Christmas Story

SUBHEAD: It’s a Wonderful Life presents an American scene poised to arc toward tragedy.

By James Kunstler on 25 December 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/christmas-story/)


Image above: Colorized poster art for "It's a Wonderful Life" for digital download from Apple for $10.99. From (https://itunes.apple.com/nz/movie/its-a-wonderful-life/id297250466).

(IB Editor's note: "cis" is the Latin prefix for "same side of" versus the the prefix "trans" meaning the "other side of")

These are the long, dark hours when cis-hetero white patriarchs sit by the hearth chewing over their regrets for the fading year and expectations for the year waiting to be born.

I confess, I like Christmas a lot, Hebrew that I am, perhaps the musical and sensual trappings more than the virgin birth business.

Something in my mixed Teutonic blood stirs to the paganism of blazing Yule logs, fragrant fir trees, rousing carols, and snow on snow on snow.

I hope we can keep these hearty ceremonies… that they are not banished to the same puritanical limbo where the Prairie Home Companion archives were sent to rot.

One surviving old chestnut of the season is the 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie so thick with gooey holiday sentiment, it’s like bathing in egg nog.

It’s larded with messages of good-will-to-all-mankind, of course, but some of the less obvious themes — almost certainly unintended — tell the more interesting story about where America has come from in recent history and where it went.

One thing for sure: every year that goes by, the America of It’s a Wonderful Life seems utterly unlike the sordid circus we live in now.

The movie takes place in a town, called Bedford Falls, like many in my corner of the country, upstate New York, or at least the way they used to be: alive, bustling with activity, with several layers of working, middle, and commercial classes employed at real productive work making things, and a thin candy shell of “the rich,” portrayed as unambiguously greedy and wicked — but overwhelmed in numbers by all the other good-hearted townspeople.

The movie depicts an American social structure that no longer exists. It’s both democratic and firmly hierarchical — owing probably to the lingering influence of army life in the recently concluded Second World War.

Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the head of an old-style family-owned Savings and Loan bank, a very modest institution dedicate to lending money for new homes. His competitor in town is the wicked old rich banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a swindler and thief, who wants to put George out of business.

Bedford Falls is a man’s world. The women in the movie are portrayed as taking care of the “home front” and supporting the male “troops” in the toils of small town commerce — another social holdover from the war years. This depiction of life would surely give a case of the vapors to any post-structuralist college professors who dare to watch the movie.

Now here’s one catch in the story: the main business of George Bailey’s bank is lending money to build the first post-war suburban housing development outside of town, a project called Bailey Park.

One of the pivotal scenes concerns the Martini family, immigrants, moving into their new suburban home with great sentimental fanfare.

So, what we’re witnessing in that incident is the beginning of the destructive force that will soon blight small town life (and big city life, too) all over the country. Moviegoers in 1946 probably had little intuition of the consequences.

Another catch in the story involves the plot twist in which George Bailey misplaces a large sum of money ($8,000, actually purloined by the wicked villain, Mr. Potter).

With his bank facing ruin, George contemplates suicide. He’s saved by his guardian angel, who goes on to show George what Bedford Falls would be like if he had never been born. It would be called Pottersville.

Its Main Street would be bustling with gin mills, the sidewalks full of suspiciously available young ladies, the whole scene a sordid nest of vice and wickedness.

The catch is that Pottersville would have been a much better outcome for American small towns like Bedford Falls than what actually happened.

Today, the lovely landscape of upstate New York today is dotted with small towns and even small cities that have absolutely nothing going on in them anymore, and stand in such awful desolation that you’d think a long war was fought here. Much of that is due to the activities of good-hearted suburban developers like George Bailey.

The Americans of 1946 must have had no idea where all this was headed, nor of the coming de-industrialization of the country that had won World War Two, or the massive social changes in the divisions of labor, or the annihilation of several layers of the working and middle classes, or the much greater wickedness of the generations of bankers who followed Henry Potter.

It’s a Wonderful Life presents an American scene poised to arc toward tragedy. It’s an excellent lesson in the ironies of history and especially the dangers of getting what you wished for.

Readers may agree: we’ve never seen our country in such a state of ugly division moral confusion, and intellectual disarray. A coherent consensus eludes us. Grievance, resentment, and bitterness boil and sputter everywhere.

My Christmas wish is that we might put behind us some of the more idiotic and pointless debates of the past year and get on with tasks that really matter… that will allow us to remain civilized through the hardships to come.

That’s how I roll this dark morning, here at the glowing hearth, while the Christmas day ahead, at least, offers some comforting stillness as the snow on snow on snow piles high. And so… to the presents waiting ominously under the twinkling tree.

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Interview with James Kunstler

SUBHEAD: Rob Hopkins interviews Kunstler on living in a moment of unprecedented incoherence.

Interview by Rob Hopkins on 16 June 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-16/james-howard-kunstler-living-moment-unprecedented-incoherence/)


Image above: James Kunstler in his home near the Hudson Valley of New York. From original article.

James Howard Kunstler lives in upstate New York and is the author of about 20 books, 14 novels and the rest are non-fiction.  These include The Geography of Nowhere, about the suburbanisation of America, The Long Emergency, about the energy predicament and financial predicaments of our time, and the prospects for collapse, and Too Much Magic, an update of The Long Emergency about wishful thinking and technology.  He also recently completed a four book series of novels set in the post-collapse American future under the rubric ‘World Made by Hand’. He also runs a great blog, which includes my personal favourite, ‘Eyesore of the Month’.

I wonder how you would evaluate the state of the collective imagination in the US in 2017?

That’s a very interesting question.  I would say generally it is disorderly in a manner that we have not seen before in my lifetime.  That the various places that used to be the touchstones of ideology and belief, the ideas that are circulating there are pretty much insane.

If you’re on the left, what we have in the USA is a new kind of Maoism.  Mostly seen on campus, and it’s an anti-free speech despotic movement that used to be about identity politics – that’s how it started – and the ideology of victimisation, but it has really turned into something else now completely different.

What it’s really about now is just the pleasure of coercing other people.  I think the analogue to that is exactly what happened in the cultural revolution in China in the mid 1960s, which started out supposedly as an attempt to correct the thought of people who were not conforming, but ended up really just being a matter of young people enjoying pushing other people around.  And that’s what’s happened in the USA on the left.

On the right you have Trumpism which is just a celebration of incompetence and buffoonery, all based on the idea that we’re going to make America like it used to be in 1962, and that’s not going to happen.  What’s most amazing about the whole situation is that the places where people ought to do their thinking, places like the universities, and the thinking classes in general, are absolutely AWOL, as they say in the military.

Absent without leave.  They are not on the scene.  They are not raising their voices.  They are not making sense.  We are living in a moment of unprecedented incoherence.

We always used to look to the future with optimism and hope and think the future is where we want to get to, but now people seem to want to go to the past.  It seems to be the thing somehow that the 1950s was this golden age and we have to get back to the 1950s again.  What’s changed?  Why has our view reversed and we’re looking behind us rather than forwards?

We’re suffering from the disappointment about the promises of progress and technology, and it’s not much more complicated than that.  We have reason to feel that way.  In fact I don’t believe in the techno utopia that a lot of people are trying to sell.

I do believe that the direction of where civilisation is going in the not distant future is going to be a time out from what we have thought of as progress.  And in fact that’s really what’s happening.

There’s probably a very confused reaction to the dynamic tendencies in the on-going self-creation of history.  Human societies being the emergent phenomena that they are.  In other words, history is something that is a self-informing and self-creating phenomena, or dynamic.  Where it’s taking us is for example the downscaling of a lot of the activities that we’re used to, like the way we do industry or techno industrial things, and the size and scale of the way we operate our stuff.

Namely nation states and gigantic corporations and the gigantic organisation of just about anything, whether it’s a college, university or anything.  So the trend in all of that is to disaggregate, become smaller, for the world to become a larger place again, for our activities to become finer, smaller, less complex.  The reaction to that emotionally and intellectually by people at all sides of the political spectrum has been to be fairly confused about it.  That’s my analysis of it.

