After the PLDC (Public Land Development Corporation) being in charge of the DLNR by Hawai'i Governor Abercromie, but was forced by the people, through petition, calls, and general public out rage...to be Repealed...Another method has been devised to overrun the Islands...Appointments...A Monsanto consultant? Really?...
Representing the Governor for the Position to hold the head of Water Commission...Tell them that this guy illegally favors the plantation/Monsanto/Corporates and that last time he was on the Water Commission he twice voted for the corporations and both times got overturned by the Hawaii Supreme Court
Action Alert Hawaii!!! Representing the Governor for the Position to hold the head of Water Commission...Tell them that this guy illegally favors the plantation/Monsanto/Corporates and that last time he was on the Water Commission he twice voted for the corporations and both times got overturned by the Hawaii Supreme Court
Ige has outdone himself. His latest nomination of Bill Balfour to the water commission takes the cake.
In a nutshell, Balfour, a guy who has made a career out of stealing water from the public for corporate profit, would now be on the very board charged with protecting water as a public trust.
You can't make this stuff up.
He spent 39 years as a sugar plantation exec. and is now a Monsanto consultant. He doesn't belong on the water commission. There are 3 things you can do to stop his nomintation:
1. sign the petition below and share it
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/do-not-confirm-plantation
2. Submit testimony to the Senate against his nomination.
(Dead line ends in 1 hour, so need to flood with balls all week, until Friday https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152848577936032/ more info)
Tuesday deadline! Submit testimony to the Senate Water & Land Committee (WTL) on GM 820 OPPOSING Bill Balfour’s confirmation to the Commission on Water Resource Management (CWRM) for a term to expire 6-30-2019. Also call the Committee Members, who’s phone numbers are below. Doing both is most effective.
The confirmation hearing is Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 2:45 pm in Room 224 before the Senate Committee on Water and Land (Chair Thielen, Vice Chair Galuteria). Consider testifying in person.
Submit testimony to the Senate on GM 820 OPPOSING Mr. Balfour’s confirmation:
http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/measure_indiv.aspx?billtype=GM&billnumber=820&year=2015
Sign up or sign in, then enter 'GM 820' in the 'bill status' field and hit return. Click 'submit testimony' and enter fields.
3. call the senators below and tell them you oppose the confirmation of Balfour to the water commission.
Laura Thielen: 587-8388
Brickwood Galuteria 586-6740
Les Ihara 586-6250
Maile Shimabukuro 586-7793
Gil Riviere 586-7330
Sam Sloan 586-8420
Russel Rudermann 586-6890
And for DLNR...The head of the Nature Conservantcy...
Suzanne Case, State Director of Nature Conservancy nominated to head DLNR. And tell them NO to Suzanne Case TOO!
We got him to withdraw a developer last week...Let's do this again...UPDATE:: William (Bill) Balfour...passed Senate Committee...BUT...Is he who he says he is?
I think the Hunt is over...Just look at those EARS! Likes plastic surgery too...His under eyes are either photoshopped, or adjusted ..
.Where his top part of the ear meets the head looks like had something done too...
If it wasn't for the internet...we would all still continue to be tricked.
Ma Trix...
Fooling our spirits, and Mother Earth is the one who suffers, along with every other life on Earth...Our Ma has been tricked...I love semantics...
And, It is not nice to fool Mother Nature...In fact it is destructive, and non-productive...
Vultures In The Nature Conservancy
The Nature Conservancy: Another example of How To Pluck A Non-Profit.
KYCBS.NET|BY THE CATBIRD
http://www.kycbs.net/NatureConservancy.htm
Vultures in
THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those
who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
An Interview with Christine MacDonald
By Paul Comstock
~ ~ ~
CLR INTERVIEW: Christine MacDonald is a journalist who has written for the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and Chicago Tribune. She also worked for Conservation International’s Global Communications Division. Her new book is Green Inc., An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad. Below is Christine’s interview with the California Literary Review.
~ ~ ~
What do you think is the main problem with the way environmental organizations are currently run?
It’s impossible to generalize about the entire environmental movement. There are about 12,000 nature groups in this country alone. Many do good work and have strict rules governing corporate fundraising; others are not as scrupulous. In my book, I discuss excesses at about a dozen large groups and take an in-depth look at three organizations that play a huge role in nature conservation not only in this country but in tropical countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.
While Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) often make important scientific contributions, they cancel out all the good works by taking millions of dollars from corporations in an array of polluting industries. Their contributors include power companies, mining conglomerates and grain traders that are fueling the transformation of the last remaining rainforests in Latin America and the Asian Pacific into vast soybean and palm oil plantations.
