It’s always interesting to see what people elsewhere are reading about Hawaii. The internet makes this much easier than it used to be. Here are a few stories I gathered during a broad sweep of news this morning.
From Reason.com: “Is Hawaii’s Anti-GMO Movement Really Just Anti-Science?”
The battle over GMOs will likely turn on questions of safety and property rights: Are GMO foods safe for human consumption? And who gets to decide how cropland is used – voters or landowners?
Reason TV traveled to Hawaii and reports on both issues.
For more on the situation in Hawaii – and the scientific consensus that GMO foods are absolutely safe to eat – read Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey’s story, “The Fable of Hawaiian Frankencorn.” For Reason’s coverage of GMOs, go here.
Business Insider: “10 Pictures That Will Make You Wish You Went To College In Hawaii
”
Across the United States today — from Michigan down to Florida — colleges are closed due to the freezing cold weather.
Meanwhile, Honolulu — home to the University of Hawaii’s flagship campus — doesn’t have these sort of problems. Today’s weather will hit 73 degrees, although there might be some clouds in the sky.
Business Insider: “America’s Most Interesting Olympic Skier Lives In Hawaii And Trains On The Beach”
Julia Mancuso is the most decorated U.S. women’s skier going into the Sochi Olympics.
She won a gold medal in 2006 and two silvers in 2010. She has qualified for every Olympics since 2002, when she was 17 years old.
While she’s best known for her brief but much-publicized beef with Lindsey Vonn in 2010, she’s actually one of the more interesting people you’ll see in Sochi.
Mancuso spends most of the year traveling the world as a pro skier. But in the summer when she’s not working she lives and trains somewhere you’d never expect to find her — Hawaii.
In a video on NBCOlympics.com, Mancuso talks about the benefits of training in Maui. She says the extreme juxtaposition between the Alps and the tropics helps stave off boredom, and lets her get in touch with nature.
EarthSky.org: “View from space: Hawaii”
Two views of Hawaii from space, both taken in January 2014.
WALB.com: “Andersonville: Even Hawaii touched by Civil War”
The National Prisoner of War Museum will be hosting historian Justin Vance from Hawaii Pacific University in two weeks.
On Saturday, February 15, 2014 at 1:00 pm, Dr. Vance will be giving a program in the auditorium entitled, “Hawaiians and POWs from Hawaii in the American Civil War.”
Vance is a history professor at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, and has spent much of his academic career exploring the connections between these foreign powers. “Hawaii had a very close relationship with the United States for 40 years before the Civil War began,” Vance writes, “and there are many reasons that people of the Pacific decided to take part.”
Hawaii missionary descendants and many New-England educated Native Hawaiians had interests in preserving the Union and in abolition, while other Hawaiians joined the Confederate Navy.
Condé Nast Traveler: “Hawaii’s New Wave: Honolulu is the Next Foodie Frontier”
Now a generation of young chefs who trained under the HRC chefs and Kenney, as well as on the mainland with Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, and the like, are bringing that same sensibility—quality ingredients and expert technique—to all kinds of enterprises, from gastropubs to food trucks to pop-up restaurants. “It’s really an exciting time to be in Hawaii,” says Kenney. “The number of restaurants opening up in Honolulu alone is just crazy. There are so many young creative chefs at work.” Among the rising stars, he says, is Mark “Gooch” Noguchi, a former hula dancer who is as passionate about Hawaii’s cultural and culinary heritage as he is about cooking. “We’re just doing what our ancestors did long ago,” says Gooch, about this new wave of farm-minded chefs. “Nana i ke kumu—looking to the source.” And you can too. Here’s the best of what’s cooking in Hawaii right now.
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Re: reason.com. One’s info is only as reliable as one’s source, right? I’ve only read the GMO articles linked to, and I’m shocked at their distortion of facts… these writers must have post grad degrees in propaganda & brainwashing techniques. I tried to find who’s behind reason.com, but it provides no “about”… who’s behind this? Who’s paying these writers — they’re far from objective. Mostly, i barely paid attention to the Kauai county council battle about pesticide spraying by biotech companies, BUT last night i just happened to watch some video clips of public testimony during the bill’s hearing… Kekaha (west side) parents telling the rare birth defects of their babies: brain defects, heart defects, baby born with stomach and guts outside the body… 10 times the number of rare heart defects in west side babies compared to national occurrence… testimony from doctors and nurses and HSTA (teachers & students affected)
I’m sorry, I cannot let this go without making a comment. The contention that there are these defects or increased cancer rates or whatever are NOT borne out by the facts. The critics claim that the Reason article borders on propaganda –yet they are also guilty of using similar tactics.
