John J. Berger''s new climate book: A comprehensive approach to saving the planet

 The top-of-mind responses to the climate crisis tend to be few and simple.

Use less fossil fuel and switch transportation to electric vehicles, restore forests, recycle, eat less meat.

But a serious response requires a broad rethinking of everything about how we live on the planet. And that’s complex.

John J. Berger’s new book runs through a lot of the approaches that are already underway and makes recommendations for how to proceed. The book is Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.

Berger is the author of Climate Myths, Beating the Heat, Forests Forever and more. He is a noted environmental writer and climate policy expert, and in his latest book he conducts a comprehensive review of strategies to address our warming climate.

Some possible solutions are underway right now or at least starting. Manufacturing steel that doesn’t depend on massive fossil fuel inputs. Replacing oil-based products with ones made from plants. Electric and fuel cell aircraft.

There’s green concrete, new approaches to recycling, buildings that produce more power than they use, hydrogen cargo trucks and so much more.

There are examples of farmers who have turned problematic fossil-fuel-reliant businesses into thriving green enterprises that restore the soil and entrain carbon. He outlines the benefits of saving and expanding forests.

He reviews some of the geoengineering approaches, like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, and seeding the skies with compounds that reflect solar radiation.

He takes a realistic look at the issues associated with decarbonizing planet-wide.

There’s clearly lots to be done at the legal, policy and international affairs levels, Berger writes. His to-do list starts with a national recognition that we are in an emergency, and that we need a National Clean Energy Transition Plan.

But it would all be so very costly, right? Maybe not.

“Various studies have found that a clean-energy transition would cost no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product in the United States,” Berger writes. He says he worries about the accuracy of those estimates, but even so, “that’s a pretty good deal, given all the other economic, environmental, and health benefits the United States would also receive.”

Berger’s book is a little overwhelming in its scope, but it’s well-written and anyone interested in how we need to approach this crisis will find lots to chew on. That, and some hope. It may be complicated, but it's possible, is Berger's message.

It does occur to me that, given the topic of the book, an actionable strategy for Berger would have been making the ebook dramatically less expensive than a paper copy of the book, but it’s close to $20 for the electronic version. Here, here, here and here are a some ways to find Solving the Climate Crisis.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Our take on the Mueller Report: Clear Case of Obstruction, but not Collusion

On reading the entire report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, here are two takeaways:

Obstruction of justice is clear and inescapable (see Volume II.)

Russian collusion, not so much. (See Volume I.)
You can find the full text of the redacted Mueller Report at numerous sites. Hereʻs CNNʻs. 

Iʻm not sure how many people talking about the report actually read its hundreds of pages. I did, and from my reading, there are three key points on two overarching topics: Russian interference and obstruction of justice.

1. There was ample evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election;

2. There was a lot of evidence that the Trump campaign worked with the Russians to damage Hillary Clintonʻs campaign and to bolster Trumpʻs. Thatʻs what the President is calling collusion. But thereʻs not a lot of evidence they did it knowingly.

3. On obstruction of justice—mainly all the things President Trump to interfere with the investigation—the case is absolutely clear. There was a lot of evidence.

Mueller laid out all the facts and legal arguments needed to reach a conviction on obstruction, but he stopped short of declaring guilt, noting that a sitting president canʻt be prosecuted.

In count after count, Mueller laid out each of the three elements needed to convict. The three are: An overt act of obstruction; Whether that act was tied to an official proceeding; and Whether the obstruction was done with intent.

Here is just one of the many counts, recounted briefly, from Vol. II, P. 12, and Vol II, PP. 44-46:

Obstructive Act: The President repeatedly asked FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn for lying to the FBI.

Nexus to a proceeding: There was evidence President Trump had been informed that there was a likelihood of prosecution of Flynn over Russian issues.

Intent: The President told others that he wanted to end the Russia investigation.

Thatʻs just one of many counts. Here is another, from Vol. II, PP. 77-90:

Obstructive Act: The President ordered several officials to fire Mueller.

Nexus to a proceeding: The President knews that Mueller was investigating him for federal crimes, including the previous firing of the FBI director.

Intent: "Substantial evidence indicates that the President's attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel's oversight of investigations that involved the President's conduct-and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice."

So, why didnʻt Mueller take the next step and declare outright that the President had obstructed justice?

He pretty much did, but he did it oddly.

"If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the  facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state," Mueller said.