If what we’re seeing is a retreat of the imagination, or people being less imaginative than they used to be, what do you think are some of the causes of that?

I wouldn’t say that they’re being less imaginative.  I would actually challenge you that that is not an accurate representation of what’s going on.  In fact it’s very imaginative.  The trouble is that a lot of the imaginative result of it is delusional thinking.  That’s why I wrote the book Too Much Magic, because we had entered an era of wishful thinking in the United Sates, and probably in the West generally after the financial dislocations of 2008.

We adopted the idea that certainly a set of technologies was going to rescue us from the problems of techno industrial civilisation and the internal contradictions of it, and the place that it was leading us.  We basically don’t want to let go of this stuff that we’ve got, and the way that we’re running it, and the universe doesn’t really want us to do that anymore.   Doesn’t want us to run our stuff the way we’re running it, and it’s a very perplexing predicament for the human race.

So for you Donald Trump is somebody who is a very imaginative person?

No, I wouldn’t say that it’s a question of imagination.  I consider Donald Trump to be a clown and a buffoon.  And a product of an election process, and a society that cannot form a coherent idea of what’s happening to it, and as a result cannot make coherent plans for what to do about it.

So we elect a guy who has a lot of really empty promises and unrealistic plans for getting through the bottlenecks that we face.  I don’t think it’s about imagination.  Human imagination is always present.  It really depends on its capacity for meeting the exigencies of our time with ideas that comport with reality.

You’ve written about the built environments that we have now, and suburbia.  What happens to a culture when the world around it, that it interacts with on a daily basis, becomes boring?  You said in your TED talk about when there are enough places that nobody cares about anymore, then just nobody cares. 

The problem is not that they’re boring.  They’re not boring.  They’re not boring at all.  In fact they’re punishing.  They take all of the attention that you’re able to muster and punish you, and make you very self-conscious of your discomfort in these places.

It’s not a matter of boredom.  These places punish your neurology.  They punish really the way that you are designed to function as a human being in space.  And I don’t mean outer space.  I mean in the world around you.

If you give a talk about suburbia and say, “What’s the matter with this?”  American audiences will always say, “Oh the trouble is it’s all the same”, and that’s not true of course because there are a lot of things in the world that are all the same.  The hill towns of Tuscany are all the same.  At least from 500 ft away.  The boulevards of Paris all look the same to the casual observer.  The problem with the American milieu is not that it’s all the same.  The trouble is that it’s all the same lousy quality.  It’s all the same bad design and bad idea.

I like to think of it this way, what people identify as the immersive ugliness of their surroundings.  When you’re sitting in a car for example, on an eight-laner in the USA, one of those commercial boulevards where the street is lined with muffler shops and Taco stands and big box stores and parking lots and other furnishings and accessories of suburbia, people regard that as ugliness.  But there’s more to it, because this immersive ugliness actually represents entropy.

It’s entropy made visible, and entropy in the physical universe is really the force behind things running down or dying or moving towards death and stasis.  That’s really the quality that’s being reflected in the environments that we create in America.  And it’s no surprise that it’s punishing to the human psyche.

You’ve been writing and speaking about this for some time.  Do you see any change in direction? 

No, there’s no change in direction.  We’re doing what we’re doing here in the USA because we’ve developed an enormous matrix of behaviors and rackets that we don’t want to give up.  We’ve learned how to do this stuff, we’ve learned how to build suburbia, we’ve learned how to live in it.  We’re not going to give it up until reality compels us to because we can’t use it anymore, and then we won’t.

There was a guy who was an economic advisor to President Nixon back in the 1960s, and he made the observation that things go on until they can’t.  And that’s really how it’s going to roll in America.  There’s this wish, among all the other wishful things, for us to point to trends that are “hopeful”.

I must add or hasten to add that I am hardly without hope.  I think there will be some very salubrious results of the reset that we face, the civilizational reset that we’re entering.  It will put us in a place that will probably be better than where we are now.  But it doesn’t involve, for me, a lot of techno narcissistic triumphant rescue remedies.  I think the things that we’re going to be returning to are going to be pretty fundamental.  Things like leading a purposeful life.

Things like knowing the people who you transact with, and being part of a real community, and making music with your friends and neighbours, and taking part in the ceremonies of human existence in a meaningful way.  Those are the things that are going to matter.  Not whether we can run our cars on batteries.

You were very high profile in the debates around Peak Oil, which people don’t seem to talk about so much now.  I wondered what your views are now on that 10 years on, whether they’ve changed, or whether you still hold by everything that was in The Long Emergency, or whether events have overtaken that analysis in any way?

I would say that the analysis has changed because there were elements of the story that people like myself perhaps didn’t see coming, misinterpreted, but on the whole I think the story is still intact.  We do face a predicament with our oil supply.  What we got wrong was how the pricing mechanisms would affect the story.

What it turns out to be about is not running out of oil, it’s about not being able to afford to get the oil out of the ground.  What we missed was the whole story of the energy return on investment and how important that was.  The fact is that you can’t run an industrial society on less than a 3:1 oil energy return on investment.

We’re now at about 17:1 in the world wide aggregate, including everything, including tar sands, shale, deep water, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, everything.  But the newer, unconventional oil has a terrible return on investment, which is running about 5:1 for shale oil.  Once you’re at that ratio, you either have to drop certain activities in your daily life, or something else is going to happen.  And the something else that happened is that we destroyed the middle class.

So instead of saying, “Oh well, at an energy return on investment of 17:1 you can’t really have commuting and suburbia, and theme park vacations and the trucking industry, and some of those have to go”, well, we didn’t actually do that, and that’s not how it worked out.  How it worked out was we just destroyed the middle class, so that all of that aggregate demand coming from the middle class is dwindling because increasingly they have no money and no income.

That of course has led to massive political problems in the West.  So it has played out differently, to answer your question.  It has played out a little differently than we imagined, and that’s probably because history is not always strictly linear, and certainly not extrapolative.

How far do we have to go down Trump’s vision of how things want to be before it becomes blatantly obvious that it doesn’t work and we try something else?

Oh I don’t think we’ll have to go more than a year or so, maybe less.  Actually I predicted in my blogs that he wouldn’t make it as President for more than a year.  That he would be removed from office one way or another.

Clearly the guy’s a buffoon, doesn’t know what he’s doing.  But the nation also doesn’t know where it’s going.  He is in fact perfectly representing the incoherence of our politics.  How we get out of that?  I don’t know.  As I said a moment ago, it’s really only a question of how disorderly our journey is going to be.  In the US is it going to be a real political breakdown?  We’ve seen them before in the USA.  It can happen.

It’s not going to happen the same that it did in 1860, but it can be pretty bad.  In my ‘World Made by Hand’ books, I was actually trying to present a fairly realistic picture of where I thought we might be going, and where we would end up.  My idea is if we’re fortunate, we’ll land in a reset economy and civilisation that is not unlike the early to mid 19^th century, if we’re lucky.  If we’re not so lucky and we make some really terrible blunders we could either go full medieval, or worse.

By the way, I’ve written in my blog that I believe that Japan is going to be the first advanced nation that goes medieval voluntarily.  And for the reason that they actually had a really lovely pre-industrial civilisation, the Edo period.  It preceded the 1850s when Japan was “opened up” by Commodore Perry of the USA.  That was a lovely civilisation.

Things don’t last for ever of course and history doesn’t repeat itself, but I think that the Japanese are very nostalgic for what they left behind and what they lost, and I think will be very glad to get back to it.  I don’t think that modernity is working out for them.  So they may be the canary in the coal mine, if Asia doesn’t go up in a vapour because of conflict with North Korea or something like that.

Heaven help us.  Jim, thank you, thank you very much.

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Clothesline at the end of the world

SUBHEAD: The apocalypse of climate change is not going to come with a bang but with a whimper.

By Charlotte McGuin Freeman on 6 May 2017 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/dark-mountain-issue-11-clothesline-at-the-end-of-the-world/)


Image above: Steel framed washing line with clothes blowing dry in sun and wind. From (http://lawoffashion.info/old-fashioned-washing-line-pole/).