World Wildlife Fund draws the line at oil companies. But CI, TNC and groups like The Conservation Fund, which works inside the United States, are beholden to BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips and Shell Oil Co.. Corporate moguls including Roger Sant, the founder of AES Corp., which operates dozens of coal-burning power plants, and Rob Walton, the chairman of Wal-Mart’s board, sit on the boards of directors that run the groups.
While these relationships have spawned lucrative new funding streams, the money has essentially bought off the organizations. Groups that take oil money, for instance, have studiously avoided comment on the battle these companies are waging with other environmentalists to open up more of the country to drilling.
The corporate ties also lead to warped relationships. CI and Bunge Ltd., one of the world’s largest grain traders, have a partnership in Brazil that both tout as a “success story.” They are working with soy farmers to set aside some of the savannah lands that the farmers are converting into soybean fields. According to CI, the project has saved about 120,000 hectares (one hectare equals 2.5 acres) over several years. By CI’s own estimates, however, 2.2 million hectares of Brazilian savannah are lost every year. Much of it is being converted to supply Bunge’s soy crushing factories. So, the net positive effect of the project is insignificant. Bunge’s demand for soybeans continues to fuel large-scale habitat destruction. CI is helping Bunge greenwash its image....
How much money do the leaders of environmental organizations earn?
Again, it’s impossible to generalize given the number and wide variety of environmental organizations in the country. What I can tell you is that the leaders of several of the country’s largest nature groups make salaries of $350,000 or more, which puts them in the top 1 percent of US taxpayers. Among the highest paid is Steven E. Sanderson, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who makes more than$825,000 in salary and fringe benefits, according to his group’s 2006 tax return.
You criticize environmental groups working with large corporations, but isn’t it more effective to engage them than to attack them? Could much have been accomplished without corporate support?
I bought into that notion before I went to work for CI. But after watching environmentalists blatantly engage in greenwashing for their corporate sponsors, I can tell you that once a group takes money from a corporation and comes to rely on the continued flow of those dollars to run programs and pay salaries, it loses its ability to be a critic and a watchdog. One high-ranking environmentalist once told me he shies away from seeking corporate funds because corporate executives “tend to want to buy you up first and talk about conservation later.” I think that is largely the norm.
It’s not that the groups don’t do some good work with the money they get from corporations. While too much goes to pay those six-figure salaries, posh offices and extravagant “fact finding” trips to exotic destinations such as the Galapagos Islands or Pacific Island atolls, some of it is used to conduct scientific studies of endangered species and pay for nature conservation such as CI and Bunge’s partnership to save savannah lands in Brazil. But when you look at the result of that program – saving 120,000 hectares when more than 2 million are lost annually – and so many others like it, they can hardly be considered “success stories” by any objective measure. Meanwhile, Bunge and other companies use their relationships with these groups to paint themselves as an environmentally friendly, which is pure greenwash.
There are plenty of groups that refuse to take corporate funding and continue to thrive and be effective – arguably more effective. Among them isGreenpeace, which has a much more confrontational approach. It’s also more controversial. But it was Greenpeace – not CI, TNC or WWF – that got Bunge and other international grain traders to agree to a moratorium on buying soy raised on recently deforested Amazon lands. They didn’t do it by being polite.
Similarly, Greenpeace showed up WWF earlier this year with a day of protests at the European offices of Unilever, a manufacturer that uses palm oil to make everything from Knorr soups to Dove soap. Unilever responded by agreeing to stop buying palm oil from Indonesia, where the orangutan has been driven to the point of extinction by plantation expansion. WWF had spent years spearheading corporate-nonprofit roundtable negotiations to coax Unilever and other manufacturers to address the same issue without achieving an agreement. So there is reason to believe that environmentalists are more effective when they act like environmentalists – not like corporate courtiers.
You write in your book about the lack of consideration for Native peoples. Would you talk a little about that?
While international conservation groups like to describe the rainforests where they work as pristine, undiscovered places, the truth is people have lived for millennia in the vast majority of these places. The conservationists often see them as “invaders of the forest” who threaten the plant and animal species they have come to protect. But the natives see the foreign conservationists as the interlopers.
In the last few decades, with the urging of international conservation groups and the enticement of foreign aid dollars, millions of people have been evicted from their ancestral homes around the globe according to sociologists who study the trend, and the land turned into national parks and other protected areas. At the same time, conservation groups have come under fire for cutting deals with corporations operating in these same remote places. The groups often trade their acquiescence of large-scale logging operations, open pit mines, oil drilling and pipeline building in exchange for corporate money to do conservation work nearby. The money is often used to strengthen management of protected areas, which usually includes hiring more park rangers to police the parks and keep local people out.