A reasonable plain language translation of that would be, "If he were innocent weʻd say so, and weʻre not, so heʻs not."

So Mueller didnʻt outright say the President is guilty. What Mueller did say, in case after case,  was that it takes three things to prove obstruction, and he had all three things."

The Russian interference case is a little less clear.

Mueller clearly lays out the many ways in which the Russian government actively interfered—hacking websites (Vol.1, P. 36), recruiting Americans (Vol.1, P. 31), arranging public rallies (Vol.1, P. 29), using social media to promote pro-Trump and anti-Clinton themes (Vol.1, P. 26), and so on.

And lots of Trump campaign personnel were meeting with lots of Russians, were doing what Russians were asking them to do, and were passing campaign information to Russians. Although that sounds like coordination, Mueller says it is at least possible that some Trump organization people werenʻt aware that they were doing Russian bidding.

Examples of some of the links between Russia and the Trump organization:

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russians Trump campaign internal polling data on the states where the Trump campaign needed help. (Vol.1, P. 140)

Russians asked the Trump campaign to help promote Russiaʻs social media activity, and the Trump campaign then tweeted links to Russian-controlled sites. (Vol.1, P. 33) Both President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. were among those tweeting and retweeting Twitter posts (Vol.1, P. 34) prepared by the Russian Internet Research Agency.

What is not clear is whether the Trump campaign always knew that they were responding to and retweeting Russian disinformation.

Mueller concluded that there wasnʻt enough evidence to file criminal charges:

"The investigation did not...yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal," the report says.

Thereʻs our conclusion: Mueller has laid out a clear case of obstruction, not so clear on collusion.

©Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Oxford English Dictionary all hemajang

"Chee, you seen Kaipo? He had karang da reef on his face. Ho, all hemajang. Was uji."

I was reminded of the wonderful Hawaiian pidgin word hemajang when the Oxford English Dictionary announced it was putting the word hammajang on its extensive list of "real" words.

There is, of course, no standard spelling for most pidgin words. And I was concerned the English dictionary OED would create a standard where none existed. I was concerned, because if you were to find a standard, it might not be hammajang.

I wrote OED this email:

I note that you have added a word, hammajang, to the dictionary.

I am a lifelong journalist in the Hawaiian Islands and want to suggest another spelling, which is often used, is pronounced in the same way, is more attuned to the word’s Hawaiian language roots, and doesn’t violate Hawaiian pidgin spelling rules in the way that hammajang does.

The more appropriate spellings, from my perspective, are hemajang, or perhaps hamajang or even hemajeng or hamajeng.  But not hammajang.

I have no thoughts on the origin of “jang, but hema may be from the Hawaiian word hema meaning left or south (used in the sense that English uses sinister, as left but also wrong, odd or unfortunate). Or perhaps hemo, which can mean loose or undone.

The Hawaiian language reduplications, hemahema and hemohemo, emphasize these definitions.

Hemajang is Hawaiian pidgin, meaning it is a spoken and not a written language. There is no consistency in spelling. But one rule is this: As in the Hawaiian written language it doesn’t use double consonants.

This word is sometimes spelled hemajang, my own preferred spelling, which is also the preferred spelling of the classic Hawaiian creole book, “Pidgin To Da Max,” which dates to 1981. I’m not sure whether hemajeng was in the first edition, but it was in later editions of a book that now claims more than 200,000 printings.

And sometimes hemajeng (https://quizlet.com/89843159/pidgin-flash-cards/),

And sometimes hamajang (http://slang.uoregon.edu/pub_search.lasso?RecordIDNumber=15079&Process=detail01)

If you’re going to stick with hammajang, please at least concede that there are other spellings. But I suggest that hammajang is a nonstandard spelling and that hemajang is the one that gets the most currency.

Pidgin is very personal to folks, and I know that the pidgin I learned on west Molokai is different than the pidgin of Kalaheo and of Makawao and Kunia and Papakolea. There really isn't one pidgin. It changes (at least words, although not so much grammar) with the ethnicities of the community.

I will concede that there are occasionally double consonants in pidgin (but not Hawaiian). Like buggah. And slippa. At least in these cases, the double consonants are a function of English words repronounced as pidgin, bugger and slipper.

I will further concede that some folks in the Islands have used the spelling hammajang. The website e-hawaii.com does, but then, with all due respect, they also spell hanabata as hanabaddah and uji as ujee. Maybe that's an O`ahu thing.