On the first warmish March day, I’ll be outside hanging my wash on the line even if my boots are crunching on snow. If the sun is shining, if there’s even a hint of warmth on the breeze I’ll be bringing my wash outside, freeing it from the clotheslines in the basement.

I am a tiny bit fanatical about my clotheslines. The outdoor line is attached to my side yard fence and, like all people who engage in a repetitive physical task, I have a specific method for hanging the clothes. Pants, dresses, bathrobes – long items get hung on the back line against the fence.

Then shirts, which must be hung upside down, connected at the corners to save on clothespins. (If you hang them right side up by the shoulders, you get weird bumps dried into your shirts that make you look like you’re continually shrugging.)

Smalls get hung on the end furthest from the street, between the dresses and the shirts. No need to embarrass the neighbours. Then last are the socks – matched together, hung in pairs. A load of wash takes me maybe ten minutes to hang. I work at home so it makes for a nice break in the day, and I love my washline. I love the way things look hanging there in the breeze.

But I don’t hang clothes just because I like the way they look. I am a true believer in the power of the clothesline. For one thing, the clothes dryer is second in American homes only to the refrigerator for electricity consumption, and while I know that eliminating my use of the dryer individually isn’t going to slow the onslaught of climate change, it’s something concrete I can do. Also, as a freelancer,

I’m broke, so anything to bring down the electric bill.

But I hang laundry for a less concrete reason, because hanging the laundry is about taking care, it’s about a version of domesticity that is not oppression, but which models the sort of caretaking we’re all going to have to learn to value in order to make a hotter, drier, more crowded world habitable.

I live in a small town in Montana, a town that until about 20 years ago was solidly working class. It was the headquarters for the Northern Pacific Railway, and it’s a town of small railroaders’ houses with tiny yards, nearly every one of which has a sturdy clothesline out back.

Because we’re one of the windiest towns in America and these are serious clotheslines – usually built from six–inch plumbing pipe, sunk into three or four feet of concrete.

And yet, I’m one of the few people I know who actually dries my clothes on the line. As the cost of appliances dropped and dryers became ubiquitous, clotheslines came to be seen as ‘trashy’, a symbol of poverty and sloth.

Even as the new people moving to town buy hybrid vehicles and put solar panels on their roofs, even as greenhouses and chicken coops spring up in backyards, those sturdy old plumbing-pipe clotheslines, painted silver, are always empty.

I moved here from California in 2002 for a number of reasons, but chief among them I was anxious about climate change. It made me nervous, California. It had been good to me career-wise, twice.

First when I moved there to do my master’s degree at UC Davis; then when I left Salt Lake City after my PhD and went back out to live with my brother and find a job.

Desperate to pay off my student loans, I got work in a tech company, editing user and administration guides. I liked it. I liked the people I worked with and the intellectual challenge of figuring out how to present information to people in the most useful format possible. But California was giving me the willies.

It was so crowded, and the Bay Area is such an enclosed space, bounded by the Pacific on the one side and the coast hills and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on the other.

Three years into my tech job, I’d seen field after field on my evening commute disappear under the onslaught of ugly housing developments, just as I’d watched the last few migrant workers hoeing a zucchini field that was doomed to become another Cisco campus.

I wish I’d had a camera that day. I was stopped in traffic, and across from me were several guys with computer cases standing at a bus stop, while behind them four or five Mexican guys hoed zucchini rows, and behind them another three–storey Cisco building, identical to all the others, was going up.

I could feel the big change coming – whatever we want to call it, climate change, global warming, the Anthropocene, the great acceleration – I don’t know what it is, but having been raised by unreliable parents you develop antennae for impending doom.

You can tell by the energy level, the degree of frantic vibration, that something bad is about to happen. And that’s how I felt in California. I couldn’t put a finger on it exactly, but I knew something wasn’t right and I wanted to get out of the way.

I knew about Livingston from having run writers’ workshops while I was in graduate school. The nature and western writers were a friendly lot, most knew one another, and talk across the patio tables at Squaw Valley often turned to places where a person could live cheap. Livingston was one of them.

Like a lot of beautiful places left empty when an industry implodes, Livingston has attracted writers and painters and fading movie stars for decades now, along with a vibrant population of hunting and fishing guides, building contractors and former cult members. It’s a creative bunch and, with the exception of the rich summer people who build trophy homes in the valleys that radiate out from town, it’s a place where no–one has ever had much money.

Most of us live in one- and two-storey houses on small lots in town. Old railroaders’ houses like the one I bought. Mine was built in 1903, and hadn’t had anything much done to it since they put the indoor plumbing in sometime in the forties.

It’s a small house on a town lot that I bought for a number of reasons, chief among them the five-foot clawfoot tub, and the well-used vegetable plot that took up half the back yard.

I was lucky enough to get to hang around Gary Snyder when I was at UC Davis, and Snyder’s advice to us wasn’t about poetry, well, not directly. Gary told us that if we wanted a creative life, we should find someplace cheap to live, where a person could afford to buy and pay off a house.

Cheap housing attracts artists, he said, so chances are you’d wind up with interesting neighbors, and if you had a place to live you wouldn’t have to go teach in places you didn’t want to be. You’d have your freedom.

And that’s what I was aiming for when I moved here. I’d been living with my brother for four years, a roommate arrangement that had worked out so well we thought we’d better break up before we wound up like one those pairs of spinster siblings you used to see sometimes out in the country near our grandmother’s farm. The ones in the white farmhouse they’d been raised in, still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms.

In the four years we’d lived together we’d both found better jobs and had repaired some of the anxiety we had about domestic life. We’d been raised in a world of unstable alcoholics, the kind who pick a fight whenever they’re feeling existentially itchy.

By teaming up, we’d figured we could practise domestic life on one another, see if we could figure out how to live in a house with another person you love without screaming fights or tears of recrimination. That we’d done it and had righted our little ships, both financially and emotionally, was a major accomplishment. But it was time to move on.

Time to take those skills and go find real partners. And so when my manager agreed to let me telecommute, I went looking for a house I could afford, and since I wasn’t tied to the Bay Area anymore, a house I could afford back in the Rocky Mountains I loved.

Pretty quickly, things fell into place and I found myself in possession of a mortgage and the keys to a small bungalow in Montana. I packed the cat and computer and boxes of books into my Honda, and arrived three days ahead of the moving van.

That I’d been able to not only buy a house, but could afford a moving van felt miraculous to me. We’d moved every 18 months or so growing up, renting U-Hauls or borrowing horse trailers.

Despite having managed to get a mortgage, purchase a house and arrange for a moving van, I still felt that first night, setting up the inflatable mattress in my empty house, that I’d broken in, that any moment someone was going to burst through the door and shout at me to leave.

The first year went pretty well. Patrick, my brother, wound up moving here after me, having been laid off from his job just as I was leaving California.

I got a dog, and built raised beds in the existing vegetable patch, and made friends. Patrick found a cheap apartment on the other side of town, took up with his first girlfriend in ages, and set about building himself a niche running events and helping with wedding planners, work he’d done since his teens.

We were settling in. At his birthday party in early September he made a sentimental speech to our new friends, thanking them for taking us into their lives, saying he’d never had such a happy year.

On 28 September that first year I lived here, on a beautiful, blue-sky, golden sunshine autumn day, I was in the hammock strung between my apple trees when the Assistant Coroner of Park County Montana walked through my front gate.

I got up to see what the dogs were barking about only to meet this big man, taking off his feed cap as he saw me, who put one enormous hand on my shoulder and said;

 ‘Ma’am. There’s no good way to say this. There was a car accident last night. Your brother is dead.’

Time stopped.

The world as I knew it ended that day, and while a new life has taken root, it is not at all the same. It is a replacement world.

Patrick dying was the one thing I had feared above all others. It was like being simultaneously orphaned and widowed.

Our divorced parents are unreliable at best, our youngest brother had died as a toddler, and we had survived it all together. We were less than two years apart, and in every photo I have of us, from earliest childhood until the end, one of us has an arm around the other.

I’d gone from the oldest of three, to being the big sister, to being an only child.

