Amidst the wonders and beauty of this part of the world, I find a fierce battle raging between concerned residents and corporate chemical/poison interests. There are 2 sides to the controversy, I’ve learned. I asked Wayne Jacintho, a Kauai photographer, who are the people against the GMO/poison folks; he replied: “Everybody who cares about people and creatures that are being poisoned, everybody who cares about clean water and air and soil and the ocean…”

On the other side are the chemical companies, and locals who need jobs.

Here is a letter written by Wayne this summer to a local paper in southwest Kauai:

FEEDING THE WORLD
In Aug. 3rd’s Garden Island, yet another letter proclaiming the chemical companies’ noble reason for existence: feeding the world.
And the heartrending revelation, by a Dow Chemical testifier the night of July 31st, that they, in conjunction with Bill & Melinda Gates, are developing a drought-resistant sorghum for some African country or countries. Yay!

Then, unwanted, unbidden questions arose, extinguishing the thumping koom-bah-yah in my heart. 
I ask that gentleman to answer these questions, if only to restore the almost unbearable lightness I felt upon first hearing his stirring words:

1. Will these sorghum seeds be given, or will they be sold, to these people?

2. Will these plants at maturity have viable seeds, or will a ‘terminator’ gene have shut them down?

3. If the resultant seeds are viable, will those farmers be able to save some for replanting, or will they be punished if they try to do so?

4. If these farmers are not allowed to save and replant “their” seeds, will they have to buy each year’s seed from you?

5. Can these seeds be grown without special needs, or do these farmers have to buy Dow Chemical herbicide, pesticide, and synthetic fertilizers for which these seeds may have been “engineered”?

6. If these farmers have to buy these seeds, (and, if necessary, other Dow chemicals), and if there are unforseen disasters, natural or otherwise, and they then fall into debt to Dow Chemical, what will be the fate of these farmers and their lands?

Please answer straightforwardly, with source references.

Naturally, Wayne never got an answer.

See my post here of 2 months ago: https://www.lloydkahn.com/?s=roundup

This explains why there are so many dangerous places to swim in Hawaii — the steep drop-off of mountains into sea.

–From Ted Fleming

Ed (shown here) and Cynthia Justice run a great bookstore (with some 100,000 books in inventory, many of them used, in the small town of Hanapēpē.

How are you doing in this age of Amazon, I asked? Ed said their business has been growing each month, a 65% increase in the last 2 years. 80-85% of their sales are used books,and many of these sales come via Amazon.

There’s also a v. cool coffee shop in Hanapēpē, opens at 6 AM.

Books and coffee, 2 of the staples of life…

Nature rebounding? Agriculture doing well? Huh? I wish all this were true, but I find this analysis troubling. What’s wrong here? What parts of this are right and what parts are not? I’m posting this for comment.

I don’t like Stewart’s (and probably Jesse’s) take on GMOs. Gardeners, people who work with the soil and respect natural processes know intuitively there’s something wrong with the GMO juggernaut. And I’ve just found out that Kauai is a proving grounds for the GMO giants: Dow Chemical (makers of napalm, right?), Syngenta, DuPont and their like seem to be poisoning Kauai and its people in their brilliant blending of genetic manipulation, poisons, and profit.

We are as gods, right? Wrong.

In the next few days I’ll post my observations on all this. It’s especially vivid because I just saw huge fields of genetic experiments (nary a weed in sight) on the road from Waimea to Polihale Beach.

—LK

Read More …

My experiences/photos are way ahead of my ability to post them. I’ll throw out what I can when I get time.

This was at the very end of the road on the southern part of Kauai, at the end of the Na Pali coast.