There are places where a voyage is something on which she went go, where other places she had go.

Certainly, there are a lot of communities that don't use some pidgin words that are common elsewhere. Take tantaran or borot. Some places you hear them, others not so much. (Incidentally, if you can have a conversation about the difference between someone who's tantaran and someone who's borot, you’re up in pidgin master's degree territory.)

And back to the subject at hand, when a European publication decides to decide how to spell a Hawaiian pidgin word. 

Well. 

That's hemajang.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

New book on Breadfruit: Make it part of your agroforest

It's no surprise that the British sailed around the world, twice, to collect breadfruit.

The ulu is that important a crop. Rich in nutrients, versatile, drought-resistant and darned easy to farm. You just plant them once, and then harvest fruit for the rest of your life.

That work of food production in the tropics and subtropics is going to get easier still with the guidance from Craig Elevitch and Diane Ragone's new volume, Breadfruit Agroforestry Guide: Planning and Implementation of Regenerative Organic Methods. Elevitch is Director of Agroforestry Net and Ragone is director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden.

Their new book is available as an ebook from the National Tropical Botanical Garden website or in print for $19.95 at Amazon. 

The 72-page volume will be useful to home growers, but it's designed for agricultural professionals and extension agents, and it's an unabashed paean to the tropical and subtropical tree in complex food production systems.

The mission of the authors is not only to point up the value of breadfruit as a species, but to celebrate its role in a food forest—as part of an agroforest. Traditional Pacific societies grew breadfruit as part of a forest garden that might include taro, sugar cane, ti, banana, kava, noni and many other crops.

They argue that such a system doesn't require external fertilizers and buffers the impacts of fluctuation in markets for single crops. Multi-story agroforestry captures carbon in the soil, protects plants from the wind and reduces moisture loss.

The National Tropical Botanical Garden has a research agroforestry breadfruit garden at its McBryde Garden on Kaua`i. And it has a collection of about 150  breadfruit varieties at Kahanu Garden on Maui and at McBryde.

There are many varieties of breadfruit. The traditional Hawaiian seedless variety is just one. Others fruit at different times, produce crops that taste different, and some have seeds that can be eaten like chestnuts. 

Trees product a hundred to several hundred fruit annually, often in two seasons. The fruit is edible at any stage. Unripe fruit can be cooked and eaten as a vegetable; soft ripe fruit are eaten as a starch, and they can be baked, fried or used in any number of dishes. 

I visited an island in the Solomons where ripe breadfruit was dried for use in the season when they weren't available fresh. Other Pacific cultures preserve them underground. But they'll last a while on your kitchen shelf, and refrigeration works, too.

The book was funded by Patagonia Provisions, the Hawai`i Department of Agriculture, Kauai Office of Economic Development, and Western Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education. Its publishers are the Breadfruit Institute and Permanent Agriculture Resources.

The same authors in 2013 produced what works as a companion volume: Breadfruit Production Guide: Recommended practices for growing, harvesting, and handling. You can download that one free here. 

But actually buying the books--search for them at Amazon--helps support the programs Ragone and Elevitch run.

Here's what the authors had to say, from the press release on the new book:

Ragone: “Breadfruit has been grown sustainably since humans began cultivating it thousands of years ago. It’s vital that we revive centuries of indigenous knowledge and traditional methods into a modern context. Doing so will help breadfruit thrive and support communities for many generations.”

Elevitch: “This is a crucial time for the future of breadfruit and island agriculture in general. Given that the single-crop plantation model with high chemical inputs leads to declining soil fertility and plant health, growers are now developing models for breadfruit production rooted in traditional methods.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

A new look at Polynesian voyaging. After initial contact, maybe it was all about goods and services.

Polynesians maintained distant voyaging links through much of the history of their Pacific occupation.

It was a kind of connectivity that helped new island occupations succeed, and kept voyaging communities vibrant. And why? Some of it may have been just business--meeting the need for trade.

This ocean connection “was a deliberate enabling strategy essential for colonising the remote Pacific…this process played out on a canvas of different archipelagos with contrasting resources, both small and large islands, and with varying levels of ecological diversity and remoteness,” wrote Marshall Weisler and Richard Walter, in a new book, The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization.

The evidence of the long-term connection between distant islands comes in many forms.

One example, of course, is a famous adze, sourced from a quarry on the Hawaiian island of Kaho`olawe, and found by archaeologists in the Tuamotu islands far to the south. It proved that the Polynesian voyaging that led to the discovery and population of the Hawaiian Islands was not a one-time accidental event, but that there were return voyages.

