Peter S. Adler, Ph.D.
Tel: 970-513-5841
Fax: 970-262-0152
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Peter S. Adler, Ph.D. is President of The Keystone Center, which applies consensus-building and scientific information to energy, environmental, and health-related policy problems. The Keystone Center also offers extensive training and professional education programs to educators and business leaders and runs the Keystone Science School in the Rocky Mountains. Adler's specialty is multi-party negotiation and problem solving. He has worked extensively on water management and resource planning problems and mediates, writes, trains, and teaches in diverse areas of conflict management. He has extensive experience in land planning issues, construction issues, water problems, marine and coastal affairs, and strategic resource management.
Prior to his appointment at Keystone, Adler held executive positions with the Hawaii Justice Foundation, the Hawaii Supreme Court's Center for Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR), and the Neighborhood Justice Center. He has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in India, an instructor and Associate Director of the Hawaii Bound School, and President of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution. He has been awarded the Roberston-Cunninghame Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the University of New England, New South Wales, Australia, a Senior Fellowship at the Western Justice Center, and was a consultant to the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution.
Adler has written extensively in the field of mediation and conflict resolution. He is the author of Eye of the Storm Leadership (2008); co-author of Managing Scientific & Technical Information in Environmental Cases (1999); Building Trust: 20 Things You Can Do to Help Environmental Stakeholder Groups Talk More Effectively About Science, Culture, Professional Knowledge, and Community Wisdom (National Policy Consensus Center, 2002); the author of Beyond Paradise and Oxtail Soup (Ox Bow Press, 1993 and 2000) and
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I've always objected to my Uncle John removing our grandpa and grandma from our back yard 1845 Maunawili Road. Thirty years later, I now realize why my uncle did that. It is sad because now I am old and my Tutu man may fall prey to non family members and their insignificant attitude towards my Ohana. I truly understand the confusion between religious faiths, churchs and easy to prey on the church members.
I believe, the will to direction is to say no! My position is to keep it in place is a final decision made before the OHA at a board meeting. From this stepping off point one should connect all facts, information and point to writing ones own protocol and action steps.
We could have kept grandma and grandpa in place if there was stronger laws, I myself prefer international laws when it comes to burials. Although I have known Bankers to superceed with development in foreign countries. I learned this by listening to our guest that came to confront the Asian Bankers on this very issue. Our protest was warranted and the cost to that protest to the 'system' was I believe conservative number 11 million for Hawaiia's protest. But, I believe it was 21 million. If I am blowing out the facts, please feel free to correct my assertion with factual information which is always welcome.
Training was very much part of our daily staple, and Peter isn't just a person that was here and have gone away. He was not my trainer, and yes, I did attend lots of training in the 70s for almost 10 years of my life. The Hawaiian Movement was terrible and we needed to access human skills as a Hawaiian National Collective. I grew up on DHHL and now am a lesee on DHHL--how isolated can that be! Outside of DHHL residential lands--Na Kanaka are part of the splintered populace of the general public.
DHHL live with only Na Kanaka household residence--except for some places on Kauai--DHHL auctioned off their lands to white people in Anahola. It was done by legislatures of the Fake State of Hawaii. I took Pono Kealoha to such a place and we stayed with Michale and Sondra Grace, a place that remained in Hawaiian hands in Anahola.
The Hawaiian Movement is no sissy place--one needs many dimensions to get through chaos. And not to create chaos out of need to be popular, need to behave blindly, and expect the clean up crew to come in after to sweep up the hurt and pain. Aunty Frenchy is resting! We simply don't have the energy and resources to sweep up the pieces of the windmill and take care of our families.
When Na Kanaka go to the frontline and then leave to go home to your 'dominate white populace' communities--those of us that go home to DHHL communites continue to carry the fight on our shoulders. It never leaves! We are surrounded with native Hawaiians that are na kanaka and they too feel the heat of the Social Media and bigotry. Most are under the age of 18 a clear target for people that Peter trained.
Wounded Island
From Beyond Paradise: Encounters in Hawaii Where the Tour Bus Never Runs, Peter S. Adler, Ox Bow Press, 1993.
Wake up! Our islands are slipping away. While you sleep, we are standing on the edge of darkness.
- Uncle Luther Makekau
The Hawaiian archipelago reaches up from the ocean floor and spreads out like a necklace of emeralds, 132 pinnacles, reefs, and shoals stretching 1,500 miles across the central Pacific basin. Of these landfalls, eight islands make up 99 percent of the land area. Seven are permanently inhabited: Niihau, Kauai, Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, and Hawaii. The eighth is Kahoolawe, a 45-square-mile island situated eight miles off the coast of Maui. By most measures, Kahoolawe is the driest, windiest, and least habitable of the major islands. It has also been one of the most conflicted and controversial pieces of real estate in the United States.To understand the saga of Kahoolawe, what it means to different local people, and what it may come to mean in the near future to everyone, requires a bit of patience. It is not just one story but many stories that cascade into each other, mingle, fold, mix, and finally amalgamate into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Some of these accounts center on events that happened centuries ago. Others are still occurring.
