The Future of Hawaii
Price of Paradise · Hawaii Public Radio · aired 1994-04-01
Guests: James Dator (futurist, University of Hawaii); Peter Adler (sociologist and mediator)
Duration: 0:26:14

[00:00:00] Randall Roth: The Price of Paradise Radio Show. My guests this week are Jim Dator, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, and past President of the World Futures Studies Federation, and Peter Adler, Executive Director of the Hawaii Justice Foundation and author of the highly acclaimed book Beyond Paradise, Encounters in Hawaii where the tour bus never runs. Jim, what does it take to be a futurist?
[00:00:25] James Dator: Well, I think um what's call Aglaston Aglaston is nostalgia spelled backwards. I see. It's an inordinate concern about things that are yet to happen.
[00:00:37] Randall Roth: Um, what do you see for the future in Hawaii?
[00:00:41] James Dator: Well, if unless we make some major changes in the way things are going now, we can certainly expect the future of our children and grandchildren to be far worse than our present or uh the present of our own parents and grandparents here.
[00:00:57] Randall Roth: Peter, do you agree with that?
[00:00:58] Peter Adler: I do. I think uh there's a uh uh there are forces at play here and uh trends at play that that seem to be uh putting us on the down slope of a some kind of big curve and the quality of life, whatever that means and how it's ephemeral in the best of times, but it seems to be declining and uh by all measures, people seem to be things seem more crowded, more difficult, more complicated. Yes, I think that's right. I think things are on the down slope and but at the same time I don't think that it has to be that way and I think there are things that can change that picture.
[00:01:32] Randall Roth: Uh, Jim, what specifically do you see? You you say it's going to be far worse unless we change some things. Tell me about some of the specific things that are bad in the year 2020.
[00:01:42] James Dator: Uh, well, bad in the year 2020, if we don't do something about it. You must understand that I'm in the futures business, not to predict what will happen, but rather to uh encourage people to look at the trends that Peter was mentioning and uh decide whether they want to go in that direction or or move elsewhere. So the things that concern me at the present time uh are the economy, uh the fact that we are a part of a global economy but have very little control over our uh place in it, and the long-range deterioration of the environment and what that will do for the quality of all life in the future.
[00:02:26] Randall Roth: Well now, the latter one, we have some control over, don't we? The environment?
[00:02:30] James Dator: Um, not very much in my opinion. I think that most of the things that we need to worry about that will affect us over the next uh 20, 30, 40, 50 years are the uh already accumulating effects of things that we have done in the past and are continuing to do, even if we were to shut down all uh industrial processes at the present time all over the world, which we will not do, we would still have a deteriorating environment for the next 50 years.
[00:02:59] Randall Roth: Well, Jim, I was taught to not worry about those things that I had no control over, and I hear you saying our biggest worries are the global economy and global environmental problems. Is that right?
[00:03:10] James Dator: Yes, that's right and we have no control over them. I use the analogy of surfing in which I I say we need to learn to surf the tsunamis of change. Uh, I see these things as major forces that are coming that we need to prepare for, but we need to take the attitude of a surfer, look out there, study those waves, and then use them to go where we want to go and to have fun at it.
[00:03:37] Randall Roth: Peter, what do you think?
[00:03:38] Peter Adler: Well, one of the things where I'm not sure if Jim and I might not part company on some of these. I I share a lot of things. I've learned a lot from Jim. Jim has been a teacher for me in in the this whole area of uh trying to think about think hard about the future and get other people to think hard about the future. But one of the assumptions that I hear in that is that the kind of the natural systems, at least environmentally, are on the verge of collapse and that uh once they do collapse, there's no regeneration. And one of the things that struck me and maybe this is the difference between being optimistic and being pessimistic and half full and half empty glasses, but it strikes me that very often uh natural systems do regenerate if they're given a chance, but the question is do we give them a chance. Hanamoa Bay was almost dead at one point in time. It was turned into a natural preserve. Now it's got a different category of problems, but there's a lot of life out there, same thing with lots of other reefs and lots of other natural systems. So, I'm not so pessimistic that we can't uh, you know, save a lot of systems and can't do a lot of things, but it will take big interventions to do it.
[00:04:35] Randall Roth: Jim, are you doom and gloom on the environment?
[00:04:37] James Dator: Um, well, big interventions is the key word. I uh for example, just one example, uh we read a lot about China's economic future and uh you have 1 billion plus people who are intent upon achieving our standard of living, our current standard of living through the use of um rather significantly polluting uh energy sources and I think they're likely to do it. Uh India can't be far behind and uh not much of the rest of the world either. If we continue to move uh in the current uh direction of economic growth, uh then things are going to get real bad environmentally very soon for all of us. Can we stop that process? Can we tell China and India, no, you've got to continue living at your current standard, well, we can try but I don't think we'll be successful.
[00:05:33] Randall Roth: And when you say we, we, you're talking about the United States as opposed to the state of Hawaii?
[00:05:38] James Dator: Yes, I am.
