Getting Excited About Sustainability

When I began writing this column five years ago, I made sustainability the core theme. Sustainability challenges us to think constantly of the future. It makes us think of coming generations. It demands that we think about all the big pieces at once.

While sustainability was not a new idea, it came into more widespread use as a result of Earth Summit I (1992) and Earth Summit II (2002). Within Hawaii, a discussion of sustainability underscored the absence of long-range planning that characterizes the contemporary scene. I think public interest in sustainability has also increased because growth and development have been occurring too rapidly, without adequate planning.

In this changing climate I began to write in this column about a new Hawaii State Plan, referring to the law that was the hallmark of my administration. I was compelled to spend so much time on it for the most essential of reasons: Good planning will help shape positive lives for our children. The resulting Hawaii State Plan of 1978 was (and is) the law of the land, but when I left the governor’s office in 1986 after 13 years, there was a feeling that I had been too big on long-range planning. You heard things like, “The trouble with all these plans is they sit on the shelf.” Alternatively, plans were critiqued for leading to land-use regulation, which engendered a great deal of resistance. Effectively, the State Plan died after I left office.

When I first returned to the subject of the State Plan, I felt somewhat isolated, but I began to receive positive feedback. By 2003, I wrote, “… our mechanisms for planning have either lost focus or fallen into disuse. We have drifted through a haze of anxiety over the economy, with less and less agreement about who we are, how we are to manage ourselves, and where we are going.

“The State Plan, or something like it, should be reworked for the 21st century.”

As time passed, sustainability continued to provide a theme in which to renew and expand our thinking, and it is therefore gratifying that a Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan is being unveiled this month.

From all indications, the Hawaii 2050 plan will be a positive step. It puts a new emphasis on keeping the Plan alive through periodic monitoring of progress, reviewing and revisions. There also is a refreshing emphasis on individual as well as collective responsibility. The sustainability of native Hawaiian culture and multiethnic Island cultures is also a much more prominent concern.

Much has been made of the fact that Hawaii 2050 was developed over the objections of the incumbent governor— and specifically in spite of her two vetoes of the enabling legislation, both of which were overridden by the Legislature. I personally am acutely aware that if the chief executive does not promote the principles and practices of a plan, much will go undone. I used the plan in everyday governance. When department heads came to me, I asked how their ideas related to the plan. Government is immensely complicated, and a plan helps establish and maintain an overall direction that is widely understood.

Optimistically, the Hawaii 2050 plan may have been strengthened in the long run because it was fashioned without the support of the governor. Sustainability becomes everyone’s challenge. A sustainability process must be continued regardless of whether it is to the liking of—or actively used by—any given governor.

In any event, the existence of Hawaii 2050 will make it more likely that long-range planning will be a part of the discussion in the election of a new governor in 2010. Two generations of children will grow up between that time and the year 2050.

For all these reasons, I am excited. A strong, clear statement of concern for the future is alive and at work.

George R. Ariyoshi, chairman and cofounder of Convergence CT and Cellular Bioengineering, is the former president of Prince Resorts Hawaii Inc. He is active in international business circles, particularly in Asia. An attorney by profession, Ariyoshi served in elective office in Hawaii from 1954 to 1986. He served as governor of Hawaii from 1973 to 1986 and was the first Japanese American to be elected governor in the United States.

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