Summer's End

I’ve always marked the end of summer not by the autumnal equinox but when school starts, and so as summer draws to a close we are preparing for two trips: one to the Big Island for a short family vacation followed closely by a trip back East to take our daughter to college. The usual anticipation I’d have for these trips has been tempered by heightened security levels occasioned by the latest terrorist threats which both dampen my enthusiasm for air travel and increase my anxieties about my daughter leaving home. I am reminded how lucky we are to live in Hawaii and how important it is to preserve what we have for our kids, but also how critical it is for us to maintain a global perspective.

Preserving what we have in Hawaii has become almost a cliché through years of overexposure to a seemingly endless list of problems and underwhelming leadership in addressing them. Interest in the environment, however, has been rekindled by an unlikely summer movie hit, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on global warming that presents dire warnings about near-future environmental disasters that loom ominously and the small window of time left for us to defuse them. Locally, the Legislature created the Hawai’i 2050 Sustainability Task Force to plan a sustainable future for the state by 2050, but as critically important as that effort is, we know that little can be accomplished without a growing economy and prosperous business community.

To help the business community understand what the issues, Hawaii Business, in partnership with the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs, will sponsor a series of free monthly breakfast briefings at the Hawaii Prince Hotel on the issues that Hawaii must address to achieve the sustainable future we all want for our children and grandchildren. The goal of the series will not only be an understanding of a myriad of issues such as education, affordable housing, agriculture, mass transit, and environmental and cultural preservation and how they all fit together, but to develop a plan for action in which we all can play a part. We expect to begin the series before the end of this year.

Of course, we cannot achieve a sustainable Hawaii if the rest of world is going to hell, but to influence what happens outside Hawaii we have to depend largely upon our national political leaders. We have the opportunity to select a couple of them in the elections this fall. That it is our moral duty as citizens to participate in that selection by exercising our right to vote is a no-brainer, but how we vote should not be. We need to elect leaders who possess a vision of a world in which a sustainable Hawaii can thrive, that is, one that is as stable as possible socially, politically, and economically. They don’t have to have the all the answers—clearly, no one does—but they must have that vision and be open to any good ideas on how to achieve it.

In the meantime, I’ll wistfully recall the days in simpler times when you could arrive at the airport 15 minutes before your flight departed and, adrenaline pumping, still make it on board before they closed the doors.

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