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From Alana:

Too often loko i’a are talked about as things of the past, and somewhat obsolete. They are spoken of like memorials of a time past, a time when Hawaiians could essentially farm huge amounts of fish without even needing to feed them. But those days are over, right? No, they don’t have to be. 

On Saturday at He’eia fishpond in Kaneohe, a bunch of people got together to help fish some of the predators, like baracuda, out of the fishpond. He’eia is an estimated 800 years old. It is owned by Bishop Estate, and is cared for by  Paepae o He’eia, a private non-profit organization. It has taken them years to clear destructive mangrove trees off of about half the fishpond wall, and they are still working on fixing a hole in the wall, but they still manage to produce and sell moi. He’eia produces anywhere between 300 and 700 pounds of moi each year and that number is expected to increase when the wall is fixed and the fishpond is completely restored. About 100 years ago there were many more fishponds all around the island, but most of them have either been filled in completely with mangroves, or are in ruin. 

He’eia, though, is a beautiful example of how community effort can lead to something meaningful and productive. Although many fishponds are privately owned now, they could still serve as productive entities of society. He’eia and Moli’i on O’ahu both manage to. Hawaiian fishponds utilized a system that was not found anywhere else on the planet. It was probably the most efficient and sustainable way of raising herbivore fish ever. Fishponds are not the remnants of an ancient culture. Hawaiians are still here, and Hawaii can still benefit from fishponds.

From Melissa:

Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) was denied approval by the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) of it’s Amended Biofuel Contract with Imperium Renewables on August 5, 2009. The amended contract would have Imperium import biodiesel from a West Coast refinery to power HECO’s new 110-megawatt generating plant, instead of a refinery built by Imperium.

Costs brought on by this amended contract would have shifted costs from Imperium to HECO’s customers, as it would have to import the fuel from the West Coast of the Continental US. The PUC ruled,

“…the Amended Contract limits Imperium’s potential liability for failure to perform, but HECO failed to provide credible evidence that such a provision, which substantially shifted risk from Imperium to HECO and its ratepayers, was necessary.” Given the substantial amendments to the Original Contract, which were not subject to a competitive bidding process (or some other process that would provide the commission with some assurance that the amended terms are reasonable), the commission finds that HECO failed to demonstrate that the Amended Contract is in the public interest…”

Although this is a win for HECO’s ratepayers, they must also ask themselves if biofuel is right for Hawaii. As stated in the testimony of Henry Curtis, Executive Director of Life of the Land, against the Amended Biofuel Contact,

Life of the Land’s position (on HECO’s application requesting the Public Utilities Commission’s of the State of Hawaii’s approval to commit funds estimated at $134,310,260 for the purchase and installation of the Campbell Industrial Park Generating Station and Transmission Additions Project) was that biofuels negatively impact climate change in a number of ways: producing ethanol and biodiesel requires the use of large amounts of fossil fuels, water, and land. Hawai`i is parceling off its agricultural land and where we would get the water remains a huge issue. Will Hawai`i ever be able to grow enough biofuel to satisfy our needs? Life of the Land doubts it. After one hundred plus years of plantation-style monocropping, is this what we really want to do? Growing biofuels is not about small farmers, it is about big agribusinesses and corporate farming. How will this help Hawai`i’s struggling family farms? Should Hawai`i be using our precious agricultural lands to grow energy crops or food? Since Hawai`i imports 90% of our food, wouldn’t promoting food security and feeding our people be a more prudent use of these lands? Biofuel production competes with food products for resources. In the US, corn that could be used to feed people and animals is siphoned off for fuel. In Brazil ethanol production displaces other crops which are then grown in newly decimated Amazon rain forests. The most productive source of biodiesel is palm oil. Most of the world’s biodiesel is grown in Indonesia and Malaysia on recently destroyed rain forests. … Indonesia ranks third in the world in greenhouse gas emissions from the carbon emitted by burning forests and peat soils to make room for mono-cropped palm oil plantations. In essence, we are substituting the greatest source of global warming – the burning of fossil fuels – for the second greatest contributor – deforestation. …

Also provided in the testimony of Henry Curtis, Dr. Tadeus Patzek, Chairman of the Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin, states:

Now I am predicting the diverse negative consequences of intensive biofuel use in Hawaii and dare the defenders of the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO’s) decision to burn palm oil from Malaysia in an electrical power plant on Oahu to laugh at me. What seems to be at stake here is a tragically misguided decision by HECO to secure a new source of fossil fuel for its electrical power station. Their thinking seems to be that as long as the new fuel is not crude oil, somehow its flow will increase the strategic security of energy supply of Oahu. This type of linear, unimaginative thinking is characteristic of large bureaucracies under pressure to come up with a quick fix of a perceived problem.