Is public testimony at Kauai Council by parents about the birth defects of their children NOT factual? Is testimony by doctors and nurses about the ailments of their West Kauai patients NOT factual? Is testimony by head of HSTA about the effects of pesticides on teachers and students at school next to fields NOT factual?
Ian I am surprised at you linking so uncritically to the Reason.com article. It has classic hallmarks of a propaganda piece. Thoughtful consumers are not focusing on the genetic changes in the plants directly causing changes in humans who consume them. Instead, they focus on the fact that the plants are being engineered to withstand larger amounts of toxic chemicals such as herbicide or pesticide. To test whether the modification is working, large amounts of these chemicals are then applied to the plants and the soil surrounding them. These chemicals end up in people either through the air, through the ground water or through people consuming plants. People are also concerned that the genetic changes that are being made to make plants resistant to pests can also make them hostile to organisms that humans need, ranging from pollinating insects to friendly stomach bacteria, and the effect on these delicate ecosystems has not yet been studied or become well understood. Stated simply, breeding or modifying plants to make bigger fruit or more nutrient-rich vegetables (or taller corn plants as the article describes) is not the same as breeding or modifying them to withstand poison so you can apply greater amounts of poison to the environment or breeding/modifying them to have characteristics that are intended to disrupt other ecosystems. The fact that the Reason.com article does not explain that these are the main purposes of commercial GMO — not growing taller corn plants — tells you it is a hit piece, not a think piece. The basic message of the article is “not only are they dirty hippies, they are superstitious, irrational and unscientific dirty hippies.”
My only point is that this is the stuff people elsewhere are reading. An endorsement of the views expressed was not intended.
My colleague, Kevin Folta has said it well: “In order to wage an effective war against science and reason, it is important to convince as many people as possible that science and reason are killing them. This task is difficult because most people realize that science and reason have greatly enhanced life quality and expectancy. The trick is to misdirect the credulous from the daily examples where science works, and then manufacture risk, connecting an activist target to a familiar disease du jour.”
Chemtrails, anyone?
First, a self-description of Reason.com from their website:
It’s not a scientific journal, nor pretending to be one.
Second, one of the earliest articles I ever read about GMOs was about how a new ‘robust’ type of corn was being developed by Dow — not to withstand pests or disease or drought, but to tolerate higher levels of pesticide. It was disturbing to read.
But let’s not conflate the issues of pesticide abuse and the alleged dangers and supposed ‘un-naturalness’ of GMOs.
Also, not all GMOs are developed by corporations. The ringworm-resistant papayas were produced by UH scientists. I find it hard to imagine a UH scientist as the kind of evil genius featured in a James Bond movie, in his vast underground lair, with seemingly unlimited resources, plotting to either destroy or conquer the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gJAm1BA6Fg
Speaking of organic, let’s change the subject to … the quintessential conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke.
At some point everyone seems to like Burke just because he seemed to be on the politically correct (victorious) side of history. He was:
1) pro-American Revolution;
2) anti-French Revolution; and
3) anti-colonial.
(I’m trying to recall what I’ve read about Burke and from Burke….)
American Revolution. Burke pointed out how the colonists were simply (re)asserting their “traditional rights of Englishmen”. In this sense, there was no American “Revolution”; it was more like an American Evolution.
French Revolution. This was truly a radical break from French tradition, which is why it was doomed to fail. Utopian and emotional, full of abstract, idealistic and fictive notions about the “universal rights of man” and so forth, Burke predicted accurately how such a project would destroy the society’s institutions and social fabric, leading to civil chaos which would only end with the rise of a new monarch (Napoleon) who would reign supreme in a totalitarian state that would be unconstrained by any of the now-destroyed institutions of the old order, like religion or tradition.
Anti-colonial. As a member of the British Parliament, Burke waged a one-man persecution of the East India Company that was colonizing south Asia.
What these three commitments by Burke have in common is a conservative ethos of organic rootedness.
And perhaps it can be difficult to identify something like the emotionalism and rebelliousness of the Romantic movement of the 19th century with conservatism, but one finds these elements in Burke’s anti-colonialism.
One also finds it in the popular culture and counter culture (hippies) of the 1960s, with its rebellion against a technocratic, industrial authority matched with a desire for a conservative organic social order like that of the Middle Ages, where there was a place for everything, and everything in its place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaZmdZACMNo
Chad Blair joked during the last election about the kind of language that politicians throw around during election time in Hawaii, talking as they do about the ‘kapuna’ and the ‘keiki’ and the ‘aina’ and ‘ohana’.
This is the conservative language of organic rootedness.
