Musings: Celebratory and Not

Up early, unable to sleep; out early, walking with the dogs. The sky is buried beneath a blanket of gray; the air is thick, wet, dead. I am thinking, this is what it must be like to live in Guam, or the Midwest — ugh — when suddenly the wind gusts, gentle rain begins to fall and the birds bust out a celebratory songfest.

Councilman Gary Hooser is quoted in today's paper as describing what's happened over the last month on Kauai in response to his pesticide/GMO bill as a “celebration of grassroots democracy.”

It doesn't feel very celebratory to me, unless you're talking about the kind of celebrations staged by dysfunctional families where everyone's fighting and distrustful and taking sides and talking stink. The energy on the island has felt downright turbulent, with a striking number of people using the word “growly” to describe their state of mind.

But it does feel very much like democracy, in that what is being served up is not exactly what you want, but it's the only thing on the menu.

I think there's pretty widespread sentiment that the seed industry, like the tour boats and TVRs before it, needs to be more carefully scrutinized and managed. But when I look at the boating issue – that bitter standoff ended only when then-Gov. Cayetano stepped in, and two decades later the county is struggling with rules and threatened lawsuits — and the complete and utter debacle of the TVR law, well, let's just say it requires a greater imagination than mine to believe the county can implement Gary's bill.

And if 2,000 people show up, as Gary expects, at a venue that can seat 500 to 600 and even half want to give their three-minutes of testimony in an event that will last roughly 12 hours, you don't have to be a genius to see the math doesn't work. Which means a lot of folks will be left out, just like in a democracy.

I didn't end up going to last night's forum sponsored by the biotech industry. I thought about it, but I'd just been swimming in the ocean, and so I was happy, and I knew that if I went, I would get unhappy. Besides, I'm pretty well-versed in the pro-biotech arguments. I have actually studied both sides.

And I can totally relate to the concerns voiced by small farmers and ranchers who feel they are already over-regulated and fear their own pesticide practices will be scrutinized and possibly banned next. It ain't easy to make it as a farmer on Kauai, and I give kudos to every one who is pulling it off, conventional and organic alike. They really are getting it from all sides, and the new food safety laws will only make things harder.

As one non-farmer friend who opposes the bill put it: “I feel like I should be standing up for the farmers. It's kind of like that saying, 'first they came for the communists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist, then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up and by the time they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.' Is it going to get to where I have to report to Gary Hooser every time I buy a can of Raid?”

To which I might reply, well, first we noticed that we no longer have bugs on our windshields, but nobody said anything, because we don't like bugs. Then we saw the amphibians die off — a new study has found pesticides in frogs 50-100 miles from California's Central Valley, at body concentrations higher than was found in the remote mountain ponds where they live — but we didn't say anything, because who cares about frogs and toads? Then we saw the bees dying off – the newest study implicates fungicides and the cumulative impacts of multiple pesticides in colony collapse disorder — and that got our attention, because they pollinate our food. But still, we didn't say much, because they're just insects.

I'd like to speak for all of them, because these die-offs are a way of speaking to me, as in canary-in-the-coal-mine early warning signs about the dangers of our pesticide use.

In a letter to the editor today, we have the Hawaii Nurses Association speaking up in support of pesticide disclosure and buffer zones to protect human health.

In testimony submitted on Bill 2491,  Dr. Carl Berg writes:

My preliminary testing for the pesticide Atrazine on Kauai has found positive readings for two west-side ditches and four streams. More sophisticated analytical techniques will be used to confirm these results.

A very preliminary survey by the Hawaii Department of Health in 2012 found detectable amounts of Atrazine, the insecticide Carbaryl, and the Nonylphenol surfactants used as wetting agents in pesticides, in Kauai streams. This was part of a preliminary nationwide survey and did not look for the full range of pesticides being used on Kauai. The raw data is under review by the HEER office and the results will not be released right away.

A study of more streams and looking for more types of pesticides is needed to show how widely agriculture, as being practiced on Kauai, has polluted our waterways and the ocean, and is detrimental to the health of our community and to the environment. Pesticides in the water are unhealthy for our people and for the tourist industry. If high levels of pollutants are found, the beaches must be posted and closed.

As an example of how pesticides may be entering the waterways, this video depicts erosion and runoff from one of Pioneer's Kaumakani fields last year.

So while this bill isn't exactly what I'd order up, it's at least got people speaking up about an issue that really does concern us all, in one way or another. If we can get to the place where we're actually conversing, well, then that will be cause for a celebration.