New Rules for Green Homes

I have a new article out in the Big Island Weekly, re the freshly-enacted "International Energy Conservation Code of the County of Hawaii." The code, which requires insulation and other energy-saving measures in new structures and in major rehabilitations of old structures, is well-meaning and should save energy, but will add a fair amount to the cost of each home, spell bad news for some existing plantation-era homes, and just doesn't always make sense for our climate....

Kapulena Ag Park Article Out

'Sorry about the dearth of recent postings on this site. I've been busy writing articles for people who pay me....

The current Big Island Weekly features an article article of mine about Mayor Billy Kenoi's proposed Kapulena Ag Park in Hamakua, for instance. It turns out that when Kenoi announced that the Kapulena lands were "generally considered the best of the county-owned lands for farming purposes," the county hadn't even gotten back its soil surveys for those lands. Now the surveys are in, and the results aren't the best they could be....

Corporate Emancipation!

I’ve been pondering the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same rights of free speech as human beings, and therefore can put unlimited amounts of money into election campaigns. I’ve decided that maybe the Supreme Court is right, so long as corporations are given all the constitutional rights of human beings. They already have the right to bear arms, as is evidenced by Blackwater (sorry, Xe Services LLC) and countless security guards. I suppose they can exercise freedom of religion, though I’ve never seen one in church. But what about the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery?

“Slavery,” according to Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, is defined as “1: DRUDGERY, TOIL. 2: Submission to a dominating influence. 3 a: the state of a person who is chattel of another. b: the practice of slaveholding.”

I assume that 3a is the type of slavery that the Thirteenth Amendment refers to, since it was passed in the wake of the Civil War. “Chattel,” for those who don’t know, means any property that isn’t real estate.

Someone should immediately mount a Supreme Court challenge to emancipate the corporations.

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits the ownership or “involuntary servitude” of human beings, unless they’re convicted of a crime. But even unconvicted corporations are routinely held in stocks and kept in bondage. You can’t buy or sell human beings. But corporations are bought and sold daily. Corporate families captured by corporate raiders are often torn apart and their individual companies are sold, never to be reunited. Sometimes a brutal new owner will even vivisect them, cutting out or transplanting whole departments and excising employees who were members of the corporate body. No human being, whether homo sapiens or homo corporatiens, should be treated this way.

It’s time to acknowledge that Wall Street is a slave market, trafficking in corporate human misery. It must be shut down. Corporations must be free to earn their own way, without fear that someone else will buy them, strip away their assets and take the fruits of their labors.

A final argument for corporate emancipation: if we can’t own them, they can’t own us. This breach of the Thirteenth Amendment works both ways, after all: corporations may not own our souls, but they own our jobs, our food supply, a percentage of our houses -- even our genes. They already own huge numbers of politicians and at least five Supreme Court justices. If they don’t hold us as chattel, then they at least hold most of us in drudgery. When we allow a privileged class to exploit human corporations, we all lose our freedom.

I don’t expect change to happen overnight. Just as with slavery, the supporters of corporate trafficking will argue that it’s an economic necessity -- that the nation cannot survive without it. They will argue that corporations don’t know how to survive by themselves without the enlightened guidance of their masters. Some may even take up arms to support their “right” to own corporations. But justice must eventually prevail. We must get a writ of habeus corpus so that Microsoft can appear in court and tell us if it really wants to work for Bill Gates. We must prohibit the sale of any more shares of Bank of America unless it has been indicted by a grand jury, read its Miranda rights, and tried and convicted for its alleged crimes by a jury of its peers. We must sever the bonds of tyranny that hold Chrysler in thrall to Fiat, 20th Century Fox in servitude to Rupert Murdoch, HBO in captivity to Time-Warner, Random House in the yoke of Bertelsmann AG, ABC in peonage to Disney, NBC in bondage to General Electric, and Spartina in foul grip of Stephen Colbert..

But I don’t think corporations should be allowed to vote or make campaign donations, at least for now. They’re not ready for that, just as uneducated, rapacious corporations are not ready to sit on juries. They must first learn to be good citizens, a job for which their bondage has not prepared them. They must understand, first, that they are truly free, and learn the responsibilities that freedom entails.

Otherwise, corporate votes are controlled by their masters, who can use them to oppress the rest of us.

That must not happen. We shall overcome.

Trash Outside the Transfer Stations

The Jan. 20 issue of the Big Island Weekly ran a story of mine called "Trash Talking," about the new restricted hours at the island's outlying transfer stations. I reported that a number of household trash bags had been pitched along the roadside on Volcano Highway. After the story ran, I got the following report from Rene Siracusa of Malama O Puna, about the state of things along the highway to Pahoa:

"On the 2 mile stretch between Pahoa Village Rd. and Kaohe Homestead Rd., there were 26 dump sites that began with the new reduced hours of 8 to 4. Included are 4 pig carcasses in varying stages of ugh.... [Solid Waste Division head] Lono Tyson says they are working on a plan to change the hours again, but that in the meantime the dumping is expected until people get used to the new hours. When I pointed out that the 8 to 4 hours are prohibitive for people who work, he replied that they go shopping on weekends so they can go to the tranfer station on weekends too. There goes your day off!"