There is no denying that indigenous communities and the rural poor put pressure on the local ecosystems through hunting and clearing land for subsistence farming. But their impact can’t be compared to the much larger scars left by open pit mines, plantations and oil rigs say Native peoples and their advocates, who accuse the conservationists of hypocrisy. They see a double standard in which the world’s poorest, most vulnerable residents are bearing the brunt of the conservation burden while the rich and powerful are immune....
Read the complete article at
Get the book at
Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad
by Christine MacDonald, The Lyons Press, 288 pp.
by Christine MacDonald, The Lyons Press, 288 pp.
Profile of the author, Paul Comstock, Editor of the “California Literary Review”
http://calitreview.com/author/paul
This link...Will take you to the Dirt not fit to grow in....it goes on and on...
This man has documented all the dirt in Hawai'i ...He fought the state, was a whistle blower who never gave up...The Canary in his nest...
This link...Will take you to the Dirt not fit to grow in....it goes on and on...
This man has documented all the dirt in Hawai'i ...He fought the state, was a whistle blower who never gave up...The Canary in his nest...
RIP friend! BOBBY N. HARMON
https://sites.google.com/site/thecatbirdsnest/home/cv05-00030---justice-vs-harmon
https://sites.google.com/site/thecatbirdsnest/home/cv05-00030---justice-vs-harmon
Welcome to the Catbird's new nest...currently being built in the very top of the tallest tree in the forest!
As many visitors to the former Catbird Seat may know, at the behest of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the unjust United States Department of Justice, the old tree was ordered chopped down by Honorable Judge David A. Ezra.
This new nesting site, once completed, will bring you startling new views of the world, along with the best of the archived sightings from the old Catbird Seat. So, spread your wings now and join us at the top of the tree!
He has died this past year but, left his legacy of research for people of Hawai'i to ponder...Amazing...The web, and where it came from, who plays in it, and where this has led in our state government, and federal courts...From Kam School, to Dan Inouye...Learn the truth...
http://www.kycbs.net/
http://www.kycbs.net/
Also, be aware that the Hawai'ians and those who stand by them have taken a stand against the desecration of their Islands, especially, Mauna Kea...
This will be the beginning, of the end of the USA in Hawai'i...
The time is now...
Stand with us to help save Hawai'i's most sacred mountain, Mauna Kea @ Facebook - "Protect Mauna Kea"
(For the Love of the Mountain)
"Aloha mai kakou,
If you would just take a moment to pause from your busy day and think about the most
sacred place that you are connected to, the place that brings you peace and accepts your prayers, very likely the place where your grandparents and their parents once prayed, the place you would safeguard with all of your might, with all that you are and all that you have. If you said the holy name of that place out loud, would it be the name of a church or a temple or chapel you hold dear? Say it, utter its name out loud as I do....my church, my temple, my mountain, Mauna a Wakea, Mauna Kea.
Yes, it is I, an educator, a cultural practitioner, a chanter, a dancer, a teacher, a mother, a petitioner. I have come forward to speak of this mountain, this place I hold dear, this place I sing of and sing to because it is sacred. As a Hawaiian raised in Waimea on Hawai'i Island, raised by my elders, I know intimately of the relationship our kupuna had with the land and the natural elements in what they did and what they knew. I still sing those songs and say those prayers as I place my hands upon the earth or hold them to the heavens. Our ancestors never destroyed to advance, never constructed in a manner that would irreparably harm their island home or its inhabitants. They were a people who protected the balance, the alignment, the interdependence, and the energy in all things. They knew on the deepest of levels how connected all was and is still, not just to here, but to everywhere and everything. In us, that memory still lives.
I am asking you, my people, my public, to imagine over 18 stories of concrete in the construction of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope and the excavation of over five acres of the sacred landscape of Mauna Kea that still moves and shakes and is still alive. Just imagine what it takes to build something of that size, what will be carried up to the top of the mountain, and what will be left there when all is done. This is a time when we must be sure, we must be clear, we must be brave and we must be proud. "Be proud even if you stand alone" were the words from my 11year old as she was guided to prompt me into action. If you believe that something that immense will not create repercussions, I ask you to think again. Let's do something, let's become more aware, more knowledgeable, let's raise our level of consciousness, and be steadfast once again. Let's do what is right for our lands, our people, and our children. Let's do what is right and say, No! Not this time. We have made too many concessions, too many compromises, this time we must stand and speak up. This is our piko. Our mountain is still sacred."
B. Pua Case
Waimea" I'm so concern about the future generation vs Mauna Kea and if we will have Aloha Aina. Right now the game is all or nothing. Even if the present day aina is available in the future, it will be contaminated. We can stand up for Mauna Kea (all or nothing) and begin to clean up now or, we can win this present day war now! So, feast now cause for sure it will be famine." ~ Our Kapuna
Think Permaculture...
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