Are monocropped agrofuels the fix to our dependence on petroleum, or should be be looking other places such as renewable energy systems? As HECO moves to solicit bids for alternative biofuel suppliers, that question should be in the back of everyones mind.

From Alana:

From “Hawai’i has a lot to gain from open ocean aquaculture” in today’s Honolulu Advertiser:

Just as we need to be off imported oil, we need to be off imported seafood. This opportunity can be an economic engine for Hawai’i, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.Let’s not stand in our own way. There’s  a lot to gain for everyone.

Absolutely.

The amount of seafood that we import is really astounding. It is upsetting, though, that in the wake of a very large aquaculture operation, which would export up to 90% of its ahi products, statements like the above, are used to defend it.

The article, by Jay Fidell of ThinkTech Hawaii, goes on to say that:

There are anti-aquaculture groups who don’t want “greedy” corportations to make a profit and export aquaculture products to outside markets. Those groups don’t acknowledge andvancements in the technology, and regularly diseminate disinformation about the industry. They’ve been pulling out all the stops, apparently bent on wiping out open ocean aquaculture in Hawai’i. Theyre’re completely wrong. Without open ocean aquaculture, Hawai’i would have to depend on foreign unregulated producers and overfished wild stocks. Those options are not nearly as secure or sustainable as the development of homegrown open ocean aquaculture.

I do not think of myself as entirely “anti-aquaculture”, I just think it should be done right. My cause is not to “diseminate disinformation”, it is to let people know that there are serious implications that multiple aquaculture ventures could have on Hawaii’s marine ecosystems. It is also to open peoples eyes to aquaculture in other parts of the world, and to how it has affected those places. This article makes it seem like there is some hidden agenda beneath fighting these giant open ocean aquaculture projects. But really, I have nothing to gain from this. I have neither read nor heard anything pro-open ocean aquaculture, aside from the people who would benefit direcly from it.

From Alana:

For the past few weeks there have been numerous articles, editorials, and letters to editors in several local newspapers regarding open ocean aquaculture. A recent editorial in the Honolulu Advertiser states that 

the large size and experimental nature of the [Hawaii Oceanic Tech] project demands that state regulators, and the public, keep a critical eye on the project as it moves forward.

The article goes on to say that the objective of this project is an organic, ecologically sustainable fish. 

PROBLEM #1: Organic. The problem with this is that there are no organic standards for fish farming. It would also be especially hard to develop one for open ocean aquaculture, because the cages are not closed systems. Anything that is in the water will wind up in the bodies of the fish.

Hawaii Oceanic Tech also hopes to use “organic feed” for their fish. The main ingredient in HOTIs feed will be “sardines from sustainable fish stocks”. But, this goes back to what I said above: there are no organic standards for fish, so any claims of their feed being so are false.

PROBLEM #2: Ecologically Sustainable. This is a tricky one, just because it is so undefined. What is ecologically sustainable? Everything humanity does will impact the environment in some way. Perhaps ecologically sustainable means there is a balance of pros and cons for the environment. But what are the pros in this situation? Proponents of aquaculture say that farming fish gives wild populations a chance to repopulate, but this is easily proven wrong by the environmental havoc  that fish farming has caused in British Columbia and other places where fish farms are popular. Many Canadians are embarrassed that their government has let the caged farming industry expand because of its serious impacts. 

More information about ocean fish farming’s impact on wild stocks can be found here: Science Daily: Ocean Fish Farming Harms Wild Fish, Study Says (Neil Frazer-UH)

Keep your eyes open for more aquaculture in the news in the coming weeks.

Rock, Metal, Petrol-based Product Dumped in Stream Bed

City of Honolulu Must Clean Mess, Halt Illegal Acts

posted by: Stewart

The U.S. government has ordered the City and County of Honolulu to clean up an illegal dump in Waianae after the city was found to have used a stream bed as a landfill for more than a year, in violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which announced the order earlier today, the area of the dump was about 1.08 acres, or roughly the area of a football field.

