WHO WE ARE
Mālama Hāmākua is a group of community members on Hawaiʻi Island and beyond who seek to protect the health of Hawaiʻi Island’s rich agricultural and scenic coastline of Hāmākua and her people.
THE ISSUES
This group started out by focusing on making sure that the Big Island Dairy in Ookala complies with the Clean Water Act and behaves in a neighborly fashion within the Ookala community. It soon included examining the destructive plan of the Hū Honua incinerator currently under construction in nearby Pepeʻekeo, also on the Hāmākua Coast. This project plans to draw 21 million gallons of water PER DAY, every day, from the Hakalau aquifer, mix in about two dozen hazardous chemicals and then re-inject it back into the ground via 400-feet deep injection wells, just 80 feet from the cliffline, which means that the contaminated water will percolate not only back into the aquifer, but also out the side of the cliff and into the ocean. The facility, which will log and burn five acres of trees per day, will also spew 300,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year into the atmosphere. This is SO UNNECESSARY!!
The Hū Honua Bioenergy plant is putting Hāmākua’s lands, waters, and people at risk, as well as is contributing to the climate crisis.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Think global, act local. We are in a time when global environmental phenomena spurred by climate change related to capitalism-based activity is becoming all too commonplace. When humans take from nature only what we need, the impacts are not the cataclysmic ones we are experiencing now through capitalism, which is predicated on continual and ever-accelerating consumption and expansion of development. It is an economic system that can exist only in conditions of infinite resources — which is NOT what we have here on our fragile planet.