Musings: News Great and Non

If you ever wonder why Kauai isn’t further along in achieving progress on all the things that could really make a difference — affordable housing, sustainability, supporting local ag, reducing waste, eliminating ice — it’s because so much energy is being squandered on total bullshit.

For starters, instead of spending all its time caring for discarded animals, finding new homes for critters and dealing with the tremendous feral cat problem, the Kauai Humane Society is diverting both volunteers and paid animal control officers over to The Path to beef up patrols by county rangers.

As The Garden Island reports:

A volunteer team is monitoring compliance. The group submits a daily summary sheet reporting the number of bicycles, walkers, joggers, dogs and other pertinent details, {KHS Director Becky] Rhoades said.

The humane society has officers patrolling once a day at different times each day in addition to county park rangers’ enforcement, she added.

And this is after “The Kaua‘i County Council grappled with the legislation for more than three months before approving a compromise bill in August,” according to the paper.

But so far, so good. We can all sleep well at night knowing that apparently not one pile of doggie doodoo has been left on the Path.

Then over in Hanapepe, we’ve got Kimo Rosen leading a pro-Superferry protest that is based in the delusion that it’s Kauai activists who are now keeping the big boat away from the island rather than the company’s own financial interests.

He was joined by folks whose thought processes are similarly stunted:

Still, Jennifer Houle said the opposition has not been straightforward. For example, she said there have been no incidents of the catamaran hitting whales.

OK, so under that line of thinking you can only express concerns about the possibility of a huge speeding boat hitting a whale AFTER the humpback is slashed and bloodied in the water.

Meanwhile, the big issues of the day, the ones that could really make a difference in how we all live and exist on this planet, slip by unnoticed, save for a few, like science writer Jan Ten Bruggencate.

In his most recent post on Raising Islands, he reports: “Our island state and the world are even more severely threatened by the acidification of the ocean than previously known.”

Citing research — some of it conducted in Hawaiian waters — by Tim Wootton of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and others, Jan reports that the acidification, which is linked to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, already is causing population declines for some creatures, which serve as food for others.

And you know how everything is linked together, and once one thing falls, it creates a domino effect through an ecosystem. Or then again, if you're a member of the oblivious clan, maybe you don't.

Anyway, Jan reports:

“An alarming surprise is how rapidly pH has declined over the study period at our site--about 10 times faster than expected said in an email to RaisingIslands.

As Jan concludes:

The essence: things are changing, changing fast, and we don't know exactly where they'll end up.

It used to be that Jan’s reports would be published in The Honolulu Advertiser, which apparently no longer has a science writer since Jan left, or any general reporter savvy enough to pick up leads from Jan's blog.

Heck, even one of The Garden Island reporters could have grabbed this story and run with it, since Jan already did all the research and names his sources.

But then, they wouldn’t have time to write about the really compelling non-news of the day.