“The Value of the Long View: A Long-Term Industrial Ecosystem Model of Hawai‘i Island”
Prof. Marian Chertow, Industrial Environmental Management Program, Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

E-mail: marian.chertow@yale.edu

View the accompanying PowerPoint presentation (9.5 MB).

“The Kohala Center has been working together with Marian Chertow and her Yale colleagues for a long time now. Marian is a whirlwind of creative and rigorous thinking. When she was in her 20s, everyone expected her to become a classicist, a scholar of Greek and Latin. Then she discovered garbage! By the time she was 35, she had built a billion-dollars worth of waste management infrastructure. Then she surprised everyone again and took an academic post at Yale. With every move in her career, she has served an ever larger number of people and communities.” —Matt Hamabata, The Kohala Center

I have a sober message to share. If we look back in time and then we look forward and try to imagine what some of the future transitions will be – that’s what this meeting is about. We will talk about the changes that have already happened and about those that are coming.

Why should we take a long-term view? By long-term, I mean a minimum of 20-30 years.
If you think about all of time and the transitions that have occurred in the lifespan of mankind, it makes sense to look at changes over the long term. The tools that man has invented have allowed us to increase our population over time. So did the agricultural revolution: highly organized planting techniques allowed our population to increase. The industrial revolution permitted our planet’s population to grow to its current 6.5 billion people. And every time our population grows, we also increase our resource use: we eat more and we use more materials.

The question now is, “Are we going to proceed with our current unsustainable systems and crash – or will we move toward more sustainable systems?”

Looking at the history of Hawai‘i Island, I have chosen four icons to represent four major transitions that have occurred here.

Today, Hawai‘i has transportation connections to the rest of the world, but there are definite limits to the availability and security of resources and to the ability of the island environment to absorb the impacts of this modern lifestyle. How to deal with garbage is a good example of a modern challenge facing the island. And island challenges are what we need to address in our long-term study.

How do we do this? Our energy plan, a cooperative effort of the County, The Kohala Center, and Yale, is a good example of how we can look at the status quo and compare it to an alternative future. In this study we imagined the future with just 30% fossil fuels by 2028, and then we created a roadmap for how to generate more renewable energy and be more efficient here on the island. Since I was last here, your island has doubled its wind energy production, and many plan recommendations have been accepted, including the newly passed building code.

Hawai‘i County is now tracking 79 indicators to measure its progress in meeting the goals articulated in its General Plan. These indicators look at economic, environmental, and social health. For the first time in 2008, the County issued an annual report on its progress in meeting these goals.

And this island has a legacy of groundbreaking environmental research. Right here on Mauna Loa, C. D. Keeling took measurements of carbon dioxide to create his very, very famous chart that showed an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over time.

Another famous example of the kind of long-term study we are proposing here is the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, which has been ongoing in New Hampshire since the 1960s. Hubbard Brook is a watershed, and research showed that through careful monitoring of a small watershed over time, we can elucidate environmental impacts of varying factors over time. For example, lead concentrations started to be measured in the late 1970s, and lead levels decreased over time. This decrease coincided with legislation that eliminated leaded gas for transportation fuel, legislation which was then shown to reduce the amount of lead in a natural system at Hubbard Brook.

The LIEM-Hawai‘i Project is an expansion of our relationships on Hawai‘i Island. The island will be a long-term research site to study how human actions influence resources over time. We will look at issues such as where resources go on the island, how long they stay tied up in buildings, when do they cycle out again, and how we can use fewer resources, be more efficient, and create a vibrant economy.

This will be a model study for Hawai‘i Island and for the world. We will include socio-economic factors as well as biophysical factors. It is very challenging to add in human factors, but we want to watch what happens in the socioeconomic system on the island, in order to identify best practices. If we can document best practices and study them, then maybe we can turn them into policy.

The term “industrial ecology” (IE) is itself an oxymoron, similar to the term “sanitary landfill.” IE looks at human and industrial systems in the context of their natural surroundings. The idea is to move from linear to circular flows, in order to limit waste and importation of resources and energy. We need to think in terms of ecosystems that take care of all the inputs and, therefore, generate limited waste.

So far we’ve studied water, waste, and energy through our partnerships on Hawai‘i Island. Now we need to bring this all together and integrate natural and human systems. When we look at agriculture we see that there are very promising opportunities for diversified agriculture. The price of coffee has skyrocketed in the recent past, as one example. We can also look at how to better “metabolize” tourism into the economy. We have seen that resource use by guests is significantly higher than it is by island residents. Tourists use more water, sewers, electricity, utility gas, and highway gas, and they generate more solid waste. This study will help us think about these issues for the future – what should the metabolism of tourists be and how can we adjust the situation to align with our goals?

Another issue of daily concern on the island and throughout the state is what role should biodiesel fuel play here? A study our Yale students completed this spring looked at three potential fuel crops: invasive grasses, eucalyptus, and algae. We considered two scenarios to meet the State’s standard of 20% bio-fuels by 2020, even though the standard need not be met by Hawai‘i Island only. Scenario #1 modeled 20% fuel production through fermentation from eucalyptus plantations and would require between 372,000 acres and 606,000 acres. Scenario #2 modeled 20% biodiesel production from algae and would require between 8,000 acres and 67,000 acres to produce the same amount of fuel. So we can see that eucalyptus plantations are much more land intensive.

The challenges involved in doing the LIEM study are huge. There is so much variety on this island - including everyone from folks in Puna who don’t want to be on the electric grid to guests at the Kona-Kohala Coast resorts with lots of air conditioning. We see “complex adaptive systems” which, according to recent theory, just emerge without central control. So, for example, the fact that there is only a ten-day food supply on the island is moderated by a system of suppliers, shippers, and distributors that has evolved on its own over time. We need to study and describe the way the existing system works, so we can understand it better and make recommendations for the future. For example, would a department of food supply here even be useful?

You may have heard the term “black swans,” which are highly improbable events. If for a thousand years we thought all swans were white, seeing a black one would make you question all your underlying premises. Black swans are events which have unpredictable, massive impacts. After the fact we concoct an explanation that makes such events appear less random and more predictable than they were. Examples of black swans on this island are volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the demise of the sugar industry, rapid population growth, and rapidly rising real estate prices. The hope is that through LIEM-Hawai‘i, we can be more prepared for what is coming over time and become more resilient in the face of such events.

Some of the tools we use are satellite images, material flow analyses to show us possible local substitutes for something that we’re currently importing, system dynamic modeling to predict future resource needs, and agent based modeling which uses behavioral rules to model how people will react to various situations. For example, we might want to predict how people will react as the price of gasoline reaches different per gallon thresholds.

It is important to recognize what resources you already have and to develop flexible systems. Economies of scale are a relevant factor in island settings. Consider solid waste, for example. In all of the State of Hawai‘i there isn’t the volume to justify a paper manufacturing operation, and it is expensive to ship paper off island. If you depend on markets elsewhere, they go up and down, so you want to recognize that you might not have a market for paper in six months. There is also no aluminum manufacturer, so you must ship cans off the island to be recycled. On the other hand, with green waste and composting there is a local market, so it makes sense to concentrate on serving this market. You also have a huge construction waste flow on this island, and some of the flow could be redirected and reused. These are some of the issues that careful analysis can help to address.

Academics fight over what conditions define sustainability. The LIEM-Hawai‘i study will help us to discover what sustainability means for this place. The important point is that we need to talk about and look at the bigger picture to understand how best to move forward in light of this island’s unique local circumstances. The bottom line is that we can do a lot better in maximizing our sustainable use of materials and energy than we’re doing now.