SUGAR CANE SMOKE EDITORIALS

Wednesday, December 06, 1997
Sugar cane growing is right. Sugar cane burning is wrong. The burning must and will stop. The sugar companies will have to settle for less profit.

No, the sugar companies do not care for the people. They care about money. If they cared about people, they wouldn't keep a stranglehold on land. The high cost of land is a big deterrent to any business and home ownership. The high cost to business is passed on to all of us. The high cost of health care is passed on to all of us. The high mortgage payment is ours.

It is wrong to tell people to leave the islands if they don't like cane burning. It is our right to protest any wrong, even if it has a negative effect on some.

Let's unite and do what's right.

Sal Rizzotti
Kihei

Sunday, November 9, 1997
I am writing to you because of my concern about the burning of sugar cane in Lahaina. Pioneer Mill is now preparing to harvest its sugar cane near Lahainaluna Road. In the past they have chosen to burn their cane during school hours even though Lahaina Intermediate School is just a few feet away.

I know of many people in my school who can't cope with the smoke produced by the caneburning and thus can't concentrate with their work. I feel that if they burn this cane during school it will not only be a health hazard for the students but also a distraction to our work.

Lahainaluna High School, Lahaina Intermediate and Princess Nahienaena schools all are in a clump on the top of Lahainaluna Road, and when the cane gets burned, the smoke blows directly over these schools. I would hope that Pioneer Mill would be considerate enough to think about us students and not burn cane during our school hours.

Jeffrey Shelton
Lahainaluna High School, Junior

Wednesday, November 05, 1997

The most recent concerted campaign to bring about an end to cane burning is just that -- the most recent. Many have come before.

The past three decades of urban growth on Maui have spawned one group after another with the good intention of extinguishing the harvest-by-fire method that has so long been standard operating procedure for Hawaii, and other, sugar plantations. And no wonder. The ash is a dirty nuisance and the smoke is irritating at best, harmful at worst. Being home to the state's largest sugar plantation -- Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. -- Maui is therefore the site of the most smoke and most ash.

But the anti-burners seldom made much progress. Longtime Mauians, plantation workers and their families would quickly and publicly unite in opposition to anything they saw as a threat not only to their way of life, but to their way of making a living. More importantly, the plantation usually had a simple, straightforward response -- no burning, no plantation. It was a matter of money.

But now, the response is something very different.

HC&S Plantation Manager Steve Holaday told The Maui News last week that he is encouraged by the advances in technology and the findings of experiments the plantation has been conducting on both the growing and the processing ends. No question that it's still a matter of money, but Holaday says that if the yields from the experimentation continue in their present positive direction, his company is prepared to spend the money needed to make the conversion to a near-smokeless harvesting method.

That's good news on more than one front. No one, HC&S included, would lament the passing of the irksome smoke and ash. Not only does that portend a cleaner environment for Maui residents and visitors, but better conditions as well for HC&S workers, none of whom would lose their jobs because of a conversion, according to Holaday.

And, it's a powerful vote of confidence by HC&S in the future of sugar on Maui.

Getting rid of the smoke and ash while retaining the vast green waves of gently swaying cane that are an integral part of Maui's beauty has long seemed the ideal equation -- ideal, but impossible to attain.

Not so impossible after all.

Recently I went sailing. It was gorgeous, until they started burning the cane. Every time we have to be in cane smoke, we are in the most carcinogenic (cancer-causing) environment possible. Although many call this paradise, I've been here 22 years andhave watched many born and raised here die of various forms of cancer. Cane burning causes cancer.

Marybeth Seavy
Kula

The feeling of fresh salt air in your face on the deck of a sailboat off Kihei is hard to exceed. You can see almost to infinity as the gentle morning breeze fills the sails. The water is clear and radiates colors, dark blue, light blue and green from reflections of puffy clouds.

A large mushroom, atomic-looking cloud appears windward over the island of Maui, caused by the burning of sugar cane. It soon spreads out and blanks out Kihei and Wailea. Before the cloud envelopes the boat we take navigation fixes to plot our position because we know our visibility will reduce to almost one-eighth mile.

The boat and sails are covered by brown dust and black soot sucked into the air from the fire. We breathe through wet handkerchiefs, and our eyes water, as the fumes are like standing down-wind from a bonfire.

In about 45 minutes the wind pulls the toxic cloud away from us, and we rinse the soot from the decks, change clothes, put eye drops in and resume our sail. Luckily this only happens nine months a year during the cane burning season. It's comforting to know there is no health risk from cane burning, saith the Health Department. How convenient for Alexander & Baldwin that it doesn't need to be concerned with massive air pollution.

If you would like to talk further or participate in brainstorming 50 ways to have clean air, visit the Maui Clean Air Coalition meetings, alternate Tuesdays, next meeting Oct.21, 6:30 p.m. at the old Kihei Library. I will be the guy in the red shirt.

Noman J. Freeland

Kihei

Harry Eagar's usually informative column, Off Deadline, was full of errors Dec.31 when confronting the issue of sugar growing in Maui's central valley. He spreads the fallacy that Maui's central valley was "naturally" a wasteland before sugar cultivation.

The natural state of the valley was a thick dryland forest. In this forest, giant flightless ducks, nene and other birds roamed among trees that grew nowhere else in the world. Eagar compares the valley to the Arizona desert. Find me one town in Arizona named for flocks of geese that lived there, as Pu’u Nene is named.

The Polynesians reduced this forest to a grassland by recurrent burning as a means to cultivate grass for thatches. But it was cattle that turned the valley into a dust bowl. Beginning in 1793, for a whole generation cattle were let loose to run over Maui. Cattle, pigs, goats and deer turned virtually all of Hawaii's dryland forest areas into dust. "A Natural History of the Hawaiian Tslands" edited by E.A. Kay (available in area bookstores), gives. abundant details.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to see Maui's forests restored? The state convened a conference in Hilo this week to look into just that -- the potentials of agro-forestry as a replacement for sugar cane. Mauians have far more constructive approaches to "the sugar problem" than espousing fallacious myths about Maui's "natural" wastelands. Reforestation would bring back one of the great lost pieces of Maui's enchantments.

Lee Altenberg, Research Affiliate
Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology

I can’t help but chuckle, quite humorlessly. at the front-page snide Oct. 4 alleging that cane burning was allowed Oct. 3 because no "widespread haze" condition in the central valley existed.

I don't know which sky Mr. Blake Shiigi was looking at, but he obviously was nowhere near Kihei. I've been a tax-paying Maui homeowner for 12 years, and while I've had to resign myself to black "Maui snow ," the choking smoke has become less and less tolerable with each successive harvest.

It's been hard enough to deal with 90 plus temperatures, total lack of trade winds, and hazy. vog-lined skies, but to add round-the-clock cane burning is a bit much. Those of us with chronic pulmonary problems who aren't fortunate enough to live in air-conditioned condos suffer. And to those insensitive people who cry, "If you can't take it, move!", I refuse to subscribe to that sentiment. As tax-paying citizens, we all have a common right to live on an island with a reasonably healthy environment.

I recently honeymooned in Australia, a substantial competitor to Hawaii's sugar industry, and I was told that cane burning was outlawed decades ago. They use machines to cut the tops and then just harvest the stalks like we do on Maui. And no, the industry didn't fall through the floor when Australia took such brave measures. There is absolutely no reason to insist that will happen here. It's the fear of the unknown and the pressure of the Maui sugar industry that governs our blindfolded approach to the danger of cane burning.

Wake up, Maui, and smell the smoke. It's time we move into the 21St century able to breathe.

Bob Bourbean Kihei

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