In losing Patrick, I lost the one person on this earth who loved me absolutely, whose faith in me was unshakeable. Without Patrick, it took me a very long time to piece together some kind of identity, and even now, 13 years later, it feels false, because he hasn’t been here to see it.

It was terrible, and I survived it in large part due to the tender ministrations of the town of Livingston. ‘If you’re going to have a disaster,’ I tell people when the story comes up, ‘you want to have it here. Everyone came, and they stayed.’

My house filled up that first night as word got out. They got me through a funeral, and saw that I was never left out. I had people to go to Happy Hour and dinner with on Fridays, and they took me in for holidays, and some, like my friend Jennifer, occasionally walked in my front door that first year or so and said ‘No really, how are you?’

My best friend had twins (after a terrifying pregnancy), so for a couple of years there was always a screaming baby to tend, and her two big girls needed an auntie as much as I needed kids to take care of. I was taken in by a tribe of people, people who became my new family, people who I love with all my heart. And yet.

When I say the world stopped, I mean that I have a very strange relationship to time now. There was my life until 2003, a life that hummed along and things changed and I moved from place to place and attended schools and published a novel and got a job and eventually moved to Montana. My story kept unfolding.

And then Patrick died, and it feels in some weird way like my story ended. However, I’m still here.

To compare my personal loss to the avalanche of loss that is heading our way as a planet would be unbelievably callow, and yet there are things you learn when you lose the person you thought you could not live without that seem germane.

For one thing, the surprise at still being alive. You have to figure out how to live in this diminished world. You have to figure out how to go on after the fourth, or seventh, or 15th time you pick up the phone to call the person who is no longer here.

Those first months after Patrick died, I remember thinking, ‘Forty years? Fifty years? I have to live like this for how long?’

The literature of climate change is mostly of the apocalyptic variety. There will be a disaster and then it will ALL END. But if there’s anything I have learned in these intervening years, it’s that it doesn’t end. You’re still here. The sun comes up.

The apple trees bloom in the spring, and the garden needs planting, and the children you love will keep growing and even, eventually, you might be lucky enough to meet someone who loves you and who doesn’t mind when you spend the first three or four years telling him stories about your dead brother, and who you love back even though you find it inconceivable that you’re spending your life with someone who didn’t know Patrick, and who Patrick will never know.

Apocalyptic stories are sexy in their drama. The end of the world as we know it will be big and dramatic and everything will change, and we will be living in some mythical landscape where we’ll be freed from all the boring conventional aspects of our daily lives. My instinct, however, is that this is not how things are going to unfold.

More likely it’ll entail the slow chipping away of things we’re accustomed to, changes like our fruit trees dying. We had a frost three years ago, a freak freeze in October that killed every cherry tree in town. We didn’t find out until spring, when they didn’t come back. Here in Montana we get much of our fruit in the summer from Utah.

Orchardists will drive up and set up roadside stands where they sell raspberries and plums and currants and peaches. Beautiful peaches. They were late this year, and my first thought was, ‘Is this it? Is this the year they don’t come? Is this the year we’ll look back on and say, “Remember when there were peaches?”’

One reason I’m such a fanatic about the clothesline is that, like clearing the table after dinner and doing the dishes in the sink with soap and hot water, hanging your wash on the line keeps you in actual physical contact with the world.

You have to touch each piece and in doing so you can see which tee shirts are wearing thin, which socks have holes in the heels, which trousers are getting worn in the knees. It is this physical contact, this clearing up of messes that I think is at the root of the peculiar hostility toward clotheslines that has taken root in those neighborhoods where clotheslines have been forbidden and even outlawed.

For two or three generations now we’ve been told by the culture that success is measured by the distance we can put between ourselves and the physical acts of both making and cleaning up.

I know perfectly competent grown people who cannot cook themselves dinner, who rely on restaurants or make a sandwich, who have no idea how to do something as simple as roast a chicken. People rely on clothes dryers and dishwashers.

We hire cleaners for our houses. We hire gardeners to mow our lawns.

We sometimes have to hire people to raise our babies so we can continue to work at jobs we might love, or just need in order to bring in the money we require to keep the machinery of consumption humming along.

We rent storage units where we put the stuff we worked all those hours to buy but that no longer fits in our houses.

That my household chores are largely physical in nature – hanging out wash, cooking dinner and then cleaning the dishes, mucking out a chicken coop, tidying the garden to get ready for winter – marks me as old-fashioned and an outlier.

I don’t live in a city, or even a particularly large town. I cook all my own meals, in part because our town is so small that there aren’t cheap takeout places. I work at home so I don’t have a commute anymore. I’m already a throwback, to the extent that when I visit folks ‘out there’ I do find the noise and pace and sheer amount of disposable trash of modern life a little disorienting.

What I learned when my brother died and left me here alone is this: it is in taking care that we can save ourselves and others. Nina’s twins, with all their mess and screaming those first few years (and they were screamers, those two), that’s what saved me. Having something useful to do. Something immediate.

The baby cannot sleep without being held, and there are two of them. So days we spent, on Nina’s big white sofa, watching Barefoot Contessa reruns and trying to get those girls to sleep.

What I learned is that the garden can save you, because it doesn’t give a shit if you’re having a freaked out, weeping kind of a day. It’s spring and things need planting, or it’s the end of the season and snow is coming and if you don’t get the tomatoes in and taken care of the whole summer will have been a waste. And so you do it.

You find a rhythm in the physical world that carries you through, because the bottom line is that you are not dead. You are still living on this earth, and there are days of stupendous beauty, even in the midst of unbearable sorrow.

And so, because I love the world, even in its diminished state, I hang the laundry outside. I hang laundry and refuse to use my clothes dryer. I bought a tiny, efficient little car. I grow food in my backyard and put it up in jars for the winter and I’ve pretty much stopped flying on airplanes. I know that these actions, taken as an individual, are not going to slow down the changes we see happening. The freak frost that killed the cherry trees.

The fish parasite that bloomed in the Yellowstone River this summer, when the river was at its lowest-ever recorded flow, when the water was hotter than it had ever been and so a parasite bloomed and thousands upon thousands of fish died. So clear was the danger that the state banned our sacred sport, fly fishing, for a month. Which was unprecedented.

For the 14 years I’ve lived here I’ve watched that rusty brown creep across the mountains as the pine beetle kills off the trees and, more years than not, there are no chanterelles or boletes in the fall, not even up high in the mountains, because the late summer rains didn’t come.

But I hang my wash on the line, and grow vegetables in the backyard, and love the girls I’m helping to raise even when they turn into terrible teenagers who are acting out in the most ridiculous ways possible. Because I’m still here.

Apocalyptic stories about of the end of the world are sexy, in part because they allow us, in much the same way as fantasies of past lives do, to cast ourselves as important players in grand historical dramas. They strip us of boring domestic chores. They set us free from our stuff and give us a blank slate with which to start over.

However, I think our job is going to be more complicated than that. My hunch is that we’re not going to get a big, sexy, end-of-the-world do-over. What we’ll be faced with is more ordinary. A series of diminishments. The loss of one thing we thought we could not live without, and then another, and then another yet.

Every so often, when someone mentions that something happened years ago, in say, 2011, I’ll find myself startled at how far in the temporal past 2003 has slipped.

For me, it’s still right here. The day the world stopped. The day that Mike Fitzpatrick, that big kind man who is himself dead now, walked into my side yard bearing the worst of all possible news.

It’s right there with me as I hang wash in that same side yard, dresses and pants and shirts waving in our stiff winds, as the cottage roses and cosmos and hollyhocks wave back. We might all be living in the end times, living in the aftermath, but we are still living.—

Source's Note: You’ll find more articles where this came from in our latest book. Dark Mountain: Issue 11 is available through our online shop

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Tax Donkey Purgatory

SUBHEAD: Somehow the idea of a "Workforce World" evokes something even worse than the plantation era company towns of the last century. 

By Juan Wilson on 18 July 2014 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/07/tax-donkey-purgatory.html)


Image above: Image of GoogleEarth plan of Workforce World by Juan Wilson derived from Garden Island published rendering below. Click to embiggen. For GoogleEarth KMZ file of layout click here.