How important was that?

“One Tuamotuan adze was identified as originating from the Hawaiian islands, a distance of  ͠  4000 km—making it the longest known, continuous maritime trip in world prehistory,” they wrote.

In the Cook Islands, there was evidence of active trade. Basalt for adze blades has been found on coral islands without hard rock of their own. And pearl shell for fishhooks and scrapers has been found on volcanic islands where the pearl oysters didn’t grow. The assumption is that the fine-grained basalt and black-lipped pearl shell were traded by voyagers.

And there is also a strong oral tradition of voyaging that backs up the archaeology. In the Cooks, there are stories of the famous navigator-voyagers Tangi`ia, Karika and others. Hawai`i has the stories of Mo`ikeha and his voyaging son Kila.

Weisler and Walter argue that goods traveled back and forth, not only resupplying small island communities, but also bringing goods back to parent communities. The voyagers brought not only rock and shell, but planting material, volcanic glass for fine cutting, and even marriage partners.

Hawai`i even has a tradition of the priest Pa`ao, who felt Hawaiians were lacking adequate leadership, sailing to Tahiti to bring back a chief to rule them. The chief was Pilika`aiea.

For some islands, such voyaging was critical to the survival of the community. The small, isolated Pitcairn group could only have survived with the assistance of “repeated resourcing from the parent populations on Mangareva,” the authors wrote.

Not every island group had much to offer in material goods, but some had other values. The Tuamotu Islands, for example, have few resources, but they sprawl across the ocean, and they’re hard to miss. That being the case, they are a convenient stopping place to establish a voyager’s position, so it would have been valuable to keep their residents part of the “family.”

Hawai`i's voyaging canoe Hokule`a has regularly used the Tuamotus as an intermediate stop, to confirm the accuracy of navigation.

“There was little economic reason to travel to the Tuamotus, but their location made them a navigational screen that captured any movement in the region, and no doubt they benefited from this,” Weisler and Walter wrote.

Limits are one of the hallmarks of island societies. There is a point at which further population increase, or further drawdown of resources, cannot be sustained.

“In Mangareva during late prehistory food scarcities drove people to steal growing crops and rob breadfruit storage pits (the main staple), and there are even instances of fresh meat cannibalism and unearthing graves of newly buried corpses for food,” they wrote.

Some anthropologists argue that population pressure was a promoter of new voyaging, to find new islands and new resources. But perhaps the opposite was sometimes also true. Population pressure could have rendered voyaging difficult or inadvisable. 

“Constructing ‘expensive’ voyaging canoes and resourcing their crews was no longer a priority. Indeed, it was risky to leave agricultural lands unprotected to engage in long-distance voyaging trips,” Weisler and Walter suggest.

So, maybe islands full of people and short of resources caused societies to look inward instead of outward, ending the great Polynesian traditions of voyaging.

That said, the cultural memory of the voyaging days has resulted in a paradigm that still exists today. “Interaction and exchange is …a part of the fabric of Pacific life,” the authors wrote.

© 2017 Jan W. TenBruggencate 

Four Hawai`i books: a couple of winners, no losers

I celebrated the flow of the old year into the new by reading four books by Hawaii authors, some new some not.

Charley Memminger’s 2015 book, Aloha, Lady Blue is a rollicking story with familiar Hawaiian themes, along with murder, sailing, gangsters, light romance and a fun take on the modern cultures of the Islands. 

One of the blurbs on the back cover compares Memminger to John D. MacDonald, perhaps because Memminger was trolling for it. The hero’s boat is named Travis McGee and the hero lives on the boat, just as MacDonald’s McGee lived on his boat, the Busted Flush. 

But that’s not the best analogue.

Memminger, an accomplished humor writer, is far more Dave Barry than MacDonald. Irreverent, funny, occasionally sardonic. 

I hope Charley is working on a sequel, because Lady Blue was fun.

I came across another 2015 volume, The Musubi Murder, written under the pseudonym Frankie Bow—one of this prolific author’s Professor Molly mysteries.

I’d qualify this as a light Island detective story. The heroine, professor Molly Barda, works at a private college in a mythical town on the Big Island, where she teaches classes and solves murders.

“Bow” does a good job with local culture, which is hard to do. Because of that, I was disappointed that she sets it in the mythical town of Mahina. Why not use the real Hawaiian landscape? It would be so much more fun for the local reader.