[00:05:40] Randall Roth: Okay. Jim mentioned the the global economy, Peter. What does that mean to you, a global economy, and and how is it that we are so much affected by that that that Jim would use the analogy of the surfer?
[00:05:51] Peter Adler: Um, you know, I'm I'm still trying to figure out how to balance my checkbook on on quite a few things and and I suspect a lot of people are, and I'm still I'm trying to understand money and what money is in this particular day and age that we're in.
[00:06:03] Randall Roth: Well, let's throw it back to Jim. What do you think?
[00:06:05] Peter Adler: Well, well I guess what I want to say is that is that uh, you know, whatever you read on on what the state of the economy is is shifting so fast and so back and forth. And again, this comes down to I think in some cases uh, you know, what's the disposition of the people on the day that they woke up? Are they optimistic or are they pessimistic? I don't know. But I I mean I what I'm saying is that the prognostications on the economy are real real complicated and real difficult. I mean, I've gotten I don't think there's any simple answer to it because some people say the global economy is just starting to warm up and starting to cook in in interesting ways and the United States is on the verge of kind of uh softening its technologies while India and China are starting to go for the old technologies and there's this kind of uh you know, linkages between uh and you know, adaption adoption and that that kind of thing. So
[00:06:56] James Dator: Well, um I would have to agree if I were to be optimistic with what Peter said. On the one hand, if it is possible to use uh energy sources and building materials that are not typical of those of uh the immediate past, uh then one can be relatively optimistic as far as the impact of the economy on the environment for the foreseeable future. Um I don't see us in the United States or uh Western Europe making the transition to those uh energy sources and materials as quickly as uh Peter's optimism is implying. We had that opportunity in the 70s but I just can't forget the 80s. The 80s were a massive uh denial of everything that we uh know in my opinion need to be done uh economically in order to have a sustainable environment. Um so, I it just is is tough for me to be optimistic. Now if we were just to ask questions about the economy per se, I think that a perpetual increasing and global unemployment is a major continuing fact of life for the feasible future. So the economy in the financial sense might look great but the standard of living of of most of the people on the face of the earth, including here in Hawaii, looks real bleak.
[00:12:38] Randall Roth: Tell tell me more specifically, how do outside owners control Hawaii? Where do you see them using their their influence?
[00:12:56] James Dator: In virtually everything. That is to say they physically own uh a lot of the most important uh properties, or at least own uh control the use of those properties. And uh the economic system that has always characterized the United States since the Second World War, but which was heightened and improved uh during the 1980s, uh recently uh actually has the intention of not making us be concerned about long-range consequences but only focus on bottom line uh short-range profit. Uh and so that we have an improving economy now, Peter, because we fire everybody, absolutely everybody in of every status that we get rid of of the costs and somehow we then say we have an improving economy. And I think that's the sort of thing that I'm describing. Our economic system now is designed to make us not think about the long-range consequences of what we're doing and that's primarily done, yeah, in in in Tokyo, in uh New York, in uh Bonn and other parts.
[00:14:03] Peter Adler: But but the interesting thing is that uh we see here, for example, developers, offshore developers from Japan or Taiwan or other other places that have bought projects pieces of land here and are unable to develop those. I mean, I I I know a development project on the Windward side, 20 years, three different owners who've been trying to to cite a a project there. They've tried housing, they've tried all kinds of different proposals and it's only now 20 years of discussion is starting to produce a plan that's acceptable to the community, which has lots of small farmers in it, and is acceptable to the developer, and has the balance and the mix and the chemistry that looks like it might be both economically viable and environmentally sensitive.
[00:14:41] Randall Roth: So Peter, you're saying they're equally frustrated?
[00:14:43] Peter Adler: Everybody's frustrated. The offshore guys want to buy they buy into these things and they think they're going to make a a quick buck and these guys have been holding this property for years and they can't recoup their costs. So
[00:19:00] Jim: borders it can only do what the United States permits it to do.
[00:19:03] Speaker 2: Well, we as a state have no control over our borders, right?
[00:19:07] Jim: Well, as a state we have no control, except in the indirect ways. Make it extremely expensive to live here or very unpleasant to live here, then you might be able to hold it back. Otherwise, it's real tough. That was something we we did have some control over 20 years ago, but we couldn't get local people, local decision makers, to worry about the future at that time. And now we've got to deal with the consequences of it.
[00:19:34] Speaker 2: So if uh 10 million people from California want to move to Hawaii, there's nothing legally that we can do to stop them. And the more attractive we make Hawaii, the more likely we're going to have, maybe not 10 million, but a lot of those folks wanting to come. Peter?
[00:19:48] Peter Adler: I think so. I I think actually there's What does that mean? Well, I want to go back to what Jim said about the sheer numbers of people, globally, nationally, and locally. The the escalating populations. And and one of the consequences of that strikes me is that we start to move more and more into something that looks like the administered world, where every single day-to-day activity is now becomes more administrated and more regulated and we have uh, you know, more regulation trying to to handle every single little problem. And the reality is you can't enforce any of it. The reality will be that it'll start to look very chaotic and very anarcit. So, um I I mean, I concur. I think that the population is at the core. You know, if I was worrying about any one of your tidal waves more than the other one, that's the one I'm trying to figure out how you're going to serve. You're going to need a big surfboard for that one.