The recent article titled WORKFORCE WORLD (see below) on the promotion of the Lima Ola project in Eleele prompted me to consider the impact on my neighborhood in the Hanapepe area.  The proposal will put stress existing infrastructure besides traffic, sewage, power and water.

Eleele Elementary School is under population pressure already. On many weekends Salt Pond Beach Park has no parking available for neighborhood families. A project the size of Lima Ola will need more jobs and commercial development than exists today.

From my professional experience as a planner I judge that this Lima Ola scheme is just the beginning of what will become major changes for the south side of Kauai that will lead to unsustainable suburban sprawl.

The developers and flaks behind this 550 unit master plan tell us that what they are trying to do is help out low and middle income people who need housing on the westside so they can work at the Pacific Missile Range Facility or perhaps on the several Agro-Chemical companies polluting the westside with GMO seed crops fed on experimental pesticide cocktails.

The idea that the future welfare of  Kauai will be dependent on the death dealing military industrial corporations (Ratheon, ITT, General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, BAE Systems, Dow, Dupont, Syngenta, BASF, etc, etc) that infest the westside of the island is laughable. It is without merit. These companies are not supporting Kauai, - They are killing the land and the ocean. They are laying waste to the Earth.

This "housing" project is one phase of many to suburbanize the south side from Hanapepe to Poipu on 3,000 plus acres of Alexander and Baldwin (A&B) land. That land is now being used mostly by Kauai Coffee and a bit by Dupont-Pioneer, but A&B has been think for years of a more profitable land use - suburbia.

I am not against all residential planning, although I think planning should not include efforts to accomodate ever increasing human population of Hawaii. The outer islands have the capability with current populations of being sustainable with some resilience. That is not true of Oahu. It is overpopulated several times over.   

But in America "Growth" is the magic word. It's the solution to all that ails us economically.

And land-rich, cash-poor large property owners like A&B must have wet-dreams of filling in every nook and cranny with more consumers for the plazas and galleria malls imagined as the jewels in their Barbie-World. They have a strong incentive to cash in on their land by selling it off for urban use. That's where the big dollars are. And our property-tax dependent county concurs.

If you want to know the future here just look at the nightmarish sprawl at Mililani on Oahu. What was once a pineapple plantation has become a desert of oil dependent cardboard Californication. Without cheap oil, cheap food, and overpaid jobs it all falls apart.

And that's the problem with Lima Ola Workforce World. There will not be jobs at the PMRF and the GMO outfits once the next wave of bursting bubble and economic collapse breaks the surface. A new Ford F-250 deluxe four-door extended-cab off-road pickup will be unaffordable for a tax donkey with a job. The need food and housing will trump a new tuck in that new and withered economy.

If you want to build housing think about making it self-sustainable and self-reliant. Think of growing your own food to share with your community. Think about providing useful service to your neighbors. Forget the jobs and the plazas. They won't be viable soon. So will you be on a 6,000 foot lot half covered in a particle-board house and blacktop for the cars.

We need homesteading, organic community gardens, permaculture and more. Sleep, work, play, grow, eat where you live. You won't need the car or the job in the right plan for Lima Ola.

If A&B really wants the best for Kauai and its people they should reduce the use of restricted pesticides on their lands, eliminate the leases to GMO companies, and begin a program with the County to offer homesteading opportunities on small acreage parcels along with community gardens and a permanent farmers market mauka and west of the Kauai Coffee Visitor's Center.

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Workforce World

SUBHEAD: Housing officials want to break ground on $59.2 million project by 2017.
 
By Darin Moriki on 17 July 2014 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/workforce-world/article_1c1c441c-0d7e-11e4-b984-0019bb2963f4.html#user-comment-area)


Image above: Architects rendering of the Workforce World plan. Note about 40% of the site is multifamily apartments, many of them multi-story. From original article.

It has been four years since County of Kauai officials acquired a 75-arce piece of land in Eleele from the McBryde Sugar Company to plan what some housing officials say is one of the county’s most ambitious affordable housing projects.

But in the years since then, ground hasn’t been broken on the now barren land set aside for the project.

That could change, however, within the next three years as Kauai County Housing Agency officials move forward to conduct studies, refine design plans and apply for permits to get the 550-unit Lima Ola master planned community off the ground. But not everyone agrees on the best path forward for the project.

Some county officials say the current plan to build out 165 single-family or duplex units and 385 multi-family units on the Westside is suitable to address a growing need for affordable housing on Kauai.

Other officials, however, say more planning is needed to ensure that specific elements, such as infrastructure improvements and traffic mitigation measures, will not increase construction costs and affect the affordability of units within the development.

“I know a lot of people are living in Kapaa and Lihue who are working on the Westside or at the Pacific Missile Range Facility, so this would benefit them — this would bring them closer to work,” Councilman Mel Rapozo said. “I think this helps Westside residents. I think there are sometimes three or four families living in a house on the

About 1,312 new housing units, according to Kauai County Housing Agency statistics, will be needed by 2016. Nearly 70 percent of those homes, or 925 individual units, will be needed to accommodate low- and very low-income families.

The development, which would potentially break ground between 2016 and 2017, according to county housing documents, is intended to accommodate residents whose income is between 80 percent to 140 percent of Kauai County’s median household income.

It would be scaled by the number of people who live in the home. The county’s median household income in general is $70,300, according to 2014 Kauai County Housing Agency data.

Eighty percent of the median housing income for a family of four, for example, is $72,600, while 140 percent of the median income for a family of four would be $98,400. Eighty percent of the single family income would be $50,850, while 140 percent is $68,950.

In all, County Housing Agency Director Kamuela Cobb-Adams estimated that the county has invested about $3.1 million into the project, including $2.69 million to purchase the land and about $130,000 to map out and design the development

To make the project more feasible, Cobb-Adams said county officials decreased per unit costs by re-engineering the design of the project and eliminating homeowners association fees that can make homeownership difficult.

County housing officials, Cobb-Adams said, are also pursuing partnership opportunities with state, county and federal organizations and searching for a variety of funding sources, such as state and federal grants, to help push the project forward.

>Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura and Councilman Tim Bynum, however, said they were concerned that certain improvements, such as installing a pedestrian underpass or overpass near Laulea Street to bypass the traffic on Kaumualii Highway, could eventually make the project a tough sell.

“I think a smaller, down-scaled project, maybe along the highway, would be better than this huge project,” Yukimura said. “If you look at other places and other opportunities, they could be, in the long run, better. This project should pencil out as an affordable project, but when you start putting in the kinds of things that are going to make it workable, like an underpass, then it starts to fall apart.”

While some improvements are needed to ensure that the development is accessible and energy-efficient community, Cobb-Adams said the main focus is providing homes for as many families as possible.

“We’re trying to make it as green as possible, we’re trying to make it as smart growth as possible, we’re trying to make it as healthy as possible, and we’re trying to make it affordable,” Cobb-Adams said.

“Affordability, however, is the No. 1 thing — food and shelter are the biggest issues on this island. From there we can build upon sidewalks and other planning issues.”

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Reject Shawn Smith for BLNR post

SUBHEAD: Shawn Smith has a history undermining Kauai by converting prime agricultural land to luxury residential sprawl.

By Andy Parx on 26 October 2013 for Parx News Daily -
(http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com/2013/10/please-ask-kouchi-and-senate-to-reject.html)


Image above: Converting a real Kapahi Farm into "gentleman Estates" by Chris Singleton, whose legacy includes disinterring Hawaiian burials for that garish Waipouli Beach Resort across from Safeway. From (http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2013/10/musings-dirt-cheap.html).

While the threat to "real farms" by the Westside chemical companies has sucked up much of the oxygen in the debate over the future of agriculture on Kauai an arguably more insidious undermining is going on just above Larsen's beach on the Northeast side.

And, one of the chief facilitators of the theft of our agricultural legacies is about to be appointed as the Kauai representative to the all-powerful Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) if we don't speak out right now and ask our state senators to reject his nomination.

