Kanu Hawaii Topics
Every day, stories are shared on KanuHawaii.org. To help organize some of these stories, volunteer editors pore over this content and organize certain journals, blogs, and commitments into topics. We hope you find this organizing feature useful.Eat Local (110 stories)
Topic Editors
Kaimana
Carmille
mailelaulii
Kaimana
Carmille
mailelaulii
Over 200 people pledging to buy locally grown produce
Ryan recently shared in his blog post: This past weekend at the Farm Fair at Bishop Museum, a crew of volunteers (Eathan Ozawa, Cherilyn Inouye, Dan Diffenderfer, Brian and Jackie Chappel, and staffer Lehua Slater) challenged fairgoers to commit to spending at least 10% of their food budget on local, laying the groundwork for our upcoming Eat Local campaign. Well I got the images from that event and decided to mash them together into a video. Here it is. Over 200 folks committing to buy local. May we all find locally grown fresh fruits and veggies waiting for us at our local shopping options...
Eat Local 2010 Events (1 stories)
Topic Editors
mailelaulii
Ryan
mailelaulii
Ryan
Join us for a discussion on sustainable living & Hawaii agriculture.
Charles Reppun, an author from the book "The Value of Hawaii," will speak about Hawaii and how we need to develop better strategies in growing our own food. Read his article here: http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2010/08/23/3399-the-value-of-hawaii-agriculture-by-charles-reppun/ Please RSVP Here:...
Eat Local Featured (1 stories)
Topic Editors
Olin
mailelaulii
Ryan
Olin
mailelaulii
Ryan
A witness to a time when the local food supply was severely disrupted
The Eat Local Challenge addresses a real issue, food security. At any given time, we have about two weeks of food on these islands. What happens if the barges and planes temporarily stop delivering our food? Anyone can come up with a bunch of plausible scenarios. However, I personally witnessed the impact of one possible scenario – economic collapse – which led to a decrease in the available food supply. My wife and I served in the Peace Corps and were sent to Russia in the year 2000. Two years before we got to Russia, the country suffered a devastating financial blow now known as the "Ruble Crisis" of 1998. One of the many impacts of this financial crisis was the...Eat Local How Tos (2 stories)
Topic Editors
mailelaulii
Ryan
mailelaulii
Ryan
Aquaponic Adventure
Organic veggies in 3 weeks? Kalo harvest in 8 months? Papaya trees with 8 fruit-bearing branches in 1.5 years? Last week I toured Olomana Gardens (http://www.olomanagardens.com/) with Glenn Martinez, farmer extraordinaire. I could rave for ages about his brilliantly simple solutions for grow-your-own, wherever you live. He's also a volunteer extraordinaire for sustainable farming, education, and even created a program for IHS to grow their own food. So I came back home preaching the good news to my sweetie. After three days of my effusive enthusiasm, and probably out of sheer fan-fatigue, we watched the DVD. He truly supports my pro-sustainability mission, but...Eat Local Issues (2 stories)
Topic Editors
mailelaulii
Ryan
mailelaulii
Ryan
Our bodies burn the same energy as 4 CFLs: Food security reflections
From what I've read, our adult bodies need between 2,000 and 2,500 food calories per day. Can this figure be converted to watts? Yes! One food calorie is roughly equal to the energy equivalent of 1.163 watt hours (OnlineConversion.com). So, let's peg the average daily diet at 2,250 calories. That's roughly equal to 2,600 watt hours. If we divide 2,600 watt hours equally over a 24 hour period, we burn on average about 100 watts per hour. In other words, our bodies burn the same amount of energy as four 24-watt CFLs (or one 100 incandescent bulb...though we are trying to phase them out of our lives and thus out of our examples, right!). That's pretty efficient. For...Eat Local Recipes (1 stories)
Topic Editors
mailelaulii
Ryan
mailelaulii
Ryan
Today I ate...
Today, I was lucky enough to attend the final hour of the Haleiwa Arts Festival. There were a variety of visions that struck me as simply genius touched with an island humility that displayed an honesty only the artist can embody yet an audience could appreciate. I enjoyed my moment of cruising through Haleiwa town and witnessing the super energetic activities along the shorelines... stand up paddlers floated across the waters, footprints tracked time along sunset beach sands, colorful flags on white tents fluttered in the forgiving air and cars desperately hugged the sides of rainbow bridge... a beautiful experience... BUT it was wela (hot) so I anxiously searched...
Education (17 stories)
Topic Editors
Laurie
Gregory
James
Kaimana
Laurie
Gregory
James
Kaimana
School Furloughs Finally Over. Now What?
Nine months after contract negotiations first cut instructional days for keiki, and seven months after the first citizen rally at the Capitol, Furlough Fridays have finally come to an end. At a press conference Monday, the Governor, the DOE Superintendent, Speaker of the House and Senate President announced the plan to end school furloughs – essentially the same plan that had been floated by many, including us, as early as October of last year. Here’s what ended the furloughs at last:The Legislature passed a bill allocating $67 million from the hurricane relief fund to reduce furlough days. The Governor said she would release $57 million instead of...
Fitness (4 stories)
Topic Editors
Jacoby
Kaimana
Jacoby
Kaimana
Inconvenience Me
Our lifestyles are set like clockwork. Who likes change? Change requires more intellectual and physical efforts, possibly adapting to another environment or culture, maybe even balancing your beliefs with others to be part of a community. There is a lot of hype out there about saving our planet, and most of the ways to do this will inconvenient all of us: reducing CO2 means changing the way we drive, cook, buy; reducing toxic waste means changing the way we manufacture, clean, buy; and lastly, reducing waste in general by changing the way we eat, live, buy. Looking at how we can reduce waste going to our landfill or drowning our marine life in the ocean, many...
