kauaianken's story links

Carlin's line about “How we gonna save the planet when we haven’t learned how to care for each other yet” haunts this caring island as we mourn our Mayor, too. As Carlin says, "he was just here."

Psssst! Wanna see the islands without spoiling something for someone else? Try these virtual flyover high def videos from Blue Hawaiian, the 'cadillac’ of helicopter tour companies. There are so many parts of each island that you cannot see without getting up in the air, yet I have never wanted to go by chopper. Why?

When Kermit noticed how tough it was being green, many folks thought that meant it was OK if ya weren’t…green, that is. ‘Cause “it ain’t easy”, right? Of course, our sympathy for Kermit might just as logically have helped us raise our own standards. Fact is, achieving sustainability is gonna be a heroic struggle. The opposite of easy. Turns out, Kermit plays the ‘ordinary hero‘…just listen to the end of his song.

Here’s Hunter Lovins in a recent interview, framing sustainability in terms of 3 spheres: “sustainability, as typically defined by those of us who work in the field, is solving the very real problems facing us. We live in a carbon constrained world, we’re losing virtually every major ecosystem in the world, and all of our infrastructure is vulnerable and could be cut off at any time.” Voila! There’s your 3 spheres…

Are bio-agents sexy, or wot? You know, the little buggie-wuggies that replace weed killers by doing wot comes naturally. Who knew this was a growth industry in Hawaii? Yet, increasingly, bio-agents are taking up some of the workload in the islands’ war on invasives. Wudja believe fungi that kill leaves, stem-boring nematodes that kill branches, and bugs that eat leaves and flowers. The trick is to make sure biological control stays on the species it’s supposed to control.

Part of our shift toward less unsustainable ways of living, traveling, and doing business in the islands involves mitigating our footprints. Another part involves adapting our systems. These threads are interwoven. Our island living is threatened by global warming, resource wars, and social unrest, just like everywhere else. And our way of doing things in business, households and governance must change to fit the special challenges of our tropical islands.

Nothing could be finer than sitting with cocktails at sunset on the treehouse deck, chatting with my wife about the day’s learnings. Most often, we come round to morsels of science and insight that crossed our screens this day. Some days, it’s the crunch, others it’s the crew. Always, it’s about connecting our work with the world’s transformational trajectory. And, we weep for our grandkids. Not just for wot we know their planet will be like, but especially for wot we don’t know we don’t know about the terrestrial triggers our epoch has fingered and fired.

Slate's Daniel Engber worries about (ahem) overkill on viewing the military’s latest bizarre gizmos, now on display at the DARPATech Conference in Anaheim. Engber notes there is a plethora, if not a surfeit, of robotics technology now enabling the military to do their fighting remotely. And, the new kid on this block is ‘StickyBot’, a robotic lizard that appears to already incorporate the latest nano research on gecko feet.

Even if the seas don’t rise too much and the hurricanes don’t come through too often, Hawaii might still lose its appeal as a visitor destination. How’sat?

Sure, beach closings in Hawaii jumped way up last year as we floundered through 40 days and nites of rain. That’s one of the key findings in a report just out from the National Resources Defense Council. Still, to say that Hawaii is responsible for the nation’s poor showing on this score is to miss the point of the story. Much of the nation learned about this from headlines like “Hawaii woes push up U.S. beach closures”. The story might better be cast in terms of extreme weather events, and what the nation can expect as these increase.