Sustaining Hawai’i
- Sustaining Hawai’i
- Kapolei sets sustainable example
- Green thumb, green heart
- Harnessing Hawai’i’s natural powers
- Groundwater sheds not recharging like they used to
- Green’s guide
- Sustainable eating
- How to hold your water
- Native plants preserve Hawai’i’s culture
- To change our world’s energy culture
- All for one and one for all–curbside recycling
- Recycling dropoff
- Earth Day–Leading by doing
Wait again. The operative word here is still “if.” We still have time to make change. As environmental activist Bill McKibben told the Weekly before his UH talk on stopping global warming, while we’ve surpassed the safety limit for carbon in Earth’s atmosphere, “if we quickly act, Earth will cycle some of that carbon back out and get us back to a safe level.” To hear this faith in Nature expressed by the author of The End of Nature should come as no surprise, for in the midst of dire and gloomy news, hope springs. That’s human nature. And McKibben is following up his successful Step it Up campaign with a plan for international action that envisions Hawai’i as one of its crucial hubs.
As this and other recent Weekly issues show, Hawai’i’s people, from keikis to kupuna, are thinking creatively and acting positively, gathering the sustainable wisdom of our traditional host culture to malama ‘aina and effect positive change. Students are building models for a sustainable future. Environmentalists, community groups, farmers, native Hawaiians and government officials are collaborating on ways to contain sprawl and preserve open space to feed both our bodies and our souls. We were the second state in the nation, after California, to mandate an 80 percent reduction in global warming gas emissions by mid-century. Wind energy is fast getting established here, wave energy is becoming a reality, and solar incentives are taking hold. Since the start of the year, Hawaii has hosted an international Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change and the first Blue Planet Summit on global warming solutions, which tapped into indigenous peoples’ knowledge as well as the latest science from Stanford.
When it comes to protecting species–and our other food basket, the ocean–we are endowed with a marine sanctuary in the Northwest Hawaiian Isles. It’s just in time, because, as most local shoppers will have noticed, less and less fish in our markets is labeled Hawai’i-caught. This is due to overfishing as well as pollution, and we can make a difference by choosing fish from regionally healthier populations. Download the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Hawai’i Seafood Watch list at [mbayaq.org]. For the sake of the birds and forests, our health and wealth and heritage and all the rest, read on: The pages of this guide provide ongoing resources for positive actions we can take in the political arena as well as in our daily lives.
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