Importing to Hawaii

I must admit that I’m at a loss to understand why we import so much stuff into Hawaii. I get that cars, clothes, many consumer goods, boats, and building materials must come from faraway places. They’re not easy to produce here and everywhere not here is, in fact, far away. I know we lack deposits of iron ore for making steel (not that we would want to make steel here anyway, it’s very messy). I know we lack oil reserves for making plastic (not that we would want to make plastic here anyway, it’s very messy). I know we lack sand for making glass (okay, we have lots of sand, but making glass is probably very messy), and we lack good wood for making lumber (I guess eucalyptus, that grows on the Big Island straight and tall in just a few years, doesn’t qualify, and anyway, making lumber is possibly very messy).

What I don’t get is get why we import so much food, especially fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, fresh fowl, fresh eggs, and fresh meat. I live in Hawaii, in part, because the weather here is nearly perfect for pleasant living year round. I believe it is nearly perfect for plant production year round as well. We have lots of sun, areas with hundreds of inches of rain a year, and lots of fertile soil (maybe not in Kona, where real dirt can qualify as a Christmas present, but most everywhere else). We are surrounded by ocean, abundant with a variety of truly delicious fish species. In fact, I could probably eat nothing but Ahi (Yellow Fin Tuna) dipped in wasabi shoyu and be a truly happy haole.

Raising turkeys and chickens here must be easy; they are already raising themselves throughout most of the state. In my subdivision you can trip over a wild turkey just trying to get to your car in the morning. And our C,C & R’s require drivers and joggers to give the right-of-way to chickens crossing the road (no, I don’t know why they’re crossing the road). Then there are the feral pigs and feral cows (maybe not so much feral as lost) and the feral mongeese (are there non-feral mongeese?). So many mongeese, so few recipes……

I really don’t get why we import almost all our energy. I know that most all energy comes from the sun. On a sunny day something like 250 British Thermal Units per hour per square foot make it through the ozone layer (I majored in Physics for about a week when I started college). Some of that sun (but not much) supports the plants that eventually die and rot and become compressed and rot some more and become compressed some more and millions of years later turn into fossil fuels. We then use huge amounts of energy, not to mention money, to extract those fossil fuels and turn them into a readily usable form of, you guessed it, energy.

I know that solar heaters and reflective solar generators and photovoltaics aren’t very efficient, returning only about 10 to 20% of the BTU potential of the sun into readily usable energy. But I have to believe it’s more efficient than the multi-million-year plant to compost to fossil fuel to readily usable energy process. Not to mention that what took many millions of years to create will only last a few hundred years. Not to mention that most of those few hundred years have already gone by.

11/16/10