The EPA’s order requires the city to remove the illegally dumped material and restore the stream bed and banks of Maili’ili Stream near Waianae. Under the order, the city of Honolulu also must refrain from dumping more material in the stream bed, which is located near Waianae, a poor community on Oahu’s Leeward Coast that is largely populated by Native Hawaiians.

In July, the EPA inspected the stream and confirmed that concrete rubble, metal debris, dirt, and petroleum-based asphalt had been placed in Maili’ili Stream. The city had filled an area of about 1.08 acres in Maili’ili Stream: along both the north and south banks, the fill was about eight yards wide for a distance of about 175 yards. Fill extended across the entire 33-yard channel width for the uppermost 70 yards of the stream, the EPA said.

“This order will protect the coastline and water quality by removing the unauthorized fill and restoring the Maili’ili Stream to its previous condition,” said Alexis Strauss, the EPA’s Water Division director for the Pacific Southwest region. “It’s vital to consult with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and obtain needed permits well in advance of any fill activity.”

From Melissa:

Haleakala National Park is being invaded by Yellowjacket wasps as you are reading this blog.

Invading wasps in Haleakala National Park, which usually make nests the size of a football, have grown nests “the size of a ’57 Buick,” according to a new study.

Research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows a fascinating interplay in which the invaders are being shaped by their new environment, just as they are drastically changing the native ecosystem. Not only do the aliens — western yellowjacket wasps, Vespula pensylvanica — take advantage of the lack of cold winters to grow huge nests, they have taken to eating vertebrate meat as well as other insects, geckos and native shearwaters.

Erin Wilson, who has just completed a doctorate in biology at the University of California, San Diego, studied the yellowjackets at Haleakala and Hawaii Volcanoes national parks in 2006 and 2007. The yellowjackets have been a problem in the parks for years, but their new diet and their numbers were a surprise.

In a telephone interview from Acadia National Park in Maine, where she is vacationing, Wilson said yellowjackets like high, lonely places.

They are hard to find, which is why the size of the nests — up to 600,000 individuals compared with a few thousand in a usual nest — escaped attention.

Along with Argentinian ants, the yellowjackets are among the most dangerous alien arthropod invaders of the park.

“It’s not just what they’re killing,” Wilson said. “They’re also collecting great amounts of nectar, drawing down the resources for anything else that might want to feed on it, whether it’s native insects or birds like the Hawaiian honeycreepers.”

The wasps do not attack and kill vertebrates. They scavenge the protein-rich remains of dead animals. But even that could help unbalance the native ecosystem by usurping the food supply for native scavengers, like the pueo.

To read full story, click here

From Alana:

Entitled Aquaculture in Hawaii: Economic Advantage or Source of Sustainability, the Hawaii Venture Capitalist Association’s recent meeting addressed the benefits of many types of aquaculture in Hawaii. I think the presentation did a good job of explaining how aquaculture could be in Hawaii, in its most ideal form.

One of the first things mentioned was that aquaculture could help restore wild fish populations that are headed towards extinction. They failed to address, however, how that would happen. It is accepted in the scientific community that fish raised in fish farms are much less fit to live in the wild. Another weak point in the presentation was explaining how the current and future open ocean aquaculture ventures would increase self-sufficiency in Hawaii by reducing imports. Up to 90% of the future ventures’ fish would be exported, while the 10% allotted for Hawaii would go to restaurants like Alan Wong’s and Mariposa, restaurants that most people here can’t afford to go to on a regular basis.

There were also two slides that were completely skipped, clearly regarding genetics. I understand that this may have been due to time constraints, but the public deserves to know not only about possible economic gains from aquaculture, but also the genetic and environmental consequences of it.

A good way to sum up the outlook of the meeting is with the quote

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”

this quote was used during the presentation, but who is to say what is worth doing and what isn’t? Is anything worth doing badly anymore? A  commenter on one of m previous posts claimed that “fish poop” produced from aquaculture can curb the effects of climate change by absorbing the CO2 from the atmosphere, and adding it to the ocean. However, as my previous “ocean acidification” post details, an increase nutrient-rich fish effluent leads to the acidification of the ocean, thereby further risking the health of many ecosystems.

Once again, I urge everyone to learn more about what is going on in terms of aquaculture in Hawaii.

Here are some links to more info on open ocean aquaculture. It is our responsibility to find out as much as we can while we can.

Food and Water Watch: Fish Farms

Kona Blue Fish Farm

Hawaii Oceanic Technology, Inc