Two Personal Appeals

Aloha all,
As you may have noticed, there haven't been a lot of blogs here lately. That's because, quite frankly, I'm broke, and I've had to concentrate on stories that I could get paid for, so I can keep the phone and electricity on. This blog hasn't earned me a dime since my first post. Google's marketing strategy of basing advertising placement on key words just doesn't work very well on a locally-oriented blog such as this; I've even seen adds from Mall Wort here just because I wrote a blog critical of them.

So I'm putting out an appeal for sponsors. If you'd like to see more stuff here, get in contact with me. I'm going to go over the fine print of my Google contract, but I believe I can post my own ads as photo attachments. I'm thinking $15 for an ad on one blog would be appropriate.

Second appeal: If anyone out there has any news or anecdotes about the new transfer station hours or increased littering and dumping since the hours began, please post a response here. I'm working on a story about the issue for the Big Island Weekly.

Saddle Road Hearings This Week

There will be hearings for the final phase of the Saddle Road reallignment in Hilo and Kona this week. This phase of the project might be somewhat less controversial than some earlier phases--it will essentially take the road on a more southerly, pointing more toward Kona than Waimea and skirting the land that the Army recently acquired from Parker Ranch as a maneuvers-training ground for its Stryker units.

There may still be some fireworks, however. I got an e-mail from antimilitary activist Jim Albertini, suggesting that Depleted Uranium may be made an issue a the hearings.

"As part of the EIS, possible depleted uranium contamination was suppose to be addressed. One independent geologist reviewing the data said DU presence may be understated in the EIS draft, and he questions the kind of testing done. We are awaiting other comments from independent scientist," Albertini wrote.

Hearing times and places:


Wednesday, Dec. 9, 5 p.m., Aunty Sally's Luau Hale, 799 Piilani St. Hilo (near the Kanakaole Tennis stadium/Merry Monarch festival.)
Thursday, Dec. 10, 3:30-7:30 p.m., Natural Energy Lab of Hawaii Authority, Gateway Energy Center, 73-4460 Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, Kailua-Kona

White Rocks, Black Tires and Green Shoulders

Warning: this blog is going to be of interest mainly to Volcano residents and visitors.

It's the week after the Volcano Artists' Hui's annual Open Studios event, and the evidence still remains around the village. On Haunani and Kilauea and Lehuanani and Wright Road -- wherever there was an open studio -- formerly grassy road shoulders have been turned into a morass of muddy ruts where visitors parked along the roadsides.

It happens every year. The Artists' Hui has tried to limit the damage, (and neighbors' complaints of noise and traffic snarls) by limiting the number of participating artists, by having more than one artist at a site, and by using sites on major streets instead of the one-lane trails by which many local residents reach their homes (hardly any of the official "open studios" are actually held in real artists' studios any more), but a number of other artists continue to hold "unofficial" sales at their houses on the same weekend.

Some neighbors put up obstacles such as construction-scene tape to keep vehicles off the shoulders near their homes. But that reduced the areas where cars could park, concentrating the damage and causing some drivers to pull off in really soggy places they might otherwise have avoided.

It's probably a small price to pay, in the long run, for the economic boost that the event gives the Village every year; not only the artists, but the local stores, restaurants, lodges and B&Bs all benefit from the flood of visitors. And the fault isn't wholly with the artists: it rests in part on the people who permitted and built the village's substandard roads.

And rutted road shoulders are not just a one-weekend-a-year problem. The cops were up here a couple of weekends ago, ticketing cars parked on the shoulders of Wright Road during Farmer's Market (another runaway success story, which keeps outgrowing its facilities despite the bulldozing of several acres of rain forest for parking lots.) And just day-to-day, the village's one-lane roads occasionally force cars onto the shoulders to avoid head-ons, though most of us long-time residents have become quite adept at pulling off on driveways when we see another car coming.

Which leads me to what I really want to talk about. A number of residents (and vacation rental owners) have taken to protecting the grass in front of their houses by placing rows of large rocks or stakes on the shoulders. Sometimes the rocks are painted white to make them more visible; sometimes not.

I'm sorry, but that practice is dangerous and illegal. Road shoulders, soft or not, are a functioning part of the right of way, not part of someone's lawn.

No resident in his right mind would pull off on a soft shoulder and risk getting stuck, if there's a viable alternative. But sometimes you have to. I was approaching a blind intersection of two one-lane lanes in the village a few days ago, when another car suddenly pulled into the intersection and turned toward me. The house next to the intersection apparently had guests, one of whom had parked on the shoulder opposite the house -- because the shoulder beside the house was lined with rocks. Had I been going a little faster or been a few feet closer to the intersection, I would have faced a split-second choice between head-oning the moving car, running into the parked car, or ripping off my exhaust system on the rocks.

Many residents would argue that our substandard roads and grassy shoulders are part of the Village's charm, and part of the price we pay for living in such a rustic and beautiful setting. The narrow lanes have imposed a sort of etiquette of consideration, with drivers pulling off and giving each other a friendly wave as they pass, that are part of the joy of living here. If people use a little common sense and common courtesy, the roads are not that big a burden. But rocks on the road shoulders are not charming at all.

If you live in a rain forest, there's going to be mud. But if you live in a rain forest, the grass will grow back really fast anyway. So visitors, please, if at all possible, don't pull off on the grass if there's an alternative. And residents, please cut it out with the rocks already.