Musings: Sweet and Sour

Whenever I hear the bzzzz, I have to stop, and look, and discover where the bees are, and what they are collecting.

In this case, it's the white pollen from hinano, the hala flower. I've often wondered, while watching them work the beach heliotrope, what the honey might taste like.  But though I've smelled it in the haole koa and ironwood thickets, in the heat of late summer, I've never searched for the sweet source. That's theirs.

The big dump that somebody took in the beach parking lot, that's ours, as in the public/county having to clean up a lazy sack's trashy mess. Geez. You'd expect higher consciousness from someone who grows organic.

It's a big win for YES – folks who opt-out from smart meters will pay the associated fees. It was the biggest turnout in KIUC's history, with 43 percent of the members casting ballots and 74 percent of them voting yes. That's saying something. Loud and clear. 

It's a big loss for no, especially since four of the candidates for the upcoming KIUC Board of Directors have traded heavily on the anti-KIUC, anti-smart meter, anti-fee platform. One of them, Jimmy Trujillo, opined on Facebook:

we'll see how this saturday's election results will shape the [KIUC] BOD election.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to say the die has been cast, but.....

I watched “Queen of the Sun” last night, a pro-bee movie, because who, really could be anti-bee? Except those people who freak out at anything that goes bzzzz and aren't thinking about how many wild hives are destroyed when they top a forest of ironwoods to improve their coastal view, clear cut a jungle to develop gentleman's estates.

The developer of one such project, Chris Singleton, was arrested last week at the scene of one such clearing. He had evicted Growing Greens Nursery, a small family-owned business that had been there some 20 years, and they had until the end of the month to get out. But he showed up and allegedly started getting very nasty with the nursery owners — an attitude that reportedly was directed as well at the police who charged him with disorderly conduct. 

Singleton, you may recall, is the same guy who developed the Waipouli Beach Resort, with its many iwi kupuna. In his latest project — the luxury “ag” estates that displaced Growing Greens in Kapahi — he is teaming with anti-GMO Realtor Neal Norman. Geez, you'd expect higher consciousness from someone who used to  grow organic.

If you still doubt that high-end developers and realtors are looking to destroy real ag on Kauai, look no further than what's left of Growing Greens Nursery.