A SMELL BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD
STINK TO HIGH HEAVEN: Talk about your love-hate affair. Tourism,
the numero uno cash cow in Hawai`i and Kaua`i, gets the love but it's
also the industry we all love to hate. That's evidenced by our
preoccupation with "diversifying"- maybe even finding
something to supplant it- that has gone on ever since King Sugar,
having slipped to #2, finally went belly up.
But now, in a "the kind is dead;
long live the king" twist worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy, the
current #2 has been slowly poisoning King Tourism and everyone seems
to know it but the King and the minions of the King's biggest rival:
the innocuous sounding "seed corn industry."
"Aw shucks folks- we're just
farmers," the rival says. And who could be against agricultural
diversification?
Well, just maybe the peasants, who are
finally figuring out that they're getting poisoned too because the
strategy to take over the throne is to simply poison the town's well.
The townsfolk have discovered that the
kindly corn-farmers like Pioneer are actually part and parcel of
legacy chemical companies like Dow and BASF.
They've started to notice how uncle,
who works for these companies, is coughing up pieces of lung and
they've seen those nightly helicopter-generated, bubble-gum-smelling
showers that have turned out to actually be highly toxic pesticides
with an illegal bubble-gum masking agent.
Not only that but
the
townspeople of Kaua`i have introduced
a
bill (#2491) before the county council and will be descending on
the second largest auditorium on the island (the KCC Performing Arts
Center) for a public hearing on July 31 (at 1:30 p.m.) just to obtain
the right to know just what the heck kind of poisons they're spraying
on us.
So how did we get here- where it's up
to Kaua`i to protect itself from outsiders coming in and spraying
toxic chemicals and refusing to say exactly what they are spraying?
The fact is that the feds and the
state, bought and paid for by the chemical giants, have failed to
protect the people. That's practically irrefutable making the
politicians' cries of "regulation is the realm of the feds and
the state" sound like the complete lunatic fantasy that it is.
One courageous Kaua`i County
Councilmember, Gary Hooser, first spent a year or so trying to get
information from the "biotech" industry- all to no avail-
then introduced the bill to force kindly Farmer "Pioneer"
Brown and his brother Syngenta Jones to tell us what kind of
"restricted use" and "experimental" pesticides
are being atomized and nebulized, often in the middle of residential
neighborhoods.
The bill would create 500 foot buffer
zones especially around schools- because the use of these poisons is
banned by law from anywhere it's likely to be in contact with
children- and other places where people generally congregate as well
as institute a temporary moratorium on the propagation of all new
outdoor experimental genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the
associated experimental restricted-use pesticides until an
environmental impact statement is completed.
But you'd think that the bill, focused
on disclosure, was somehow a death knell for the "seed farmers"
to hear what they are telling their employees, in a disinformation
campaign that would make the NSA blush.
And speaking of politicians, believe it
or not, despite the overwhelming outcry from parents, teachers, and
just about everyone who doesn't depend on the biotech industry for
their daily contaminated bread, there is doubt as to whether the bill
will pass.
So far Hooser has only one declared
ally- Councilmember Tim Bynum who co-introduced the bill- and one
opponent, a long-time member-in-good-standing of what's know locally
as the GOBAGs (good old boys and girls) Club, Ross Kagawa.
The rest are waiting to see which way
the toxic wind is blowing and whether the biotexters smelly breeze is
stronger than the oratorical winds of practically the entire
electorate.
And why might that be?
While the money from the biotech
industry dribbles pretty regularly into many of their campaign
coffers the main players here are those who control those visitor
industry bucks. And thus far people in the Kaua`i and Hawai`i
visitors' industry are tightly balanced on the fence putting passage
of the bill seriously in question, coming up on that public hearing.
The tenuousness of passage has of late
become glaringly obvious to many vote-counting, long-time government
observers. As local news-blogger, journalist and pundit Joan Conrow
wrote
recently
I'm hearing Councilman Gary Hooser currently does not have the
votes to pass Bill 2491, the ordinance that deals with restricted
pesticide use disclosure, buffer zones and an EIS for the GMO crops.
Only Councilman Bynum is solidly on board. So no doubt the rhetoric
will ramp up as both sides seek to convince the other five.
Well she isn't the
only one. As if it weren’t obvious from watching the first meeting-
where the bill unanimously passed the first of two required
"readings" (as bills usually do no matter what the final
vote turns out to be)- the word around town is that the third and
fourth votes may well come down to the leanings of Council Chair Jay
Furfaro whose life-long career in the visitor industry makes his nod
dependent on how people like Sue Kanoho, head of the Kaua`i Visitors'
Bureau (KVB), sees it.
And she ain't
sayin' nuttin'.
The remaining
three- JoAnn Yukimura, Nadine Nakamura and Mel Rapozo are eyeballing
the 2014 election where the first two will no doubt be vying for
council chair when Furfaro retires (as he has announced he will do)
with Rapozo ogling the mayor's seat. They need, if not an
endorsement from Furfaro, at least his good will.
Well that all got
us to thinking- always a dangerous proposition.
The bio-tech
industry has been calling everyone on the island this week as part of
their mis-disinformation campaign, conducting "push polls,"
setting up secret, supporters-only, town hall meetings and taking
fast talking no-means-yes-and-yes-means-no "surveys"
The rest of the
time they spend threatening their workers with losing their jobs if
forced to answer the question "what in the the heck are you
spraying anyway."
