997, when it proposed to lease state lands in Hamakua to the Japanese consortium Oji Paper/Marubeni to grow eucalyptus for wood chips, which would have been sent to Japan for conversion into paper products. The plan was voted down by the Board of Land and Natural Resources in the face of massive community opposition. In putting together its management plan of Waiakea Timber Management Area, DOFAW set up some stringent criteria designed to meet some of the public concerns expressed during the Oji Paper debacle. One concern was the lack of local jobs that the Oji Paper proposal would have generated. The WTMA management plan required that the winning proposal would generate such jobs.

“They can’t export raw logs. They can’t export wood chips as their only product,” said Buck – although wood chips were considered as a viable use for wood that was unsuitable for plywood or lumber. He added, “We have to make sure that in our timber licenses, we are protecting the public’s interest, and we’re not going to have any timber harvested unless the facility has been built.”

But DOFAW has other goals in mind as well. “One of the major reasons to be involved is that Hawaii needs a viable use for these large tracts of agricultural land,” Buck explains. He basically sees three alternatives for plantation-sized blocks of land such as the former Hamakua Sugar holdings: pasture, timber, or subdivisions. “If we don’t’ tie up some agricultural land and keep it in green, the quality of life is going to go down,” he believes.

Lessons from Big Sugar?

But on the ground in Hamakua, some residents see hundreds of different opportunities for the land, not just a few larger ones.

“Why are we in such a hurry to push a big industry, when wonderful, diversified agriculture is beginning to blossom – like vanilla bean, cacao, the different medicinals, like noni, awa, and aloe vera? There are so many crops here – it’s just going to take time for this to come about,” says Friends of Hamakua Secretary Linda Lyerly. “We really wouldn’t mind a smaller saw mill veneer plant. But this is so huge – too big for this island. Seven acres under one roof....”

Also weighing on residents’ minds are the lessons of Big Sugar, which plunged the entire island into a depression with the collapse of a single crop. They aren’t anxious to repeat the experience.

Friends of Hamakua has launched a petition requesting and Environmental Impact Statement on the entire plywood operation, from tree plantation to factory to harbor, before the WTMA management contract is finalized. So far, over 700 residents have signed the petition.

Even without an overall EIS, the project still needs to overcome several regulatory hurdles. Although it didn’t rebid the WTMA contract, DOFAW held up the final approval process until Tradewinds could get on sounder financial footing. Now that the company has assured itself of the Prudential Timber contract, Buck says DOFAW will forward a final contract proposal to the Board of Land and Natural Resources for approval.

Tradewinds still has to decide on a site for its mill and perform engineering studies; when those are done, it has to go through rezoning and permitting processes for the factory and power plant. “The Department of Health would be the lead state regulatory agency for the permitting process” for that stage of the project, says Buck.

Buck thinks the company probably will have to pay around $2 million for the permitting process alone.

Bryan believes that if all those hurdles are cleared, the earliest the mill could come online would be in two years. “My guess is before we are truly up and running, it’s three years from now.”

If construction is completed, the challenge then becomes to keep the mill running.

“The more inundated we get with trees, the more land gets filled with trees, the more the people in the state will feel that the need to accommodate the people with the trees, and it’s going to be at the expense of the people who live here,” worries Pulin-Lamme.

But Bryan remains confident. “We’ve been five years into the investigation of this business,” he told the Journal. “We’ve thought it through, and we’re ready to get started.”

A Liar's Club Tour of Volcano Village, by T. Wilfred Forkenoy

2009-10-06T17:53:00.010-10:00

From the archives..... -ADM

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching the Volcano area. On your left, you will see Mauna Loa Estates. Although resembling a jungle, this area was long ago recognized by our state to be prime agricultural land, of such fecundity that farms are a mere 1/3 of an acre each. The geography of Mauna Loa Estates is extremely unusual. You will note that we have been driving up the slope of Kilauea, the most active volcano in the world. Mauna Loa Estates, while appearing to be contiguous to this mountain, has actually been declared to be physically and legally a part of Mauna Loa, which erupts less frequently, much to the relief of residents. The three main streets in Mauna Loa Estates -- Jade, Ruby, and Pearl -- were named after the mines which produced large quantities of those gems in this area during ancient Hawaiian times. The pearls were extracted from Hawai`i's famous mountain oysters, unfortunately now extinct.

We're now turning onto Wright Road, named after famous religious philosopher Gerald Wright, the only surviving son of Orville and Wilber. Along this road are several noteworthy buildings and attractions. On our left, beyond the world's largest rainforest parking lot, is another link to aviation history: Cooper Center, named after D.B. Cooper, the notorious highjacker who bailed out of an airplane with several million dollars and was never heard from again. Mr. Cooper now resides on a palatial estate in the rainforest near here; his generous anonymous donations helped make Cooper Center possible.

Coming up on your right, you'll see the famous Chalet Kilauea Lodge, which derives its name from the fact that it is covered with over 2,541,150 wooden shingles taken from genuine Swiss chalets. In a few minutes, we'll be passing by the Llama Ranch, the home of this country's only herd of rare Tibetan Llamas, a species believed to be related to both the Bactrian Camel and the Yak. Wool from the Tibetan Llama is used to create beautiful maroon or saffron cloth, said to instill its wearers with a strange sense of inner peace, to deepen the voice to roughly the equivalent of a lighthouse foghorn, and confer a mystical desire to eat mouldy rice.

Ladies and gentlemen, as our bus turns around, you see on both sides the Ola`a Rain Forest. Please keep your seats. For safety's sake, we will not leave the bus. Several persons have disappeared without a trace in the forest in recent years. They may have fallen prey to the legendary giant upland mongoose, which is known to eat anything, even Californians. Or they may have succumbed to man-eating hapu`u ferns. Another hypothesis is that they fell victim to Wild Bores, also known as Park Rangers.

We are now returning to Old Volcano Highway. On your right, you'll see the Kilauea Lodge, famous for its fine continental cuisine and for its fireplace embedded with stones from around the world, coins from around the world, stamps from around the world and fossilized bones of Boy Scouts from around the world. Now we're coming up on the Kilauea General Store, named for diminutive Civil War General Philip Sheridan, renowned for his volcanic temper. General Sheridan is said to have once expressed a desire to visit Hawai`i and plant a monkeypod tree.

This store marks the edge of Historic Downtown Volcano. Now we're leaving Historic Downtown Volcano, and entering Suburban Volcano, which consists of Volcano Village Center, on your left, and Volcano Village Square, just ahead, one of the few squares in the world which is shaped like an 'L'. Volcano General Store, the centerpiece of the L-shaped square, is obviously also named after General Sheridan. The reason that Volcano has two general stores is that each store is the habitat of a rare native creature, the kama'aina. Volcano has only two kama'aina families left, each with its own store preserved strictly in accordance to the Endangered Species Act, even though two competing general stores in one village is a violation of the natural laws of capitalism. We will not, however, stop at either store, as the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism the has strict rules against feeding the kama'aina, which our tour bus company is only too happy to observe.

Behind and beyond Volcano Village Square is an area known locally as "The Warren," which consists of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of miles of narrow, winding roads through thick rainforest, each road exactly as wide as 1.5 Toyota Priuses. Approximately half of all Volcano residents are thought to live in The Warren -- no one knows exactly how many, because (A) no one has ever successfully mapped The Warren's true extent, and (B) it's difficult to ascertain how many people are true Warrenites, and how many are simply visitors who became lost, gave up all hope of return, and built small shacks in order to survive.

We have reached the end of Old Volcano Highway, and are turning right on New Volcano Highway, distinguished by the new volcano which it will skirt on our left (the old volcano cannot be seen, as it was buried during highway construction). Ahead lies Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park, distinguished chiefly by its military camp, distinguished chiefly for having no military value whatsoever, except for that secret Pentagon volcano-powered laser thing. Oops. Forget I said that.

Thus we bid a fond farewell to historic, fascinating Volcano Village. Best wishes to all of you, thank you for taking our tour, and warmest aloha, which was named for Al Oha, the father of Hawaiian Bureaucracy. Adieu.

Beaches, Bottles and Butts

2009-09-20T21:01:00.003-10:00

This past Saturday, I went out on a solo "Get the Drift and Bag It" run to Honuapo (Whittington Beach). My friend Janice Crowl had originally arranged it, picking up the bags, rubber gloves and inventory cards. But she wasn't feeling well, so I went down by myself. Once I got there, though, I got help from a lady and her daughter who'd just come to the beach for the day. They took off on their own, and I filled a bag by myself. Another gentleman started cleaning up aroun his own picnic table, but declined to join the official venture; he just dumped his collection into the nearest trash barrel.
Whittington/Honuapo is probably one of the cleanest beach parks on the island; it's been adapted by a local citizen's group that, I suspect, regularly polices the place. I can remember the time before the County purchased the area around Honuapo Pond: then, the whole area was overgrown with head-high weeds and saturated with trash, particularly broken beer bottles. Now it's a beautiful, open park, with close-cropped lawns, except in the wild area on the Puna side of the pond.
But there was still plenty to pick up. Thanks to the years of abuse prior to the county takeover, the dirt under the grass is filled with shards of bottle glass and rotting bits of plastic. And park-goers still contribute their daily dose of fresh cigarette butts, plastic forks and stray food wrappers.
The Ocean Conservancy, which sponsors the cleanup, gives out cards on which to inventory card on which to record items we pick up; they use the data to "educate public, business, and government officials about the scale and serious consequences of the global marine debris problem." The card instucts participants to "Please pick up ALL the debris you find," but "Only record information for the items listed below." "Below" are lines for keeping a running tally for 42 categories of litter, from batteries to tobacco packaging.
By far the most common category of debris I picked up were cigarette butts; by the end of the day, I'd collected 73 of the little buggahs, and I had by no means gotten all of them. I suspect that many of those butts were the work of only a few slobs: in one small area, for instance, I found 14 butts, all Seneca brand. That guy's lungs must be really gray.
But the adults weren't the only sinners at the park: the second largest category of litter was food wrappers--mainly candy wrappers. I found about 20 of those, including the first Bazooka Joe bubble gum comic I'd read in years.
I also collected 14 caps and lids, 12 pull tabs, nine beverage containers, seven plastic forks or spoons, six plastic BBs, six pieces of fishing line, five pieces of rope or cord, three fishing floats (but no glass ones. Rats.), three fragments of toys, one empty cigarette pack, one bait container (in this case, squid), one piece of building debris, one lead fishing weight, and hundreds of the aforementioned glass fragments).
The low number of beverage containers suggests that the HI 5 deposit program may, indeed, be working -- especially since three of those were non-recyclable juice boxes, and four of the five cans were fished out of the water;I suspect they got caught by the wind and blown out of the beach-goers' reach. But the bits of old glass were really bad news, especially in a place where there are loads of kids are running around barefoot.
The most unusual find of the day was floating in the little pond below the Whittington Beach picnic tables. It was a 50 milliliter glass vial, still sealed and full of water: obviously a scientific sample of some sort. The waterproof marker that the researcher had used had worked really well: I could still make out most of the label information, which included the date: " 12/14 /O4"
Unfortunately, the label did not include a name or address. I'll probably take it down to the Department of Health office in Hilo and have them dispose of it.
At one point, my path crossed again with the lady and daughter who had volunteered. She thanked me again for doing this job, and mentioned that she'd had an unpleasant encounter with one group of picnickers. A male in the party had asked what she was collecting. She'd explained, and the man turned to a female companion and told her "opala."
"Fuck," the woman had replied.
"And they were locals," said the volunteer. "You'd think they'd be the ones with the most to lose." She added that she was a kama'aina herself, of Portuguese ancestry.
"You get some hate doing this job," she mused.
But I also got thanked by three or four people over the course of the afternoon. One woman helped me gather up a few butts, asked me what I was finding, and I explained about the inventory sheet and the categories. I mentioned a few of the categories, including cigarettes.
"What about marijuana?" she asked.
"I guess that would be a butt, too," I replied.
But I didn't find any of those. People don't tend to waste joints, I suspect. Besides, they're biodegradable. A cigarette filter is forever.

Article on HECO Biofuel Controversy Online at the Independent

2009-09-04T09:42:00.008-10:00

An article of mine on a HECO's efforts to secure biodiesel for its new 110 megawatt O'ahu power plant is online at www.thehawaiiindependent.com. HECO has been touting the plant as a model for renewable energy ever since it was first conceived (plans originally called for it to run on ethane) . But the ideal started to go sour when the mainland company contracted to supply the biodiesel ran into financial difficulties and welched on its plan to build a biodiesel refining plant here...

Enter the Armpit Police?

2009-09-01T15:44:00.018-10:00

It's been a busy few days on the Island of Hawaii. Last Tuesday, 70 or so people rallied at Hilo's Mo'oheau Bandstand in support of single-payer health care. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held hearings on the Army's request for a permit to leave radioactive shell casing debris in place at Pohakuloa Training Area on the Saddle. And last Sunday, there was an emergency ad-hoc meeting about Gov. Linda Lingle's controversial move to oust Micronesian immigrants from their current, QUEST-like health program and place them on a much more basic program that wouldn't pay, for instance for chemo and radiation therapy for cancer victims. (Shameless self-promotion: for coverage of the Micronesian health issue, see my article this week's Honolulu Weekly.)

Meanwhile, over on O'ahu, their council is debating the pressing issue of BO on buses.

The council is hearing a bill today that would establish a code of conduct for bus riders, including prohibition on "bring[ing] onto transit property odors that unreasonably disturb others or interfere with their use of the transit system, whether such odors arise from one's person, clothes, articles, accompanying animal or any other source."

The bill is sponsored by Councilmembers Rod Tam and Nestor Garcia. The Honolulu Advertiser quotes Tam's rationale: "As we become more inundated with people from all over the world, their way of taking care of their health is different. Some people, quite frankly, do not take a bath every day and therefore they may be offensive in terms of their odor."

Hmm. And just how are they going to determine who's exceeded the offensive level? Odor isn't like sound, which can be measured scientifically in decibels. Is there some sort of odorometer that's been recently developed? Are they going to train some experts or import some--perhaps expert wine tasters or perfumiers? (And if so, how much would they have to pay such a person to sniff armpits on public buses?) Are they going to train special pit-sniffing dogs, creating a whole meaning for the term, "pit bull"? And what will the penalty be? A week in lockup, where the smells can be really bad?

And who is to decide what types of odor are to be prosecuted? My ex, for instance, was allergic to many types of perfume. If a woman with the wrong scent on sat next to her, it would definitely "disturb" her and "interfere with her use of the transit system." Should the perfumed lady be prosecuted? And I'm allergic to red pepper. Could I get someone with kimchee breath thrown off the bus?

But let's set measurement and punishment aside for a moment, and get on the blatant prejudice inherent in Tam's statement -- prejudice both ethnic and economic.

Yes, as a former English as a Second Language teacher, I know very well that some cultures bathe less--but they're usually cultures where water is a scarce, as in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. I do remember a confrontation between my Nigerian and Iranian students and my Vietnamese and Malaysians one day, back when I was teaching at the University of Missouri--the former didn't even realize that they were causing nasal discomfort to the latter, until a Vietnamese student spoke up and was seconded by others. To their credit, the Iranians and Nigerians took the Asians' comments to heart, and the atmosphere in the classroom improved considerably. No fines or jail time were necessary.

But how many Nigerians or Iranians do you usually see on the bus in Honolulu?

If you're smelly and riding the bus, it's probably not an ethnic dis-stink-tion. You're probably either a sweaty worker who's just gotten off from a long day at the construction site or a farm or a hot restaurant kitchen, and you're anxious to get home for a nice bath -- or you're homeless, and you haven't been to a beach park with an indoor shower lately.

Tam got into trouble last year by trying to ban people from sleeping on park benches--a measure criticized as targeting the homeless. This is more of the same. If he really wants to improve odors on buses, he should sponsor a bill for more public shower facilities (and more public housing), and stop trying to ban the very people who need public transportation most from using The Bus. And he should stop trafficking in xenophobic slurs about ethnic armpits.

I've never smelled a bus rider as putrid as Tam's statement.

NRC Hearings on Pohakuloa

2009-08-25T11:55:00.002-10:00

This Wednesday and Thursday in Kona and, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will be holding public meetings/hearings on depleted uranium contamination at the Pohakuloa Training Area. The hearing times are below.

The military is seeking an NRC license to allow the radiation contamination at PTA to remain in place. The army has been beating a series of strategic retreats on this issue for months. After I reported that activists had taken abnormally high radiation readings in the saddle area, the military denied that there was any use of depleted uranium on the mountain. Then it discovered that a cold-war era artillery piece designed to hurl small atomic bombs had been tested at Pohakuloa; the gun hadn't fired actual bombs, but the non-explosive shells that it had fired contained DU. Then it found pieces of those rounds. Then the army claimed that although there was DU was found at Pohakuloa, it wasn't dangerous to the public. Each of those claims was disputed by various activists and experts, who contended that DU did present a danger, especially if particles were stirred up by more activity (such as construction, vehicle activity or bombardment) and got into someone's lungs.

I don't know which is right about the danger level. But I'm not inclined to take the Army's word about it. It would be good if those findings were verified by an independent source. It would be even better if the DU were removed and disposed of properly. The army has a long history of and not thoroughly cleaning up its messes on this island, which has exacerbated public resentment and distrust during this most recent controversy.

Meeting times and places:

Kona: 6-8:30 p.m., Wednesday, Aug. 26, King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel
Hilo: 6-8:30 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 27, Hilo High School cafeteria

Natural Food Store Switcharoo

2009-08-21T09:22:00.005-10:00

Island Naturals is moving from its current location near Mall Wort to a bigger space in the Hilo Shopping Center on Kilauea Avenue. Another natural food chain called Down to Earth, which some Honolulu residents may be familiar with, is moving into Island Natch's old spot. This is inevitably going to lead to some confusion, when people come to the old spot and see the new store; some folks may assume that Island Natch got bought out. This is not, I repeat, NOT, the case.

I wish both stores the best, though I admit to being a bit biased toward the Island Natch with its home-town roots. My general impression is that the Island Naturals chain and its owner, Russel Ruderman, have been pretty responsible corporate citizens for Hawaii Island over the years, and I hope Down to Earth will follow their example.

Food Inc. at Honoka'a People's Theater

2009-08-21T08:56:00.002-10:00

Slow Foods Hawaii is sponsoring a benefit showing of Food, Inc. at the Honoka'a People's Theater on Thursday, Aug. 27. Doors open at 5 p.m., film at 5:30, Discussion session at 7, entertainment and networking at 8. I highly recommend this film.

For an alternative view on this issue, written by a farmer, I also recommend an essay called "The Omnivore's Delusion."

Losing Patients

2009-08-15T14:12:00.007-10:00

I got an annoying phone call from AIG yesterday. I'd been in their Hilo office the day before to renew my auto insurance with them. The caller wanted me to rate the service I'd gotten during that visit, on a five point scale from "poor to "excellent," on dozens of different points: Did the person who served me explain my options clearly? Was I greeted promptly? Did she thank me for patronizing AIG at the end of my visit?

All told, the survey took longer than I'd spent at their office. After all the questions about the visit, the surveyor still wasn't done. He had a whole bank of questions about what else they could sell me. Would I be interested in talking to an AIG agent about life insurance? Would I be interested, etc., about homeowner's insurance or renter's Insurance? Health insurance?

I'm afraid that when he reached the question about health insurance, I exploded just a little bit.
"I'd love to talk with someone about health insurance," I almost-shouted, " if they'd offer something I could afford!"

I've been watching the national debate (or yelling match) on health reform with more than a detached journalist's interest. I'm one of those millions of Americans who don't have health insurance.

Fortunately, I live in Hawaii, the only state that offers universal coverage to children, so when my son gets over here, I'll be able to get insurance for him. But that children's insurance program nearly didn't survive the state's budget crunch, too.

So I can understand why tempers run so high on the issue, at least for people like me. I have more difficulty understanding why opponents are so upset. Some of it seems to be emotional reaction to misinformation such as Sarah Palin's "death panel" remarks; some of the heat seems come from legitimate anxieties about what the bill will do to the cost of health care or the already-inflated national debt. And a lot of publicly expressed anxieties seem to be not about the actual details of the bills, but about vague ideals and glittering generalities: I've seen at least two of the town hall ranters in news reports, for instance, saying something like, "The America I know is disappearing!"