That kind of language is extremely rare in these United States. In this sense, Hawaii is unique — perhaps radically so — in its political culture within the context of American life.
But the dominant conservative ethos of organic rootedness that prevails in Hawaii is not uncommon in the rest of the world. Conservative traditionalists had a monopoly on power in countries like Japan and Italy from the end of the Second World War until the end of the Cold War. Hawaii is actual normal and typical. It’s the US that is peculiar in its political culture, with a conservatism that is merged with classical liberalism (libertarianism), which is the opposite of a true, organic conservatism.
The ringworm-resistant papayas
That should be ringspot virus-resistant papayas. Sorry, but I wrote this in the early morning (and after being exposed to all these cat photos on this blog).
Someone in one of the comments linked to a video of the head of Monsanto saying that if we are to avoid a famine in Africa, we need to develop GMOs. Is that credible? Is it blackmail of sorts?
To look at this more positively, let’s look at a letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “Three Myths That Block Progress for the Poor”.
The myths are:
1. The poor are doomed to stay poor.
2. Foreign aid is a big waste.
3. Saving lives leads to overpopulation.
The couple mention their own travel experiences.
It’s an extremely optimistic view of the shape of the things to come.
Remarkably, it does not contradict anything that I have read in perusing the daily news.
Now, from (faulty) memory, I can recite a few things I read about Mexico last year. Between 2009 and 2012, the Mexican economy grew by 50%. In the 1950s, the fertility rate – that is, how many children are born per family – in Mexico was something like 6.7. That’s almost seven kids per family. Today the fertility rate in Mexico is 2.1 – exactly the rate of replacement.
In 70% of the countries of the world, there is a negative population growth. The other 30% of countries tend to be in Africa and the Middle East (or so I heard). The following is from a wiki of a list of countries by fertility rate. The highest rates are:
That’s about six kids per family for those African countries listed above.
The lowest rates are:
The lowest rates seem to be either in the most developed Asian countries, or in East European countries (I think Russia’s population has been falling since the 1960s). So the trick(s) to save the world from overpopulation might be high levels of material development (as in East Asia), on one hand, as well as high levels of education and high culture (Eastern Europe) but not necessarily with high consumerism , on the other hand.
In the developed world, within the most sophisticated urban cores, there might be a high-tech creative culture that will manifest both of these imperatives, high tech coupled with a highly cultured, materially minimalist lifestyle. From the New Yorker, here is Nathan Heller’s article “Bay Watched: How San Francisco’s new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/14/131014fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all
Now, let’s figure in the effect of global warming in Africa and the Middle East. The ultimate trigger for civil war in Syria was years of drought caused by climate change, leading to the collapse of Syria’s agriculture sector. This has led to Syrian migration to Europe, with a significant extreme nationalist backlash in countries like Bulgaria.
Now, if Syrian immigration can have such dangerous implications for Europe, imagine if (when?) the agriculture sectors of a number of African countries collapse, as they did in Syria. For example, in countries like Spain, there is already 30% unemployment, and 50% unemployment among young adults. Here are right-wing demonstrations in contemporary Spain.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fascist+demonstration+spain&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=PPf5Uv69KKqU2AWzv4DQAQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=960&bih=487
Europe’s economy could get worse on its own, and mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East won’t help.
There are a lot of politicians in the US playing up the so-called “China threat” for the sake of securing patronage for their constituencies (although it seems that these same politicians like to talk about the “great investment opportunities” presented by China, and no one wants to mention the one-third of a trillion dollar trade deficit caused by Americans happily buying Chinese goods). Historically, however, China has primarily been a threat to itself.
The real threat might be from the right-wing in places like Europe. For example, in one scenario I read about, if the 9-11 terror attacks had been suspended for seven years and had happened in September of 2008, the results would have been worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In that case, the two most dangerous countries in the world, it was argued, might have been Germany and Japan as they dealt with a total economic collapse. There is something about their highly organized and centralized cultures that makes them the kind of potential threat that China will never pose.
Climate change would be central to the scenario of European political turmoil fueled by high unemployment and mass immigration. So, while in Hawaii, the concerns over climate change have been over things like sea level rise, a global perspective needs to be adopted.
This brings us back to GMOs. Perhaps to help stave off this kind of worst-case scenario, GMOs will be necessary for a changing climate, especially in places like Africa. But will Monsanto lead the way, if it cannot make a profit off its pesticides in poor places like Africa? It might be GMOs designed pro bono at universities that might be more likely to sustain farming hit hard by drought.
So, yes, GMOs might be essential to avoid this scenario.
