Musings: From Here to There

It was amusing, in a cringe-worthy sort of way, to hear our nation's President claim, “Nobody knew health care was complicated.”

Really? Seems to me that just about anybody with a brain and a sense of how things work knew full well that health care is incredibly complicated, like every other system in our modern world.

And that includes food. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently released a report outlining the many challenges facing the world's agriculture and food systems.

These include: shifting weather patterns due to climate change, increases in migration due to military conflicts and extreme weather events, water and other resource depletion, the global spread of pests and diseases, increases in the number and intensity of natural disasters, and demands to use plants for more than just food.

The report noted that “major transformations” are needed to make production sustainable and said that “business as usual” is no longer an option in agriculture. Not when the planet's human population is expected to hit 10 billion 2050:

To meet demand, agriculture in 2050 will need to produce almost 50 percent more food, feed and biofuel than it did in 2012.

All without tipping the planet's carrying capacity or increasing agriculture's already sizable contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. And while dealing with food faddists who oppose new technology and embrace inefficient agricultural models.

It dovetails into a comment I heard Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan make at the recent American Academy for the Advacement of Science meeting in Boston:

By 2050, we will be running out of food.

To further complicate matters, just as more food is required, there's increased competition for land, water and other natural resources as countries seek bioenergy alternatives to fossil fuels.

So it was interesting to see Maui anti-GMO activists Kelly King, Kaniela Ing, Alika Atay and Elle Cochran make big hay — pun intended — over planting sunflowers to produce biodiesel.

As Ing proclaimed on Facebook: 

We just planted the first regenerative crops, sunflowers (with hemp coming soon), on old Maui sugarcane land!

Gosh, amazing how they managed to stay so clean....

And odd that they chose to grow a crop for fuel and cattle meal, seeing as how these same folks are always bitching about how the seed companies should be booted because they supposedly aren't producing any food.

But it is pretty striking to see the sunflowers coming up — along with a healthy batch of weeds — in soil that Ing and others have dismissed as “poisoned” and “toxic” after years of sugar cane production. 

We'll just have to wait and see how this crop does, since it will depend solely on rainfall and the birds are known to feast on the tasty seeds.

Still, it was amusing to see them get all dizzy patting themselves on the back over how this 100-acre parcel will produce the equivalent of 800 barrels of oil per year — if all goes well and the federal subsidies promised by Sen. Mazie Hirono keep coming.

Meanwhile HC&S was using sugar cane bagasse to generate the equivalent of 500,000 barrels of oil per year to meet its power needs, and this went on for decades.

But doncha know that sugar is bad and sunflowers are good? So let's not let the real world get in the way of our Maui dreamin'.....

Speaking of real world, I found out what's happening on the upper fork of the Wailua River, where Tim and Hope Kallai indignantly claimed that “some unknown ecoterrorists dammned up North Fork Wailua and sent all the water into a ditch!”

Turns out the exact opposite happened: all the water was taken out of the ditch and put into the stream.

Yes, the state Commission on Water Resource Management and the US Geological Survey had asked KIUC for its help so they could measure stream flow on the North Fork of the river. As KIUC spokeswoman Beth Tokioka explained:

In order for them to get accurate flow measurements, they requested that the entire diversion be blocked to prevent any leaking of water over the spillway so they could use the diversion as a control point for taking measurements. Since regular maintenance activities were planned anyway, the ditch crew used the sediment to block leakage at the spillway rather than bringing in sandbags.

The material shown on the spillway in the photo is a combination of sand, gravel and some small rocks and will wash away easily when water tops the spillway. It is temporary and will not block the stream’s path long term.

Is it too much to ask that people seek out information before they jump to conclusions and rile folks up over nothing? Or in this case, something that is actually working toward gathering better stream flow data, with an ultimate goal of putting more water back in the stream?