America is changing, no doubt about that. Much of the America I grew up in has already largely disappeared, and I'm only 55. The diversified family farm I grew up on, for instance, has been replaced by factory farms, feedlots and corporate food distribution. (See my essay on that subject at The Hawaii Independent Web site. I also highly recommend Food Inc. It just ended its run at the in the Palace Theater in Hilo, but I'm sure it will be showing up on DVD soon.) Most people who've lived any length of time remember places that have been transformed beyond recognition by development and local stores that have been obliterated by corporate behemoths such as Wal-Mart and Target. I can remember when you could make a purchase or cash a check without having your picture taken, and when political conventions weren't choreographed, and when airports weren't police states.

And I remember a time when even a hardscrabble family farmer could get health insurance for himself, his wife and three kids and take them to the doctor of his choice. That world started to die during the Reagan administration, when deregulation allowed both insurance rates and pharmaceutical profits to soar. Its condition deteriorated rapidly after the Clinton Administration's efforts at health reform got torpedoed and HMOs were born instead.

Big abstractions like "The America I knew" can be very dangerous. Wars get started for economic considerations (Even the American Revolution was essentially a dispute over taxes and tariffs), but get fought in the name of "Protecting our Freedom" or "The American Way of Life" or "Manifest Destiny." Bad decisions get made when ideological sacred cows get placed before the realities of daily life.

One of the biggest, most untouchable sacred cows of American life is "capitalism." It's almost impossible for someone to say, in the U.S., that capitalism is not a solution for everything, without the bearer of that news being labeled a "socialist." I am not, repeat, not a socialist, because socialism is not a solution for many things, either. But I'm just the writer of an obscure little blog, so I'm going to say what people with more to lose don't dare say: Capitalism is not the solution to everything. In fact, unbalanced capitalism is often a large part of the problem. And nowhere is that more clear than in the area of health care.

Example: you're a pharmaceutical company, and you're planning your research budget. Which drug is more likely to make you a big profit: a drug that cures a disease, or a drug that alleviates the symptoms but leaves the patient sick, so he'll have to take the drug for the rest of his life?

The answer, obviously, is the latter. I'm on three such drugs myself; they cost me about $130 a month. I'd love to get whatever's causing my high blood pressure and enlarged prostate fixed, but nobody in the medical profession is offering me that option.

If you look at the airwaves (BTW, I remember an America where prescription drug commercials weren't allowed, and companies didn't add millions our medical bills to pay for advertising campaigns) virtually every high-profile pharmaceutical commercial is for such a drug. They lower cholesterol, but only as long as you keep taking them; they cure your erectile dysfunction for twelve hours, but then you have to take another pill--and the pills cost $12 apiece. Why cure cancer, when you can alleviate acid reflux?

Example #2: Insurance is essentially legalized gambling: the company is betting you won't get sick and you're betting that you will. Like any gambling, the odds have to favor the house, or the casino goes broke. But what if the rules allow the house to drop you like a hot potato if you do get sick? Then it's a rigged game, and the profits get much, much higher....

My ex and my son are already relying on socialized medicine, and I'm very grateful that it's available. She was a lawyer with an independent law office; when she got cancer, her insurance policy skyrocketed beyond what she could afford. The insurance company lost its bet, but it still got to keep all the money she'd paid in until she got sick. Then she had to close her law office and go on disability; now the government is paying for her chemo and my son's ADHD maintenance drugs.

Sarah Palin is worried about government death panels. What about the private ones: the insurance company rule-makers who cut cancer patients off from treatment?

My ex's case is hardly the only one. My heart goes out to the family of Kimberly Reyes, the 51-year old Waimea mother who died on July 27 after being denied a liver transplant because trace amounts of marijuana were found in her blood.

That's what happens when the goal is to maximize profits: you find ways to minimize your payouts and maximize your pay-ins. The health-care crisis, in a nutshell: too many people--doctors, nurses, medical technicians, hospital companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, tort lawyers, medical supply distributors, medical machine manufacturers, advertising agencies, unions -- are demanding the right to maximize their profit margins on our misery, and we patients have too little leverage to bargain with them.

Some things are just too important to leave to market forces alone. Health care is one of them.

A Correction, and an In-Tents Discussion

2009-08-11T12:48:00.006-10:00

Some follow-ups on my last post:

First, a correction. In the first draft of the previous post, I mistakenly said that Brenda Ford was chairing the Hawaii County Council's Planning Committee; actually, she was chairing Public Works. I later fixed that, but not before a fan e-mailed the uncorrected version out to a few hundred other people. My apologies.

A couple of other observations about that day at the Council:

I was actually very impressed with Brenda Ford as the day went on. Yes, she's not the smoothest reader in the world, but that's more than outweighed by her thoughtfulness, especially on fiscal matters. Time after time, when other councilors were routinely going along with the administration's requests, Ford was asking good,specific, well-researched questions about budgetary procedures and cost effectiveness. In many ways, she's begun to take Curtis Tyler's place as the council's conscience, voting against things that she didn't think quite right, even if that meant she was the sole vote in opposition.

It's not surprising that Ford and Emily Naeole sometimes clash. Naeole seems intuitive and impulsive, following her gut; Ford comes across as just the opposite, critical and careful , sometimes almost nit-picky.

There was one point during the day, however, when Naeole actually thanked Ford. Naeole's bill to allow residents to camp on their land while building a permanent home was up for a re-vote. Ford offered an amendment that would make the bill temporary and experimental and would limit the tent exemptions to Puna. Naeole accepted the amendment as friendly and thanked Ford for her help in moving the bill forward.

In this case, though, I wonder if Ford was right. In offering her amendment, Ford cited an online poll in which the majority of Puna residents supported the tent bill, but an overwhelming number of respondents from Ford's district opposed it. Dominic Yagong, supporting Ford's amendment, cited similar results in his district.

That's troubling. It could be another sign of the way this island has been ghettoized. Ford's district certainly has a large number of upscale subdivisions in it: places where people who are struggling for a home can't afford to build, and people who have forked over huge piles of cash for their homes are more worried about maintaining their property values than about helping poorer families to move in next to them: prime NIMBY country. Yagong's Hamakua Coast is rapidly becoming a combination of old plantation towns and new upscale subdivisions. But Puna, thanks to the lack of foresight of certain land speculators, is riddled with substandard subdivisions that the developers originally thought they were going to sell to unsuspecting mainlanders who would never build there, because nobody would actually build on land in a high-risk lava zone if they understood what that meant. But the developers didn't count on thousands of poor and middle-class families who were just desperate enough to play the odds of a lava inundation in order to have a home.

Kelly Greenwell raised the issue of economic discrimination, if the bill was limited to Puna. Years ago, planning advocate Bonnie Goodell and others had talked of filing an economic discrimination case on behalf of district's residents because of the deprivation of basic services and infrastructure they were suffering, especially compared to the level of services and infrastructure in Hilo. I wonder if it's time to re-explore that issue in a full-fledged article: are the people of Puna being discriminated against? Is funneling the middle and lower classes of Hawaii into a single district, and setting up separate rules to encourage that economic segregation, legal and ethical?

Sideshows at the County Council

2009-08-05T11:37:00.014-10:00

'Sorry for my long absence. After a couple of weeks' delay due to airline scheduling, I finally got back to Missouri to see my son and meet with people about bringing him over here when the time comes (See June 2 entry) Then, on the plane home, I was apparently riding in the same cabin with someone who was carrying some nasty microbes. I was mostly in bed for a couple of weeks (but if a job with a health plan had come along, I'd have climbed out of bed and gone). About the only writing I did was an essay about the personal cost of the industrialization of the food chain for my family and home town, which just appeared at the Hawaii Independent Web site.

Yesterday I was back in the saddle, though. I spent most of the day down at the County Council, because I've got an assignment from the Big Island Weekly to write a story about Billy Kenoi's plan to sell the county's Hamakua lands. That plan hit an unexpected snag yesterday. The council has already approved the land sale once, but had to re-vote on the issue because of the mess from its violation of the Sunshine Law in displacing liberal council members from their posts. Then some Native Hawaiian advocates claimed that the county didn't have clear title, and when corporate council Lincoln Ashida was called to the stand to assure the council that the county had clear title, the best Ashida could offer was an answer in two weeks--a performance that rather flabbergasted Hamakua Councilman Dominic Yagong.

"I think it's incredible, since the county has supposedly owned the land since 1994, that the corp counsel cannot stand before us today and say that for sure we own this land," he said after the meeting.

I'm checking out the native Hawaiian claims and other issues regarding the land sale, and will have my report in the Weekly shortly. Meanwhile, some random observations about the Council itself:

I hadn't had the occasion to attend a council meeting for a while. But I've been covering the council for over 15 years now. And I have to say that this current group of councilors is the least professional I have ever seen.

Yagong, restored temporarily to his post as chair of the Finance committee, did a good job of conducting that meeting relatively smoothly--despite some of the antics of his fellow councilors, who were sometimes chatting on their cell phones or with each other during testimony and discussion. Some of the discussion was good, but Emily Naeole seemed to be basing her positions mostly on anecdotes about Puna life (some on point and some not so much) and an idolization of Billy Kenoi. When she introduced a resolution opposing the delisting of the 'io (Hawaiian hawk) from the Endangered Species List, she said her reason was because "Mayor Kenoi asked me to." It's good that someone is still judging things on whether they're "pono" or not, now that Curtis Tyler is gone. But it's a bit frightening to see what a small part logical problem-solving plays in Naeole's decision-making process.

Despite Yagong's efforts to move the agenda along, the Finance Committee ran badly overtime and the Hamakua lands bill was tabled until the end of the day. So I went out to get lunch and do my laundry. When I got back at 4:15 or so, Naeole's Committee on Human Services and Economic Development, scheduled for 3 p.m., was just convening. That committee had almost no business, so I didn't get to see whether the fears voiced by Hoffman and others about her incompetence with the gavel were well-founded.

Up next was the Public Works Committee, chaired by Ford. She did a fairly competent job, although she was not as smooth a reader as Yagong. Occasionally she would stumble on a word as she read the agenda items into the record. Each time that happened, Guy Enriques would snicker.

Enriques seemed to be having the most fun of any of the councilors. With the possible exception of Dennis "Fresh" Onishi, Enriques probably spoke less on the record that day than any of the others, but he made several under-his-breath comments to J Yoshimoto that Enriques, at least, found humorous--especially when Ford was speaking. His biggest laugh of the day, however, came when an administration official was asked about a routine traffic bill and replied,"No comment." Enriques chuckled and snorted and sniggered over that for at least five minutes, finally prompting a "No snickering" admonishment from Ford.

Apparently somebody had brought some fruit to the Council table. Enriques was popping grapes in his mouth while the public testified that morning. During the Planning session, Naeole was sucking on juicy pieces of grapefruit. She offered some to Greenwell, who was sitting next to her.

Then an agenda item came up that Ford wished to comment upon, so she relinquished the chair to her vice chair, as was proper. But nobody knew who the vice chair was. They had to temporarily adjourn the meeting while they figured it out.

It turned out that the vice chair was Greenwell, much to his surprise. He assumed the gavel, and the public was graced with the vision of a committee chair actually licking juice off his fingers while conducting a public session.

That was the least of his problems. He got confused about which agenda items and amendments were being voted on. He called on members out of order and missed the green lights that appeared on his panel when other members wanted to speak. The other councilors and the county clerk repeatedly had to remind him about the council's rules for conducting a meeting.

When he finally relinquished the gavel, Enriques told him, "You're getting better."

But perhaps the low point of the day happened back during the Finance Committee hearing that morning, when the council re-voted on Yagong's proposal to give back their hefty salary increase, and the various councilors started giving their excuses for keeping those raises, which Ford described as "obscene." Naeole told a story about giving a meal to a homeless person, and claimed she needed the money to help others.

Greenwell, of Kona's wealthy Greenwell ranch family, claimed, with a straight face, "I don't want to begin the downward spiral of this and have people say, 'The county council cut back, you can cut back, too.'"

Council Chair J Yoshimoto, with an equally straight face, claimed, "My main concern is that the county council not influence the salary commission."

Various councilors echoed Naeole's contention that it should be up to the individual councilors to voluntarily give up portions of their raises if they so chose. Somebody said that since the councilors no longer had discretionary money, they needed their raises to give to local charities and causes within their district.

It didn't seem to occur to them that their option to give to the charities of their choice might come at the expense of someone else's job, or be paid for with the sale of land that the people of Hamakua had long said they wanted for family farming. During a session when councilors were arguing over the lease of a copier and debating whether it was more fiscally prudent to hire a parks project manager for Kona or to transfer one there from Hilo, the councilors' arguments for their own pay raises seemed laden with unconscious irony.

Only Yagong and Ford supported the rollback. Kohala councilor Pete Hoffman was absent.

The TMT, the Woodland Center, and Public Frustration

2009-06-18T08:54:00.006-10:00

It's been a busy week. I'd just completed a story about the Puna Woodland Shopping Center controversy for the Honolulu Weekly, when I got the go ahead from the Big Island Weekly to cover Protect Pahoa's protest near the shopping center site on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, I went to a briefing for bloggers and a public hearing, both on the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope. Now I'm working on a Sunday, trying to wrap up stories on those events.

Stories about the Woodland Center controversy are out in the Honolulu Weekly and upcoming in the Big Island Weekly. I'm working on a piece about the telescope for the Hawaii Independent.

One thing that impressed me about both issues is how many well-intentioned people, no matter which side of the issue they stand on, simply don't understand how the system works or how to intervene effectively.

Take the Woodland Center controversy. The permits to build Woodland Center were issued years ago. The contracts have already been signed; the bulldozers are already in motion. About all that the protesters can hope to accomplish, at this point, is "raising consciousness" for other small towns. The only hope that the public ever had of stopping that center or shaping it, really, was back before the zoning approvals and grubbing permits were issued.

Nor was either side very likely to sway the question of whether or not the Thirty Meter Telescope was going to come to this island, based on their testimony at the hearings on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Both sides seemed to be offering statements beginning with "I support the TMT" or "I oppose the TMT." But that just isn't what an EIS hearing is for. In the 20 years that I've been attending EIS hearings on the island, I've never seen an EIS rule in favor of the "No action" option--the option that would kill the project. EISs are paid for by the developer. Their purpose is not to stop a project or to give it the green light; they're meant to examine impacts and propose methods of mitigation--in other words to make the project better, not to kill it. The only time I've ever seen public input stop a project on this island, it was through lawsuits, administrative hearings, or public hearings held by lawmakers.

Still, EIS hearings are a popular method of venting about a project and a way to allow lawmakers and reporters to get some sense of the public's sentiment. That's probably why the holders of EIS hearings have been actively seeking ways to make the hearings less of a bully pulpit in recent years. First the armed forces started holding their hearings in "open house" format, inviting the public to look at informational booths but accepting testimony only in written form or in a private session with a court reporter. That backfired at one hearing, where angry protesters brought their own microphone and cameras, held a noisy demonstration at the hearing with plenty of speakers, and then gave the army a tape afterward as "testimony." The TMT people tried a new variant on that strategy. There were the informational booths first, then presentations by telescope officials, then an open mike--but those who spoke at the open mike were told that their testimony would not go into the record unless they also submitted it in writing or dictated it to a court reporter. A lot of people got up and spoke anyway--and only a couple bothered with the court reporter. So they got their rants in without the TMT people having to dignify those rants with a response in the final document.

In short, the system really is rigged toward the developer, and sign-wavings and EIS hearings aren't likely to change that fact. If people really want to be effective in shaping this island's future, they need haunt the Planning Department and the newspaper's public notice sections so that they know when a new development is proposed; then they need to hit the meetings of the Planning Commission, the Board of Land and Natural Resources, the Land Use Commission, the County Council and other deliberative bodies that actually make land use decisions. And they need to give generously to the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund so that when a court battle needs to occur, the ammunition is available to win it.

Big Tobacco Article Out

2009-06-10T14:13:00.003-10:00

The article about Big Tobacco and local politics is out in the June 10 issue of the Big Island Weekly--and it's featured on one of the more disgusting, but effective, covers they've done, complete with an outline of Hawai'i Island crammed full of cigarette butts. Upcoming is one last campaign spending piece (for now, anyway), about a convict and some of the politicians who have accepted money from him....

A Personal Note

2009-06-02T11:16:00.005-10:00

The tobacco story (see below) will be coming out while I'm gone to the mainland. I'll be spending a couple of weeks there with my 12-year-old son, whose mom, Susan Decker, is in the terminal stages of bone cancer. (Some of you may remember Susan; she had a private family law practice here, years ago, that specialized in helping famly violence victims. It of course went broke, because there was a huge demand for her services but the ones who needed it most couldn't afford to pay. But it was a noble effort.) While in Missouri, I'll be meeting with my son's school councilors and physician, in preparation for bringing him over here to live.

That's scary, because while this is happening, my unemployment benefits are running out (They got extended for six months, thanks to the Obama Administration, but the Hawai'i Island Journal has been gone now for nearly a year), my savings are exhausted, and the general economy and the newspaper crisis have made job-hunting in my field a masochistic exercise. Between now and when I leave, I'll need to do enough freelance work to pay my July rent when I get back. And then, somehow, I'm going to have to earn enough from freelancing to not only pay my rent and utilities, but to build up the money for plane tickets and moving expenses when the time comes to bring Aidan over.

On the good news side, I'll no longer be operating under the restrictions that the State's Unemployment Division was placing upon me (I could only do freelancing if it didn't affect my ability to accept "real" employment--i.e., from a company that pays wages, rather than awards a contract--if it happened to come along--which sort of works for where you sit in a union hall and wait for a ship to come in, but does make not much sense when the only "real" jobs available in my field have been 99.9 percent off-island.) I found that more than about eight hours a week of freelance work raised alarm bells and caused delayed unemployment checks. Now I can work 40 hours a week, or more, on freelance jobs if they're available, instead of 4-8.

All this will mean some changes with this blog--probably either moving it to another location or giving it up. Frankly, I've not gotten a single check from GoogleAds since I started this thing--and even if they actually had a check for me, there would be problems, because Google won't send a check to a P.O. Box and there's no home mail delivery in Volcano. I gave them the street address of a friend in Hilo who'd agreed to accept any checks for me, but she's now moved to Volcano, too.

From now on, everything I do has to pay--maybe not very much, but it has to pay something. So I'll be looking at other hosting sites and the possibility of selling local ads. If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know.

I still think it would be a great idea if all of us Hawai'i Island bloggers could unite under a single site, and hire a couple of the Journal's former ad sales reps to sell local ads for all of us.

Upcoming in Big Island Weekly: Tobacco and the Legislature

2009-06-02T11:10:00.002-10:00

The tobacco story is finished, and sitting over at the Big Island Weekly. Jed says it will probably come out in two weeks. I don't want to give away the ending, but suffice it to say, I found a lot of money flowing into the legislature from America's tobacco companies, and some big rewards for them, hidden in the legislature's cost-cutting bills--but I also found out that there's a potent counter-force at work that's keeping Big Tobacco from getting its way all the time: Big Health....

Upcoming at Honolulu Weekly: GMO money at the State legislature.

2009-05-23T23:13:00.004-10:00

The next installment of my research on who's funding our legislators' campaign races should be appearing this week in Honolulu Weekly. This one deals with agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta, which have heavy investments in both genetically modified crops and our legislators.

I've got a couple more campaign funding articles to spring after that. Nearly completed is a story about tobacco money in the legislature, which is already promised to Big Island Weekly. And then I've got a couple more pieces that I haven't finished researching yet and don't want to reveal until I've asked a few pointed questions of some specific legislators. After that, I'm going to be ready to take a break from the subject for a while. Anybody got something else they want investigated?

Chevy Bites the Dust on the BI

2009-05-20T20:57:00.007-10:00

Big Island Chevrolet is no more. Both the Kona- and Hilo-side dealerships have been taken over by GMAC, General Motor's finance wing, after the business's owner couldn't pay for the vehicles he'd purchased, in the wake of sales that had dropped over a third in the past year.

This touched me personally, unfortunately. I'm the owner of a 2000 Chevy Prizm. A Prizm is essentially a Toyota Corolla with a Chevy bow tie on the front, but some of the parts are just different enough from a Toyota's that you have to go through Chevy to get them. The tail lamps, for instance. I'd recently damaged a tail lamp, and after a fruitless search for a used one at local parts houses and on the Internet, I finally ordered one from BI Chevrolet for $216. That was last week. They said it would take about ten days to arrive. So when I heard on OC-16 last night that this would be the last day the dealership would be open, it was a call to action, even though I'm down with a bad respiratory infection.

