Musings: Witch Hunt

Just five days after The Garden Island printed a front-page article bashing the proposed dairy at Mahaulepu, it prints a guest editorial that essentially rehashes all the negativity of the original piece.

As a friend noted in a wry text:

Glad TGI managed to find room for more coverage of Bridget Hammerquist's petition.

To which I replied:

Can't have too much propaganda.

And propaganda is exactly what Jenica K Waymen and Michael Coon are advancing in their guest editorial, which raises the specter of “the eddy at Baby Beach in Poipu Beach Park covered with a scum of cow waste!” along with “stinking, black, fly-ridden, manure-polluted shores” and other such nonsense.

Particularly ironic was their fear that dairy operations would spawn “Pollution warning signs warn that the beaches are not safe for human use.”

Actually, Surfrider Kauai already plans to demand that Department of Health “post warning signs on the most polluted streams, whatever the source, as per EPA. Pigs are major reservoir for lepto and other diseases, so DOH should be warning folks.”

So the warning signs that Waymen and Coon dread should already be posted at Mahaulepu, Nawilwili, Wainiha, Hanamaulu and elsewhere, according to Surfrider.

And then what's next? A campaign to eradicate all the wild pigs?

At least Waymen and Coon made it clear where they really stand with the admonition that “Poipu tourism operators” are now duty-bound “to preserve the clean air, water and land that their future guests require and expect. Their loyalty ought to be directed to maintaining these resources for their clients and their businesses, rather than to the landowner, Grove Farm.”

In other words, it's no longer about protecting resources for kanaka, or future generations, or even for the sake of the overall environment, but simply to please the new alii: paying clients. Yet the anti-dairy folks are the first to scream that Hawaii Dairy Farms is all about the money.

But what bothers me even more than the hypocrisy and tourism worship is seeing the anti-diary activists use the same despicable tactics as the anti-GMO activists. Though HDF voluntarily agreed to conduct an EIS, it has already been convicted and sentenced to death, with no trial, facts and studies be damned.

Sadly, TGI reinforces this witch hunt mentality by printing without question articles and guest editorials that make outrageous, unsubstantiated claims. Once again, Kauai people are happily spreading misinformation, outright lies and fear without compunction, all in an effort to stop some perceived evil.

As a friend noted:

The whole thing is based on creating the maximum amount of fear, same with the anti-pesticide/gmo initiative, and it's working. One of the problems with this is that people who are really afraid are generally not thinking very clearly and tend to blindly follow someone who is going to "save them". It's at the root of all of the despotic shit we see coming down all over this planet.

I really don't care if the dairy lives or dies.

But I do worry about the future of agriculture, and common sense, when every viable farming initiative is opposed as “industrial” and “toxic” and a visitor industry that consumes more water and produces more shit than a dairy ever will, while generating tons of trash — and mountains of construction waste in the inevitable remodels — is revered as sustainable and benign.

And I care deeply about the downward slide of this community when I see people repeatedly taking the low road of dishonesty, fear-mongering and propaganda in order to get their way.  

Because where do you go from there? Burning at the stake? Lynch mobs? Nowhere good, that's for certain.