When I wrote the above comment, I had just read about the anomalous warming of Europe in the late Middle Ages that led to a population boom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
In the first thirty years alone of this warming spell, I read, Europe’s population in this period doubled or tripled. Huge population increases happened in this two or three century period.
And then it ended. Europe got cool again. This led to societal crisis, including a breakdown in health conditions and a declining population. This made Europe vulnerable to disease. Consequently, the plague swept through Europe. In the four-year period of 1347 to 1350, half of Europe’s population perished in the Black Death.
This is another potentiality of climate change today: the increased vulnerability of people in warm regions of the world to disease as economic and health conditions deteriorate. But epidemics in today’s globalized world would not be expected to be confined to any one region.
There is also the possibility of massive immigration to Europe and a right-wing backlash.
Something like this happened with Irish immigration in the 1840s as famine swept through Ireland. Irish farmers who lived on the poorest, marginal lands turned to potatoes, which grow almost anywhere, and because of the lack of genetic diversity in the potatoes (monoculture) grown in Ireland (as opposed to South America), they became susceptible to blight, which struck. Half of Ireland’s population either died or emigrated abroad.
Speaking of mass immigration in crisis, here is an article about migration out of rural Canada on the front page of the WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304202204579252510717736366?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304202204579252510717736366.html%3Fmod%3DWSJ_hp_RightTopStories
What are some examples of potential mass migration from localities within the United States?
I don’t know of any sort of discourse in Hawaii about the effects of the rising price of jet fuel on long-distance tourism, and what sort of time frame is being discussed locally (is it being discussed locally?).
I’ve heard more about the future of Las Vegas from the documentary “Last Call at the Oasis”.
Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado River, has never been lower, and if it gets too low, it won’t power the generators in Hoover Dam. That was 36 feet and four years away when the documentary was filmed (2012), so I assume that it is two years away now. So, 2016 might be the end of Vegas as we know it.
There is also a 50% chance that Lake Mead will go completely dry by 2025. Or, so says the documentary (which I am streaming right now on Netflix).
Is there any sort of sense in Hawaii that both Hawaii and Nevada face threats to economic survival from resource scarcity, not just in the long term or medium term, but in the short term?
Are people in Nevada aware of these potential threats?
Are people in Nevada aware of these potential threats?
Yes, they are aware of this.
From a CBS News report from a couple of weeks ago.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/lake-mead-is-shrinking-and-with-it-las-vegas-water-supply/
The question is, How did Nevada drop the ball on this?
After all, Nevada has generally been responsive in terms of water use, and also savvy in terms of reinventing itself in terms of tourism.
There is, in tourism, a tendency for tourist destinations to experience something like ‘Gresham’s Law’, crudely stated as “Bad money drives out good” (e.g., silver replaces gold as a currency, and is replaced in turn by copper, which is replaced by bronze, then by nickel, then zinc and paper/cloth, and now by electrons).
So upper-class Japanese tourists used to come to Waikiki and shop at Armani and Gucci. Nowadays, those kind of tourists go to Bali or Paris, and working class Japanese shop at Ross Dress-For-Less.
http://www.uhero.hawaii.edu/95/
The solution to this in tourism is constant reinvention, as well as economic diversification. That’s what Las Vegas has done. But prior to 2000, they never saw water depletion as a possibility. It’s as though their eyes were fixed on economics.
Could Hawaii diversify its tourism market? There is the possibility of greater educational tourism, with students coming here to stay not for days but for years. But HPU is experiencing a drop in foreign student enrollment. There is also eco-touism. But at this point what are tourists going to look at, new suburbs?
Also, who would drive the solutions to these problems in Hawaii? In Las Vegas, there are guys like Steve Wynn who, for better or worse, are visionaries and drive change. Hawaii has the eBay billionaire philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, but he is really a global figure who happens to dabble in environmental and journalistic endeavors in Hawaii.
In college, I once saw a lecture on state and local government, and the lecturer began to talk about the elected officials he dealt with in the legislature of his own state (Washington). He glanced up from his notes and looked sternly across the lecture hall. “We’re talking about muffler repairmen, people.” Local politicians have good intentions, but when an issue like natural resource depletion comes up, the politicians’ response is to start talking about the “need” to build a new stadium.
I just wanted to add something.
The 2012 documentary “Last Call at the Oasis” said that Lake Mead would no longer be able to power Hoover Dam if the water level fell by 36 feet.
The documentary stated that this scenario was forecast to happen in 2016 if things don’t change.
That means that the water level of Lake Mead would have to fall by nine feet per year for four years.
Yet the CBS News article says that the lake might fall by 20 feet this year (2014) alone.
How is that even possible?
Also, the news article does not mention the potential loss of hydroelectric generation capacity at Hoover Dam.