This morning, I tried calling the Parts Department; no answer. So I jumped in the Prizm and, four cough drops later, walked into the department in the back of the dealership's sprawling Hilo complex.

The displays were already packed up, and the floor was strewn with boxes. There wasn't an employee in evidence at first, but after a few minutes' wait, one appeared from the back.

He told me that GMAC was taking over the the dealership and would probably call me when the part came in. In case they didn't, he gave me toll free number to call. Those of you who also are stuck with a GM product on this island should probably also save this number: 1-800-323-9935.

GM announced on May 8 that it would not be renewing the contracts of 1,100 dealerships nationwide when they came up for renewal in 2010. But Big Island Chevy was not on that list. It's demise was really a mass repo job: the local owner Alan Clark told the Tribune Herald that when he couldn't come up with enough capital to keep the business afloat and couldn't close a deal to sell the business fast enough for GM, GMAC seized all the company's assets, which had been used to collateralize the cars currently on the company's two lots. That doesn't seem to add up; the cars should be worth what Allen paid GMAC for them--or less, given that the company's good name has been sullied by its own instability, and very people on this island is going to buy a car that they have to take to O'ahu for service on the factory warranty. But I guess the furniture, computers, phones, and outstanding accounts are going to cover GMAC's interest.

That, of course, leaves all of us other creditors, such as me, at GM's mercy. I suddenly have a $216 stake in whether or not GM itself declares bankruptcy.

I wonder how many other dealerships across the country are simply being seized, as Island Chevrolet was. Those 1,100 whose contracts aren't being renewed may just be the tip of the iceberg.

All in the Family

2009-05-12T19:24:00.006-10:00

If you think running for office on the Big Island is expensive, try running on O'ahu. While $2,000 or so would be a high-end donation for a Hawai'i Island legislator or councilmember, O'ahu officeholders often get the legal max of $4,000 per person (especially if the donor is a lawyer or contractor). Or, in some cases, more.

According to state law, campaign donations are limited $4,000 per candidate for each “person” donating; a "person," is defined as "An individual or any general partnership in which the individual belongs." But there are some big loopholes. Apparently, for instance, there's an exception for family members.

Take the case of Ann Kobayashi, for instance, who resigned her Honolulu council position last year in order to run for mayor.

Having the last name of Kobayashi can be pretty expensive at election time. Kobayashi got $8,000 out of Honolulu housewife Dawn Kobayashi, and another $4,000 out of financial advisor Dale Kobayashi of the same address. Mellon Capital Management portfolio manager Susan Kobayashi of San Francisco gave $10,000 to the cause. Honolulu Real estate Developer Burt Kobayashi added another $1000--but then, real estate developers commonly drop that much money on officeholders, whether they share the same last name or not.

Of course, small family fortunes like this are only a few drops in the bucket for a full-fledged O'ahu campaign these days. But it’s also possible to tap other families for more than the maximum donation, if you divide the donations between family members. Honolulu Attorneys Patricia and Arthur Park of Park, Park, Yu and Remillard, for instance, anted up $4,000 each for Kobayashi. So did J Frances E. and Francis Y. Toyama, who both reside at the same Nu’uanu address, and John and Charlene Flynn, who share an address in Nevada, Missouri. Honolulu Accountant Betty Lou Stroup and retiree Edward Stroup, also both of the same address, chipped in another $4,000 apiece--and so did Betty Lou’s employer, Princess Abigail Kawanakoa. President Joseph Pickard of Community Planning and Engineering, Kaneohe, dropped in $4,000, and Melissa Pickard, who shares Joseph's address, added $3,000 on the same day. Wagdi A. Guirguis and Peter Melnyck, who are both listed as “President” of GMP Associates on Kobayashi’s campaign reporting forms, also put in $4,000 apiece.

Kobayashi donated $10,512 worth of postage stamps to her own campaign, but that apparently wasn’t enough, so Honolulu housewife Jane Kumabe to chipped in more stamps worth $3,825. Lawrence Kumabe, an attorney for the city’s Corporation Counsel office who shares Jane’s address, donated in another $800, boosting the Kumabe household’s contribution to $4,625. (Kobayashi also got $2,199 worth of postage stamps from City and County of Honolulu legislative aide Karen Yorimoto.)

One would think that, if the intent was not to skirt the $4,000 contribution limit, one also would also see members of the same households putting in smaller amounts. But in fact, I found only one couple on Kobayashi’s list who shared an address but whose dual contributions totaled less $7,000.

Kobayashi also hit up all the usual donors: labor unions, lawyers, developers, insurers, construction firms. Among other members of her “$4,000 club” were manager Teri Otani of the Honolulu structural engineering firm Mitsunaga & Associates; Hilo attorney Terence Yoshioka; Pueo Trucking Company owner John F. Souza III of Kapolei; Sheet Metal Worker's International Union Local 293; United Airlines manager Valerie Van Buren; Honolulu attorney James Wright, Island Title escrow officer Chin Davone Tan, and the Realtor's Political Action Committee,. The campaign committees of Scott Nishimoto, Scott Sakai and Romy Cachola gave $4,000 each from donations collected for their candidates. The Ironworkers Local added $3,775 to the kitty. All told, Kobayashi reported raising $637,490.84 during the 2006-2008 election period.

Philip Morris's Campaign Generosity; Mufi Hanneman Money Glitch?

2009-05-11T11:01:00.005-10:00

I've been continuing my voyage into the wacky, wonderful world of campaign finance. I've got a green light from the Big Island Weekly to do a story about tobacco money in local politics. And yes, local politicians have been calling for Philip Morris quite a lot, but it ain't easy to trace. Unlike, say, Anheuser Busch, which funnels its money through its own non-candidate committee, Philip Morris's money comes in sometimes under its company name, sometimes through its parent company, Altria; sometimes via its wholly owned lobbying subsidiary, Altria Commercial Services, sometimes through local lobbyists that the company hired, and sometimes through company officials. As a result, I'm having to go through every individual candidate's campaign filings to look for all the names....

In the process of doing that, meanwhile, I'm making other interesting discoveries. It's no suprise Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hanneman's contributors include a long list of developers and lobbyists, both mainland and local, for instance--but one collection of entries particularly caught my eye. On June 19, 2007, three different partners in a Washington lobbying firm called The National Group dumped a total of $5,500 dollars into Hanneman's campaign spending fund.

State campaign spending laws limit contributions to $4000 per "person." A "person," for the law's purpose, is "An individual or any general partnership in which the individual belongs." The three lobbying partners' donation looks like a clear violation of the law. But if you're waiting for the Campaign Spending Commission to investigate, don't hold your breath. Last year, I brought a similar situation to their attention: Billy Kenoi's mayoral campaign got a huge influx of cash from various heirs of the Campbell Estate. Most of those contributions came in on the same day, and all of the heirs listed their profession as "entrepreneur" (a term used only by Campbell heirs among Kenoi's contributors--which strongly suggests that they planned their contributions together.

I asked the CSC if they were going to investigate.

"We don't go on fishing expeditions," I was told.

SB 884 passes, but campaign fund safe.

2009-05-07T23:37:00.003-10:00

After several delays, Senate Bill 884, which raids several special funds to help with the state's billion-dollar-plus projected deficit, has passed. Among the hardest-hit funds: the Hawaii Tobacco Settlement Fund, which loses $20 million to the general fund; the Housing Finance Revolving fund, also $20 million, and the Wireless Enhanced 911 Fund, out $16 million. A bit of good news: the legislature backed off a proposal to raid the Campaign Elections Fund after getting a letter from the the State Attorney General that said such a raid would probably be unconstitutional. So it looks as if the pilot project for publicly funded council elections on this island will probably move forward as scheduled.

The current version of the bill on display at the legislature's Web site, which I assume is the final version, apparently does not find that there is a specific amount of "excess funds" that can be be taken from the HI 5 beverage container deposit fund. But it does give the legislature the authority to make that determination in the future, and takes that authority away from the State Auditor. So we may see another attempt to raid the HI 5 fund in the next legislative session.

The Gravy Train Article is Online

2009-05-01T15:17:00.001-10:00

To see who's bankrolling some of your local legislators, click the following link to the Big Island Weekly.

Bill 884 Moved to Wednesday

2009-04-28T11:24:00.001-10:00

The title says it all. I assume that, since they haven't heard the bill yet, they're still accepting testimony.

Bill 884 Set for hearing.

2009-04-25T09:20:00.007-10:00

Senate Bill 884 has been set for a hearing on Monday, April 27 at 3 p.m. in Room 229 at the Capitol. This bill would raid various special funds, transferring moneys to the General Fund, where they could be used for anything from road repairs to education to legislators' pay raises. The ostensible purpose of this is to make up for a projected $1.76 billion shortfall in tax revenues due to the recession. But it could be used to gut such programs as the Campaign Elections Fund and the HI 5 beverage container deposit funds.

The latest version of the bill at the Legislature's Web site authorizes the state to raid at least two dozen special funds for “excess” money, including $33 million from the Hawaii Tobacco Settlement Special Fund, $20 million from the HI 5 fund, $12 million from the Emergency Medical Services Special Fund, $10 million from the Rental Assistance Revolving Fund, $9 million from the Wireless Enhanced 911 fund, $8 million from the Clean Air Special Fund, $6 million from the Special Fund for Disability Benefits, $5 million from State Risk Management Revolving Fund, $4 million Environmental Management Special Fund, $1 million from the Agricultural Loan Revolving Fund, 3.3 million from the Compliance Resolution Fund, $2 each from million from the Special Land and Development Fund, Hydrogen Investment Capital Special Fund and the Housing Finance Revolving Fund, $1.5 million each from the Stadium Special Fund, the Neurotrauma Special Fund, the Judiciary Computer System Special Fund and the Medicaid Investigations Recovery Fund, $600,000 from the State Identification Revolving Fund, $1 million from the Drug Demand Reduction Assessments Special Fund. The bill also would trancfer 5 percent of the receipts of several other funds to the general fund for "central service expenses," and woul require other funds to turn any interest earned on their accounts over to the general fund.The Campaign Elections Fund isn't mentioned in this draft of the bill, but its house companion bill, HB 39, contains a clause stating that the fund "$1 in excess of the requirements of the fund" and authorizes the transfer of that "excess" to the general fund. The "$1" a placeholder for an amount to be filled in later. If that paragraph is moved into the Senate draft on Monday and that $1 is replaced by more than $5 million, it could jeopardize the pilot program, currently scheduled to start in 2010, that would provide full public funding for county council elections on this island.

If the various funds really do have such excesses, then the bill could provide for more efficient use of state revenues. But many of those funds come from specific revenue streams that were authorized only for specific purposes. The Hawaii Tobacco Settlement Special Fund, for instance, was the result of a legal settlement with the tobacco companies, and was intended to finance efforts to mitigate the damage caused to those companies' victims. The Special Elections Fund contains the voluntary donations of taxpayers who checked a box on their tax forms thinking that their donation would go toward publicly funded elections. If that money becomes part of the general fund, ironically, it could be used to pay for various projects espoused by the very special interests that donors thought they were helping to thwart.

In some cases, the bill transfers the authority to determine "excessive funding" from the Auditor's office to the legislature itself. In the case of HI 5, it deletes a clause that authorized the "adjustment" of deposit rates in the case of excess funds, and instead transfers consumers' extra nickels to general revenue. And it explicitly claims a nearly unfettered government power to raid special funds in the future:

The legislature finds that section 37-53,
Hawaii Revised Statutes, provides the governor nearly unlimited
authority to transfer non-general funds to the general fund.

Apparently, the legislature is taking that authority for itself as well. If this bill passes, our beverage deposit nickels and our donations for publicly funded elections might end up paying bureaucrats' salaries or financing legislators' pet projects.

SB 884 goes to Conference Committee at 3:00 PM on Monday, April 27. Key legislators to contact on the issue include Sen. Donna Mercado Kim and Sen. Colleen Hanabusa.

Coming to Big Island Weekly: Riding the O'ahu Gravy Train.

2009-04-23T13:47:00.003-10:00

A few days ago, I mentioned that an article about campaign finance would soon be appearing at www.thehawaiiindependent.com. There's been a change of plan. I'll continue to write other articles for the Indpendent, but the article I'd mentioned will be appearing, instead, in next week's hard copy in the Big Island Weekly.

I have very mixed feelings about writing for a Stephens Media publication, but with the demise of the Hawaii Island Journal, there are limited outlets for important news on this island, and I think Jed Stockton, BIW's editor, really does want to give this island the information it needs--and this particular article is, at least in my opinion, very important. It traces the campaign contributions that flowed into the coffers of five Hawaii Island state representatives who supported a delay in implementing the publicly funded elections project on this island. All five, as it turns out, get a lot of money from vested interests, which gives them a huge advantage against potential opponents. Three of them were funded entirely or almost entirely by special interest moneys from outside their districts. And all could be voting on issues where their constituents' interests and their donors' may be at odds.

I hope you read it.

--Alan

Senate Bill Would Raid HI 5

2009-04-21T08:59:00.003-10:00

Senate Bill 884 (see previous blog) has been "deferred." That doesn't mean that it's dead. And unlike a county council measure, which is subject to the Sunshine Law, a legislative bill hearing can be called with only a one-day notice. The bill could be revived any time this month.
"We're waiting for the 24-hour notice," says Cory Payne of Voter Owned Elections.
The latest version of the bill posted online contains no mention of a raid on the Campaign Elections
Fund--but it does raid the HI 5 container deposit fund, stripping the State Auditor's office of the power to determine if the fund has excess moneys, transferring that power to the legislator, and transferring $10 million from HI 5 to the state's general fund.
Note: Anheuser Busch distributed total of $9,300 among 20 Hawaii legislators during the last election. Of course, Busch has a vested interest in weakening HI 5.

Big Vote Today on Clean Elections

2009-04-18T10:43:00.003-10:00

Another emergency message came in last night from Voter Owned Hawaii. I usually investigate something before I put it up, but given the time frame, I'm just going to post this and let people make their own decisions. The message, verbatim:

We know movies usually come out on Friday nights, but Saturday (today) is different.

Lawmakers will decide on SB 884 and it will be a show you don't want to miss! Bring popcorn and a blanket (air conditioning will be blasting) and watch as legislators decide whether or not (here's where the plot is) to add Section 25 (of HB 39) to SB 884. It's the old bait and switch plot. Will legislators switch Section 25 (of HB 39) over to SB 884?? If so, this would knowingly undermine Act 244, the Big Isle Fair Elections Act ( For those of you who want more technical details, see below ).

(If you are not on Oahu, but listening, can you help us by making phone calls to our supporters tomorrow?! Just respond to this email with your phone number and we'll call you - Mahalo!!)

WHEN: Saturday, April 18 4:00 PM

WHERE: Room 309 at the Capitol

(Can you be a volunteer? -- Help us call through to our supporters tomorrow! If you can volunteer, please respond to this email with your phone number and we will call you!! )

As you know, we worked 10 years to pass a Fair Elections Law. Last year, Hawaii became the 9th state in the U.S. to pass this important reform. It's a movement that is sweeping the country....

Technical Details

1. While HB 345 to delay Act244 is dead (it could still be brought out by Sen JGO
technically but not likely),

SB 884 is being fast tracked, and it could completely undermine Act 244
(hearing tomorrow, Saturday at 4:00 PM )

2. When opponents to this bill realized HB 345 wouldn't pass, they figured out
that they could raid the Haw Election Campaign Fund to bring it under
the $3.5 million threshold (by Sept 1 this yr).

If the HECF is under $3.5 million then Act 244 cannot run (and, w/ the
continued efforts to raid the HECF -- even before the stock market crash
act 244 might never run, which may be the play)

3. SB 884 goes to Conference Committee at 4:00 PM tomorrow Saturday.

Senator Donna Kim, and Senator Hanabusa are the legislators who can make or break it

4. SB 884 Takes from the HECF in two ways:

a. takes the interest from HECF

b. it could potentially contain another section ( Section 25 in the companion bill
HB 39 ) ---- this section would give the finance director the
authority to take a set amount out of the HECF on July 1.

If this section allows more than $500,000, we could be sunk, not
able to meet the $3.5 million threshold. ( $1 million might also be
safe, but the numbers are shaky )

Right now, in HB 39, there's a $1 placeholder in Section 25, leaving
it open for negotiation.

As the conference committee goes through this, line by line, tomorrow
night, they'll come to Section 25 of HB 39, and have to decide whether
or not they're going to raid the HECF and exactly how much.

This is a concern. The House has already indicated support to do away
with Act 244 - Big Isle Fair Elections.

5. The Hawaii Election Campaign Fund is different from other special funds in 2 ways:

a. most importantly, it has a constitutional mandate from the 78 Con Con
(section 5 of Const I think)

b. taxpayers check off money on tax forms ( legally, the state can take certain
amounts of money from the HECF )

To Recap

SB 884 is the new vehicle to potentially raid the HECF, bringing it under the $3.5 million
threshold. On Sept 1 2009 (year before an election year), if the HECF balance
is under $3.5 million, Act 244 cannot run.

------------------------------------------------------

Also, if you haven't done it yet, please consider writing a letter to the newspaper editors. If you send a letter, please BCC the letter to kory@voterownedhawaii.org

Here's what to do:

Compose an email to be sent to letters@hawaiitribune-herald.com, letters@honoluluadvertiser.com, letters@starbulletin.com, and letters@westhawaiitoday
Begin your letter how you want, you may want to start by saying "Dear editor, I'm writing in response to Sunday's editorial from Big Island House reps regarding HB 345..." or something similar to that.
Write your letter. Feel free to use the talking points below.
Call the Tribune Herald editorial department at 930-7324 and ask them to print your letter.

Talking Points:

The Supreme Court has already turned down an appeal to hear the constitutionality of the matching funds mechanism of some comprehensive public funding programs. This is a clear sign that they don't believe there is a case. To use speculation about a possible court case as a reason to undermine Act 244 is disingenous.
It's a fact that oil costs are going to start rising again, and this is going to leave Hawaii helpless in many areas: tourism, food security, and energy security. It's precisely because of the pay-to-play elections system that Hawaii is hamstrung in all of these areas. These are the urgent issues of our day, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's interesting then, that it would be a modest pilot program for public funding that would create the type of urgency that would cause five House Reps to spend their time on an editorial to oppose it. Aren't there better things to do then to spend time oppoosing a program that would help solve the very problems we should be tackling? Stop HB 345 and let the Fair Elections Act have it's chance to run as a pilot program.
Money is not an issue. The money does not come out of the General Fund, but instead out of the Hawaii Election Campaign Fund. This money, by law, must be used for publicly funded elections.
Money is not an issue. In order for the Fair Elections program to run, there must be $3.5 million dollars in the fund. This will guarantee that the Big Island Fair Elections Act doesn't deplete the fund.
There is a cap on the Fair Elections program that is set at $300,000. It cannot use any more money than that.
The projections being cited in Sunday's editorial are inflated and do not take into account the difficulties of the qualifying process in order to access public funds. In Arizona, even after the program had been running for three election cycles, the average number of candidates who qualified per district was 1.17. Even though 24 candidates ran during the last Big Island county election, some of those candidates simply put their name on the sheet without running a serious campaign.
Citing the economy as a reason to delay the Fair Elections Act is only a scare tactic. In fact, it's during bad times that it makes the most sense to run a program like this. The very reason we're in the bad economic situation we're in is because of privately financed elections. Big Banks essentially marched right in to the Securities and Exchange Commission and convinced regulators to change debt-to-capital ratios and risk management factors for the lending industry. These were major factors in creating the fake bubble in the housing market that lead to the recession. The only reason these banks could do that is because they finance the campaigns of the legislators who appoint the leaders within these regulatory bodies.
Citing Massachusetts is another scare tactic too. Voters enacted the Massachusetts "Clean Elections" program through a ballot initiative. The Speaker of the House at that time however, Thomas Finneran, was staunchly opposed to the measure and refused to fund it. The Massachusetts Supreme Court then found the Massachusetts Legislature in violation of their Constitution.
In summary, legislators can use all of the scare tactics that they want to, but in the end, this is a matter of challenging the "powers that be". Fair Elections allows qualified candidates who have trust in their communities to run a legitimate campaign to at least get their ideas onto the table for debate. In general, this makes sitting legislators uncomfortable because it allows more people to participate in a game that right now is only open to people who have connections to money.

Thanks again for your continued support!

Voter Owned Hawaii

http://voterownedhawaii.org

457-8622

---------------------------------------------------------

If you haven't written a letter-to-the-editor, please consider doing that with our easy-to-use form. Just click here!