To begin with, the island is small -- eleven miles long by six-and-a-half wide -- and off the main tourist path. Casual visitors are not allowed and few would want to go there if they could. There are no rain forests, waterfalls, or quaint plantation towns. Most often it is described as a wasteland, a barren and forgotten landscape made up of eroding hills, crumbling sea cliffs, grass, cactus and mesquite. On windy days, clouds of red dust rise up from the island, shrouding it from view. Centuries ago, geologists tell us, Kahoolawe was fully forested, but today fifteen feet of its topsoil has been lost to erosion and 85 percent of its fringing reefs are drowned in silt. Nonetheless, there are some folks who live on Maui who claim that Kahoolawe offers the best off-shore fishing in Hawai’i. Then again, there are some life-long residents of the state who could not tell you precisely where Kahoolawe is.
Kahoolawe's cultural and political history is also complex. Some chants remembered by the Hawaiian people refer to the Island as a landmark on the old Polynesian voyaging route to Tahiti and as the mother-island that gave birth to all the other islands in the chain. Its earliest, most ancient name means "the shining vagina of the sea."
At various later times, records show Kahoolawe to have been a fishing station, a prison colony, a sheep farm, a cattle ranch, and the proposed site for a thermonuclear power plant. From the early 1950s to 1990 the island was used as a U.S. Navy bombing and gunnery range, a large target for combined air, sea and land assaults. Today, it is still controlled by the Federal government and the military but the bombing has been stopped, at least temporarily. Moreover, the people of the State of Hawaii are expecting to see the island returned to local control sometime in the very near future. The Navy -- a formidable economic and social presence in Hawaii -- is not pleased with this.
Baked ocher by the sun, swept low by wind and age, Kahoolawe was bombed and shelled continuously for nearly fifty years. The Navy's justification for its use of the Island was -- and still is -- based on national defense. "There really is no other place in the Pacific where shore bombardment can be done simultaneously with ground fire," explained ex-Third Fleet Kahoolawe Project Officer Charles Crockett. "The roughly 8,000 acres that are used as an impact area provide a valuable variety of realistic targets including airfields, actual truck convoys and pin-point targets."
Training needs aside, the Navy's preemptive use of Kahoolawe has not gone unchallenged. Since 1976 a group of young Hawaiian activists calling themselves the Protect Kahoolawe Ohana have sought to halt the bombing and return the Island to the Hawaiian people. In its short lifetime, the PKO -- or simply the Ohana (lit., "family") -- has become the Navy's nemesis by turning the target island into a rallying point and the spearhead of a much broader cultural clash.
The issue of Kahoolawe is fraught with contradictions. Owned by the state, leased to the military, and governed by a 1953 Presidential Executive Order, the island was, for several years, the subject of a massive lawsuit. The litigation, Aluli v. Brown, charged the Department of Defense with violations of (1) Federal standards for water, noise and air pollution; (2) the First Amendment Rights of Hawaiians; (3) laws that guarantee marine mammal and endangered species protection; (4) laws designed to protect historic places; and (5) the rights of religious access promised under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
Arguments over Kahoolawe have also not been restricted to the courtroom. Depending on whom one listens to in the 50th state, the issue can be viewed either as a minor, regional controversy instigated by a few late-blooming student radicals or as one of the major front lines of the new Hawaiian revolution. Abandoned and forbidden to most people, Kahoolawe has elicited a steady chorus of rumblings from the Ohana, the Navy, local archaeologists, politicians, judges, reporters, and the larger Hawaiian community, which remains divided over the issue. Kahoolawe is the center of one of the most rancorous controversies in the Islands and because of this, it attracts rhetoric the way a picnic draws ants.
Charles Kenn, an elderly part-Hawaiian denying Kahoolawe's religious significance at a 1977 trial: "There is no such thing as Hawaiian religion today." An exhortation from an Ohana brochure: "Kahoolawe will become the model of an alternative value structure for the Hawaiian people of today, as well as for the U.S. and the rest of the world." And a West Coast correspondent for a syndicated chain of newspapers: "In my opinion, these Hawaiians are going to shove that island, rock by rock, up the Navy's ass."
Or take Elmer Cravalho, former mayor of Maui County, which includes the Island of Kahoolawe: "My position is that the bombing should stop immediately and the Island be turned over to the state at which time we can decide its future use." Or U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye in 1978: "Without wanting to be the Navy's apologist, I think they have been very cooperative." Or former Rear Admiral Thomas B. Hayward: "I am disturbed by the absence of appreciation for the Navy's need for Kahoolawe." And a poetry class at the Kamehameha III Primary School in Lahaina, Maui:
Kahoolawe, I love you
Kahoolawe say you love me too
I've only seen you from a distance
I wish I could see you up close.
-Robin Bodinus, Grade 5
and:
Kahoolawe
poor island of Hawai’i
it must be painful
when all those big bombs hit.
Unfortunately they don't miss.
-Keith Karlo, Grade 5
If geography, as is sometimes asserted, is a prime determinant of destiny, then the fate of Hawai’i is inextricably linked with its isolation. Island life is life in an echo chamber, a self-contained universe in which cultural traditions, politics, and public opinion reverberate back and forth in barely predictable ways. Sometimes the reverberations come as peals of thunder. More often, vested interests are obscured by the murmurs of hearsay, gossip, equivocation, obliquity, and purposeful indecision. In many ways that is what has happened to Kahoolawe and all of the people whose lives have been touched by it.