[00:20:38] Speaker 2: But what I heard Jim suggest, Peter, is that our single most effective weapon against overpopulation here in Little Hawaii is the high cost of living, to make housing outrageously expensive so folks can't move in. Is that what you're saying?
[00:20:54] Jim: Well, I'd say that would have the effect. I'm not suggesting that as a positive weapon. No, I think that uh, that sovereignty probably is the uh, the most effective weapon for controlling our own borders, but one of the things that um, I, I am concerned about in the future per se is uh, the decline of the nation-state as an effective um, administrative unit to to use your phrase Peter. So that even sovereignty in the sense of becoming a nation-state is going to be of minimal effect. I think that we we need global governance, which we don't have at the present time, in order to to control these issues.
[00:21:33] Speaker 2: Gavin Doz the other day was saying that if we go for a form of sovereignty that severs us from the United States, and if something happens in China for example, to where a lot of folks want to get out of that comfort, country, and they head this way, we don't have the U.S. Army, Navy, Coast Guard, etc. His point was, how do we keep them out of here? How do we get them out of here once they're here? Peter, I hear you saying that's a real problem.
[00:21:59] Peter Adler: That is a problem.
[00:22:00] Jim: Well, I think not only that, that we shouldn't look at it that way. We're not going to be able to prevent massive global migrations over the 21st century.
[00:22:08] Speaker 2: Oh, even if we're part of the United States?
[00:22:09] Jim: Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, we can't keep Mexicans out of out of uh Los Angeles. I don't think we should try. I think uh that this whole idea of trying to prevent uh this this movement uh is futile, and I think we have to look at what happened in Europe which had in in its own sphere a population explosion in the 18th century, 17th and 18th century. They went to the new world. There is no new world to go to, except maybe space. That's something else I'm working on.
[00:22:43] Speaker 2: And that is one of the one of those visions of the future that a lot of your colleagues in the future say, the direction of the next migration is out to the stars.
[00:22:50] Jim: That's right. My my statement is two planets are better than one.
[00:22:54] Speaker 2: Peter, earlier, I heard Jim using the metaphor of uh of the surfer. And what I got out of that was that there are a lot of things that we have no control over, so we've got to learn to to adjust to those. Is part of the problem right now, all of this anger and frustration, that our expectations don't match with what we see down the road? Is part of the problem that that we as a people are more interested in in a quality of life for us to for us right now and that maybe we're not willing to give that up, even if it's necessary to preserve a quality of life for our children down the road?
[00:23:28] Peter Adler: Well, I think so. I mean, short-term, long-term costs and benefits are part of what goes on, both intuitively as well as in some bigger calculus. But I, you know, I I mean, I have a, one of the interesting things in Jim's article in the newspaper, which I'm sitting here looking at is, Hawaii's future Paradise lost question. And I have questions about what is that metaphor of Paradise all about and does that serve us well? That's a real Western notion. I think it's a Western notion and that's something that we, we talk You and your book talk about as, you know, price of paradise. And I use it in the title of the book I wrote, and Jim talks about it in the title of the article. We don't have any real concurrence about that. That's even inappropriate. So maybe we're we're trapping ourselves into an an inappropriate metaphor? I think so.
[00:24:09] Speaker 2: What do you think, Jim?
[00:24:10] Jim: Well, I like the metaphor of Hawaii itself. I think Hawaii was and still is everywhere in the world a uh a condemnation of of everything else. It is an ideal of a better place than any place is at the present time. And uh it was for the people who originally came to Hawaii, they came with this vision of a better place than where they were. Uh, and I I think that we need to find our our Hawaii. We need to recognize that Hawaii has not yet been achieved. We haven't yet found it, and uh, we've got to get one of those waves that's going to push us in that direction.
[00:24:49] Speaker 2: We've got uh a little bit less than a minute left. I'm going to make each of you king for the day. Peter, what are you going to do as your first act as king of Hawaii?
[00:24:59] Peter Adler: I'm going to uh uh issue a decree that requires everybody to show up for a meeting.
[00:25:05] Speaker 2: And in that meeting we're going to close the doors and we're we're going to sit down and crash some of this stuff out, and we're going to do that meeting on a big time scale. We're going to we're going to hook people in electronically in every which way and we are going to sit down and we're going to put these different possibilities of what we want to be in the future out there, and we're going to try and do a really good collective analysis and then finally try and pick one and start to move towards. Jim, what do you think?
[00:25:27] Jim: I'll go with that one. I think it's great. Let's do it, Peter. That sounds great. My guest this week were Jim Dator, a UH political science professor and futures studies expert, and Peter Adler, Executive Director of the Hawaii Justice Foundation, and author of Beyond Paradise. This week's show was produced by Jill Senner with technical assistance from Mark Wagner. Be sure to tune in next week when my guests will be two internationally recognized experts on tourism, Jim Mack, and Ken Tucker. You've been listening to the Price of Paradise Radio show. I'm Randy Roth, Aloha.