Gardening (38 stories)
Topic Editors
Jacoby
Kaimana
Jacoby
Kaimana
Greening the Desert
An incredibly inspirational video about literally "greening the desert". Permaculturist Geoff Lawton created a forest a mile from the Dead Sea , the lowest place on earth, in the country of Jordan. MUST WATCH! "You can fix all the world's problems in a garden." - Geoff...
interviews (4 stories)
Topic Editor
Olin
Olin
Kanu Hawaii Interview with Daniel Anthony available on-line
In case you missed it, our interesting and inspiring interview with Daniel from Friday Lunchtime Live is now available on the KH Vimeo channel. We had some issues with the sound from our remote location, so you will probably need to turn it up or use speakers. (http://vimeo.com/12527651) This is one of the coolest interviews I've had the pleasure to do in a long time. So please check out Daniel's story when you have 30 minutes to spare and learn about the intersections of food, culture, and modernity in Hawaii. Daniel will be sharing his talents with us again during the June 19th service day, delivering goodies to all the Oahu projects. He is also going to be...
Low Impact (1 stories)
Topic Editors
Nova
Olin
Kaimana
Nova
Olin
Kaimana
BYOC - Bring Your Own Container?
I work downtown, and like many people, I often eat out for lunch. Actually I guess that’s an understatement because to be honest I eat out almost every day. Eating out at lunch is convenient, and it’s a good time to socialize with my co-workers and associates… but it comes with consequences. And by that I mean the plastic and Styrofoam containers most (“fast”, ie: not sit down) lunch places dispense their food in. If I start to think about all the plastic and Styrofoam entering our landfills each day because of take-out containers, I start to feel sick and like the whole system is just ridiculous. When did we start eating out of a package we’re just going to...
Rail (4 stories)
Topic Editor
Olin
Olin
County of Honolulu February 10, 2010 Update on Rail Transit
About a couple of years ago, Andrew and James starting writing what would become three pieces on Oahu's rail transit system. You can find these articles on our Rail topic page. Yesterday, Mayor Mufi Hannemann held a public meeting at the State Capitol to update the public on Oahu's rail transit system. I attended and recorded the meeting to share with the Kanu community.Part 1: Update by Mayor Mufi HannemannPart 2: Update from Don Horner, First Hawaiian Bank board chairman and Hawai'i Business Roundtable executive committee memberPart 3: Update from Jennifer Goto-Sabas, U.S. Senator Dan Inouye's chief of staffPart 4: Update from Shaun Ushijima, American Institute of...
Recycling (16 stories)
Topic Editors
Kaimana
Ryan
Jacoby
Kaimana
Ryan
Jacoby
Recycle Plastic Bags
One of the most common recyclables we encounter everyday are plastic bags. We usually get one whenever we buy something at a store. While some people have gotten reusable bags to carry groceries in, not everyone has and there may be times that you didn't bring it with you. What to do? If you shop at Walmart, KMart or Safeway, you may have noticed that each of these stores has a dropoff available for people to place their plastic bags for recycling. I've been told that they are turned into new plastic bags for future...
Reuse (14 stories)
Topic Editors
Jacoby
Kaimana
Jacoby
Kaimana
Reusing apple containers as planters
We try to only buy things packaged in recyclable containers. For plastics, it has to be labeled a number 1 or number 2. Recently, I noticed that many of these plastic containers are the perfect size for starting veggies! And they are already made from food grade material. So I busted out the seeds and my boys choose their starters. Ryan selected Rainbow Chard and Pumpkin (he's 2). Noah chose bush beans (he's 5). Here is a pic of Noah's bush beans sprouting up after a few days. The nice this about this particular apple container was how easily and gently the starter plants popped out of the container for transferring to our garden. I like these so much better than...Volunteerism (121 stories)
Topic Editors
Joannie
Kaimana
Carmille
Joannie
Kaimana
Carmille
Calling all active Kanu members: help us cover the campaigns!
The Hawaii Independent, Hawaii's new source for news, culture, and community, needs your help to cover the political campaigns. It’s a major election year, with a new governor, HNL mayor, and congresspeople on the way, plus a full load of legislators, councilmembers, and of course, OHA trustees. In other words: there’s a lot to cover, and we need your help! We’re building a team of concerned, active citizens, to watchdog the candidates. You’ll follow the campaigns; attend events; take pictures and update a blog; ask pointed questions of the campaigns and the candidates; and share that information with your community via the HI and other media. If you’d like to get...
Waste (9 stories)
Topic Editors
alani
James
Kaimana
alani
James
Kaimana
Dealing with Waste: A Call for Member Input
"Foul a clear well and you will suffer thirst"This is from a Greek philosopher several thousands of years ago. The headline of today's Honolulu Advertiser is, "Leeward landfill extension OK'd to 2012—with warning." Garbage, what we consider "waste", is not a sexy, exciting issue. It is, literally and figuratively, dirty, stink and, in our modern age, toxic. No one wants to worry about or do something about all the "waste" we produce. And yet, this is one of the first and most basic lessons that we teach a child: clean up your mess. It is one of the earliest affirmations that we give a keiki that they...Interested in becoming a volunteer editor?
If you are interested in helping, please contact Kanu's Social Media Fellow Kaimana Pine via private message. Mahalo!