Thanks again for your help to pass the "reform that makes all reforms possible"!

----------------------------------------------------------

Voter Owned Hawaii

http://voterownedhawaii.org

808-457-8622

Raid on Elections Fund?

2009-04-17T11:27:00.010-10:00

Another last minute maneuver may be underway that could derail Hawai'i County's pilot publicly-funded elections program. The program, passed last year by the state legislature, is designed to ensure that county council candidates who could gather enough signatures and five dollar donations from their constituents could get matching money to counter an opponent who had lots of special interest money. The matching funds were supposed to come from the interest on the state's Campaign Elections Fund, which is running a healthy surplus right now.
Yesterday I got an e-mail alert from Kory Payne of Voter-Owned Hawaii, which had pushed for the original program. It said that House Bill 39, which originally had been about placing a $5 surcharge on various state-collected fees had been gutted and rewritten as a bill to let the state borrow the interest from various special funds--including, presumably the Elections Fund, which is supplied from voluntary donations by taxpayers who check a box on their tax returns for that specific purpose.
The Voter-Owned Elections release explained one possible ramification:

Because Act 244 contains a section that says there must be $3.5 million on September 1 before each election year, citizen advocates believed legislators might try to raid the Hawaii Election Campaign Fund to bring it below that $3.5 million threshold. House bill 39 is now waiting to be scheduled for a final “conference committee” at which both house and senate members will try come to a resolution on the matter.

I pulled up the bill's various versions at www.capitol.hawaii.gov, the state legislature's Web site.
Here's the complete text of the latest version:

A BILL FOR AN ACT
relating to state revenues. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF HAWAII:
Section 1. The purpose of this Act is to effectuate the title of this Act. SECTION 2. The Hawaii Revised Statutes is amended to conform to the purpose of this Act. SECTION 3. This Act shall take effect upon its approval. INTRODUCED BY: _____________________________

In other words, we don't know what the heck is actually going to go into this bill at this time. But we do know that it's no longer about adding surcharges to various state fees. That language really was deleted.

The bill was amended by the Senate to its current gutted form on April 14--enabling the Senate, perhaps, to say that it had hadn't supported a tax increase, just in time for Tea Party Day--and the amended version was returned to the House, which notified the Senate today, April 17, that the House disagreed with the amendment .

Here's Voter-owned Hawaii's take on what happens next:

Payne believes the decision on how much money to take from the election fund rests in the hands of house and senate leadership. “At the end of the day, the two most powerful politicians in the Capitol decide what to do on issues of large public concern. Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, along with Senator Donna Kim, as well as House Speaker Calvin Say, will have the final say on the matter.” House bill 39 will be decided sometime between now and the final decking deadline on May 1.

For those who wish to make their voices heard on what fills in the blanks, here are Hanabusa's and Say's contact info:

Sen. Colleen Hanabusa
21st Senatorial District
Hawaii State Capitol, Room 409
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
Phone 808-586-7793; Fax 808-586-7797
Email senhanabusa@Capitol.hawaii.gov

Rep. Calvin Say
20th Representative District
Hawaii State Capitol, Room 431
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
phone 808-586-6100; fax 808-586-6101
e-mail repsay@Capitol.hawaii.gov

Shotguns and Tsetse flies

2009-04-15T15:37:00.009-10:00

I don't usually comment here on national and international events. But like many other people, I've been following the news of the dramatic rescue of an American merchant captain from Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa. What I've found most striking about the whole affair--aside from the incredible luckiness of three simultaneous head shots into a covered boat bobbing on the ocean--were the story's correlations to two other news stories that it nearly drowned out (sorry about the pun) in the U.S. Media.

One of those was about Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to direct U.S. funding away from weapons systems designed for the Cold War, such as the super-expensive Raptor fighter, and toward systems more in line with current threats, such as as guerrilla fighters, terrorists and pirates armed with relatively primitive but highly effective weapons such as AK-47s, RPGs, improvised land mines, suicide truck bombs and small speedboats.

The pirate standoff was a classic example of the problem. The two primary adversaries were four pirates with small arms in a lifeboat versus a U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer. Look at that again: a guided missile destroyer. I toured such a destroyer when it visited Hilo Harbor two or three years ago. The Arleigh Burkes are 506 feet long (my guide that day claimed his ship was nearly the size of a World War II cruiser, but that's a slight exaggeration; most U.S. cruisers in WWII were over 600 feet long. On the other hand, WWII destroyers was usually only about 350 feet long). They carry an awesome array of vertical-launch and cruise missiles, and a Phalanx Gattling gun for defense against incoming missiles--but their only standard armament useful against a pirate speedboat would be a single five-inch deck gun. U.S. Navy ships used to carry marine snipers on board--but according to one news report, the Navy seals who finally took the shots that ended the pirate standoff had to be parachuted down to the Bainbridge.

According the the Bainbridge's own Web site, the missile destroyers were "originally designed to defend against former-Soviet aircraft, cruise missiles, and attack submarines"; now, "This higher capability ship is to be used in high-threat areas to conduct antiair, antisubmarine, antisurface, and strike operations. " This ship was not designed for this job.

So why are we hunting tsetse flies with a shotgun?

The flies apparently realize the fallacy of this. The day after sniper rifles did what guided missiles couldn't, Somali pirates seized four more ships and raked a second U.S. container ship--which, ironically, like the Maersk Alabama, was carrying emergency humananitarian supplies--with RPG and automatic weapons fire. I didn't see any stories about whether the pirates were abetted in their efforts by the fact that at least two U.S. warships (a guided missile frigate ironically named the U.S.S. Halyburton reportedly joined the Bainbridge) were tied up watching a lifeboat.

I'm no defense expert, but it seems to me that unless we plan to start nuking towns along the Somali coast, we'd be a lot more effective in the region if we were using the equivalent of coast guard cutters, or or maybe something along the line of WWII PT boats (After getting the PT 109 cut in half, John F. Kennedy commanded a PT boat that had been rearmed as a gunship. A modern equivalent might actually be able to catch a Somali pirate who didn't somehow get himself stranded on a lifeboat.) And we could build a batch of them for the cost equivalent of one guided missile destroyer.

The other article that caught my attention was about the origins of the piracy problem. The story was widely publicized in Europe--BBC's "World Have Your Say" based an entire one-hour program to it. It seems that after the Somali national government collapsed, big commercial fishing vessels began moving into Somali's coastal waters and gobbling up all the fish, in violation of international treaties of the seas. This, of course, devastated the local fishing industry. The out-of-work local fishermen started launching vigilante operations against the interloping fishing fleets, and then escalated to general piracy.

It seems to me that if our Navy ships are going to attempt to catch the pirates, we should also use them to go after illegal trawlers, which a destroyer probably could catch. Then the local Somalis would have less reason to go pirating. They might even actually like us, and let us send them surplus American grain without firing at our ships.

Where I've been.

2009-04-14T13:13:00.006-10:00

My apologies for the infrequent posts lately. I've been heavily engaged in a little research project. I've been going through the campaign spending reports of local legislators, and making my own annotated versions: figuring out what the acronyms of the various political actions committees stood for, who the individuals worked for, which of them were lobbyists. The results have been pretty eye-opening.

This all stemmed from a couple of requests for stories about the move to delay the start of publicly funded elections in Hawai'i County. The pilot "voter-owned elections" program, passed last year, was to have started in 2010. This year, however, five Hawai'i Island legislators--Robert Herkes, Clift Tsuji, Cindy Evans, Jerry Chang and Mark Nakashima--introduced House Bill 345, which would delay the start of the program until 2014. The measure passed the House, but seemed dead in the Senate until a the Hawaii County Council, with its new majority under J Yoshimoto, voted 6-3 yesterday to support Bill 345, despite all-but-unanimous testimony against the delay. Those supporting the measure cited the possible cost, the possibility that the money alloted for public funding would run out before every candidate who applied was funded, and court challenges to similar measures in other states. Those against the delay argued different figures and different court cases, and wondered why the debate wasn't on how to fix any perceived problems instead of about delaying implementation.

But one thing is certain: some of those who support the delay are doing very well under the current system. They've gotten big contributions from special interests outside their own districts, which gives them a huge advantage against any challengers--an advantage they'd lose if publicly funded elections ever became a reality.

Hence my little project. It was an extremely time-consuming job, but it's going to bear considerable fruit. I'm about to send the first story based on that research off to the www.thehawaiiindependent.com: a report on who's financing those five legislators. And now that I have the data, I'm going to be tracking the money behind various other issues at the legislature, such as genetically modified crops (Clift Tsuji, who wants to prohibit state or county regulation of them, is getting a lot of money from the companies that produce them) and the tobacco tax increase (You'd be surprised about who's getting money from Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds). It's going to be fun.

If somebody out there has some experience with data crunching or spreadsheet programming and wants to help extend this effort to other state legislators, btw, give me a call or drop me a line. It's a big job, but it's something that needed to be done a long time ago.

Online Poll: Should 2 Percent for Public Lands be Suspended?

2009-04-05T22:55:00.004-10:00

Mayor Billy Kenoi is moving forward with his plan to balance the county budget in part by raiding the 2 Percent for Open Spaces fund. According to a recent e-mail by Councilman Guy Enriques, Kenoi has asked Councilman Dominic Yagong to introduce Bill 49, which would suspend payments into the fund for two years, beginning retroactively on Jan. 1, 2009. The fund, which was approved by referendum, sets aside 2 percent of county revenues to acquire lands for parks and open space before they're snatched up by developers.

Enriques sent out a poll, asking those on his e-mail list if they favored the suspension. Of course, since he rose to prominence in his district (and garnered probably the biggest campaign war chest for a council race in county history) by supporting development at Punalu'u, it's likely that those on his mailing list are a bit skewed toward development and against the open spaces fund. But those who'd like to express their views, but who didn't get the e-mail notice, can go to http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cGNFa3V5NVkyTGdEYXg2eGNUMGZpY0E6MA and vote. And of course, those outside Enriques's district can always contact their own councilpeople.

Hamakua to Host Community Development Workshops

2009-03-11T06:31:00.000-10:00

Want to make a difference in your community, but don’t know how? The Hamakua Community Development Corporation is sponsoring a series of workshops in April and May to teach the basics of “Community Organization Development.” Tuition is $10.00 per class. If interested, call call Donna Mitts at 936-2117 or email her at ohanadonna@yahoo.com . The schedule is below:

April 6: The Basics of Non Profit Boards/Community Groups
Location: North Hawaii Education & Research Center , Honokaa
Presenter: Diane Chadwick - Philanthropic Services Officer, Hawaii Community Foundation.
Topics: An overview of non-profit boards in Hawaii , mission statements, etc.

April 13: Legal Affairs
Location: North Hawaii Education & Research Center , Honokaa
Presenter: George Zweibel, Attorney, President of the Legal Aid Society, Honolulu
Topics: Board governance, fiduciary duties, board conduct, conflict of interest policies.

April 20: Managing with Aloha
Location: Laupahoehoe High School Band Room
Presenter: Rosa Say, Founder, Say Leadership Coaching and author of Managing with Aloha
Topic: Bringing Hawaii's Universal Values to the Art of Business

April 27: Funding Resources
Location: North Hawaii Education & Research Center, Honokaa
Presenters: Tim O'Connell, Assistant to the State Director, USDA Rural Development; and Beth Dykstra, County of Hawai`i Department of Research and Development
Topics: Meet representatives from local agencies that fund community projects on our island.

May 4: Financial Matters
Location: North Hawaii Education & Research Center, Honoka'a
Presenter: Chris J. Clarke, CPA
Topics: Financial Aspects of Not-for-profit Governance, Board Members Role in Finance

May 11: Grant Writing & Fundraising
Location: North Hawaii Education & Research Center , Honokaa
Presenter: Jeani Navarro, VP ARC of Kona, Grant writing instructor, UH Hilo
Topics: Grant writing and fundraising

Pro-GMO "Pre-emptive" bill moves forward

2009-03-10T11:51:00.004-10:00

Rep. Clift Tsugi and Speaker Calvin Say are at it again. Tsugi's House Agriculture Committee has passed a "preemptive bill," House Bill 1226, and which would essentially prevent any state or county law prohibiting or regulating genetically modified organisms. The bill does exempt existing laws and ordinances, such as the one passed by the County Council of Hawaii last year that bans GMO Taro and coffee on the island. It also specifically exempts Hawaiian taro, though it doesn't define what "Hawaiian taro" is. But if HB 1226 passes, no other place in Hawaii will be able to control whether or not GM crops aside from Hawaiian taro are grown there, or be able to regulate how those crops are grown.

In his report on the bill, Tsugi justified its passage on the grounds that "biotechnology will become increasingly important in the future to feed the population of the United States and the world, and meet their energy demands. Scientific research and improvement of food and energy crops will be necessary to increase productivity, yield, quality, and drought, pest, or disease resistance."

"In the agricultural industry of Hawaii, the seed corn component now ranks second," he notes--second, presumably, in profits generated, since a number of crops occupy more acreage. It's questionable how much of that money stays in the state, since those seed corn crops mostly are being grown for large corporations, and sold by those corporations to farmers elsewhere. But GMOs are also moneymaker of the University of Hawaii, as well, since the University holds some important patents in that area.

The bill, however, is bad news for organic farmers, who may face cross-contamination of modified genes from nearby GM fields. That's already happened to organic farmers on this island, some of whom have had to destroy CM-contaminated papaya trees. It's bad news, especially, for organic honey producers, especially, since they won't even know if their bees are bringing pollen from GM crops back to the hive. And its bad news for most farmers who want to export their crops, since much of the world still doesn't accept GM products. And it's bad news for anyone who want to plant seed not bought from a corporation, since GM plants are patented by the company that modifies it and cannot be grown without permission from that company.

"This is serious stuff, to take away home rule, to prohibit labeling, forever," wrote local food activist Nancy Redfeather in a letter circulating on the Net. Redfeather and other activists are urging opponents of the bill to contact Dwight Takamine and other members of the Senate Agricultural Committee, which will have to vote on the bill if it crosses over.

Speaker Say and Tsugi, last year, helped to kill a bill to protect taro and coffee growers from GM contamination, when the ag committee inserted preemptive language similar to that of the current bill at the last moment. At that time, I asked Tsuji who had introduced the amendment, and he wouldn't say. This year, though, we know that Say, himself, introduced the bill.

This year, they appear to have conceded on Hawaiian taro,but want to make sure that no other crop, including coffee, has protection from genetic tinkering.
In addition to Tsugi(D-S. Hilo, Upper Puna)the bill got support from one other Big Islander: Cindy Evans (D-North Kona, Kohala.

Similar bills have been introduced in a number of other states, pushed by corporate agribusiness lobbyists. According to local farm activist Wally Andrade, who has been tracking the issue, 16 other states rejected such bills so far.

Ann Noni Moss Comes to Blogspot

2009-02-03T14:42:00.003-10:00

When you get a chance, please check out www.annnonimoss.blogspot.com .

Over the years, a select number of people have received e-mails of Ms. Moss's fractured carols around Christmas time. Now, for the first time, they're collected in one place for all to see.

Some of these verses comment on local politics on the Big Island of Hawaii; others are more national or general in scope.

As always, I deny that I wrote these.

Enjoy

Upcoming at the Independent: Biofuel Land Rush

2009-02-02T15:42:00.005-10:00

Last week I sent a new story to the Hawaii Independent (www.thehawaiiindependent.com) about the rapidly evolving biofuels situation here. There's so much happening, in fact, that the Independent decided run two articles about it. The first, about the biofuel land rush on this island, should be up sometime this week, I hope. The second, about biofuel projects on the other islands, is still in progress. And of course, as usual, I found out far more than I can recount in two 1000-word articles.

Essentially, there are six biofuel companies active on, or planning, projects to produce biodiesel or electrical power from green materials on this island; one of those wants to make fuel from algae; the others are looking for land to grow trees (mainly eucalyptus) or bushes for fuel. At least two companies have projects on Maui, at least one on Kaui--and the mother of them all, an enormous biodiesel-powered generator plant will be built on O'ahu. But all of them are involved in controversies of some sort--mostly about where in the heck they're going to get the huge acreage they'll need to produce enough green stuff to create a significant amount of energy. We're talking tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of acres here.

Most of those efforts are concentrated on the Hamakua/North Hilo Coast. But heads up, Ka'u: there's one company that's looking in your direction. Alternative Fuels Hawaii is looking for 20,000-30,000 acres, probably in "South Hawai'i," to grow jatropha, a poisonous bush that produces oil-rich seeds, which the company wants to convert into biodiesel. This may or may not be a good idea--but I would suggest that Hamakua residents start boning up on this plant before they sign any long-term leases to this company. There's lots about it on the Web, and not all of it is good. A recent Reuters report, for instance (http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKHKG7593720070912) on a biofuel noted that the plant, like arabica coffee, ripened unevenly and had to be harvested by hand, and that its toxicity posed possible hazards to harvesters and to processing plant workers. A Alternatives Fuels company officer whom I talked to claimed that most of the negative publicity came from promoters of a competing fuel plant, oil palms--and, indeed, the only critic quoted in the Reuters story was an "adviser to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil." But the allegations are certainly worth looking into before we start committing sugar-plantation-sized parcels to this plant.

Palm oil, which is being grown on Kauai, has its own problems--mainly in that it's also grown for food, and boom in palm oil for biofuel has caused spikes in food prices in Indonesia and elsewhere.

More details will be available in the Independent articles, but these companies probably are already approaching local landholders and leaseholders. I urge anyone that they do contact to please do your homework. We certainly need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and biofuels generally produce less pollution than fossil fuels. But if we're not careful, we could basically be returning to a plantation economy, getting our "fossil fuel independence" at the cost of handing over huge swaths of our local land to corporations. Let's try doing something right for once, instead of just doing what some large investor wants us to do.

Religion and the US: The World Weighs In

2009-01-23T11:14:00.010-10:00

I awoke this morning to the BBC's World Have Your Say. a call-in radio program on BBC World's live Web feed. Unlike the American examples of this genre, which tend to be either politically slanted propaganda-fests or lame sports discussions, The Beeb's show actually features dialogues on important topics and is hosted by relatively unbiased moderators.

This morning's debate was on the question: "Is America a Christian country?" The spark for the discussion was a recent Obama speech that said America was a nation that held Christians, Muslims, Jews and nonbelievers, and the fact that after a slightly botched swearing-in on Election Day, Obama and Chief Justice Roberts had repeated the ceremony without a Bible at the White House.

I couldn't help but weigh in on that one. My comments, along with those of many others worldwide, can be seen at www.worldhaveyoursay.com . Some of the other comments are quite fascinating, not just for their opinions, but for what they show about how the rest of the world sees us.

America is a country in which Christianity is the most widespread religion. But the Constitution strictly forbids the establishment of a state religion and guarantees freedom of worship. To say that the founding fathers were unanimously, or even predominantly, Christian--at least, the brand of Christianity that modern Christian Conservatives tend to embrace--would be simply false. Many of the most prominent of our country's founders, including Jefferson and Franklin, would probably best be described loosely as Deists--practitioners of a philosophy that saw the will of God in nature as much as the Bible, and that tended to view Jesus as a mortal teacher, not God Incarnate. Some of the founders, including Thomas Paine, were atheists.

To say that the nation was founded on Christian principles is also questionable, though I believe that the constitutional guarantees in the Bill of Rights are very much in keeping with the ideals of a certain ancient Jewish rabbi who spoke of loving one's enemies and refused to cast the first stone. But Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism all look askance at stealing, lying, adultery, etc.; all idealize the reverence for life and the fair treatment of one's neighbors. Christianity has no monopoly on the morals that stand at the center of our laws.

Living in Hawai'i, with its large Buddhist minority, I have to take offense at the idea that non-Christians are any less patriotic than Christians. Many have proven their loyalty with their blood in America's wars (and by the way, people being sworn into the military are not required to put their hand on a Bible). Anyone who's worked an election night here can see that non-Christians vote (and serve as poll-workers). To insist that Buddhists, atheists and other "non-believers" pledge allegiance to "one nation under God" is ridiculous.

I'd like to suggest a more appropriate pledge:
I pledge allegiance to the United States of America and to the ideals at the heart of its laws: one nation, indivisible, with liberty, equality, opportunity and justice for all.