The story is just a little over the top, starting with the human skull that shows up on a platter at a fancy dinner. But the book carries you along, and—this is the highest praise I can give a writer—I’d pick up another “Frankie Bow” book for casual reading. Musubi is the first in a series featuring Professor Molly.

I should have gotten to this writer earlier, but I picked up one of Toby Neal’s books for the first time. It was her second in a series, the 2012 Torch Ginger.

The book features detective Lei Texeira. She has boyfriend issues, a problem father, and disappearing homeless people. Oh, and a cult. As a reporter who covered Hawai`i’s cults in the 70s and 80s, I appreciate a good cult story. It felt like Neal could have benefitted from more research on cults.

The story is set on Kaua`i. I live on Kaua`i. It’s fun to see her navigate familiar ground. And her assessment of the culture and surroundings feels right. If you like Neal’s writing, there’s a nice selection of her Hawai`i books.

Bill Fernandez, a Kaua`i boy, retired judge, and Kamehameha Schools grad, has made a reputation writing historical non-fiction about his youth on the island. 

But he has moved into new territory. His 2016 book Cult of Ku is a historical fiction mystery, set in the 1920s. The story plays against a backdrop of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy just a few decades earlier, along with racism, intrigue, plantation-union issues, murder, plus a little love story.

I enjoyed this book . Bill and I will disagree on his take on some points of Hawaiian history and there were some editing issues—annoying bits like spelling Maui as Mau`i throughout the book.

That said, I hope he does more in this genre.

One thing that jumps out in any book about Hawai`i is the issue of non-pidgin speakers trying to render pidgin English accurately. I was raised on Molokai, and I like to think come by my pidgin knowledge honestly. When someone writes “waves been kine good,” it’s a red flag. 

My plea to Hawai`i writers not originally from Hawai`i: Find a literate pidgin speaker, and have him or her vet your efforts to convey the local patois.

But keep writing.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2017

Native bird loss: a tragedy told in colors.

The scale of the loss of Hawai`i’s native birds is beyond imagining.

It’s just icing on the cake that Hawaiian native birds are some of the most colorful, imaginatively plumed and outrageously beaked birds to be found. Or rather, to have lost.

A new book by Michael Walther, with paintings by Julian Hume, tells the story. It is “Extinct Birds of Hawai`i,” by Mutual Publishing.

Walther calls the loss of species “an ongoing bird catastrophe unequalled in world history during the last 700 years.”

There may be more, but 77 species and subspecies are known to have gone extinct. There are just 26 species of native land bird left.

Hume had to take some liberties with the coloration of birds that went extinct earliest, since many are only known from old bones found in caves and sinkholes. Many others, which have become extinct in the past couple of centuries, have been drawn from life by early birders or can be studied as museum skins, their colors still vivid. There are photographs of the ones lost during the last century. 

I was particularly struck by the photo of one of the last three Laysan apapane, singing while perched on a coral outcropping.

Before Captain Cook sailed up to Waimea on the Big Island, the Islands had already lost owls and petrels and geese, ducks and ibis and finches, an eagle, a harrier and a host of flightless crakes, plus some others, like the Kaua`i palmcreeper and the King Kong grosbeak..

Most of the big birds were long gone before Europeans arrived. Then began the decimation of the jewel-hued forest birds. 

Nowhere else on the globe has lost so many birds. New Zealand is second, with 50 to Hawai`i’s 77. The Mascarene Islands have lost 37, Tahiti 16, Madagascar 15, and so forth.

Islands accentuate the loss, partly because islands promote diversity, partly became small land areas are more vulnerable to habitat destruction and invasive species.

The Hawaiian avifauna, birdlife, was impressive. 

The giant Hawaiian goose was more than four times the size of the Hawaiian state bird, the nene. A thundering example of birdhood.

The favored food of the Molokai stilt own was the Maui Nui finch. We know that from deposits of the fecal pellets of the owl. Both are extinct now.  

There was a nukupu`u with a simply stunning bill—more than half the length of the rest of the bird. It was named the Giant Scimitar-billed nukupu`u.

“Species which took millions of years go evolve have been decimated in a geological blink of an eye,” Walther wrote.

The saddest story is not that we’ve lost so many, but that we’re still losing them.

This volume sparely tells the story, and the risk as we stumble into a vastly poorer and less interesting future.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

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