Letters to the Editor for Sunday — April 04, 2004

• Help for boy

• Environmental Refugees

• Wailua bike path

• School teachers

Help for boy

I am sure most of you have heard of the tragic accident that happened at Lumaha‘i beach on the North Shore on April 1. While most of us played April fools jokes on our family and friends an 11 -year-old boy’s life changed forever. He and both his parents were swept off the rocks by a large wave, he was saved and his parents drowned. As a father of a 7-year-old boy and a son I can’t stop thinking about him. About how the first 11 years won’t compare to the rest of his life. About how a child is so dependant on his parents for so many things. How these parents brought him to Hawai‘i to experience the beauty of Kaua‘i we all enjoy and then having it all ripped away from him so unexpectedly,

Our ocean has recently brought the community together in helping a young Kaua‘i girl who lost a limb in what will forever change her. I am asking everyone to come together and give again. I feel a deep responsibility to help this young boy who so undeservingly suffered from a tragic ocean accident on our beautiful island. You can call tho Department of Human Services directly at 643-1643.

Joel Guy

Environmental Refugees

The Contractors Association of Kauai meeting (Garden Island Newspaper 3-26) discussing Kaua‘i’s housing ‘woes’ had 13’shoulds’in it. ‘Should haves’ would have been more accurate.

The march of progress known as development or modernization has created what is known as Environmental Refugees. Not ‘poor people’ or’income challenged folks’ as JoAnn Yukimura depicts the residents of Kauai. Two examples being —victims of governments that have foolishly or intentionally destroyed the environment for greed, profit or flimsy national security reasons or have contaminated or destroyed the environment as a way to get people to move away.

Stuart Leiderman explains how these Environmental Refugees – whose numbers are twenty-five million or more now, and perhaps will reach one hundred million during the next century. Even less attention is paid to their wrecked, depleted or contaminated landscapes, so that refugees/locals themselves can return home. Instead, a kind of malevolent opportunism bulldozes over their past and attempts to grind diverse and leafy cultures everywhere into the paved monoculture we call “civilization”. This is all wrong.

And Environmental Refugees require restoration not development. Grove Farm (Pres. and VP) is spinning the housing crisis into a reason to expedite the permit /application process for developers. Proposals to create ‘servant quarters’ and a handful of ‘affordable’ accommodations in their reckless developments serves to deepen the crisis and allow unfettered destruction by cultural annihilation (Genocide), over population, urban sprawl, land loss, soil depletion, deforestation, pollution via bad planning.

When the rightful owners of these lands are forced to live a marginal existence in cars, tents or shoddy dwellings and the usurpers, Grove Farm et al, work hand in hand with public officials whose main concern is re-election, I say, now there’s a problem. The only solution has and still is No Development but More Development is what’s on the table. And that’s why I saved the 3/26 article. I believe it’s quite an incriminating admission of wrongdoing.

Elaine Dunbar

Kilauea

Wailua bike path

This is to support the letter entitled Wailua Lands by Dale Rosenfeld, published in the Garden Island on April 1. Last year when we lived in Wailua quite close to Lae Nani my wife and I went to swim at the beach fronting Lae Nani and when exiting the ocean we were challenged by a uniformed security guard for trespassing. We were told that we were subject to arrest, but since this was the first time he had seen us, he would let it pass, but if we were ever seen there again we would be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The beach was walking distance to my house, but needless to say, we never swam there again. It is my opinion that the owners of Lae Nani have come to believe that the lawn where I was threatened with arrest is their private property rather than state land. Put the bike and pedestrian path Makai!!

Harold Goldberg MD

School teachers

A front page story in The Garden Island quoted one of Gov. Lingle’s remarks about her feelings toward the University of Hawai‘i’s faculty union, UHPA. The 31% pay increase was valid, she said, because, “It’s the one union whose members bring revenues in the state. They educate people who are going to entrepreneur…here in the state. They play a critical role in our economic development so their success is our success.” If only she would consider elementary, middle, and high schools as integral to Hawai‘i’s economy.

These schools prepare children to attend said university and other universities. Academic and social skills are developed between the ages of five and eighteen. The success of this development is vital to society and then further toward economic growth. If Gov. Lingle and the state legislators cared about this, they would see the importance of tending to this age group as carefully as college age students. A population of educated, responsible people, with or without college ambitions, could end dependence on government subsidies which would save the state money.

I very much appreciate The Garden Island for continuing to publish academic and business achievements of Kaua‘i’s students and high school graduates. Thank you! Our community needs this information to balance the overwhelming amount of negativity toward public schools. It also provides some all important data that Gov. Lingle’s appointed CARE committee could read to see that there is, indeed, quality education here on Kaua‘i. The teachers’ union, HSTA, plays a major role as the precursor so that, for Hawai‘i, all the students’ success is our success also.

Terese Barich

Koloa