Ecology 2018: Hanauma Bay and Honolulu

I dreamed last night that while walking to a cabana on a beautiful lagoon, I noticed dead carp laying in the sand.  As I took a seat on the overwater platform, I looked down in the royal blue water to see colorful tropical fish.  Instead, I saw only charcoal-gray fish floating lifelessly near the surface.

No one wants that future.

While not the environmental apocalypse of my dreams, gorgeous Hanauma Bay was recently closed due to high bacteria levels in the water.

Unfortunately, that happened to be the day Julie and I took the public bus from Star Princess to go snorkeling there.


From the moment we arrived, the dearth of people on the beach below signaled that something was wrong.

As you can see in Julie's photos (my smartphone that doubles as my camera was back on our room drying out in a bag of rice), the bay nonetheless looked alluring.

While not intentional, the source of the bacteria was human waste, not from careless city sewage treatment but from storm runoff that carried with it excrement from cesspools and to a lesser extent from animals (mostly urban pets) and homeless people.  We face similar challenges along the Southern California coast.

As an aside, this linked Popular Science article by our youngest daughter Amy excellently explains why cruise ships aren't the source of this "poop".

Regardless, we made the best of our time there, taking in the panoramic views and then reading about the assorted fish and coral of Hawaii at the Hanauma Bay Visitor Center.

The ranger working the desk said it was unlikely they could get staffed in time to re-open if the marine biologists sampling the water gave an all-clear that afternoon.

Back on the bus, we passed Coconut Island, where our eldest child Gina and her husband Laszlo attended a Marine Biology semester together as part of their undergraduate Biology majors at UCLA.  In fact, that is where they met.



Before long, our city bus had returned to Honolulu's busy suburbs.

Oahu is the most populous Hawaiian Island by far.

As with the rest of Hawaii --- and the United States for that matter --- most of the people cluster together in big cities, which for Oahu is world famous Honolulu, while most of Oahu remains rural.

I cannot say I've seen much change in Honolulu's population density, and a quick internet search revealed that Honolulu now has a population of around 400,000, up only slightly from my first visit fifteen years ago.

Thirty years ago, the people count was 365,000, and even back in 1961, when Elvis performed in a charity concert for  the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial and his movie Blue Hawaii was released, the population had already reached 300,000.

Not exactly the Population Bomb leading to "THE END...and by the end I mean the utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity" before 1985 forecast by Dr. Paul Ehrlich.  Honolulu's reality has been almost nothing compared to the very real devastation of Pearl Harbor in WWII.

In all fairness, perhaps the alarmist rhetoric of Dr. Paul Ehrlich and his disciples should be credited to some extent for positive adaptations by humans, who unlike static models can choose to change our own destiny.  In any case, hyperbole like that is why I no longer take similar alarmist environmental rhetoric as gospel truth.

Most scientists work to stop the worst possible scenarios from unfolding.  For example, as an epidemiologist, our daughter Gina, works backwards from a negative outcome like heart disease to see how environmental factors like neighborhood walkability might positively change future results.

In any case, Waikiki Beach seems no more crowded than it did the first time we went to Duke's for a cheeseburger, and the burger served to us in 2018 still tastes as good as ever (definitely not Soylent Green yet!).

While we didn't do anything other than hang out on Waikiki after lunch, it is always a pleasant way to spend a day.

Once again I was taken aback to find the shopping centers and storefronts near Waikiki (from which the beach cannot be seen) host hundreds of times more tourists and locals than Waikiki Beach itself on even the sunniest of days.

In recent years, the area has been upgraded to be among the toniest districts on the planet to people-watch and be seen buying chic fashions or sipping foamy lattes, which is apparently more highly valued by these urbanites than the renowned beach.

The city fathers are happy to give the people what they want in a case like this.

Approving new construction and redevelopment projects that consumers readily support with new tax dollars is a no-brainer for politicians looking to fill city coffers amd campaign war chests.

My life experience is primarily in California, not Hawaii, but politicians everywhere seem to be cut from the same cloth.

They like to find a parade, jump in front and pretend they're leading it.

Besides, Honolulu's skyline ceased being grass shacks scattered among palm trees long ago.

At least they've built beautiful structures redeveloping Honolulu, though I'm sure there's a strong argument about gentrification from an opposing viewpoint.

The inevitable result?

"You pave paradise, put up a parking lot."

That obviously doesn't carry all the negative connotations my generation once inferred.

Working to resolve catastrophic global warming crisis is another stroll down easy street for the political class.

By taking any action, they can take credit for doing the right thing, and it cannot be proven they didn't make the situation better, as long as they claim that it would have been worse had they done nothing.

While there are other factors in play beyond human contributions to climate change, greenhouse gases always seems to become a popular scapegoat any time natural disaster strikes these days.

Most experts agree that Pacific islands, including Oahu, are not themselves significant sources of those greenhouse gases, although volcanoes certainly can be.  Pacific Islands, however, face some of the most immediate dangers from global warming.

Having been in Disneyland's asphalt parking lot in the early 1960's when most of Orange County was still covered by orange groves and strawberry fields, I can state without fear of contradiction that man-made heat sinks like concrete buildings and parking lots have hotter surface temperatures than trees and ponds, and if you combine enough together to build a big city, it stands to reason that thermometer readings would be warmer than before.

If some combination of greenhouse gases and overdevelopment do in fact contribute to warming the climate, I still wonder if warming leads to more negatives than positives.

Keep in mind that the warming reported since the 1970's brought longer growing seasons and helped fuel the green revolution, counteracting Ehrlich's prediction of mass starvation.

But now, a new environmental movement has risen against Monsanto and other agribusinesses that led the green revolution to feed the world because their methods are "unnatural."

It's hard to know which side of the environmental movement is which, much less who is right.

In the final analysis, our most significant vote will always be how we conduct our own lives, and hopefully enough of us will act in ways to make ours the best of all possible worlds.