What brought you to politics? I’ve been a community servant and leader for well over 35 years. My aloha for Maui has been well established. Then came the calling in 2013 and 2014 to be involved in the election involving GMO and pesticides. As a steward of the land I saw it as a duty
Almost Orwellian in its doublespeak deception, Maui Senator Roz Baker’s latest campaign ad promotes her as a champion of ‘aina protection. “From protecting our reefs from harmful sunscreens to creating pesticide free zones around our schools, Roz fights from the heart to save the ‘aina,” it reads. The truth? While she has taken credit for
The upcoming 2018 Maui election offers an extraordinary, historic opportunity to change the power structure that has limited progressive change on our island. The Maui Ohana wing of the County Council – Elle Cochran, Alika Atay and Kelly King – is poised to be joined by another wave of reformist candidates seeking to take Maui
Hawai’i’s new pesticide bill passed last week made our state the first in the nation to ban the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. State legislators managed to pass this historic legislation in the face of intense pressure from the agrochemical industry, which has relied on corrupted science and media misinformation to unduly influence representatives and agencies in
For too long certain politicians in Hawaii have stonewalled pesticide regulation typically arguing they have to protect the economic interests of small farmers across the state. It’s a myth, which has been exploded by new research by Autumn Ness, who is on the Hawai’i Center for Food Safety’s Advisory Board. “The small farmer argument is
Maui’s Senator Roz Baker was instrumental in deleting important mandatory pesticide disclosure and notification sections from the SB 3095 bill. The original bill was opposed by Monsanto, Alexander & Baldwin Co., and the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association. “It was Roz Baker who gutted the bill,” reports Autumn Ness, who is on the Hawai’i Center for
The fight against the harmful use of pesticides in Hawai’i has been a slow and strenuous battle. From birth defects reported on Kaua’i to the federal court overruling the SHAKA Movement-lead GMO moratorium, the battle against pesticides has been met with little, or at least not sufficient, legislative action. But, as of this
A&B is set to increase GMO crop growing on Maui against the wishes of a majority of the island population who voted for a GMO moratorium in 2014. As part of their so called “diversified agriculture” plan, rather than devoting land to feed people, A&B is growing GMO Bt corn and sorghum on 140 acres
A brilliant new doctoral thesis by Kauai native Andrea Brower reveals the first comprehensive analysis of how Hawai’i’s historically exploitative plantation system has morphed into the ecologically exploitative “agrochemical-seed-biotechnology industry’s occupation of Hawai’i.” Brower’s 314 page doctoral thesis, titled, “Hawai’i: GMO Ground Zero,” contributes what she frames as a, “previously absent critical analysis of Monsanto,
More than 100,000 pages of documents exposing how the chemical industry and government regulators knew about the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products, yet worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press, were made publicly available last week through a remarkable project called the Poison Papers. This morning, a second group