A Little Morning Mall Wart , and a Capitol Event

2009-01-20T09:40:00.004-10:00

I have to be careful what I say here, but I feel I owe my readers an explanation. The ads that appear on this site are chosen by a Google ad program, not by myself. Yesterday, I discovered an ad from a certain large retailer on my site. I wondered why on earth that particular company would choose to patronize this particular URL. Then I realized--I'd written about an affiliated company. What I'd said was not complimentary, but that probably didn't matter to the search engine that was looking for key words to place the ad.

This morning, when I pulled up alanmcnarie.blogspot.com, the ad was gone again. If it or a similar ad ever reappear, please remember that my own opinions about such companies will be expressed in the blogs, not the ads.

BTW, I've had CNN on today to follow the inauguration coverage, and just watched George Bush's plane, no longer Air Force One, depart for Texas.

I try to be objective, but my subconscious doesn't. I have a little part of my brain that's always playing some tune or other by free association--often a melody that I don't even like, such as some ad jingle or other. But the moment I saw that plane lift off, my mental jukebox started playing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead."

Hi Ho!

Election by Mail?

2009-01-17T14:07:00.007-10:00

Below is the text of a bill being proposed by County Councilmember Brenda Ford, who wants to replace traditional polls with a mail-in ballot system, which she believes would encourage greater voter participation. Ford's arguments in favor of the change are contained within the text of the bill. I'm open to persuasion on this issue, but I admit that I can easily see some arguments against it.

The first objection is that this doesn't have to be an either-or situation. It would seem to me that the system that promoted the greatest voter participation would be one that allowed both absentee voting by mail and traditional voting at the polling places.

Second, I frankly doubt that the polling system is the major culprit in this island's notoriously low voter turnout. I suspect that a far bigger factor is the state's machine politics, where there's really no alternative to the Democratic party and huge campaign donations from O'ahu give chosen candidates an almost insuperable advantage; under those circumstances, many people may simply ask, why bother? The county's non-partisan election system, in which many local elections are already determined in the primary, is probably another factor in low general election turnout.

The third argument is the chance that polling places offer for direct participation in the democratic system. I, for one, will miss the sense of community that I feel when going down to Cooper Center and casting my ballot with other Volcano residents. And the polling system gives volunteer poll workers and even more intimate sense of playing an important role in their community. Mail-in ballots, by contrast, seem cold and impersonal.

And finally, I'm not convinced that all the possible kinks have been worked out of the mail-in ballot system. Back in 2004, I got to serve as an election observer, and gained a new appreciation for the layer after layer of procedures that have evolved to protect the integrity of our ballots. (See "The Last Jelly Bean," below). The mail-in system, like electronic balloting, would ditch those procedures and start from scratch, and I'm not at all sure that I trust the Post Office that much.

Anyway, here's Ford's proposal. You decide.

A RESOLUTION REQUESTING THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF HAWAI‘I TO ENACT A BILL TO ESTABLISH A PILOT PROGRAM FOR VOTE BY MAIL FOR ALL FEDERAL, STATE, AND COUNTY PRIMARY, GENERAL, AND SPECIAL ELECTIONS IN THE COUNTY OF HAWAI‘I , AND TO MAKE AN APPROPRIATION FOR THIS PILOT PROGRAM.
WHEREAS, the State of Hawai‘i has historically one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country, and additionally, in 2006, the County of Hawai‘i had 173, 057 residents and 131,203 residents who were 18-years-of-age or older (76% of the population), but only 42.6% of the registered voters voted; and
WHEREAS, in Hawai‘i County, the percentage of voters in the Primary Election consistently dropped from a high of 88.6% in 1959 to 41.8% in 2008, and the percentage of voters for the General Election consistently dropped from a high of 94.3% in 1959 to 67.7% in 2008 with the lowest year being 2006 at 53.2%. In 2008, Hawai‘i County had 99,337 registered voters, but only 67,258 actually voted (67.7%) in the General Election which was also a presidential election year; and
WHEREAS, absentee ballots (combination of mail-in and walk-in) in Hawai‘i County Primary Elections have increased from 1988 (9.8%) through 2008 (40.2%). Absentee ballots in Hawai‘i County General Elections have increased from 9.3% in 1988 to 43.0% in 2008; and
WHEREAS, Oregon has had Vote By Mail elections since 1998. The 2004 Oregon election was one of the most contentious and closely scrutinized elections in Oregon history, and Oregon had the third highest voter turnout in the nation at 86.48% of registered voters. Of the five states with the highest voter turnout in 2004, Oregon was the only state without same-day voter registration. In 2008, Oregon achieved 85.7% voter turnout; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail maximizes voter convenience because voters do not have to stand in lines at the polls, take time off from work, drive in bad weather to precincts, wait for their turn at a limited number of polling booths, or have an illness or personal emergency on Election Day that prevents them from voting; and
WHEREAS, fraud can be protected against by utilizing the Vote By Mail program used in Oregon, to which every signature is verified to ensure that that voter is who they claim to be; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail improves accuracy of voter rolls because mailed ballots are not forwarded by the United States Postal Service but are returned to the county office of elections where voter rolls are accurately kept without the risk of inappropriate purges; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail improves uniformity because there is centralized supervision of ballot processing in the county office of elections, instead of in dispersed polling places. This maintains uniformity and strict compliance with law; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail promotes voter confidence by providing a paper trail where the accuracy and fairness of election results are provable, and the ballots can be recounted, by hand if necessary, to prove to voters that each and every vote was properly counted; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail can cost one-third less than polling place elections for the County of Hawaii, due to the decrease in cost of training and employment of officials for 67 precincts; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail increases voter participation even in small local elections where increased turnouts were seen when voters are provided with an easy and convenient way to vote. With several weeks in which to conduct get-out-the-vote activities, every citizen will be reminded to mail their ballot in plenty of time; and
WHEREAS, Vote By Mail creates a significant gain in informed voting because voters can do their research and think about choices while sitting at home with their Voters' Pamphlet and any other information that they want to use to make reasoned decisions; and
WHEREAS, change often frightens people and the fear of extending the potential of voting to a larger voting population increases fear. While it is the business of government to empower more people to vote, Professor James D. Moore, a professor of political science at the University of Portland said, “Controlling who votes is fundamental in politics... every change made to election rules alters to some degree, the voting population...That’s why, throughout our country’s history, ‘blood has been shed’ over extending the vote---to women, to blacks, to 18-year-olds and to the poor.” The poorest people in Hawai‘i county may not have transportation to the precincts; now, therefore,
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE COUNCIL OF THE COUNTY OF HAWAI‘I that the Legislature of the State of Hawai‘i is requested to create a pilot program for all federal, state, and county primary, general, and special elections based on the State of Oregon Vote By Mail program as the exclusive method for casting ballots in the County of Hawai‘i beginning with the 2010 Primary election and all other elections in the year 2010, all elections in 2012, and continuing through all elections including the General Election in 2014. This provides three full election cycles in which to determine the advantages of Vote By Mail in the County of Hawai‘i; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the County Clerk shall forward certified copies of this Resolution, together with the proposed bill marked as Exhibit “A”, Absentee Ballot Statistics marked as Exhibit “B”, and a copy of the current State of Oregon “Vote By Mail Procedures Manual” marked as Exhibit “C” to the Mayor of the County of Hawai`i, to the Chairperson of the Hawai‘i State Senate, and to the Chairperson of the State House of Representatives, and to the Chief Election Officer for the State of Hawai‘i.

Archive: The Last Jelly Bean: An Election Observer's Diary

2009-01-17T12:44:00.009-10:00

In November of 2004, I had the privilege of serving as an election observer in the general election. Below is an account of that experience.

Early October: I’m on the phone with Hawai’i County Clerk Al Konishi when he brings up an intriguing proposal. “Did Gretchen [then-Journal Editor Gretchen Kelly] mention to you that we need a member of the press to act as Poll Watcher?” he asks. “I think you’d be ideal....”

It turns out that the reason I would be ideal not because of my journalistic brilliance, but because of the Journal’s deadline schedule. On Election Night, the reporters from the island’s two dailies are likely to be busy putting together last-minute stories about who won and who lost--and whoever would be in the actual vote counting area would be under virtual quarantine, lest partial results be leaked prematurely. But as a Journal correspondent, I can be more leisurely about my deadlines. Al and I agree that if I serve as an observer, I can write about the whole experience, so long as I write after the election is over and the results are announced.

I later learn the story behind the invitation. Two activists, Bill Eger and Milo Clark, had discovered a state law that called for a member of the press to be on the Election Observer team. That spot on the team had previously been filled by a retired journalist who recently had passed away. Eger and Clark pointed out the lack of a press observer to elections officials, including Konishi, whose domain includes the County Elections Office.

I call a staff member at the County Elections Commission, and get some details about my duties. At each precinct, there will be poll watchers assigned by each registered party (to the extent that the parties can find volunteers to fill those positions) to ensure no irregularities during voting. But I’ll be assigned to a team the Counting Center in Hilo.

This year, the county is actually using two different voting machine systems. A company called Election Systems and Software (ES&S) manufactured the two machines that will handle the paper ballots: the M-100, into which voters feed the ballots after they leave the polling booths; and the M550, which tallies the ballots again, once they arrive at the County Building in Hilo. The other system is a new, totally electronic one, mandated by a new federal law that was passed in the wake of the 2000 election controversies. Each precinct is supposed to have at least one or two of these new electronic voting booths, in order to make voting easier for those with physical impairments.

But controversy already swirls around the new system. The Journal has been getting e-mails and letters decrying the fact that the E-slates don’t leave a “paper trail” in the form of ballots, perhaps making the electronic results more vulnerable to hacking and election fraud. In March of this year, Mother Jones magazine reported that Walden “Wally” O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, which manufactures some of the new electronic voting machines, was a heavy financial backer of President Bush’s campaign and had written a letter pledging pledging to help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." and (See the Viewpoint on p. for more on this controversy.) The Mother Jones article noted that ES&L also had strong ties to the Republican Party: former company chair Chuck Hagel won election to the Senate in an upset race counted mostly by ES&S machines.

The Hawai’i State Elections Office has chosen an all-electronic voting system manufactured not by Diebold, but by a rival manufacturer, Hart Intercivic. Clark is watching the Hart machines like the proverbial hawk. During the primary, he discovered that the machines had electronically issued several Green Party ballots, despite the fact that there were no Green Party races to vote on in Hawai’i County.

Eger and Clark have also been busy in other areas. They’ve noted that two election-day teams--the “Manual Audit” and “Poll Book Audit” teams had no observers during the primary. They’ve been going through the voter registration books in a couple of precincts, and found 90 cases where, they claim, the same street addresses appeared in two different districts--an indication that voters may have been placed in the wrong precincts.

The two activists’ prodding may be helping to fix some of those gaps--such as getting an official Election Observer from the Press.

Part of my job, I’m told by a county elections official, will be to help test the voting machines before they’re used. To do so, I will need to fill out a set of dummy test ballots, which I can pick up at the County Elections Office on October 4 On the evening of October 11, the observer team will test the ES&S M-100 machines and Hart electronic eSlates. On October 30, we’ll be testing the ES&S M550 machines.

On October 4, I drive into Hilo from Volcano to pick up my sample ballot packet. But when I get to the Elections office, the packet isn’t there. I’m told to go home, and they’ll contact me when they arrive.

A day or two later, I get a call from the County Elections office, telling me that the State Elections Office will be sending me the packet directly, via certified mail.

Monday, October 11: The packet of ballots still hasn’t arrived. I call the County Elections office. An apologetic official there tells me I can use the packet of another observer who has dropped out. She asks me to come in an hour early, so I can fill the ballots out.

But as oft happens with journalists, fate intervenes, in the form of two telephone calls as I’m heading out the door. When I finally arrive at the Elections Office, my hour lead has shrunk to less than ten minutes.

My packet is waiting for me. I’m sent upstairs to the Counting Center, a vacant office area that formerlyhad housed the Department of Public Works before its mover to Aupuni Center. About half of the cavernous space is now filled with the black chassis of M-100s. Several tables are filled with suitcase-like eSlate terminals stand nearby.

Sue Irvine, the leader of the observer team, introduces me around. A state elections official explains to me about the sample ballots. “What you want is to create an easily recognizable pattern,” he says. “For instance, I can mark the first candidate in the first race, then the second in the second, then the first in the third, then the second in the forth....”

I need to create two “decks” or sets of sample ballots. I have up to 50 blank ballots to use in the endeavor, but the official notes that if I choose to mark all 50, I’m going to be here all night. I decide to make two decks of ten, and to use a slightly more complicated pattern: the first candidate in the first race, the second in the second, the third in the third, the fourth in the fourth, then back to the first candidate in the fifth. But many races only have two candidates. I do the one-two-three-four pattern in the multiple-candidate races, and alternate between one and two on the two-party races.

Meanwhile, the veteran Poll Watchers are already at work, feeding their test decks into the M-100s. I start “voting” frantically. I spoil a couple of ballots, grab a couple more....

Finally, I’m done. I’m lead to the first set of M-100s that I’m supposed to check, and shown how operate it. First, the machine must run a “zero count” printout to prove that there are no votes already sitting in the memory. Then I feed my test ballots through. The commands are punched into the machine to “close poll” then print the results. A cash-register-like tape spits out of a slot.

The pattern on the tape looks nothing like I’d expected it to look, though there does seem to be a pattern.

Now I have to sit down with my test ballots, to make sure that each candidate got as many votes as my 10 fictitious voters gave him.

Good lord, I thought. They’ve entrusted the tally of democracy to an English major.

But the numbers check out. Now I go to the next machine, “vote” the same test deck, and compare the printout to my first printout. They match, except for the one vote that I changed. The same for the next two machines. Then I switch decks for the next four.

My second deck, I discover, is even further off my expectations. I’d done it in even more of a hurry, and left a couple of races blank, and somehow only done nine ballots. That’s all right, as it turns out: it’s just a different pattern.

Next I’m led to the eSlates. Unlike the notorious Diebold machines, this is not a touch-screen system--as I discover, when I touch the numbers on the screen and nothing happens. There’s a little dial that the voter must turn, to move a highlight bar up and down the screen. An election official, or maybe it’s a Hart employee--I’m a little vague on everybody’s affiliations--shows me how to command the machine get a zero count and open the poll. Then, reading the results off one of my test decks, I twirl the dial to highlight the same candidates and each constitutional choice, then press a button to enter it, duplicating the results on the test ballot. This way, there’s at least a paper ballot to compare to the machine’s results in this pre-test, even though there won’t be any such ballots when the real thing happens.

The eSlate is actually a pretty nifty piece of machinery. The screens are easy to read, and there’s an audio headset for the visually impaired. And the eSlate does have one big advantage: it’s easier to fix a mistake or change my mind. After I’ve electronically “marked” the last constitutional issue, a screen shows up with a summary of my votes. If I don’t like one of my choices, I can backtrack and change it. Then, when I’m satisfied, I hit a big button marked “VOTE,” and my ballot officially enters the machine’s memory bank.

After the machines have been tested, each is put in a closed box with a wire-and-plastic seal that can only be broken by cutting the wire. They’ll stay sealed until Election Day. Each seal is individually numbered, and the number is logged when it is used. When the boxes arrive at the polling place, the seal numbers will be checked again, to make sure that they haven’t been tampered with.

Our test ballots and printouts are also sealed up in a big rectangular steel box known a “can.” (The metal ballot boxes in which the votes will be transported, officially referred to as Voted Ballot Containers or VBCs, are also called “cans.”)

We’re done for the night.

Saturday, October 30: the last minute phone-callers have struck again. I arrive 5 minutes late, and find a briefing session already underway. I take a seat and start taking notes--partly for the future story, but partly because I’m still the new kid on the block, trying to figure out what is going on.

Milo Clark is commenting on the lack of poll-watchers at the walk-in absentee balloting stations.

“We cast a heavy light on the mail-in ballots,” he comments. “We don’t cast any light on the walk-ins.”

The discussion moves on to the issue of the Hart machines. Clark presses a Hart representative about how the the machines’ accuracy can be audited. The company man explains that while the machines can’t produce identical copies of the paper ballots, they can produce “cast vote records.” Clark and he get into a discussion of the difference between the two, and how they can be reconciled.

The discussion is generally constructive--people bringing up minor glitches and talking about how to solve them.

After the briefing session, we adjourn to a back room, where two M-550s reside: high-speed paper-ballot scanners that will be used to read the “AB-mails,” or mail-in absentee ballots. The seal is broken on the Poll Watcher’s “can,” and we all bring in our test decks in to be read. The machines whiz through each deck at the rate of 550 ballots per minute, and spit out more readout tapes for us to compare to our originals. Again, my results match.

Afterwards, the machine’s memory chips are to be pulled and presented to Sue Irvine, who will seal them in the Observers’ Can until Election Day.

Election Day. I arrive on time, at 8 a.m., but the big room is already a hive of activity. The M-100 and eSlate machines are gone, carted off to the polls. Most of the tables that had held the eSlates have been pulled together to form a single space, piled high with thousands of AB Mail envelopes.

The election teams gather for a short briefing.

“Everybody knows that their cell phones should be off, or in the car, or at home?” we’re asked.

For the first time, the true complexity of a modern election begins to become apparent. An election isn’t just a simple counting of votes. It’s a highly complex operation, with specialized teams, security measures, and built-in redundancies, almost all designed to ensure one thing: public confidence that the vote was as accurate and unbiased as possible.

The Counting Center alone has 13 different teams, from the Receiving Team, which receives and inventories the “cans” of marked ballots as they arrive from the precincts, to the Results Distribution Team, whose job is to “prepare and disseminate election results to the media and general public.

Each Observer is assigned to watch one of the other teams. My assignment is the Poll Book Audit Team, whose duties don’t begin until fairly late in the process, so I have some time to check in on most of the other teams.

Activity shifts from one part of the room to other parts as the day passes. At the beginning of the day, most the action centers around the absentee ballots. A dozen or so women, mostly middle aged or better, has one of the more thankless tasks: opening that enormous pile of envelopes. But they seem amazingly dextrous at it, slicing hundreds of envelopes with nary a finger opened in the process, while engaging in cheery conversation, as if this were an old-fashioned quilting bee.

“Most of these ladies have been at it for years,” a veteran Watcher tells me.

In the M-550 room, the high-speed vote counter is not operating so fast this morning. The chief culprit seems to be not the machine itself, but the mail-in envelopes, which are slightly smaller than they should have been. Many ballots have been folded not in three, but in five or six to fit the envelope. As a result, the machine has a problem feeding some ballots, which then have to be extracted and fed through again; if that doesn’t work, they’re sent to the Duplication Team, which hand-fills-out exact duplicate ballots.

I’m briefly pressed into service for another duty: if a ballot unreadable because something has been over-voted, or a mark is too faint for the machine to read, it has to be hand-examined by a team of three observers, to determine if it is a “true overvote” or just a reading problem. Some of the problem ballots turn out to be erasures, with just enough ink left to fool the machine; in others, the voter tried to change his or her mind by ‘X’ing out a previous choice. If all three observers decide that the ballot is not a true over-vote, then it goes to the Duplication team.

Therein lies the only controversy in which I become involved today. We’re somewhat thrown by the fact that two ballots in a row have been both X’d out and initialed--with the same initials on each ballot. I find that coincidence a little puzzling. So does Irvine, who stops in to check on us at this moment. She says to call it an overvote, because she isn’t certain about the voter’s intent --which means that the voter is disenfranchised in that particular race.

I reluctantly agree that I’m a little spooked by the initials. But one of the other observers then says that we must count all other X’d out votes as over-votes as well, to which I don’t agree. Irvine steps in again, and changes the team, bringing in two official representatives from the Republicans and Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Duplication Team, whose work is sporadic, has started a jigsaw puzzle at their table. As the day grinds on, the absentee ballots get finished and the afternoon wait for the precinct ballots begins, members from other teams join in on the jigsaw construction. The puzzle, which shows an American Eagle, is polished off fairly quickly. But a second puzzle, depicting hundreds of jelly beans, proves to be a “buggah.”

Then the precinct “cans” start to come in, and activity erupts in whole new sections of the room. The Hart team sits at a bank of three Dell laptops loaded with proprietary software programs that will be used to download the data disks from the voting machines, tally them and send them to Honolulu. The Hart employees are somewhat bedeviled by Milo Clark, who wants compatible results from a precinct so that he can get to work with the Manual Audit Team--which is charged with manually counting ballots from sample precincts and checking them with the electronic tally from both machine systems.

I’m finally called to duty with the Poll Book Audit Team, whose job is count the names of voters that have been checked off in the poll books as they came to vote, and compare those numbers with the number of votes recorded in the two machine systems.

