OIL DRILLING

HELP PERSUADE OUR SENATORS TO ALTER VOTE

Hawai'i Sens. Akaka and Inouye have told us that they voted pro-drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because all but one village of native Alaskans wanted it. They told us that the wildlife would not be negatively affected. However, scientific studies have shown that development changes caribou calving and migration, and polar bears are severely affected by oil drilling and development.

There was a group of native Alaskans in Hawai'i last week speaking out against drilling in ANWR. They represent several villages, three different tribes of native people, and have letters of support from about 20 native villages. Many villages of natives do not support drilling in ANWR because it would severely impact the animals on which they subsist, along with causing increased levels of pollution and respiratory disease.

Congress will have one more vote this month to change its position on drilling in ANWR. Join me in encouraging our senators to reconsider their votes based upon good science and the word of the native Alaskans, instead of for-profit corporations.

CRIME

MASS TRANSIT IS FAR FROM FAST, CONVENIENT

Please allow me to take issue with City Council member Gary Okino's description of mass transit as "fast and convenient alternative."

Perhaps "fast" is in the eyes of the beholder, but in all the years of mass-transit usage in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Rome, Barcelona, Prague, Moscow, Kiev, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Bangkok and many more minor cities, I have never, repeat never, found it "convenient."

Even in polite Tokyo, there are special cars reserved for females only due to the problem of persistent groping and other sexual assault. The same subway system employs white-gloved "pushers" whose responsibility is to shove people in their backs to pack the trains like sardines during rush hour.

Transit crime will be a serious problem since the public is trapped with no escape route while being robbed, raped and intimidated by all sorts of gangs and criminal elements. No wonder all major municipalities had to create a form of transit police to combat everything from unruly and rambunctious youths on their way home from the bars to the child molesters fishing for your children on their way home from school.

Perhaps the only people who find mass transit "convenient" are long-suffering car commuters who have no experience whatsoever with mass transit outside of taking a hotel bus to the airport in Acapulco or council members peddling delusional pie-in-the-sky fantasies after junkets to the sunny localities paid by the proponents of mass transit after taking the Magic Train at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

ADAM SMITH

PRICE-CONTROL MYTH INVOKED ONCE AGAIN

John Corboy repeats the myth "Price controls always distort the market" (Letters, Aug. 19). He claims that "Adam Smith discovered it over 200 years ago." Corboy assumes that the market will always take care of itself. Yet, in the Smith book "The Wealth of Nations," he used the phrase "the invisible hand" only once.

Decades later, British evangelicals reinterpreted it as "the invisible hand of the marketplace," which now has over a million listings on the Web.

As for Corboy's "government meddling," 200 pages — one-third — of Smith's book dealt with the important role of government and taxes for the wealth of nations.

"Justice" and "sympathy" are most frequently mentioned in his earlier book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which first made him famous. In a major biography, Ian Ross summarized the aim of Adam Smith — that he might help us to aspire to virtue rather than wealth.

HURRICANE

SEND ALOHA BECAUSE SOMEDAY IT MAY BE US

Even though Hawai'i has its share of problems, let us not forget our neighbors in the South — most of whom can't get a shower, food or a mere glass of water.

Things are sometimes taken for granted in the United States. Send some aloha from the Islands to the people of the South because one day it could be us in peril.

Now that we see what the federal government has done to help, we can expect the same slow, bureaucratic help in the future.

God bless the people in need in this time of crisis.

HURRICANE

HAWAI'I IS VULNERABLE IN FEDERAL ASSISTANCE

Hawai'i residents better hope we don't get hit by a killer hurricane like Katrina. Who knows how long FEMA or Homeland Security or whatever it is that is supposed to coordinate relief efforts for the federal government will take to get to Hawai'i.

We don't have the luxury of other National Guard units driving across the border to help. Maybe President Bush can do a low flyover on his way back from another one of his vacations and drop off food and water.

COVERAGE

IT'S TIME TO LIGHTEN UP ABOUT LITTLE LEAGUERS

It's sad to see people criticize The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin for sensationalizing 'Ewa Beach's Little League championship win. It's obvious these people get a charge from bad and negative news because feel-good stories bother them to the point of actually writing to condemn it.

Come on, people, lighten up! With all the news about the high cost of housing, gas prices and tax increases, you should welcome and celebrate their accomplishments. To suggest that sensationalizing this is negative for our kids is moronic and sad.

HURRICANE

O'AHU NOT READY FOR AN EMERGENCY EVACUATION

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that this island is not ready if a hurricane or tsunami comes through. The street infrastructure does not support an orderly evacuation, as most communities are limited to one entrance off the highway (two if lucky). So-called shelters are not maintained.

