Sierra Club Hawaii is currently between directors, so the environmental nonprofit is taking the team approach toward the annual mission of lobbying at the Legislature.
But one team member already out in front is Anthony Aalto, its Oahu Group chairman, especially in the move to oppose Gov. David Ige’s controversial Cabinet pick to head the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Carleton Ching is due to face a confirmation hearing next month, but Sierra Club was one organization in a coalition mobilized in protest of the former lobbyist for landowner and developer Castle & Cooke Inc.
Aalto, 58, said he doesn’t know Ching but has heard positive personal testimonials. He doesn’t doubt them, or assertions of his competence, but added there are crucial missing components: an explanation from Ige, and any sign of environmental interest from Ching.
"It’s kind of problematic that the department that is most concerned with taking care of our natural resources is a person who has demonstrated zero interest and has zero experience in managing those issues," he said. "At the moment, it doesn’t pass the smell test."
Aalto moved here nine years ago as Pacific Rim correspondent for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso, for which he also covered numerous political hot spots.
Parenthood, he said, forced a rethinking of his career path.
Now a documentary filmmaker, he’s tackled topics such as the Honolulu rail project and homelessness. Current projects include a film on his efforts to build an environmentally friendly home, the Wilhelmina Rise dwelling where he lives with his wife and their teenage son.
Its "green" elements range from the solar panels to the recycled materials — including the fill beneath the foundation and the wood flooring, reclaimed from the renovation of the Radford High School gym.
"I want to live my ideals," he said. "Global warming is coming at us at the speed of a freight train, and it’s terrifying, and we’re not doing enough about it. I don’t like just ranting about it; I wanted to do something."
QUESTION: Where did your environmentalism come from?
ANSWER: All of my friends are fed up with hearing this story.
I say I grew up on the Oahu of the Mediterranean. When I was 10 years old my mother married a Spaniard, and the whole family moved to a little island off the coast of Spain called Majorca. Stunningly beautiful, they called it paradise, just like here.
For the first half of the century, it was the kind of place that only movie stars and celebrities could afford to go to. There were basically one or two old hotels, kind of equivalent to the Royal Hawaiian. … In 1959, exactly the same year as here, the tourist boom started, because they built themselves a new international airport, same as here. …
Just like people who grew up here after World War II and saw places that they had known throughout their childhood suddenly being transformed and felt a really powerful sense of loss, that’s what I felt growing up when I saw this.
Q: What sets Hawaii apart, if anything?
A: What Hawaii has is an almost unique opportunity to do something for the environment that benefits everybody.
There’s a perception out there that the people who are concerned about the environment are people who got theirs already, and they can afford to take care of the environment.
Here in Hawaii, with the new GEMS program, which the Sierra Club helped get through the Lege, anybody … elderly, students, renters … would be able to put PV (photovoltaic) on their roof and afford it, and cut their electric bills. Anybody can do that now….
The shift to a clean-energy economy has the potential to create the third pillar of the Hawaiian economy. You’ve got tourism, you’ve got the military and you could have clean energy. And it would create well-paid jobs that wouldn’t be dependent on tourists or the military.
Q: What sort of jobs?
A: Let’s just take the rooftop solar industry as an example. Before (Hawaiian Electric Co.) slammed on the brakes about 18 months ago, there were over 5,000 people working in the PV industry here in Hawaii. …
Somebody has to be the trailblazer. De facto, already, it is us, but it ought to be us. If you start getting a number of companies involved in installing the smart meters, installing the battery storage, all the different things one needs to allow us to install more distributed power, that is going to create bunches of companies that are working in this area.
And that’s going to have an accelerator effect, a multiplier effect. The more tech people you have here, the more you stand a chance of creating the kind of tech corridor that exploded in Boston and Chapel Hill and Silicon Valley. …
It’s something that would benefit everybody — the people who are currently making not an awful lot of money working as chambermaids or valet parkers or busboys in the hotel industry can reasonably expect that their kids could make a lot more money than they’re making by being involved in the clean-energy industry. That is a serious, potential future for Hawaii.
Q: Has this risen to the top of the Sierra Club’s list?
A: Absolutely.
And not just because of the opportunities, but also because the news on global warming ain’t good.
Q: What do you say to people who say it’s too late?
A: I happen to be a little bit more optimistic than that, not based on any science, but I know that human beings are endlessly adaptable and we’re very smart. And I’m hoping that there will be some way for us to mitigate the worst of what’s happened.
Q: So you think it’s worthwhile to stop what we’re doing?
A: I absolutely do. I think we have moral obligation to do it for our kids and our grandkids. But this is one of those instances where we actually have a chance to do what is right economically.
Q: On other issues, wasn’t the decision to support rail particularly divisive for the Sierra Club?
A: Before we came to a decision about it, we had people threatening to resign from the club if we did support rail and people threatening to resign if we didn’t.
To a whole bunch of people, the environmental rationale for the rail was so overwhelming that they couldn’t believe the Sierra Club would contemplate not supporting it….
We ended up supporting it not for reasons that had anything to do with transportation per se. We went for it for reasons that had to do with land use. …
We’ve lost 50 percent of our farm land since statehood. And the projections of our population growth indicate that we are going to have to pave over something like another 20 square miles of farm land in the next 30 years, if we continue to house the population growth the way we have been up until now, basically with suburban development.
Sierra Club thinks suburban sprawl is a disaster in every imaginable way. It’s a disaster because it’s paving over farmlands. So we only grow now — what? — 8 to 10 percent of the food we eat here? That’s not a very sustainable way of managing affairs.
The suburban subdivisions are going in over places that used to be used to recharge our aquifers. …
Suburban sprawl forces us to extend our infrastructure further and further out from the city. It draws resources away from maintaining infrastructure in the city, in the traditional urban core. … And then there is the issue of congestion and transportation, obviously, and the amount of resources that uses. …
Most people who don’t like the Sierra Club assume what is our No. 1 concern, which is the aesthetic concern. "Oh, you just like pretty views, you don’t care about ordinary people, you’re tree-huggers," that kind of thing.
That is an important issue, but it’s one of many. Here I am talking about the many, and it’s the one I mention last. But it’s a very real concern as well.
It also has economic implications.
Q: Yeah. Tourism?
A: You talk to the leaders of the tourism industry and they tell you that they have two chief complaints from tourists these days.
One is homelessness — which is one of the films I’m making, a documentary on homelessness.
The other one is that people can’t believe how urbanized we’ve become. Tourists try to drive from Waikiki to the North Shore, and they find that half of the drive, they’re basically going through one long conurbation, stuck in traffic all the way. And they don’t like it.
So paving over farmland has aesthetic implications that then, in turn, have potential economic implications. Taking care of the environment has economic benefits.
Q: Do you see the Koa Ridge project in Central Oahu as an example of this?
A: Koa Ridge is particularly egregious because we’re spending
$6 billion on a rail line in order to concentrate development. TOD (transit-oriented development) is why the Sierra Club is for rail …
The only way you can stop population growth is by not building any houses, seeing the price of housing go higher and higher and higher, so that you’re forcing people to move away, which in fact is part of what’s happening.
The Sierra Club is a progressive organization. We don’t believe in a two-tiered society. Increasingly what that’s going to do is you’re going to have more and more gated communities, more and more high-rise condos, and you’re going to have more and more people living on the beach. That’s not the kind of society Sierra Club believes in. …
It’s not that we really love the rail. It could have been done better. Personally, I think certainly the section in town should have gone underground…. But again, rail is something that’s going to benefit the working folks who live out in Waianae, the poorest members of our society. And it’s curious that it’s most opposed by the wealthiest members of our society.