The team consists, I’m told, mostly of people with book-keeping and accounting experience. They count the names on each page, then enter the totals in old-fashioned calculators. If totals don’t match up by more than five or six names, they count again. I check on their checking by counting names after they’ve counted.

At Clark’s suggestion, I also examine the Poll Logs, which are kept by each Precinct Captain to record any problems that arise. And there are problems, of all the sorts that happen when mostly-amateur human beings engage in anything this complex. One polling place opens late, for instance, because of confusion over who has the keys to the building. In another, an over-zealous Democratic Poll Watcher has to be evicted because he can’t resist talking to the voters.

In only one precinct do I find an excessive number of incidents involving the eSlates--mostly voters starting to vote on the machines, but then giving up because of the wait. I wonder if it’s not because some poll worker has been over-enthusiastic about pushing people to try out the new machines.

Most of the accounts of problems include the note: “Called Election Center.” The Election Center is downstairs, where a bank of elections officials trouble-shoots the entire operation.

As the evening wears on, the results start to come in. Ironically, at the Counting Center, we only see the posted results for Hawai’i County. For a while, we have a small television to watch the statewide and national results, but as the evening wears on, somebody takes the TV home.

As midnight approaches and operations wind down, more attention focuses on the infernal crossword puzzle. Irvine vows not to go home until the last piece is in place. Finally, a bit of purple gumdrop finds a home. Election night is over.

Afterword. Milo Clark still isn’t satisfied. He thinks the eSlate system has a couple of major weaknesses.

“Can these machines be manipulated? Yes. There's two ways,” he believes. One is the early programming stage:“Whoever does the programming on the Hart MBB cartridges--there's where somebody needs to check and double checked and triple checked.” The other is the Hart system’s use of off-the-shelf Dell computers and Microsoft software--both of which, he maintains, are easily hacked--to transmit the results to Honolulu.

But even he admits that he saw no signs of deliberate tampering in Hawai’i’s results--only flaws that needed to be fixed.

Al Konishi is more optimistic. “When you look at all that goes on here--how could anything this complex be manipulated?” he says.

And he has a point, to some extent. The Election System isn’t just a system; it’s an evolutionary process. Since elections were first invented, people have found ingenious ways to cheat. But the cheaters have to find their way past thousands of other people with an interest in keeping the elections honest: people like Clark, who point out the problems, and others who invent new ways to check on the system--poll book audits, manual audits, ballot machine checks--and thousands more who volunteer to make them work. Democracy continues to work, so long as there are those thousands of poll volunteers working the system, staying until the last jelly bean falls into place.

Unsustainable Israel/Palestine

2009-01-11T10:28:00.005-10:00

Watching the news clips about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, I couldn't help but think of a moment 27 years ago, when I was working as a volunteer excavator at the archeological dig of Gamla, on the Golan Heights. Gamla sits on a spur of land that juts out the Heights, overlooking the valley that holds the little Lake of Galilee (grandiosely called a "sea" in the Bible) and the Jordan River Valley. Sheer slopes plunge over a thousand feet into deep ravines on both sides, which means that a single wall across the base of the spur could make the place into a nearly impregnable fortress.

Or so the Jews thought, in 66 A.D. Over 9,000 took shelter there when the Roman legions arrived to crush the First Rebellion. But the refuge became a deathtrap; when the Romans besieged the place, they had only one exit to block. According to the ancient historian Josephus, the Romans sat outside the town for over seven months, starving the residents. When the legions finally breached the wall, they killed about 4,000 Jews. The other 5,000 jumped. It was a massacre ten times the size of the celebrated Jewish suicide stand at Masada.

Our little excavation team included Israelis and Druze, Americans and Germans, a young Jewish lady born in Yemen and another lady from New Zealand. Our director carried a six shot revolver because, he said, by Israeli law, when more than six people gathered, one of them had to be armed. When the Israelis bombed an Iraqi reactor that summer to slow down Saddam's then-all-too-real nuclear effort, we were cut off for three days, as Israeli tanks maneuvered to confront Syrian tanks on the heights behind us. But, all told, the Gamla excavation was an ironic little island of peace in the troubled Holy Land: a place where people could ponder and discuss the violent past and the violent present without shooting each other.

The view from Gamla was magnificent. Most of the so-called Holy Land Land lay stretched out below us. But ours wasn't the only spot with such a view. Across the gulch to the south, we could see a stone farmhouse and an orchard, whose owners had fled or been forced out when the Israelis occupied the Golan in the Seven Days' War of 1967.

One day during one of our lunchtime discussions, I remarked that I could see how the farmers who had lived on that adjacent spur would hate to leave that spot with its incredible view.

"That view was why they had to leave," responded an Israeli co-worker. "A piece of artillery there could shell the entire Jordan Valley."

And there, in a nutshell, is one of the nearly insoluble problems of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The "Holy Land"--Palestine to the Palestinians, Israel to the Israelis--is tiny. The entire land covers only about ten thousand square miles--a little over twice the size of the Island of Hawai'i, with no 13,000-foot mountains in the middle to make it seem larger. When I took a bus from Tel Aviv on the coast to Jerusalem in the interior, it took about 45 minutes. A fortified hilltop with a few big guns, located anywhere along the country's central spine of hills, could easily cut Israel in half. Which is why, I don't doubt, Israel is so unwilling to give up the fortified settlements that stud those hilltops in the West Bank, even if they weren't the site of ancient Hebrew settlements in Biblical times.

But it's even worse for the Palestinians. There's probably no place in Gaza or the West Bank that Israeli guns can't easily shell. Gaza is especially vulnerable. Its total area is only 140 square miles--if it were rectangular, that would be only 10 miles wide by 14 long. And in fact, it's more stretched out and vulnerable than that. At its widest point, along the Egyptian border, it's only seven miles across; for much of its length, it's only three or four miles from the ocean to the interior. You could walk across Gaza in an hour or two, if no one detained you; you could drive a tank across in minutes.

Economically, the situation is even worse. Gaza's 140 square miles are estimated to hold about a million and a half people--one of the highest population densities on earth. There's simply no way that this tiny patch of ground, a little more than half the size of Singapore, could grow enough food to support all those people, or supply the natural resources needed by its factories. With the blockade in effect, its people must be feeling very much the way that the starving Jews of Gamla must have felt as Roman legions tightened their grip--or as the Jews of Europe felt when walls were built around their neighborhoods. It's a bitter irony that Israel has decided that its only solution to the Palestinian problem is to build ghettos.

Israel has claimed continuously that it has a right to protect itself. But it has deprived the Palestinians of that same right, as well as virtually every civil right recognized in the U.S. Constitution, including the right to keep property (as many as half of the people in Gaza are dispossessed refugees, whose families were driven from their homes in other parts of Israel and Palestine), freedom from religious discrimination (Israel is a state specifically created for Jews, even though it does have some Muslim citizens), freedom to elect its own representatives (when Hamas was elected. the Israeli response was a blockade), and, of course, the right to bear arms. But most importantly, Israel has denied Palestinians the very security that it claims for itself: not just security from being bombed or shot at, but economic security. Deprived of most of their land and cut off from natural resources, Palestinians have little to sell except their labor--and with borders closed and walls going up, they cannot even get jobs to feed their families.

I hate to say it, but if I were a Palestinian, I would probably hate Israel, too. Since I was born into a Christian milieu and embrace a life of personal nonviolence, I can't say that the Palestinians are justified in launching unguided rockets that land in civilian populations. But I can understand that reaction.

The simple fact is that neither Palestine nor Israel are sustainable states. Israel has always existed with the help of massive aid from the U.S. and private donations from world Jewry. The Palestinian state, as currently envisioned, is an economic basket case, with little to support it except olive groves and human labor. The only inland water resource of any size is the Jordan River watershed, on which both states must depend. Israel/Palestine is just too small and resource-p00r to support two independent economies, much less two independent and fully sovereign states. It may not even be big enough to support one state. And the land's size and geography make it almost impossible for two states to be tactically secure from each other.

In short, the only hope that I can see that Israel and Palestine have of surviving is not as two independent states, but two interdependent ones, sharing resources and treating each other with enough respect that they don't have to worry about each other's weapons.

Given the mutual animosity that has built up over the past 50 years, I doubt if such a practical acknowledgment of interdependence is possible--especially if we pin our hopes of that acknowledgment on two populations in which significant numbers of people on both sides claim that God has given them the right to all of this land. Maybe the recognition of interdependence needs to start away from the battlegrounds, with the people who are controlling the purse strings to the aid on which each side is dependent. Maybe we could start by nudging the two sides into negotiations, not on the political control of Jerusalem, but on things like trade agreements and water rights.

But a sea change of attitude has to start somewhere, or that little country's (those little countries') animosities could very well pull us all into Armageddon eventually.

Ecologist Wanted

2009-01-11T10:04:00.005-10:00

The U. S. Forest Service's Hawaii office is advertising for a scientist to head its invasive species project. Those interested can check out the job description at http://jobsearch.usajobs.opm.gov/getjob.asp?JobID=78496077

FDA, DOA, EPA: No supervision for GMOS

2009-01-08T13:53:00.008-10:00

From a Union of Concerned Scientists e-mail alert. This is one reason why we need a shakeup at the DOA:

Agencies rebuff congressional investigators
on engineered crops

Three federal agencies turned down a recommendation from congressional investigators to monitor genetically engineered (GE) crops after they are commercialized. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, criticized the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency for allowing unapproved GE crops to enter the food supply and recommended several steps they should take to prevent further contamination. However, the agencies rejected the GAO's most important recommendation—to monitor GE crops after they are approved for commercial production. Unapproved GE crops are known to have contaminated the food supply six times since 2000, not counting the most recent incident in which an experimental GE variety of cottonseed was allowed to contaminate animal feed. Read the GAO report.

"After two decades of regulating agricultural biotechnology, the federal government is still unable to protect the food supply from unapproved GE crops. We urge the incoming administration to overhaul the rules governing agricultural biotechnology and to adopt the GAO's recommendations." ~ Jane Rissler, Senior Scientist/Deputy Director

Sustainable Ag needs your help.

2009-01-06T13:56:00.008-10:00

I just got forwarded an e-mail from a group called "Food Democracy Now!" with a list of endorsements for various candidates to fill important undersecretary posts in the Obama Administration's Department of Agriculture. The endorsements can be viewed online at www.fooddemocracynow.org . If the group is legitimate, and they appear to be so, then I think the people named are worth our support. The folks all appear to have a strong track record of supporting family farms and "sustainable agriculture." The list is weighted heavily with Midwesterners--but that's probably as a it should be. I hate to say it, but the Midwest is way ahead of Hawai'i in the area of sustainable agriculture--partly because sustainable ag never totally died out there to start with.

I should know. I grew up on a family farm. My folks owned 320 acres in Northwest Missouri; my grandparents owned another, 180-acre farm. Both practiced, to a great extent, what would now be called sustainable agriculture, though it was the norm for many farmers in Missouri in those days. My parents grazed cattle on the hilltops and grew corn, wheat and soybeans, roated with clover to renew the soil, in the bottom land along the two creeks that crossed our farm. They left the slopes along the creek valleys in timber to prevent erosion. We kept hogs and chickens (it was my duty to get up every morning before school and help feed the chickens, and to shovel corn to the hogs when I got home in the evening); a big garden plot next to the house supplied most of our veggies and grapes and strawberries. Fruit trees in the yard and in my grandparent's small orchard gave us plenty of apples, apricots and peaches; the woods and fence rows supplied blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, elderberries, wild plums and pawpaws. In the spring, we'd range the woods looking for morels, the best of all mushrooms (sorry, truffles), then take them home, soak them overnight in saltwater, and then fry them up with home-made butter and a batter made from flour and home-grown eggs, which came from chickens raised mainly on oats and corn and wheat from our farms. Both we and our livestock ate mostly the produce we'd grown ourselves; sales of excess grain livestock and eggs fueled our tractors, bought what fertilizer and pesticides my dad used (he used both sparingly), mineral and protein supplements for the livestock, and whatever else we couldn't make or grow. The "egg money" bought a few groceries such as the Wonder Bread that my mom loved (having grown up on home-made bread, she regarded white bread as a delicacy. We kids, growing up on Wonder Bread, craved the home-made stuff). We were often below the poverty level, but that didn't matter so much because we never went hungry.

It was a good life but a hard life, and I figured out pretty early that I wasn't cut out to be a farmer; my talent was with words, not with keeping a cultivator's weed-rooting blades in between the soybean rows all through a hot, dusty early summer day.

I was grateful that I could choose a different path for my life. But my decision to leave helped to doom the farm. It wasn't just that the big agribusiness conglomerates were pushing enormous tractors and designer seeds and expensive fertilizers that only huge farms could afford, or that enormous corporate feedlots were operating on a cost of scale that drove down beef and pork prices below what small farmers could compete with, or that development pressure was driving the cost of land up and almost any business could afford to pay hired help more than family farmers could. Farming takes not just labor, but skilled labor. When I left, I broke the chain of knowledge. I took away from that farm an enormous number of folk skills, from how to repair a tractor to how to pluck a chicken to how to make the little twists in wire that are essential to successfully repair a fence.

As a Midwestern farm boy, when I came to Hawai'i, I was astonished at the horrible land management practices that the sugar plantations were engaged in--such as denuding several square miles of sloping cane fields at once, so that Hamakua's unchecked torrential rains could wash tons of soil out to sea in a single night--and then replanting again in cane without rotating in another crop to replenish the soil. This wasn't farming; this was soil-mining for profit.

My father, rest his soul, always talked about being a steward of the land, and leaving it more productive than he'd found it; the cane companies seemed to be bent on wringing every last calorie of profit out of their lands before they abandoned them.

Unfortunately, the same thing is happening on the mainland. When I left the Midwest, it was losing topsoil at such a rate that much of it would have been desert by the 2030s; I wrote some of the early articles about low-till and no-till agriculture techniques that farmers were starting to adopt to combat this problem. But no-till ag was even more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides than was standard cultivation--forcing operating costs for family farmers still higher and increasing their dependence on the agrochemical giants. Farmers were giving up at an alarming rate, and taking the knowledge of how to do it with them into retirement. Now I've heard that only three or four percent of the population is feeding all the rest of us. Sustainable farms aren't sustainable without farmers.

Over here, Hawai'i has millions of acres of worn-out cane land, and it's importing most of its food. Even if all that land isn't planted in eucalyptus for biofuel, it's going to take a lot more than the right DOA undersecretaries to make sustainable food production happen again. It's going to take legislation to remove ag lands permanently from development pressure, because farmers simply can't compete with golf courses and condos for available land. It's going to take legislation that makes agricultural subdivision--FOR AGRICULTURE!--cheap and easy, and to encourage the big landowners to engage in it, because family farms, by nature, need to be small enough that each can be run on a family's own manpower, but large enough to produce some excess goods for profit. In some cases, it's going to take massive soil rehabilitation programs. And above all, it's going to require knowledge and love.

Right now, many of the people here involved in the sustainable ag movement have the love, but they're struggling to regain the knowledge. A couple of years ago, for instance, I saw an notice on Freecycle Hawai'i from someone who wanted a fisherman's throw net for catching chickens. Chickens are designed to look out for threats from above; a throw net just ain't going to do the job. So I wrote the person, telling him how to make a chicken hook--a device made of heavy wire, that looks a little bit like Bo Peep's shepherd's crook and and is used to catch chickens by their legs.

So by all means, sign that petition at www.fooddemocracynow.org . And encourage your local legislators to put food independence on the same priority level with energy independence, because biodiesel isn't going to be that important if we can't afford the imported food at the grocery store once we've driven there.

And for those of you who have questions about the basics of family farming, or knowledge they'd like to share, I offer the comments section below this piece as one more place where you can get together and share knowledge. If I know the answer, I'll share it, and maybe someone else can answer the questions that I can't.

Koa vs. the BioFuel Bonanza

2008-12-25T09:08:00.008-10:00

Koa graveyard on the Mana Road. Photo by Janice Crowl

Fifteen years ago, when a new monthly community paper called Ka'u Landing had just been launched, I helped get it started with a series of articles entitled "Koa: the Struggle for a Forest." At that time, one biologist estimated that only about 15 percent of the islands' original koa forests were still viable as forests. The percentage today is even smaller. I was reminded of that fact last weekend, when I went up with a Sierra Club group to spend a couple of nights at Keanakolu Ranger Cabin on the Mana Road, a public 4WD trail that hangs like a necklace on the windward slopes of Mauna Kea. Most of the land that the Mana Road runs through is officially rangeland. But it is also a vast koa graveyard: a landscape where a few twisted ancient koa survivors still stand among thousands of rotting fallen trunks.

Koa, for those who don't know, is one of Hawai'i's three major native overstory trees: the big trees that overshadow everything else in the forest and form the backbone of forest ecologies. 'Ohi'a, the most common, tend to dominate the lower-elevation forests and the areas where lava flows are still relatively fresh; Koa prevail in the deep ash soils such as those on the slopes of Mauna Kea at mid-altitude (although some grow at sea level), while the much smaller mamane are the mainstay of the high elevation drylands forest.

Koa, in my book, are the most magnificent and unusual of the three. They start out life with delicate, locust-like compound leaves, and later grow large, sickle-shaped "leaves" that technically aren't leaves at all; they evolve out of petioles, the little stems that connect leaves to branches, which in mature Koa elongate and flatten to take over the normal leaf's chlorophyll-making function. But the trunks themselves also undergo a metamorphosis, albeit a slower one. In a healthy forest, young koa sprout from seeds or tree roots wherever sunlight strikes bare soil--a mechanism that evolved so that the forest could replace itself whenever an old tree fell, opening a hole in the forest canopy. In their youth, they grow tall and relatively straight. As the forest ages, however, the old trees grow huge, twisted and gnarled, spreading out their branches to cover more and more area as the trunks around them die.

The trees along the Mana Road are extreme examples of this process, thanks to human interference. When Kamehameha the Great allowed Captain Vancouver to release cattle in Hawai'i, the bovines encountered a landscape that had not evolved with any grazing animals and had no defenses against them. With no native carpet grasses to munch, the cows greedily chomped up young koa and grazed and trampled out the understory plants. The koa seeds that had lain dormant, awaiting their literal chance in the sun, burst forth into the cow-trampled landscape, and were promptly gobbled in their turn. Then, to feed the starving cattle, humans introduced carpet grasses such as kikuyu grass, which had evolved on the African veldt and was programmed to grow faster than the wildebeests and antelopes and cape buffalo could eat it. Kikuyu is so virulent that it can grow atop fence-posts, and completely buries entire fences if it isn't grazed regularly. A koa seed that falls in Kikuyu grass and waits for sun on bare soil to trigger it may face a long hibernation indeed.

So the surviving Koa along the Mana Road have fought a long and losing battle against the cow pastures, falling trunk-by-trunk as they've waited in vain for their replacements to grow. They've grown twisted as giant bonsais, battling the elements to spread their branches as far as possible, producing thousands of seeds in long rattly pods and dumping them into the thick grass without reward.

With a little help, this forest could still grow again. That's obvious if you stroll the public trails around Keanakolu. This area of the forest has been fenced off and the cattle have been evicted. Younger trees appear to be thriving. The grass is still thick underneath them, but wherever there's a bare patch of earth--such as along the edges of the trail -- koa keiki are sprouting up. In fact, a row of young koa is forcing the path itself to visibly shift in places. A few years ago, the remaining koa in this area were being smothered by an invasive vine called banana poka, but biologists introduced a fungus that feeds on poka leaves, thinning the poka enough that the trees can survive. Now poka may even be contributing to the habitat; we saw evidence that native i'iwi and apapane were feeding on the poka blossoms and fruit.

Restoring the native understory could be more of a problem: the grass smothers other plants as well as koa, and may be altering the soil in ways that make it less hospitable to forest plants. But that problem pales, compared to a new threat: the Lingle Administration's drive for energy independence.

I recently reported in the Honolulu Weekly about the efforts of a company called Hawaii Sunfuels to start a plant here that would convert biomass to diesel fuel. To supply that operation, the company wants to plant thousands of acres of non-native eucalyptus trees on current "ranch land" under the DLNR's stewardship. But in two recent public meetings in Hilo and Honoka'a, it became clear that Sunfuels is only one participant in a new land rush: at least five different companies, maybe more, have designs on DLNR lands for biofuel production. Much of that land is currently leased to ranchers, and is the same kind of remnant koa forest that I've been describing.

