Musings: Love-Hate, Good-Bad

The hate mail has been intensifying of late, which I always take as confirmation that I'm on the right track.

Still, I did take to heart the words of one critic: "How about one positive story?"

Hey, I can do better than that. I've got at least four. So here goes:

The Philippines Supreme Court today reversed its earlier ruling banning field trials of GMO talong, also known as Bt brinjal, or eggplant. Field trials are part of the deregulation process that determines whether a crop can be legally grown.

Of course, Greenpeace, which was shut down in the ruling, likely doesn't consider this good news.

But a lot of Filipino farmers do. They've seen the success that farmers in Bangladesh have achieved growing Bt brinjal, which fetches a premium price at the market because less pesticides are used in its production. Bangladeshi farmers are also controlling the seed, just as papaya farmers do in Hawaii.

Though the Cornell Alliance for Science was the first to report on the success of Bt brinjal, you don't have to take our word for it. Even Al Jazeera found it to be true when it actually went to Bangladesh and interviewed farmers, rather than listening to the fear-mongering and mistruths spouted by arm chair activists in the West.

In other good news, the AquAdvantage Salmon, though long reviled as “Frankenfish” by misinformed activist groups like Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice, actually works to support environmental sustainability and local food production.

Why? Because it's grown in totally enclosed inland systems that can be located close to markets. This reduces the carbon emissions associated with importing tons of foreign-farmed fish, and totally eliminates the marine pollution associated with ocean-based fish-farming practices.

Here are a video and a Q&A blog post that tell more about the salmon, and the insane 20-year, $80 million deregulation process that led to its approval, making it the most intensely studied food product ever.

Of course, that's not good news to groups like the aforementioned CFS and EJ, which are making money suing the federal government over the approval process that both groups supported – indeed, demanded — until it produced results they didn't like.

Locally, the Kauai Planning Commission finally said no once and for all to the BS request from diamond broker Eddie Ben-Dor to turn his Hanalei vacation rental into a B&B. As you may recall, the planning department wasn't buying the ruse, and Eddie was even fined $3,055 for operating illegally — at a low-season rent of $5,800 per week — for several years.

But he waited six months, put his daughter on the deed and submitted a new application in her name. Once again, the commission voted to deny it.

This is great news for those who have been working to stave off the scam of pretending an illegal TVR is really a B&B in need of a permit. Though it's bad new for Ben-Dor — and all the others trying to game the system.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has launched a full-on effort aimed at eradicating invasive mammals: rats, stoats, possums and (shhh) cats. Yeah, they're kind of downplaying the cat thing because people get all emotional.

But wildlife officials and conservationists there, as in Hawaii, are well aware of how cats and other introduced mammals wreak havoc on native birds, lizards and other critters. So New Zealand plans to euthanize feral cats on conservation lands.

Could such decisive action be possible in Hawaii? It shares the same invasive species problems as New Zealand, and its native animals grew up in similar isolation, with no defense to mammalian predators.

Or will the trap-neuter-release folks like Basil Scott — close friends with Councilman Gary Hooser, btw — continue their vicious attacks on shelter director Penny Cistaro in their desperate attempt to keep their own nonprofit going?

Though a Kauai team has been working for a couple of years now on a feral cat ordinance, Scott's Kauai Ferals group is hoping to do a end-run with the help of Inge Gibson of the Humane Society of the United States.

Seems Gibson has invited Alley Cat Allies and Best Friends to help draft an alternative bill for an ordinance on Kauai to manage cats on the landscape. Or in other words, dilute and undermine the Kauai effort.

Gosh, it's so easy for the good news to careen off into bad. 

But then, as Shakespeare so astutely noted, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Still, it's hard to put lipstick on this pig, so I'll just let it rip, since it's been weighing heavily on my mind since Reuters first reported it last week: 

The earth is on track for its hottest year on record and warming at a faster rate than expected, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday.

"What we’ve seen so far for the first six months of 2016 is really quite alarming," David Carlson, director of the WMO’s Climate Research Program, told a news briefing.

"This year suggests that the planet can warm up faster than we expected in a much shorter time... We don’t have as much time as we thought."

Climate change impacts. Image by Grist.

Oops.

And then there was the HUGE news of 3-year-old Prince George offering ice cream to his pet dog, which some saw as an adorable sign of generosity and others denounced as "poisoning" and "animal cruelty." Some even said the toddler should be jailed. 

Yeah, it's too bad we can't just box everything neatly into good-bad/positive-negative to suit the simplistic among us. 

But life — and the crazy mix of people inhabiting the planet — are just a tad more complicated than that.