Before building more houses, developers should submit stronger proposals on how a new community would impact traffic with a focus on including ways out of a community in case of a massive evacuation. The city should request this before issuing a building permit.

It is all connected and has a cause and effect that must be analyzed prior to any new development to help evacuation plans and maximize safety in the street.

PROTECTORS

FIREFIGHTERS ARE REAL HEROES TO WEST SIDE

It seems that often enough people tend to look for ways to disagree in society: rail vs. no rail, tax hike vs. no tax hike, and war vs. peace. One thing that I don't think anyone can disagree with is the hard work and dedication that we have recently seen with our firefighters.

As a resident and employee of the Kapolei area, I have witnessed firsthand the tenacity and drive that these men and women have in protecting all of us. They fight these fires and watch over our homes as if they were their own. They are covered from head to toe in soot and look tired and hungry — but never defeated.

I have family and friends in Honokai Hale and Nanakuli who have stood in their yards in awe watching these people tirelessly fight these fires hour after hour. They go to sleep at night and wake in the morning to see the same faces out there, much more tired, but again, not defeated.

The Leeward Coast can rest assured in knowing that we have the best of the best watching over all of us. I sit at my desk listening to one siren after another and say a prayer for these local heroes and their family members who wait anxiously at home for their safe return.

To all of our Honolulu firefighters and federal firefighters: You are appreciated and deserve every dollar you make and then some!

BAD EFFECTS

LET'S INVEST IN HAWAI'I INSTEAD OF IN TOURISM

Congratulations to Lee Cataluna for an excellent column on tourism (Aug. 26). The effects of too much tourism have long been ignored while our state continues to suffer.

I don't understand why Gov. Lingle and others always talk about everything in terms of the effect on our visitor industry. What about the residents of Hawai'i? Our children deserve a better future than working as valets and waiters for tourists.

The millions our state spends promoting Hawai'i should be spent promoting local businesses like biotechnology. It makes no sense for the limited housing supply to go for vacation rentals and nonaffordable second homes while residents can barely find decent housing.

Let's invest in Hawai'i instead of investing in tourism.

MEDIAL SIGN

GRAMMAR PROBLEM

Eastbound on the H-1, before the Likelike overpass, the sign in the medial strip states: "Lanes Narrows." Would you please correct this to reflect the meaning — either "Lanes narrow" or "Lane narrows"?

OPTION

A BETTER ZIPPER LANE

I'm no rocket scientist or transportation expert. But would not it be easier to charge a toll for the Zipper Lane? And then make it free to three or more?

BIG ISLAND COQUI PROBLEM IS MUCH BIGGER

I'd like to add some information to Tim Hurley's Aug. 28 article headlined "Study says coqui isn't ecological scourge" to clarify some recent ecological work on the introduced common coqui in Hawai'i.

Several studies have found that common coqui frog densities in specific sites on the Big Island can reach 20,234-plus coqui per acre. This is approximately 2.5 times greater than the highest coqui densities recorded in Puerto Rico and likely one of the highest biomass estimates recorded for any terrestrial vertebrate in the world.
Extrapolating from work done in Puerto Rico, this number of coqui would consume roughly 114,200-plus invertebrates per acre per night. The deposition of nitrogenous waste at abundance levels from coqui that have been documented on the Big Island has the potential of changing nutrient cycling and thus plant community composition in our native and invasive plant-dominated forests in the long run.

We know that uncontrolled coqui populations slowly expand in high-elevation areas such as Volcano Village (3,500 feet), where diverse native bird communities begin to become common. We hope that human intervention of coqui spread into these sites will prevent the testing of the hypothesis that coqui can alter native-dominated ecosystems that are found in mid- to high-elevation remote sites near Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park.

One would think that the common coqui would eat itself out of house and home in Hawai'i at such high densities. This is sadly not the case because of the high diversity and abundance of introduced invertebrates in many low-elevation areas in the state.

Introduced invertebrates composed 80 percent of the diet of coqui in a recent study. Though we would have hoped that mosquitoes would have been a common prey item in common coqui stomachs, in several independent studies, this prey item has been consistently absent or extremely rare.

One might find some comfort for native invertebrates because they only compose 20 percent of coqui diets. If one recalls the relative abundance of coqui in many sites on the Big Island, this misinterpretation is literally dead wrong. The sad fact is that many studies assessing the impact of invasive species are conducted after native communities have been altered irreparably. In the case of much of the dietary data reported on coqui currently, we are looking at the invertebrate communities that are ghosts of predation past.

I feel my comments are little comfort for those folks who live near high-density coqui sites in lower-elevation areas of the Big Island. This is a sad situation where we have no solutions that are cost-effective at the immense scale that is needed to grapple with this problem.