They even have
their
own social media campaign- where asking the wrong question will
quickly lose you your posting privileges- telling us how some of them
are ready to drink a teaspoon of glycophosate- the active chemical in
the household herbicide "Round-up" which will probably not
kill you the same way prolonged daily exposure will.
It kind of reminds
you of one of those NY City advertising campaigns where the guy says
"if you ain't satisfied, I'll eat a bug."
They don't say how
diluted that teaspoon of poison might be (we've got dollars for
donuts it isn't undiluted, full strength) nor do they offer to drink
any of the really toxic "restricted" pesticides they are
spraying 80% of the time according to the attorneys who are
suing
Pioneer at the behest of those 64 members of the Waimea community
where Pioneer's local headquarters is located.
Those attorneys
have obtained information that many- including Hooser who
unsuccessfully tried to use his elected position to pry it loose-
have failed to get, by using "discovery" in federal court
where depositions are being conducted as we write.
The
video
of their July presentation at Waimea Canyon School- where some of
those restricted-use pesticides that are illegal to use around
children were discovered- is a real eye-opener even for those of us
who thought we knew how dangerous the situation is.
It's apparent we
need help. So it's heartening to many that recently an
article in the Huffington Post by Marin County environmental
writer Maggie Sergio went viral across the mainland after she heard
about the bill and visited Kaua`i to find out more.
Another
piece by local PhD candidate in politics and economics in food
and agriculture Andrea Brower has been gaining publication in
journals across the island and country.
So we though that
what what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and what we
need is a good advertising campaign to reach the tourists that are
flocking to Kaua`i with the truth about what those red dust clouds
that they drive though on the west side contain.
We wrote up our
idea for such an "ad." And since our graphics skills are
non-existent we posted a solicitation on the
GMO
Free-Kauai Facebook page looking for someone with artistic skills
who might be able to work with the idea.
We described out
concept this way:
It would say "Planning a trip to Kaua`i?" across the
top of two frames, the first frame with a person in a bathing suit
with the words "Don't Forget your Bathing Suit" across the
bottom and the second frame with someone in a Haz-Mat suit saying "Or
your Haz-Mat Suit." The second one also has a sign in the
background behind the person in the Haz-Mat suit saying something
like "Experimental GMO Pesticide Fields; Breath at your own
Risk"... you get the idea.
And, bless their
hearts two graphic artists took the concept and created "posters"
that have been approaching the almighty "viral" status in
the last day or so.
First artist
Dom
Acain took the ball and ran with it coming up with this:
Then artist
Rob
Cruz took the concept even further in trying to assure tourists
understand what you need to pack for a trip to "paradise":
Feel free to share
them on social media or email them to your mainland friends... as a
matter of fact, "collect-'em-all." Or do your own... the
more the merrier.
Although
many among the local "leadership" of the anti-GMO movement
on Kaua`i have been reluctant to move off their kid-glove treatment
of the visitor industry in the past, it seems they too are beginning
to see that we need the KVB and corporate tourism honchos as allies
in the efforts to pass bill 2491.
We've
tried honey but all the bees died anyway. So they might just need a
tart little nudge to get them moving in the right direction.
It
isn't as if those who work in tourism aren't behind the bill en
masse. Union support has been strong and indeed many if not most of
those fathers and mothers who testified at the introduction of the
bill- and who will be showing up on the 31st- work in a
visitor-industry related job.
That's
why many people are up in arms at reports in social media that the
"Hawai`i Crop Improvement Association" and other industry
groups are pouring buckets of cash into those various disinformation
and dirty tricks telephone campaigns on Kaua`i as almost anyone
living on Kaua`i with a land line can attest.
It
important to understand that unless the tourism industry puts
pressure on the council- which will take pressure from tourists
themselves- the bill could could be in big trouble.
It
stands to reason that people are not going to vacation in a place
where they will be driving through toxic clouds of dust and where it
rains restricted experimental pesticides.
And
they are bound to find out sooner or later. Even if it weren't just
the right thing to do, informing visitors of the dangers while the
bill is on the table is simply good customer research, showing
everyone what is bound to happen when tourists do find out.
Imagine
how they will react if they find out about the situation along with
the information that we defeated a bill to protect them.
There are some who are naive and fail
to grasp what we're up against. Many have never experienced a
Kaua`i-style movement. They think that they can control activism when
the fact is that on Kaua`i the successful campaigns are not "run"
but accomplished through a "do your own thing," leaderless
effort, built on the natural outrage... as the Superferry battle can
attested to.
KVB is not going to support the bill
unless they themselves feel the pressure. They are corporate people
whose instinct is to support other corporate people. We're working
against that instinct and the only thing that will reverse that
attitude is cash- the cold hard cash that they will be losing if
occupancy drops when people learn the truth about the so-called"seed
industry."
The most important thing any of us
can do at this point is to get the word out to the mainland that we
are ground-zero for outdoor testing of horrific experiments that are
sickening our children and threatening the health of those who visit
our fair island.
True leadership knows when to lead and
more importantly when to get the heck out of the way and let the
people do their thing. Leadership is not what the infamous
leader in the French Revolution had in mind when he said "you
must tell me which way my people have gone so I can go lead them."
What's your thing? Don't wait for
permission- just grab a peaceful pitchfork, go out and do it. Every
bit helps.