So far, the debate has been mainly between the biofuel companies and the ranchers, who argue that food-raising should also be a priority. But in fact, most of the cattle that are raised on those ranchlands are still being shipped of to the mainland for "finishing" in feedlot--they're an export cash crop, just like sugarcane used to be. Koa itself could be a cash crop. Thousands of fallen logs could probably still be salvaged from those cowpastures, and the rotten part burned for fuel and the good part sold for lumber, and some of the proceeds plowed back into reforestation. Koa could be intercropped with food or fuel crops such as apples or marijuana. There's an orchard at Keanakolu that was planted experimentally in the mid-20th Century and still produces apples and pears, despite decades of neglect. Woodworker Tai Lake and now-Councilman Kelly Greenwell started a project years ago that rotated apple and koa plantings; after salvage logging, apple trees were planted on the lumber mill site, and will produce for a few decades, then can be cut down and reseeded with koa. Sunfuels is talking about planting Eucalyptus sparsely enough that grass can grow between, and grazing cattle among the trees; a similar strategy might be employed with koa in place of eucalyptus and biofuel crops such as fuel cane or hemp (I know. Larry Mahuna is shuddering with rage) growing in between.

Both energy independence and food independence are urgent and worthy goals. But if we allow those grandmother koas to be replaced with eucalyptus, that's the end of any future for the koa forest. As we search for answers to global warming and peak oil, I hope someone will take notice of that.

Papaya Problems.

2008-12-11T21:30:00.011-10:00

I recently got a request to repost an article I did years ago, entitled "Plenty Papaya Problems." It was widely reprinted across the Web (0ften without permission) but apparently those other sites have deleted it or gone down, one by one. A partial copy is still up at www.gene.ch/genet/2003/Apr/msg00072.html, but unfortunately, that copy ends in mid-sentence. Even more unfortunately, my own e-copy was on a now-defunct computer. But I am putting up two other articles that I did on same subject, below.
If I can get somebody to pay me for my time, I'd like to do an update on the situation. I do know that the GM papayas have certainly not solved farmers' problems; in fact, they've proven even more susceptible than normal papayas to another disease, a fungal infection called phytophthera. Once more, lower Puna is dotted with abandoned fields full dead and dying papaya trees.

Archive: GMOs II: Transgenic Hawaii v. Chaos Theory

2008-12-11T20:58:00.008-10:00

Hawai`i’s government and educational establishment have rushed to embrace genetic engineering technology. But on the ground, things keep going not quite as planned.

In the movie Jurassic Park, mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) demonstrates Chaos Theory to paleobotanist Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) by using drops of water falling on a human hand. No two droplets run down the hand the same way; factors too small and numerous to control always combine to send the droplets on unpredictable paths. This, Malcolm explains, is why Jurassic Park should never have been built: no matter how carefully it is planned, chaos will inevitably set in.

Just then, of course, the power fails, the tour jeep is stranded, and all Jurassic breaks loose.

This, in a nutshell, is the argument that many opponents tend to make against genetically modified organisms.

No one, so far as we know, has actually attempted to re-grow a dinosaur. But in the past decade, a huge number of brand new organisms have been created: plants that make their own insecticide, mammals that glow in the dark, fruit trees containing virus genes, tomatoes with flounder genes and potatoes with chicken genes. Among the GMOs that have already entered commercial production-are weed-killer-tolerant and/or insectidal corn, soybeans, rapeseed (the source of canola oil), flax and cotton, which have been incorporated into food products from baby food to mayonnaise--none of which are required to be labeled as containing GMOs. Researchers have already introduced, or are currently testing, transgenic organisms including catfish, salmon, raspberries, sunflower seeds, walnuts, apples, hops, grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions, peanuts, watermelons, cranberries, plums, strawberries, broccoli, eggplants, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, sweetgum trees, poplars, spruces, bluegrass, zoysia grass, sugar beets, sugarcane, orchids, gladioli, petunias, chrysanthemums, carnations, rice and tobacco.

Hawai'i Leads the Way

While Europe, Canada and Japan have followed, at best, a “go-slow” approach to GMOs, Hawai`i’s educational and governmental establishments have largely embraced them. “Our growing biotechnology industry and its sectors--agriculture, marine sciences, human therapeutics, and the environment--are important sources of quality jobs and prosperity for the state,” Governor Ben Cayetano told delegates to the annual convention of Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) last spring. “Recognizing this potential, we formed a partnership--government, education and the industry--to develop a cohesive plan...BIO provided a great deal of assistance in the formulation of a competitiveness strategy for Hawaii's industry, completed in December 1999.....”

Hawai`i’s scientific community has already positioned itself at the forefront of this effort. UH-Manoa researchers developed “Honolulu transgenesis,” a method of transplanting genes into mammals, which could be a licensing goldmine. Among the first subjects of the technique were the university’s famous (or infamous) phosphorescent mice, which glow under ultraviolet light because of a transplanted jellyfish gene. The jellyfish gene was chosen simply as a “marker”: it produced an easily detectable trait that proved the gene transplant was successful. Theoretically, virtually any gene could be transplanted using the technique.

“Possible applications could include using the mouse as a model for studying the function of human genes,” speculates one press release. “Also, more organs could be available for human transplant if pig genomes could be modified so that the corresponding pig organs wouldn't trigger a critical immune rejection in patients who receive them.”

Using similar techniques, Oregon researchers recently created glow-in-the-dark monkey embryos, suggesting that the feasibility of gene transplants in humans.

Nor is Hawai`i’s transgenic push limited to mammals. One goal listed on UH’s Sea Grant website, for instance, is the production of commercial gene-engineered shrimp. UH researchers have been looking into a transgenic solution to the tomato wiltspot virus, which affects at least 225 different flower and fruit species. An online description of a UH-Manoa course entitled “Biotechnology” is devoted almost entirely to transgenic topics such as “Recombinant DNA technology to produce new products in bacteria and fungi, “Production of human insulin and growth hormone in microorganisms,” “Transgenic fish,” “Engineering plants for herbicide and disease resistance,” and “Gene Therapy.” To its credit, the course also looks at “Ethical issues in biotechnology” and “Environmental aspects and concerns.”

The state is also attracting corporate research dollars. GMO giant Monsanto has applied for a federal EPA permit to grow experimental insecticidal corn here, for instance. Some commercially-approved insecticidal and herbicide-resistant corn varieties may already be in production by Hawai`i’s burgeoning seed corn industry. The World Rainforest Movement recently reported that an Australian company, ProBio, planned to plant experimental gene-engineered eucalyptus trees in Hawaii.

“There have been over 1,200 field tests applied for in Hawaii alone--most of it corn, but also rice, anthuriums, dendrobiums, and coffee with with lower caffeine levels,” notes retired Indiana University researcher Marti Crouch, who helped develop GM rapeseed before leaving the field because of concerns about the technology. She adds, “A lot of those applications don’t say specifically what kind of genes have been inserted, because it’s considered confidential business information.”

The most prominent transgenic plant on the Big Island so far remains the GM papaya. The UH and Cornell researchers who developed the new papayas have touted them for “saving” the local industry from papaya ringspot virus, which had devastated Big Island papaya fields.(See Part 1 of this series, Hawai`i Island Journal, May 16-21, pp. 8-10: the first GM variety, red-fleshed UH SunUp, was crossed with the popular non-GM Kapoho Solo to produce UH Rainbow. Both varieties contain Ringspot virus genes that make them virus-resistant. But their commercial introduction has been accompanied by a crash in papaya prices, and key markets in Japan and Canada have yet to accept it for export.

Huge Benefits, Unkown Costs

GM technology’s potential benefits are enormous: new medicines, cures for genetic diseases, healthier and more productive crops. Proponents argue that the risks to the environment of changing a few genes are less than those of using more pesticides or breeding entire organisms.

Many environmentalists and some scientists, however, argue that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are flooding into the environment and the human food chain faster than regulations can be created to insure those products’ safety; that huge numbers of people are eating proteins no human has ever ingested before; and that inevitably, unpredictable and regrettable things are going to happen. Opponents can already point to some examples of Chaos Theory in action. One study indicated that genes from an insect-killing bacterium, bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), found to be harmless to mammals by itself, was linked to intestinal abnormalities in rodents when the gene was transplanted to potatoes. Another researcher found that pollen containing genes from the same bacteria, could impair or kill monarch butterfly caterpillars on nearby milkweed plants. And of course there were the infamous Taco Bell taco shells, found to contain a strain of GM corn approved only for animals.

Crouch notes that when a gene is inserted for a given effect, researchers can get more than they ask for: “Sometimes the researcher is adding a protein and the researcher thinks he knows what it does, but it creates other changes as well...sometimes it only shows up when the plant has been grown for a while. It may only show up under certain environmental conditions that weren’t encountered during the field tests....”

GMO opponents point out that among most common of the early GMO releases have been crops genetically designed to be herbicide tolerant--“Roundup-ready,” they are called--so that even more herbicides can be applied.

Papaya Meets Nature

In many ways, the GM papaya seems a best case scenario for a transgenic organism. It fulfills an urgent need by countering a virus invasion of plague proportions. If fruit from UH Sunup or UH Rainbow, the two commercial GM papaya strains, are tested for transgenic materials, only the seeds test positive. The plants contain only three alien genes. The virus genes they contain are also present in non-GM fruit that have been exposed to ringspot. Ringspot can only be contracted by other plants, not by humans.

Still, the GM papaya program has had its share of mishaps and missteps. Environment Hawai`i reported that in 1998, wind-born GM pollen may have escaped from an O‘ahu test site, due to the accidental presence of male papaya plants in the site. (Papaya plants come in three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite. Male plants are more likely to spread pollen over long distances.)

The test program also demonstrated that while the GM plants were generally virus-resistant, they were still susceptible to other pests. One of the GM strain’s ancestors was less resistant to a common fungal infection, so researchers regularly sprayed the new plants with a fungicide called Dithane. At eight months, the plants were hit by a new pest: leafhoppers. Malathion, a powerful insecticide, kept the bugs at bay for only four months. Then, as a Tropical Fruit Report article by Timothy Wenslaff and Robert V. Osgood noted, “Gradually, the leafhoppers became resistant to Malathion, then to Pyrellin [another insecticide].”

To prevent disaster, the researchers got an experimental permit to apply another insecticide called Provado, which finally brought the leafhopper plague under control--but only after the loss of several trees.

Puna farmers have already reported scattered cases of viruses overcoming the GM papaya trees--especially young trees. But UH agronomist Steve Ferreira claims that, so far, the ringspot virus hasn’t shown any signs of overcoming the resistance to mature trees in any cases that he’s investigated.

Papaya Meets People

Chaos Theory really kicked in, however, when GM papayas encountered non-scientists.

According to Ferreira, the original plan was to cut down all non-transgenic papaya in lower Puna and replace them with GM papaya. After a year, the ringspot virus would have disappeared for lack of a host, and the lucrative Kapoho Solo could have been re-introduced.

Had such a plan been followed, concerns about a GM0-resistant virus evolving would have been minimized, as would concerns about the accidental release of GM genes into the non-GM papaya population. GM and non-GM papaya might never have met.

It just didn’t happen that way.

Hawai`i’s most lucrative papaya market, Japan, refused to accept GM varieties without more thorough testing. Japanese-owned packing houses lobbied the legislature for a quarantine plan using large buffer zones of GM papaya fields to shield fields of Kapoho Solo for the Japanese market. To implement a pilot quarantine project, farmers say, the state took over GM papaya seed stocks that had been slated for distribution through the Papaya Advisory Committee, which had paid for the seed with farmers’ mandatory dues.

Some angry farmers boycotted the PAC; others managed to aquire GM seeds before they were officially released, jeopardizing patent negotiations.

Mike Durkin, the only farmer sued by UH so far for patent infringement, says he planted seeds from GM SunUp fruit he’d found at a local farmer’s market.

“Basically they’re catering to the big guys, the big packing plants, and they don’t even care what happens to the little farmers,” he believes.

Durkin accuses UH officials of “Unclean hands.... They can’t come after me for unauthorized use of the material, when they were engaged in greater unauthorized use themselves.” He says that one UH “test field” was actually a commercial farm, and that GM fruit had already been sold to grocery stores before he planted his first seed.

Many Puna farmers refused to comply with the Department of Agricultures’ plan to eliminate non-GM papaya outside the quarantine fields, when there was no assured market for the GM varieties. They pointed out that even if they cut their healthy Solo plants, diseased fields still existed in neighboring districts and feral papaya had spread into to nearby rainforests. Some farmers who did acquire GM seeds ended up cutting the trees down after GM papaya prices plummeted.

Meanwhile, even science seemed to be succumbing to commercial spin-doctoring. As part of her Master’s thesis, Cornell papaya researcher Carol Gonsalves surveyed Puna farmers who had applied for papaya seed. Before her survey results were completely tabulated, she used “trends” in them to write an article entitled “Farmers say ‘Yes!’ to Transgenics.”

Farmers and state officials finally reached a compromise, in which the state would eliminate papayas in abandoned Puna fields and farmers would be patrol their non-GM fields to eliminate new cases of the virus.

So far, this compromise seems to be working. Healthy fields of GM and non-GM papaya are now growing in Puna. But the compromise virtually assures that both the virus and the GM papayas will remain in the environment for the foreseeable future.

Larger Issues

Some of the issues involving GMOs are actually basic to all modern farming. The leafhopper incident, for example, illustrates one concern that applies to both conventional pesticides and GMOs. Unless a spray or a gene splice is 100% effective in stopping the target pest, then the survivors may multiply, spawning a new strain of resistant superpests. That danger is particularly worrisome with another popular line of GMOs: the caterpillar-killing cotton and vegetables spliced with genes from bacillus thuringiensis. Nobody argues that Bt itself is unsafe for human consumption; in fact, organic farmers have been using the bacteria for years to kill caterpillars. But organic farmers only dust with the bacteria for brief periods as needed, reducing pests’ exposure time. Bt GMOs produce insecticide constantly, increasing the chance of a Bt-resistant caterpillar evolving--and depriving organic farmers prematurely of one of their most valuable tools.

Agribusiness has long been criticized for reducing the natural plant and animal diversity that once helped to protect against widespread crop failures. In Hawai`i’s pre-GMO papaya industry, for instance, the vast majority of papayas were a single variety, Kapoho Solo, planted in a single Big Island district. These were ideal conditions for a plague: only a single parasite was needed to devastate an entire industry.

“If you step back and say , oh, maybe the problem is that you have giant monocultures and you’re stressing the environment with pesticides, then your solution, to have a healthy, diverse agricultural environment, solves several problems at once,” believes Crouch.

Ferreira sees GMOs as a way to engineer “artificial diversity” into crops. He says that while Rainbow and SunUp are resistant only to the local strain of ringspot virus, the next generation of GM Papaya will incorporate gene proteins from ringspot strains from all over the world, guarding against new strains of the virus.

Crouch isn’t buying it. “The idea of having resistance to several viruses all in one papaya variety sounds like a disaster to me, because the mechanism that allows the papaya to resist all the viruses will be the same,” she says. “When one virus overcomes that mechanism, then all the viruses will be able to do the same.”

The multiple-gene-transplant strategy may have another danger. Ferreira says the actual ringspot viruses from around the world are being kept at Cornell, to prevent any danger of contaminating Big Island crops. But research reports available on the Web show that the experimental multi-transgenic papayas are being field tested here.

“From what I understand, viruses are able to exchange genetic information by recombination when they both infect the same host,” notes Crouch. Viruses are strings of genes that take over the host cells’ DNA to reproduce more viruses. If one virus overcomes the papaya’s immunity, its genes could mix with the transplanted virus genes already in the papaya cells and produce more diverse viruses.

Ferreira sees large monoculture crops as the price we pay for high food production and mass distribution.

“The issue is quality and uniformity for the person who’s processing,” he says, noting that bakeries require flour that behaves the same way every time, and fabric makers need cotton that is uniformly white.

“That’s a sort of chicken and egg argument,” reacts Crouch. “When did the consumer become so concerned with uniformity? Export-oriented agriculture basically advertised consumers into that position, so they could be educated out of that position into an appreciation of diversity. And in fact, the organic sector of agriculture is the fastest growing market in the world.”

Other questions about GMOs apply to basic rights, freedoms, and necessities. When genes can be patented, who controls the information in one’s own body? Can large corporations, for instance, use gene ownership to gain control of the world’s seed supply, stopping farmers from saving back seed from previous crops? Like any powerful tool, transgenesis may ultimately be as good or dangerous as the social institutions that govern it. Right now, it may be at its most alluring and most frightening, because those social institutions haven’t evolved as fast as the technology.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, some farmers are looking for a market and hedging their bets, as farmers have always done. In addition to his fields of GM SunUp, Mike Durkan is currently harvesting the first commercial papaya crop to be certified by the Hawai`i Organic Farmer’s Association. In the midst of chaos, he seems to have found a sure thing: a Canadian buyer has already purchased the whole crop.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever been able to contract a crop and advance-sell it,” he says.

Archive: GMOs in Hawai'i, Part I: Papaya's Uncertain Savior

2008-12-11T13:26:00.006-10:00

(From the Journal, circa 2001)

A nationally broadcast PBS special highlights two scientists’ attempts to “save” Hawai`i’s papaya industry with a genetically modified, virus-resistant papaya. But on the ground salvation is proving more difficult.

The documentary opened with a sweeping helicopter-born view of waves crashing on the Puna Coast. The camera swept inward, then zoomed in....

Hawai`i’s papaya crisis, and the new fruit which was touted as its solution, had become the lead in for Harvest of Fear, a nationally aired PBS documentary on a growing world-wide controversy: the introduction of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) into the human diet and the worldwide ecology. The show’s opening segment focused on Hawai`i-born Cornell researchers Dennis and Carol Gonsalves and their efforts to combat the devastating papaya ringspot virus by introducing a strain of papaya containing genes from the virus itself. “A decade of work created a breakthrough, and perhaps saved an industry,” intoned the show’s narrator.

During the next two hours, the show kept cutting back to Gonsalves’ story, making it a unifying element in two hours of interviews, narrative and commentary on the question of GMOs, which in the past six years have become a common part of most Americans’ diets without most Americans even being aware of it. Genetically modified soybeans and corn have become common ingredients in everything from baby food to cereal to soda pop. Agrochemical giants such as Monsanto have made gene-spliced crops a mainstay: the show featured a Monsanto spokesman declaring that “We stopped all chemical investment...and reinvested in biotechnology.”

The program was a joint production of Frontline and Nova, two of the most prestigious names in the documentary business. It included interviews with scientists involved in GMO research, including a virus-resistant sweet potato in Africa and a strain of corn that could tolerate soil with high concentrations of aluminum in Mexico. It also included arguments from GMO opponents, from Dr. Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists to a spokesperson for an extreme environmental group that had set fire to a university office. But the special still drew some heavy flack from viewers who posted responses on the PBS website. Some comments accused the producers of using scare tactics against GMOs. Even more viewers accused Frontline and Nova of kowtowing to biotech companies. One viewer called the program “the longest commercial I've ever seen.”

Whatever the program’s overall fairness, its presentation on the GM papaya was one-sided by definition. The only interviews that the show featured from the Big Island were of the two scientists and of Big Island farmer Rusty Perry, who participated in the tests of the papaya. The program mentioned that the Gonsalves’ GM papaya had suffered a “setback” when Japan refused to accept the papaya without extensive testing, but no mention was made of any local opposition to the plants.

In fact, the opposition to the papayas has been substantial--and includes not only environmental activists, but many local farmers. Most of the fears about GMOs that the show expressed through the voices of mainland and European opponents--that the plants could accidentally crossbreed with non-GM strains, that the product will not gain acceptance by consumers, and that the targeted pest could build up immunity to the GM plant’s defenses, for instance--also have been expressed locally, in regard to GM papaya and over 50 other genetically engineered crops that have been released in the state.

So far, the claims that GM papayas will save the industry have proven premature. The factors behind this turn of events have as much to do with politics and economics as with science.

“I don’t think that they saved the industry at all. The problem is, if the people on the mainland will even buy it,” believes Ernesto Tagalicud, who heads a dissident farmer’s organization called the Papaya Freedom Fighters. Because of low prices for the GM papaya, called Rainbow, “The people could not produce more, and couldn’t afford to buy fertilizer to maintain their productivity. If you take a picture of the fields on the Kapoho-Pohoiki Road, that will tell you that they haven’t been fertilizing....