Shawn Smith has been the point-person in charge of the Kahu’aina Plantation Agricultural Subdivision, a 357-acre parcel, which is zoned Agricultural and Conservation, yet has received subdivision approval for more than 80 luxury homes.

A "special session" of the legislature is scheduled for this coming Monday (Oct 28) and in addition to the main subject of marriage equality, many other matter will be taken up, including Smith's potential confirmation.

The BLNR is the "board" that oversees the Department of Land and Natural Resources. Suffice it to say they are the most powerful body in the state when it comes to land use, in a state that, along with county home rule, has another layer of centralized land-use power at the state level.

During Smith's lengthy tenure as General Manager of land developer Falko Partners- one of the biggest and most egregious of the developers luxury residential lots on agricultural lands on Kauai- he has shown a strong alignment with, and deep bias towards, the interests that seek to undermine the goals of Hawaii’s land use laws by converting prime agricultural land to residential use and creating rural sprawl, according to critics.

Fake farms like Kahu’aina Plantation and others are plain in their desire to subdivide agricultural lands for luxury mansions- an arguably illegal use of an Ag subdivision subdivision after the "Hokulia" ruling from Hawai`i Island, potentially barring such practices.

In 2003, Judge Ronald Ibarra halted construction of the $1 billion Hokulia project saying 1,550-acre Hōkūlia was a luxury-home development and not a farming venture. As part of its decision, the court stopped the county from issuing building permits to buyers, and enjoined developer Oceanside 1250 from providing utilities to the homes already under construction. The Falko Partners Kahu`aina is simply a mini "Hokulia."

Should you want to take a gander at what they have planned, even though they took down their web site- perhaps because it so obviously violated Judge Ibara's Hokulia ruling- there is still a place to vie

Having Smith on the BLNR could actually allow him to vote on and influence the approval of this and other similar projects. And even should he recuse himself in the case of Kahu’aina Plantation, he has shown that he is not the type of person we need in the one-and-only seat representing Kaua`i on the all-powerful BLNR, which would be ruling on other such application in the future

The Kaua`i representative on the BLNR, while only one of many on the board, is often looked to for direction by other board members regarding Kaua`i projects. Shawn Smith has, though his actions as Larry Bowman GM at Falko Partners- one of the biggest despoilers of agricultural lands in turning them into Gentleman’s estates and North Shore McMansion- shown that he is the wrong person for the job... someone whose bent is to thumb his nose at the the protection of what's left of the prime agricultural lands on Kauai.

Please write or call to members of the senate, especially Kauai Senator Ron Kouchi, and ask them to reject Smith. Word has it that this is "doable" with enough phone calls and emails. You can reach Sen Kouchi at 808-586-6030 or via email at senkouchi@Capitol.hawaii.gov and all senators at sens@capitol.hawaii.gov .

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Worth Noting

SUBHEAD: Shawn is part of Kahuaina Plantation, the uber upscale gentleman's estates at Waipake being passed off as an “agricultural subdivision.”

By Joan Conrow on 25 October 2013 for Kauai Elclectic -
(http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2013/10/musings-worth-noting.html)

[IB Publisher's note: This is just a portion of Joan's post from last Friday]

... Legislators also will be considering a number of Gov. Abercrombie's proposed appointees, including developer Shawn Smith as the Kauai representative to a term on the Board of Land and Natural Resources that runs through 2016.

As I've previously reported, Shawn is part of Kahuaina Plantation, the uber upscale gentleman's estates at Waipake being passed off as an “agricultural subdivision.” And we're supposed to believe he'll be a conscientious caretaker of the state's natural resources?

Abercrombie is also asking the Lege to approve Genevieve Salmonson as director of the Office of Environmental Quality Control. Gary Hooser held the post prior to his election to the Kauai County Council. As The Hawaii Independent reports:

Salmonson previously held this position under the Lingle administration, during which time she controversially agreed that the Superferry project was exempt from having to provide the State with an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), leading to a long and bitter fight between the State and environmental groups that eventually ended in 2009 when the Supreme Court ruled that the law allowing the Superferry to operate without an EIS was unconstitutional...
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Florida vs Georgia in Water War

SUBHEAD: Florida to sue Georgia in U.S. Supreme Court over unchecked water consumption leading to disappearance of oyster industry.

By T. Olorunnipa & M. Bender on 13 August 2013 for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/florida-to-sue-georgia-in-u-s-supreme-court-over-water.html)


Image above: Apalachicola Bay, part of Florida's "Forgotten Coast" is known for its beautiful natural scenery, plump oysters and slow pace. From (http://projects.ajc.com/gallery/view/travel/southeast/apalachicola-travel/).

Florida plans to file a U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit against Georgia, saying the state is consuming too much water that would otherwise flow to Florida, the latest battle nationally over an increasingly scarce resource.

The dispute is fueled by the rapid growth of the metropolitan area surrounding Atlanta, which is demanding more water and hurting the oyster industry in Northwest Florida, Florida Governor Rick Scott, 60, said yesterday. Scott, a Republican, said he would file suit next month after the two states couldn’t reach an agreement.

“That’s our water,” Scott told reporters while standing next to the Apalachicola Bay in the Florida Panhandle. “They’ve impacted our families. They’ve impacted the livelihood of people down here.”

For more than 20 years, Florida, Georgia and Alabama have been mired in negotiations over the distribution of water shared by the three states. The dispute is emblematic of an increasingly common challenge facing cities and states across the country: Demand for water is outpacing supply as urban development and population growth sap resources.

Urban development in Georgia has led to an increased need for water, much of it pumped from a river basin that’s also relied on by Florida and Alabama.

Unchecked Consumption
Georgia has engaged in “unchecked consumption of water,” while not negotiating in good faith, making a lawsuit the only way to resolve the matter, Scott said in a statement.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, 70, a Republican, said in a statement that Scott’s planned lawsuit is a “frivolous waste of time and money.”

“Scott’s threat to sue my state in the U.S. Supreme Court greatly disappoints me after I negotiated in good faith for two years,” Deal said. “More than a year ago, I offered a framework for a comprehensive agreement. Florida never responded.”

Legal disputes between states must be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, instead of going through lower courts first, according to the Constitution.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for managing the water in the states’ shared river basin, which spans the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint rivers.

Fighting Georgia
Officials in Alabama, which has also fought Georgia over water distribution, haven’t said whether they’ll join in the lawsuit. The state will consider “all available options” to protect its water rights, said Jennifer Ardis, a spokeswoman for Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, a Republican, in an e-mail.

At a hearing yesterday in Apalachicola, U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, and U.S Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, both blamed Georgia for taking more than its fair share of water. Georgia’s consumption, along with a drought last year, threatens fisheries and economic development in the Florida Panhandle, they said.

The oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay has collapsed over the past year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a fishery disaster declaration on Aug. 12 over oysters.

Scott and Nelson have both pushed for the disaster declaration during the past year.

“The changes to water flow have decimated a once booming industry, but I’m hopeful we can soon start to turn things around,” Nelson said in a statement.

Apalachicola Bay supplies 10 percent of the nation’s oysters, according to a December report by Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The industry supports about 2,500 jobs in Florida, according to the report.

Many of those jobs, and perhaps the industry, are at risk due to the lack of fresh water flowing into the bay, Rubio said.

“We don’t have time,” said Rubio. “In a couple years, there may not be anybody left to save around here in this industry.”
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No to the Horizontal Well

SUBHEAD: It's like opening a vein in Kauai and letting her bleed out. Written testimony against the Wai'ale'ale Horizontal Drilling Project goes on until 4/20.

[Note: The testimony in this article has been updated. There is a correction to the calculation of pressure of water in testimony below. The PSI at outlet of 24" pipe did not include reduction of pressure due to friction in the rock, which reduces the likely pressure from by almost an order of magnitude. Instead of a hundred atmospheres it is more likely to be dozens. this is in the range of the pressure anticipated by the proponents of the well. The testimonies below have been modified with that recalculation. Apologies are due for our mistake.]

By Juan Wilson & Arius Hopman on 11 April 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/04/no-to-horizontal-well.html)


Image above:  Mills using the Niagara River to power, cool and wash their industrial processes. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. From (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g06887/).

