Hawai‘i Climate Week 2024
An interruption from Paradise, CA reporting to spend time in another troubled paradise
(No. 25, a ±06 minute read)
Imagination, silos, and a climate conference
For the second year in a row scientists, academics, politicians, organizers, and policy makers have gathered at the East-West Center in Mānoa to talk about the state of affairs Hawai‘i faces as global warming reshapes its climate and raises the the surface level of the Pacific Ocean. It’s “Climate Week,” as if for the majority of those in attendance this is the only week of the year our changing climate is on their radar. In fact there has been plenty climate-related on people’s radar here since January of 2023’s inaugural event — last August’s fires in Lāhainā and Kula.
In 2023 the event felt like a belated beginning, a forum to face the defining crisis of our era. Maybe a way forward to common understanding for the people informing and organizing our human systems in Hawai‘i. A way those doing the science, writing the policy, playing the politics might leave their silos and gain a broader knowledge of what others were doing, and what issues were being faced — and still needed addressing. A noble endeavor; global warming ultimately reflects a crisis of, and is caused by, systems; energy systems, economic systems, policy systems, political systems, social systems. Those who shape these systems need to be working together to create solutions. Seems like common sense. But this cooperation requires people to lift their heads from their specialized purviews and look around, broadly, and integrate understandings outside of their expertise. This is not something that people appear to be innately good at, so as far as regarding the complications of global warming goes.
By way of surprising example — I’ve had firsthand experience of the cordons that people doing high-level science live behind. In 2019 I spoke to scientists, and technical and administrative staff, at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I was there to talk to them about the social consequences of global warming, the phenomena most of those assembled were researching and at levels of detail that were, and are, astonishing.
Among my audience were IPPC report contributors and writers, people doing research gathering critically necessary data measuring sea level rise with satellites, others modeling atmospheric behaviors on a heating planet, and those doing the sort of hard science and engineering people a great deal smarter than me do. And yet many were, evidently until my presentation, so immersed in their work that they had not married their research and its results with its human consequences. Nor had they really grasped the failure of political will to take research like theirs and make policy to prevent substantial human suffering.
The work those I was speaking to did was, to them, I suppose, all so much difficult and rewarding science. Exciting work, imaginative work, but the work itself (and its data) existed outside the world of human consequence. These were scientists, working at a national lab, trained to be scrupulously separated from political issues, which of course are human issues. They were part of an academy that I believe, until too recently, felt that compelling data would demand a societal response to the climate dangers being described — a proportional response to the changes in our world global warming was causing.
Avoiding this sort of cloistering and disconnect, I think, describes a goal of our annual Hawaiian climate conference. It’s an opportunity, at its best, to break up silos; to connect the dots and make the connections people need to be making about the work they do to respond, and adapt, to global warming’s effects on the Hawaiian archipelago. Does it succeed? I am not sure I have the best answer to this question: Lāhainā might be that answer.
Our Governor, Josh Brown, opened last year’s event as he did this year’s. He announced a tremendous amount of money to start a state “climate fund” — $100 million dollars.1 He proposed a climate impact fee to be assessed tourists traveling to Hawai‘i, in part to offset the massive amounts of carbon pollution their flights pump into the atmosphere.2 He told the assembled that Alaska Air had expressed a willingness to contribute money to climate mitigation measures here.3 In 2023 he had money to allocate, was stuffed full of Hawai‘i’s leadership in the global warming realm, and was generally a bundle of hope and good old American can-do. We are all chastened in 2024.
In 2023 Green gave his speech, and then he left. As he did this year. His is a heavy gig. I cannot imagine and would not want a governor’s schedule. In 2023 Green spoke on a Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon Ryan Peralta, O‘ahu Branch Forestry Program Manager with the Division of Land and Natural Resources, took the stage. He was an understudy, my notes indicate the State Forester was slated to speak. Peralta is funny, in a particularly local, self-deprecating way. He speaks quotes my world calls “gold tape.”
For all of his good nature and humor, nothing Peralta said in 2023 about fire in Hawai‘i was funny: Invasive Guinea grass that has grown eight feet tall raises flames in a wildfire sixty feet high. Fire spotting, for all intents and purposes, does not exist here. Hawai‘i desperately needs to import methods of real-time mapping common in California and other Western states to improve wildfire response. Invasive grasses burn too dangerously for prescribed burning. There exists a seed bank of 26 million seeds to replant safer vegetation after fires, he needs hundreds of millions. Wildfire is causing the retreat of native forests, threatening aquifer recharging. There have been fires in O‘ahu’s cloud forests.
Governor Green was not there on Tuesday — perhaps a staffer was. Perhaps DLNR was briefing him on these issues. But perhaps not, this is a question for a sit-down with him. In retrospect it seems he should have been listening that Tuesday afternoon to what Peralta had to say. One part of our state’s bureaucracy ought to have been be taking notes from another. That’s easier assessed after the fact than done in any timely way. But one can’t help wonder what some of that $100 million dollars proposed to be sitting in a climate fund might have meant to wildfire fuels management.
I write in my Places Journal piece, seeking lessons from Paradise’s experience of the Camp Fire, about the terrible imagination of bureaucracies. Turns out they don’t really have much of one. Part of it is an inability to conceptualize something that has not already occurred. Another part of it is not understanding what is known across the bureaucratic organism. The left hand knows not that the right hand has been burned, and if it did, it could not understand fire in its nuance — only by its pain.
Responsive planning has built our world to be what it is, for better and worse. Responsive planning, by its definition, cannot respond to what it can’t imagine or it does, or chooses, not to know. Responsive planning is what our unimaginative bureaucracies are able to muster. And yet our individual imaginations continue to be violently expanded by the consequences of a heating atmosphere and warming oceans, causing us anxiety, stress, fear, and often paralyzing us.
There was spoken a simple admonition at last week’s climate conference by Archie Kalepa, a man who, by his admission, did not believe in global warming fifteen years ago. He did not believe until he saw it with his own eyes — global warming was made real for him in the behavior of ocean swells. His disbelief was nothing more than an individual-level example of a bureaucracy’s lack of imagination; he could not see it, imagine it, therefore he did not believe. He has come around, of course, and says this of Lāhainā, “If we build back the same, we have learned nothing.”4 It seems a stern warning to bureaucracies the world over.
Not sure what this has accomplished. To come….
Hasn’t happened, yet? It’s still kicking around, conceptually.
Bears looking into.
Kalepa also said, “We all want the easy way in life. The good work never comes easy.” Not wildly original, but nonetheless necessary to apply when considering our broad social responses to global warming.