“A lot of the farmers did what they were told. They planted Rainbow. And they either cut it down or sold it for next to nothing,” notes community activist Ginny Aste, a past manager of the Papaya Administrative Committee (PAC) and current secretary of the community non-profit Na Poi O Aina. She can empathize with the farmers’ plight. Last fall, the price of Rainbow fell as low as $17 a bin. It has since rebounded somewhat, but still sells for about half of the price of Kapoho Solo, the most popular non-GM papaya. As of early April this year, a bin of Kapoho Solo sold for around $200.

“We kill a premium crop to put out a junk crop that gets barely $17 a bin here?” Aste marvels.

The word “kill” here is quite literal. At one point, the State Department of Agriculture had proposed cutting down and replacing all but a few small fields of quarantined Kapoho Solo with a “sea of transgenic papaya.” Farmers rebelled. In a series of angry meetings last year, they demanded, and finally got, the right to police their own fields for infected trees, instead of having their entire fields cut down. An $800,000 dollar program to eradicate non-transgenic papaya and replace it with transgenic Rainbow was reduced to a program to destroy abandoned fields of diseased papaya.

“We told the industry we would take down all the abandoned fields by the end of December, which we have done,” says Myron Isherwood of the State Department of Agriculture. “It cost us about $35,000.”

Current PAC Manager Emerson Llantero puts a positive spin on Rainbow’s economic debut. “In Hawai‘i, Rainbow is the preferred variety for the consumers,” he maintains “They’re asking for it, they’re actually consuming it more than for the regular varieties.” He says that the transgenic fruit’s low prices have had “something to do with the principles of supply and demand. This is the first crop and we didn’t actually know how it performs, in terms of yield, and we found out that under commercial situations, it yielded more than double the amount than for the regular variety. I’m sure that for next time, since we have the data on the yield, the growers will find a balance....[of] how much acreage they will plant in order to produce what the market demands....”

“I don’t think that rainbow produces that much more fruit per tree,” believes Aste. “It’s simply that they have a surplus of Rainbow because they don’t have a market for it. They were encouraging the farmers to plant because they thought they could break through the market in Japan and sell genetic there. So far, it hasn’t worked.”

Llantero is optimistic that the situation in Japan will change soon. “For Japan, there are two approvals needed to be able to export a rainbow papaya to Japan: for the Ministry of Agricultural and the Ministry of Health,” he says. “We have already received the approval from the Ministry of Agriculture, so we are waiting for the approval from the Ministry of Health.”

“He’s said that for two years,” scoffs Aste.

Charges of inequitable distribution of the new Rainbow seed, allegations that the quarantine zone favored large canning companies over independent farmers, and a University of Hawaii lawsuit against farmer Mike Durkin for planting Rainbow seed without authorization--despite the fact that PAC members were slated to get the seed for free--further eroded the farmers’ trust in the state’s program.

“The issue was losing control over what we had developed,” says Professor Steve Ferreira of the UH-Manoa Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, of the Durkin lawsuit. “It put Hawai`i in a very uncomfortable situation in having to say, you gave us permission to do this work, but we lost control of the material. The ability for us to do work in the future got put at risk, as well as the ability to control intellectual property. What happened in the case of Durkin’s situation is never tolerated.”

Now that Rainbow has gone into commercial production, however, controlling the spread of the transgenic strain may be impossible, even with lawsuits. Durkin claims that he got his seed from papayas bought at a local farmer’s market. Other farmers worry that even if they plant non-transgenic varieties, pollen from neighboring fields of Rainbow could contaminate their crop. Those fears have been exacerbated by a recent Canadian court case, in which a Canola seed farmer who had planted non-GM seed discovered traces of a patented GM strain in his fields--and Monsanto successfully sued him for patent violation.

Ferreira says that cross-pollination could occur, but that if it did, the GM genes would be detected only in the seeds, not in the flesh of the fruit. But farmers say that could still cut them out of both the Japanese market and the organic market.

Organic papaya is currently not a major crop in Hawai`i, but it could be a potentially lucrative one. Organic crops often command much higher prices than those raised with conventional commercial pesticides (or from GM seeds).

“You can raise an acre of organic papaya and make value-added products, and make more money than you’d make if you raised twenty acres of papayas selling for $17 a bin,” believes Aste.

But agricultural economist Dr. Eileen O’hora-Weir, who inspects crops for the Hawaii Organic Farmer’s Association (HOFA)Hawai`i Organic Farmers’ Association, notes that food grown using biotech and agrochemical product aren’t required to be labeled as such, while organic products have to documented meticulously, placing an unfair burden on the latter.

“We’re taxing the wrong groups of farmers. Right now now we’re having to pay certification fees to prove that we’re following organic practices, and soon we’ll have to be paying GMO testing fees.”

Riding a wave of farmer dissatisfaction, the Papaya Freedom Fighters swept the PAC’s board elections on the island last month, electing their entire slate of candidates. The new members must still be appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. But if they are confirmed, Tagalicud promises a somewhat different direction. Right now, he says, he is “looking at the project, looking up the research.” The farmers want to develop a better marketing plan for the entire industry. And they’re open to looking at possible alternative methods of controlling the virus. “Maybe use a vaccine. Maybe use a fertilizer that suppresses the virus,” Tagalicud suggests.

Llantero is skeptical. “I think industry and the researchers have spent more than enough money to find controls for the virus, and research shows that here is no cure for the virus except for genetic engineering, which has been done,” he maintains. “Further research on controlling the virus--looking for chemicals, whether or organic or non-organic chemicals--to solve the virus problem, will be a waste of money.”

But Aste believes that state officials have not looked seriously at alternative control methods--and that when she and the farmers proposed it in the past, they were ignored. We said, “Fine, cut trees but put 230K toward research, and some of it toward organics. They wouldn’t even listen to us.”

She worries that the state’s plan to use some of the leftover funds from the abortive non-GM papaya eradication plan for “education” would just lead to more of the same. “What are they going to educate about?” she asks. “They’re gong to say ‘Plant genetic.’ Or they’re going to say ‘cut trees if they get the virus.’ We’ve been doing that already. Why would you pay Department. of Agriculture people say the same thing?

Meanwhile, Isherwood says that the papaya farmer’s plan to police themselves seems to be going well: “The industry said that they would take the responsibility for having their members cut newly infected non-transgenic trees down, and by and large, they are doing that. We have a crew that goes out to survey, and the reports that I get back from them are that the growers are taking down the diseased trees on a pretty timely basis--which is a good sign.”

In some senses, the hybrid plan for coping with the virus may be working. Questions about whether the world will accept GM papayas remain unanswered, prices for the new GM papaya have been dismal, and the virus hasn’t been eradicated. But Isherwood says the virus isn’t completely out of control, either. “You can find the virus around,” he says, “but it’s not nearly as bad as in the mid-1990’s so far, definitely.”

Blackened Friday

2008-11-30T07:22:00.004-10:00

Random musings in the wake of Black Friday:

I saw a new commercial yesterday. Since the auto bailout is apparently stalled in Congress, GM is taking matters into its own hands: it’s trying to get a federally-insured bailout from the American people by making itself a bank. The “GMAC Bank” is advertising 4.5 percent interest on its savings accounts--and the ad adds that “your money is safe” because the deposits are insured by the FDIC.

Shortly after seeing the commercial aired, I saw the story on Headline News about a 34-year-old seasonal employee who was trampled to death at the 5 a.m. Black Friday opening of a Wal-Mart store on Long Island. This being America in 2008, there were soon videos of the event up on YouTube. Shoppers outside the store were shrieking--not with horror, but with laughter--as the store’s glass doors caved in.

The police closed down the store, but it reopened three hours later. Wal-Mart’s brief official statement on the “incident” contained an 11-word expression of condolence to the victim’s family buried in CYA language. The entire statement reads:

“We expected a large crowd this morning and added additional internal security, additional third party security, additional store associates and we worked closely with the Nassau County Police. We also erected barricades. Despite all of our precautions, this unfortunate event occurred.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the deceased. We are continuing to work closely with local law enforcement and we are reaching out to those involved."

Jdimytai D’amour wasn’t the only victim of Black Friday. A 8-months pregnant woman in the same crowd was knocked down and reportedly suffered a miscarriage. Across the country, in Palm Desert, California, gunfire erupted at a Toys’R’Us, reportedly after shoppers got into an argument. Two died.

I hope that the Nassau County prosecutes Wal-Mart for inciting a riot. But corporate greed isn’t all to blame for the death of D’amour and the other Black Friday victims, just as corporate greed isn’t the only cause of GM’s problems, or AIG’s, or Lehman Brothers'. GM sold SUVs because millions of Americans decided they needed one (or two, or three), even though most of them had no need whatsoever to go off-road. Millions of people who should have known better bought homes with cheap, risky mortgages. Millions and millions of people bought stuff with credit cards when they shouldn’t have. And hundreds of millions flock to Wal-Mart, even though its mass-marketing strategy relies on selling the most goods with the fewest employees possible, putting thousands of local retail stores out of business and sapping money from local economies. This isn’t just corporate greed. It’s across-the-board American Greed.

And World Greed, for that matter. Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Mazda, Nissan, Volkswagon and Hyundai also happily jumped on the SUV bandwagon, though people don’t seem to notice that. China eagerly banked on American greed to hyper-energize its own economy, even as its factories took away Americans’ ability to pay for their spending spree.

Now, instead of cars and soap and other goods, American commercials are dominated by ads for insurance and credit cards and stockbrokers and FreeCreditReport.com. America’s chief product is imaginary money.

Maybe greed is not that good, Michael Douglas movie clips notwithstanding. Maybe thrift is an even better strategy. If we got back to real money and got our greed in check, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

Once the speculative frenzy dried up, gas prices suddenly became affordable again. Maybe we shouldn’t buy an SUV or a home if we can’t afford it. Maybe houses will become affordable to more people, if builders aren’t driven by speculation. Maybe somebody will start building cars that don’t cost a year’s wages. Maybe someone will even start offering bus service again. A bus is an even bigger-ticket item than an SUV; GM should make a nice profit on them.

There’s a final irony in Black Friday. If greed drives the American economy, why does the American economy need Christmas? After all, those crowds in the stores aren’t supposed to be buying for themselves; they’re buying for their family and friends.

It would be ironic, indeed, if those shoppers who trampled Jdimytai D’amour’s body did it not out of greed, but out of generosity.

Archive: Of Lawns and Carrion

2008-11-24T13:58:00.002-10:00

(This little essay appeared several years ago as one of the "Living Arts" columns that I wrote for Art Centering. I was reminded of it today while weed-eating the yard.
My current house at least minimizes the problem. It's in a tropical rainforest, and much of it is shaded by tree ferns. But threading toward the back of the lot is a semi-sunlit war zone where alien grasses do perpetual battle with native mosses, and I'm siding with the mosses.)

This writer recently had an interesting conversation with a good friend, a young woman who had leased some former cane land in Hamakua for diversified farming, and was resisting the common urge to destroy every plant that she hadn't planted herself. She even made a case for sparing introduced "weeds."

"I hate Weedeaters," she said, pointing out the noise and pollution that mowing machines in general emitted, and how much imported gas they ate. She also noted how little was known about many plants--how wasteful it was to destroy plants indiscriminately, when one didn't even know what undiscovered wonder drug might be lurking within them.

Her final argument was aesthetic.

"How can you decide that a short lawn is more beautiful than a waving field of mature grass?" she demanded.

I pondered on this conversation, then sent her an e-mail, warning her to be careful to whom she expounded her theory. "Somebody's liable to decide you're the Perfect Woman," I told her.

I strongly suspect that close-cropped lawns only exist because women make men mow. I tried arguing the beauties of long grass and dandelions to my ex-wife for years, but she never bought them. She also refused to live anywhere where there wasn't a large lawn. I guess it was a sort of power trip....

Of course, this general dislike of mowing can be overcome if men are bribed with enough compensatory power, such as a large lawn tractor or riding mower. Not only are such machines fun to ride and a macho symbol of success; they also make the mowing time much shorter.

But none of this explains the phenomenon of why anyone finds short lawns pleasing to start with. And in fact, while I hate mowing, I actually rather like short grass.

The origin of the lawn aesthetic may actually be related to our evolution. Homo erectus, one of the earliest species of "true" human, evolved on the expanding savannas of ancient Africa, and was beautifully designed for the a short-grass environment. He/she had superb long distance vision for sighting prey (or early on, most likely, carrion) across long distances in open country; in fact, there are very few creatures besides eagles and vultures who have better eyesight than a human with 20/20 vision. Upright stance also makes members of the genus Homo into living watch towers, setting those superior eyes up higher than those of nearly all other living mammals; we can look an elephant more or less in the eye. In fact, Homo erectus' near-modern height was one of the chief characteristics distinguishing the species from its probable ancestor, Homo habilus, who is now believed to have inhabited a mixed forest/meadow environment.

The short grass of the veldt also makes a wonderful cushion for human feet, which otherwise would have to needed to evolve the equivalent of hooves. This writer found that out a few years ago, during a 120-mile, cross-island backpacking trip from Kamoamoa to Waimea. By the time I reached the cattle country of Mauna Kea, I was footsore indeed, and the stones of the Mana Road were pure torture, despite thick socks and hiking shoes. But walking in the cow pasture alongside the road brought instant relief. Doctor Scholl has never made an cushioned insole that equals a good layer of turf.

While Homo isn't very fast compared to other critters, he/she can manage a ground-eating lope in open country. Homo erectus was thus perfectly designed for spotting a lion munching on a wildebeest a half-mile away, and then getting there in time to at least crack the bones for marrow. Although a single human was no match for a lion or a hyena, a whole phalanx of Homo erecti swinging hunks of tree limbs would have been very daunting indeed, exerting skull-crunching force before jaws or claws could even come within biting or clawing distance.

These advantages disappear in tall grass. Tall grass slows human speed to just short of a crawl. Our long, wedge-shaped feet, so perfect for trotting across a well-grazed savanna, become instantly tangled when they drive themselves into the mat of long grass stems. Tall grass also masks a multitude of other hazards, such as thorny fallen branches, gopher holes, and poisonous snakes. It hides both the prey and the lions, negating our wonderful vision advantage. And it only exists where game is too scarce to graze it down. Besides, most mature grass heads are armed with seeds designed to travel by barbing themselves onto animal fur. Erectus may have solved that problem by losing hair, but we re-introduced it by inventing socks.

All of this certainly jives well with modern outdoor aesthetics. I once read that bonsais bore a remarkable resemblance to the twisted acacias of the African veldt; we traditionally build temples, cities and rich people's mansions on high spots with good views, and certainly we have an aesthetic predilection for sweeping vistas (though this tendency seems stronger in U.S. culture than in the Orient; maybe it got reinforced during American westward expansion, when it was best to build your cabin where you had a clear view of approaching bears, Native Americans, fellow pursuers of Manifest Destiny, and other potentially dangerous creatures).

Despite these ancient roots, the modern lawn is of recent origin. Traditionally, European and English manor houses had enormous grounds (called "gardens" in those days) that were functioning pastures, grazed by lucrative flocks of sheep. The peasants, meanwhile, got crowded into villages where each house may have had a vegetable garden in back, but had no lawn whatsoever. The villagers had to content themselves with the village commons, where they pastured their milk cows. "Commoner" thus literally meant "person with no lawn." Then, with the invention of woolen mills, greedy landowners began closing the commons. That probably led to a major case of veldt-envy, so when modern Western culture got the chance to build spacious, auto-powered cities, everyone moved to the outskirts, then the suburbs, where each family could have their own patch of short grass. But the average modern lawn isn't large enough to support a single sheep, much less a viable flock. Besides, somewhere in there, our color-sensitive eyes also allowed us to develop a passion for beds of bright-hued flowers, and sheep are color-blind.

So there it is. We're evolutionarily predisposed to liking short grass, but not to cutting it; the latter was the wildebeests' job. So now we satisfy our primal longing for the veldt by burning gasoline in artificial grazing animals, and haul garbage bags full of perfectly good fodder off to landfills. The grass, meanwhile, continues growing like crazy, because evolution programmed it to produce huge excesses of greenery in compensation for wildebeest appetites.

But it could be worse. At least our primal aesthetic doesn't demand genuine zebra-carcass lawn ornaments.

The AIG Mess: Insurance Commissioner Schmidt Speaks Out

2008-11-20T14:57:00.000-10:00

I just did an article about the possible effects of the AIG bailout on AIG-Hawaii and other AIG holdings in Hawaii. It's posted at the Hawaii Independent Web site. In the process of researching the article, I had a very good interview with Hawaii State Insurance Commissioner Jeffrey P. Schmidt, who's responsible for supervising AIG Hawaii and making sure that any sale of the company doesn't go sour for its thousands of customers. Schmidt volunteered some good insights into the workings of corporations and corporate regulators in general--only some of which could be included in the 1000-word Independent article.

Among other things, Schmidt addressed one problem on which most politicians have been strangely quiet: the corporate feeding frenzy in which one company buys another until you end up with a company such as AIG, which is, in the media buzzword of the day, “too big to fail”--so the government is faced with the choice of either bailing it out or watching the entire economy tank. (It’s ironic that, back when John McCain was constantly comparing himself to Teddy Roosevelt, he didn’t bring up trust-busting. Maybe if AIG had been broken up like Standard Oil or AT&T, the risk might have been spread out a little bit.)

Schmidt mentioned the fear that the federal bailout monies would simply be used by the beneficiaries to buy up still more companies--and he questioned whether that was “a proper use of taxpayers’ money.”

Still, he noted, “In some instances, a larger, sounder company buying out a smaller troubled company is a good thing because it might protect the investors.”

Of course, I observed, it’s only a good thing if the larger company stays sound.

That launched a discussion of the benefits of large companies and small companies. Schmidt saw some value in having both types around. One role of regulators, in Schmidt's view, was to encourage this healthy mix--and make sure it didn’t go toxic: “You need to have regulations and government programs that encourage smaller entrepreneurial companies that come up with new ideas, new ways of doing things, while being closer to the consumer, while providing regulations for the larger companies that allow efficiency of operation It’s a balancing act...it’s not a one and done kind of solution, where you implement the solution, you’re done and you walk away. The market is dynamic, and the government and regulation also have to be dynamic and have to adjust.”

The key, in his mind, was not more regulation or less regulation, but good regulation.

“An example of bad regulation in insurance,” he said, “is when the legislature decides to mandate a decrease in insurance premiums.” Such a rule, he noted, could squeeze the company’s profit margin to the point where it didn’t have enough cash in hand to pay claims.

I brought up the legislation in the 1990s that finally put an end to Hawai‘i’s notorious “no fault” auto insurance, which wasn’t truly no-fault and seemed mainly an excuse to jack up premiums.

“That’s actually a very good example of changing bad regulation to good regulation,” Schmidt remarked.

The old rules, he said, mandated that drivers carry coverage beyond the minimum needed, and Hawai‘i’s idiosyncratic insurance laws discouraged many companies from doing business in the state. The insurance reform acts passed in 1994 and 1998, he said, “changed the law to say that people simply needed to have basic coverage and if they wanted to have more insurance options, they could choose to buy it. Now, we have a very competitive auto insurance market, with lots of companies competing to provide insurance to HI’s consumers.”

In 1998, he noted, Hawai‘i had the fourth highest auto insurance premiums in the country; by 2003, those rates had dropped to 22nd.

Good state insurance regulation, he maintained, helped keep AIG Hawaii healthy while the parent company’s federally-regulate financial subsidiaries poisoned themelves on toxic investments. While AIG Hawaii had profit-and-liability-sharing agreements with other companies in AIG family, those agreements were limited by state requirements that AIG-Hawaii keep enough capital at home to cover possible claims.

Meanwhile, the parent AIG's federally (under)regulated financial service companies were buying up investments under rules that didn’t even require the buyers to know exactly what they were investing in.

“That was the main problem with credit default swaps and securitized subprime mortgages,” Schmidt contended. “People were buying these products without understanding what these products were....There was no regulatory requirement of transparency in the sale of the products--basically letting people know how it works, what the risks are.”

We didn't get into how the professional investment managers could be so stupid as to buy financial pigs in pokes, regulation or not. But I don't really think such decisions could have a rational explanation, anyway. Why do gamblers blow thousands on slot machines when they know the odds are against them?

The difference was that these folks were gambling with other people's money. But then, other people were gambling that they could make payments on exorbitant mortgages when they knew the odds were against them, too. So now the government is betting tax dollars that they can save us from our own collective greed. Is any of that rational?

All I can say about the whole situation is: good luck. And thanks, Mr. Schmidt, for playing your little role in keeping our insurance policies in effect.