Comments will be received during the meeting or may be made at (http://kahili.oceanit.com) or (ww.kauaiwater.org)on the link to the Kauai Water System Energy Conservation Project.

Deadline for comments is: April 20, 2013.

Testimony Opposing Wai'ale'ale Horizontal Drilling:

Testimony by Juan Wilson

THE DANGERS
The proposal to drill horizontally into the core of Kauai with a two foot diameter pipe to reach our central fresh water aquifer with a head of thousands of feet should be rejected as unnecessary and fraught with uncounted risks.

I concur with the testimony of Arius Hopman (see below) on the geology of Kauai and the estimate that several dozen atmospheres of pressure may be generated by the horizontal well project, depending on specific site used and the unknown rock formations the drilling will pass through.

My question, as an architect with four years study of structural engineering, is what safety systems are currently capable and included in the design of this project to handle a catastrophic failure of the equipment handing the force of the hydraulic pressures that may be encountered.

QUESTION: Specifically, how can the engineer's of this project demonstrate the safety of this project, particularly with a major tsunami or landslide driven earthquake knocking down the KIUC power grid, Hawaiian Telcom communication system, and taking out long sections of the Kuhio Highway in Wailua-Kapaa?

The engineer's guarantees are worth little on a project that has great complexities, with monumental forces in unserviceable areas.

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon disaster at British Petroleum's Macondo well leaked millions of gallons of crude oil that has destroyed the aquatic environment of the Gulf of Mexico.  The spectacle of technological failure to cap that well for a protracted time was something
that should be remembered. The full force of the United States government and the richest corporations in the world were helpless to solve the problem at hand.

In 2011 the tsunami that destroyed that cooling pumps and flooded the backup generators at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has resulted in a continuing discharge great quantities of highly radioactive water into the pacific Ocean to this day. In Hawaii, children under three years old have experienced a 16% increase of hypothyroidism since. The Tepco engineers have no solution in hand more than two years after the disaster. They just keep hosing down the rubble and letting the results enter our ocean.

HIDDEN AGENDA
As an architect and planner with more than thirty years experience, I can guarantee that the resulting energy and 8 million gallons a day is not a plan to simply lower the cost to the public of their electric and water bills. Quite the contrary, this is a plan to increase the population of the island of Kauai by about 50% (the number of people in the Wailua-Kapaa area that now use about that much water from existing wells).

This horizontal well project is the foundation of a real estate play. More suburbia, more shopping plazas, more car traffic, more Oahu. Kauai is not underdeveloped. If, as I see likely, we will soon have to be much more self-reliant and self-sufficient. As it is, Kauai cannot feed itself or provide the power it needs to even light our homes at night. But given its resources Kauai could get there. That certainly is not true of Oahu or even Maui to unsupportably large populations.  

We cannot add tens of thousands of people on this island and reach sustainability in Hawaii. As a planner I ask the proponents of this well project to demonstrate that real-estate speculation is not the driving motivation and goal of this water/energy plan.

QUESTION: Specifically, what exactly is in this plan that guarantees that the additional water and energy will be used only to reduce cost of utilities to the residents of Kauai, and not to allow speculators to develop large tracts of suburban sprawl that will increase traffic in the bottle-necked Kappa-Lihue corridor?

COMPOUNDING THE PROBLEM
The developers of this program have not demonstrated that their horizontal well project will not reduce the volume of water in the aquifer they intend to drill into. They cannot without drilling.

One thing is fairly certain. There is diminished rainfall to this aquifer in recent decades. Rain on Waialeale Mountain is down about 30%. That means less recharging of the aquifer over many years already. The future is looking worse. As the planet experiences global warming the cloud elevations will rise and much water will never be caught at the elevation of Waialelale. Moreover, the north-east Trade Winds have diminished and are expected by climate scientists to be reduced in the weather we will face in the future.

I ask the planners of this project to demonstrate that taking 8 million gallons a day from this aquifer will be made up by the rain expected to fall on Kauai in the future.

QUESTION: Specifically, what climate scientists have you consulted and what reports did they generate to provide support for a continued future replacement of water taken from our aquifer.

RECHARGING NOT DRAINING AQUIFER
The idea that Kauai has a great need for a hydro-electric generator of this kind and scale has not been demonstrated. There are better understood technologies available without the associated risks.

Throughout Hawaii there is great progress being made in providing alternative energy using photovoltaic panels.

Hawaii's generous tax break for PV installations along with the Federal program of tax incentives makes even modest home PV stand alone systems economical. Recently, PV hardware prices have dramatically dropped making PV systems with battery storage affordable for many. 

KIUC has finally adopted the course of using large PV systems with battery backup for stability and continuity of generating capacity. After completing the large installation adjacent to its main generating station at Port Allen, KIUC is moving quickly to adopt solar.

KIUC has identified a hydro-electric system with some potential and with far less unknown and unanticipated potential problems.

That technique is to use some solar PV energy to raise water from a lower reservoir to higher reservoir during daylight hours and then, at night, letting that water run downhill to a generator at the lower reservoir. This is water that would be somewhat "recycled".

There are some existing potential sites for such a system left over from the sugarcane industry, but even this reservoir based hydro-electric system has some problems. There are some non-GMO agricultural uses that would like to replace sugarcane and utilize those sites.

Certainly, food production is a more critical need in Hawaii than energy production. Hawaiians lived rich lives on these islands for a thousand years without electricity.

A water plan for Kauai should look to reforesting barren parts of the land that were stripped and used for sugarcane. The ditches of diverted water should be used to this end. The greening of the hillside helps hold the cloud cover and would recharge their aquifers. It would slow down the rush of fresh water off the island.

QUESTION: Specifically, I ask the planners of this project to detail how their horizontal well will recharge our aquifers and slow the movement of fresh water off Kauai?

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Testimony by Arius Hopman


My name is Arius Hopman, I hold a degree in geology with honors, and have been a business owner on Kauai for 16 years and resident of Hawaii for 25 years. As a professional geologist, I find the proposed horizontal drilling with a 24 inch diameter pipe disturbing and unscientific. The consequences of such a project have not been properly thought out and are skewed towards profiteering. All Kauai residents need to become informed and ask all the serious questions before this project can proceed.

Introduction:
 the geology of the island is complex and the interior of Waiale'ale is not well understood. The permeable volcanic rocks extruded from the floor of the Pacific is magnesium and iron rich and flows into the dome-like volcanoes typical of these islands. Before the “hot spot” of liquid magma moves on, it pushes up with great pressure against the extruded dome, causing it to crack more or less vertically. The high pressure magma is then intruded from below into the cracks where it cools and solidifies into dykes. Because of the pressure, the rock in these dykes is much denser than the surrounding basalt, causing near water-impenetrable walls. Dykes can be seen in the Waimea Canyon criss-crossing the eroding walls. They extend three-dimensionally into the depth of the mountain.

Imagine hundreds of these near-impenetrable walls intersecting each other at all angles. With time, the basalt weathers and the dykes crack. Rainwater seeps in from above, filling both perched water tables and aquafers. Hundreds of springs develop where these water tables and aquifers come to the surface of the eroding island. Not much is known about the intricate hydrology in the heart of this island.

But not only are springs affected by the trapped water and the water-column pressure above the springs. There are "gaining" streams, which increase their flow from aquafers (ie.springs in-or near the streams), and "loosing" streams that seep water into the aquafers. Complexity is added by the many ditches, tunnels and wells drilled over time.

Alert:
Before we unbalance this complex hydrology, we need to understand much more carefully what the consequences are!

Add to this picture additional human elements, specifically special interests (ie. greed), that want to exploit public assets for private gain. Let us be clear from the start: all natural water on the island is a public resource. Only the public has the right to determine if- and how it is used. Neither the Department of Water, nor the State have any ownership of the public water. We, the citizens have elected and appointed our public servants to steward and malama all natural resources.

