KauaiEclectic, a blog published by Joan Conrow, has had its last post.
“All Pau,” Conrow announced today. “It’s time for a change.”
KauaiEclectic has been around for ten years. It’s been a vehicle for Conrow’s excellent reporting. Here long-running “Abuse Chronicles” exposed the seamy side of Kauai’s vacation rental industry, and set a standard for reporting that’s not often matched in these islands.
She blogged about the environment, about social conflict on Kauai, about being local, about agriculture, GMOs, politics, dogs, and walking on the beach.
It’s been a great ride, Joan. Thank you.
By the way, Conrow has launched a new blog.
Please visit my new site, where I will be writing about science, agriculture, GMOs, tourism, philosophy, politics and whatever strikes my fancy.
I just went back to the earliest KauaiEclectic post I could find. It’s dated September 18, 2007.
Conversations: Prosperity
Prosperity isn’t even a word in the Hawaiian language, Ka`imi said. It’s an entirely Western concept, that idea of making good in a way that sets you apart from others; accumulating possessions with an eye toward achieving status; attracting money and material things to be stored up, hoarded.
But there is waiwai, she reminded him, the word used interchangeably for water and wealth, and she’d experienced it herself at Aliomanu, just recently. Walking to the beach, after a month of heavy rains, she’d noticed naupaka leaves, plumped and swollen; ironwood needles, a tender pale green; springy moss, clinging thickly to gray pohaku.
The red soil had darkened deep brown with a surfeit of wet; heliotrope seedlings had sprung boldly from the sand.
It was suddenly all so rich, so plush, so luxuriant, that drought-parched patch of east Kauai coastline, restored to vibrant life by rain alone.
That’s when she saw with her own eyes, she told him, that waiwai truly is wealth. Because everything in that moist scene was so lushly abundant, it seemed wholly ludicrous to value anything more than water.
And you can call the rain, he reminded her. You can evoke the water; you can turn the trickle into a torrent. Isn’t that prosperity?
Posted by Joan Conrow at 11:26 AM
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i guess since she has long left Kauai and then became a paid blogger for the agri-chemical industry and their allied trade groups at some point it was bound to happen. she was a great reporter and her illegal TVR reporting was great but her credibility was impaired by her intense personal animosity towards certain Kauai politicians and her independence open to question because of the paid blogging. [See Conrow’s comment in reply: “…that’s just more of the nonsense that the anti-GMO trolls spew to try and discredit me. I’ve never worked for agrochemical companies and their trade groups, nor have I been paid to write my blog.”]
Thank you, Ian. That means a lot coming from a solid professional like you.
As for “inoaole,” that’s just more of the nonsense that the anti-GMO trolls spew to try and discredit me. I’ve never worked for agrochemical companies and their trade groups, nor have I been paid to write my blog. It’s been a labor of love born in large part from my frustration over the poor paid journalism in Hawaii.
i’m not an anti-GMO troll and I think this underscores the point I was trying to make about your impaired credibility/judgmnet. Your opaque work for the Alliance for Science which you say is not “paid blogging” or part of the agri-chemical industry, your intensely personal and seemingly unjustified attacks fixating on certain Kauai politicians, and your attempts to obscure your long absence from Kauai while preaching about local Kauai values, did impair your credibility for many Joan who have followed since you were in print. And for people interested in illegal TVR operations and other non-GMO issues, your impaired credibility lessened your voice for those issues that some of us care about. Not everything in this world can be framed in terms of for or against GMOs or certain Kauai politicians and as I said, it was regrettable that your work took that turn.
Mahalo to you both. Posting Joan’s post about wealth buffs out the glow I’ve valued at KauaiEclectic all those years. Yay, your muse, Joan, knows the scoop and keeps a good stopwatch for the long, long haul.