“I will never let my kids play on a lawn that doesn’t have dandelions.” This emphatic statement came from a professor visiting my school to give a talk on how pesticides act as endocrine disruptors—chemicals that act much like hormones in both animals and plants
While not obvious to the casual visitor, Maui’s sandy beaches, wind, and waves are engaged in a seasonal tug of war where sand builds up on shore and then gets pulled back to sea year after year
Tiger sharks are more prevalent in Maui’s waters this time of year—but your
chances of an encounter are still vanishingly small
Water is a precious commodity in Hawaiʻi, despite our islands being home to some of the wettest places on Earth where rainfall is recorded in the hundreds of inches. Proper management of this resource is complicated.
Whether you enjoy poke, sushi or ice cream—you already eat seaweed and seaweed-derived products. Locally known as limu or ogo, these marine algae are vital to the environment, culturally important, and have serious economic value.
Polluted runoff, the often-untreated murky brown water that oozes out into Maui’s ocean after every large storm, contains a toxic stew of oil, gas, fertilizers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals along with plastics, animal waste, detritus, sand, soil and rocks.
At best 10% of US plastic waste gets recycled. Another 13% gets burned, sometimes to generate electricity. Most of the remaining plastic is buried in landfills, but each year at least 1 billion pounds of plastic finds its way into our oceans.