Any action taken must also consider the impact on our precious and fragile environment, especially now, during these decades of extended drought resulting from human-induced global warming: Rain catchment records show that the centuary-average annual rain at Waiale'ale was 423". But from 1995 to 2011 the average rainfall had dropped to 353"/year.

Alert: 
A University of Hawaii study concludes that Trade winds, that bring most of the rain, have decreased by 30%-40% over the last 40 years. This should be a wake-up call.

Questions:

---This decrease in annual railfall must be taken into account in our environmental assessment: To put it simply, our water supply is decreasing at an accelerated rate. Is this a wise time to tap and drain down our primary water supply?

--- Has the annual and/or dry season flow of all major streams and springs been measured and documented? Are these documents available to the public? If not, how can we insure that we are not destroying the natural flow of springs and streams by drilling and extracting?

---Does the effect of the extended drought show up in any of the recorded stream and spring flow rates?

---What contingency plan does the DOW have if springs and streams are negatively affected, either by drought or drilling?


---Do we plan to once again sacrifice the environment... especially during this drying trend!?


---Have we reached our "peak of water" as in many other parts of the world? If so, what is the most responsible decision, for the many future generations to come?


---What would the sustainable consumption of water look like on Kauai, and has sustainable consumption been taken into account?


---What are the economic pressures affecting this rush to drill?


---The average water consumption of the Kapa'a/Lihue population is 6 million gallons/day. A sudden influx of 8mm GPD would either waste water needlessly or cause a rapid flurry of development. Is development the hidden agenda behind the innocent-sounding proposal for hydro-electric generation?

---What additional environmental impacts would such a surge of development have on all aspects of Kauai life?

---Isn't water the primary tangible public asset in this project, and the hydraulic energy a mere byproduct?? Yet the spin is that we need "clean" hydraulic energy. Isn't that public deception?

---Does anybody know the hydrological water head (column of water), and therefore the water pressure at the proposed drilling source under the mountain? ---...And if not, how can one determine the volume of water exiting the pipe daily?

---On Big Island in one drilling, the water column was 2000 feet. A column of water 24 feet high is one atmosphere of pressure. How many atmospheres have been calculated here and what factors/assumptions that went into the calculation? Can we risk drilling before knowing?


--- A 24" diameter pipe at, say a column of water 2000 foot high... Isn't the estimated additional 8mmGPD (eight million gallons/day) outflow a considerable underestimate?


---It is estimated that the flow of water from the Makaleha Spring is approximately 1,000,000 gallons per day. Yet the cumulative opening at this spring is much less than 6 inches diameter, and more like 3 or 4 inches. Isn't a 24 inch pipe vastly oversized for the water needs of Kauai?

---How can the Kauai Department of Water, which is NOT a public service, but rather a semi-private hybrid, possibly make unbiased decisions in the service of Kauai residents? Please explain and pledge in detail. If this project is pono, this should be an easy task.

---IF NOT 100% PONO,shouldn't the DOW recuse itself from this project, or become a fully public service-oriented (not semi-private) County Department?

---Were studies of ground water samples that found atrozene and other chemicals in the samples initiated before or after the horizontal well project was conceived? Wouldn't such chemicals be the perfect excuse to "drill, baby, drill"?... Rather than take responsibility and clean up the mess the plantations and GMO Co's have left us?

---Have any developers/real estate agents been involved in any way in the planning of this project?

---What is the connection between this proposed project and the Public Land Development Corp.?

---Isn't this the perfect "back door" to PLDC-style development?

--- Who ultimately profits from this project? Detailed response requested.

---Is there transparency in all aspects of this project? Please answer.

---The cost of new water meters has skyrocketed in recent years. If there is a sudden rush of development, what happens to that cost and who profits?

---Are there any documents available to the public that outline all details, and future profits from this project?

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Scoping Meeting on Horizontal Well  4/2/13

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Death of Sprawl Confirmed

SUBHEAD: Sustainable towns better protect local food and water while reducing pollution and CO2 emissions.  

By Warren Karlenzig on 10 April 2012 in Energy Bulletin -  
(http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-04-10/death-sprawl)


Image above: Weeds have taken over a row of vacant, unfinished new homes Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009 in Gilbert, Arizona. AP Photo by Matt York . From original article From (http://anti-union.blogspot.com/2009/03/this-is-from-boston.html).
 
The United States has reached an historic moment. The exurban development explosion that defined national growth during the past two decades has come to a screeching halt, according to the latest US Census figures. Only 1 of the 100 highest-growth US communities of 2006—all of them in sprawled areas—reported a significant population gain in 2011, prompting Yale economist Robert Shiller to predict suburbs overall may not see growth “during our lifetimes.”

We are simultaneously witnessing the decline of the economic sectors enabled by hypergrowth development: strip malls and massive shopping centers, SUVs and McMansions. The end of exurban population growth has been accompanied by steep economic decline in real estate value, triggering a loss of spending not only in construction, but also home improvement (Home Depot, Best Buy) and numerous associated retail sectors that were banking on the long-term rising fortunes of “Boomburbs.”

The fate of these communities has been so dire that for the first time in the United States suburbs now have greater poverty than cities.

In 2009, I attributed the financial crash in these car-based communities to economic factors perpetrated by the higher gas prices that had first started showing impacts in late 2006 and peaked in 2008. Others including The Brookings Institution’s Christopher Leinberger, and William Frey, along with NRDC’s Kaid Benfield have pointed to longer term demographic shifts and societal desires toward renting in denser mixed-use neighborhoods. The looming specter of excess greenhouse gases may also be playing a role in the marked reduction of driving among younger Americans (16-39 year olds), who increasingly prefer to live where they can walk or bike to their local store, school or café.

The “Death of Sprawl” chapter I wrote that was published by the Post Carbon Institute in 2009 (and in the Post Carbon Reader in 2010) provided a case study on Victorville, California. Located 75 miles outside Los Angeles, Victorville’s rise and crash epitomized the hangover of the go-go sprawl era.

During the financial system’s Derivative Daze, Victorville grew from 64,000 in 2000 to more than 108,000 by 2005: no-money-down-housing developments and “liar loans” fueled speculative investments that pumped up the desert city’s average home value to almost $350,000. The large numbers of workers that moved to Victorville had to commute long hours before dawn and after dark to get to work in Los Angeles, without the benefit of local public transit. There are still few options for those who wish to walk or bicycle to stores, jobs, schools or local amenities, and the average near 100 degree summer temperatures make such endeavors foolhardy.

When gas prices began to go up in 2006, real estate sales in the region began to dry up as people ran for the exits. As the doors slammed shut, foreclosures in California’s Inland Empire (Victorville and other parts of California’s sprawling San Bernardino and Riverside counties), Las Vegas and Florida began to trigger a nationwide real estate meltdown.

To stick with our illustration, Victorville houses plummeted from an average of nearly $350,000 in 2006 to $125,000 by late 2009. Likewise, new home permits in Victorville went from 7964 in 2004-06 down to 739 in 2008-10: a drop of more than tenfold! The average home sale now brings around $110,000, less than a third of 2005-2006 prices.

Institutional investors and homebuyers alike have avoided for the past five years the nation’s scores of Victorvilles; the new data and pronouncements by experts such as Shiller, author of The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, likely put the last nails in the coffin of speculative, auto-dependant sprawl.

Recent US Census data confirms that the future of the United States is no longer about an economy based on the false and dangerous pretenses of unfettered greenfield development, with its unhealthy and climate-destructive sprawl-scape of fast food, big box retail and freeway-bred exurbs. National policies and investments should strengthen and improve existing cities and suburbs, including transit infrastructure, building retrofitting, clean energy, walkability, bicycle networks and neighborhood redesign–all areas where quality local job and community engagement opportunities can flourish.

We’ve known for some time that planning for more sustainable metros, both cities and suburbs, makes better sense in terms of protecting local food, water and land resources, as well as in reducing pollution and carbon emissions. Now we know that such actions have been proven to make much better short-term economic sense, while acting as tangible investments for the long term.

• Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, a global consultancy for sustainable urban planning and development. Originally article published in (http://commoncurrent.com/flow/2012/04/10/census-and-experts-confirm-death-of-sprawl-in-us). 

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