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- Maui Water Struggles
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- Robynn Takayama
Water is essential to survival. Yet access to fresh, clean water has increasingly come under the control of private corporations, making it less affordable and harder to come by. Activists in Maui, Hawaii are working to recover the island's water sources for public use.
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Piece Description
Water is essential to survival. Yet access to fresh, clean water has increasingly come under the control of private corporations, making it less affordable and harder to come by. Activists in Maui, Hawaii are working to recover the island's water sources for public use.
Broadcast History
Making Contact--January 2005
won National Journalism Award, Unlimited Subject Matter-Radio from Asian American Journalists Association
Transcript
In the mid-1800s, Westerners developed an agricultural economy in Hawaii and planted sugar cane fields in the dry, leeward parts of the islands. [cane sounds out] To water their fields, they constructed massive irrigation systems to carry water from miles away in the wet, windward side of the islands.
KAPUA: when a lot of these plantation systems were put into place, ? they were done without any consideration of the impacts that taking the water out of the streams were going to have on the natural and human environments that rely on them.
Kapua Sproat is a lawyer with Earth Justice, a non-profit public interest law firm. She says for over 100 years, communities in Hawaii have suffered under the mismanagement of their fresh water.
KAPUA: Often times, streams and communities were de-watered with horrific impacts on traditional agriculture and aquaculture, on native stream life,...
Read the full transcript
Timing and Cues
ANCHOR INTRO: In 1993, a poor, rural community on the Hawaiian island of Oahu petitioned the State Water Commission and challenged the state's largest landowner over control of the island?s fresh water sources.
The case involved the diversion of streams in the Waiahole (why-u-HOLE-ey) valley by Oahu Sugar Company for its water thirsty sugar cane crop. When the company shut down its plantations, large scale agricultural and development interests tried to continue to use the diverted waters for golf course irrigation, corporate agriculture, and housing development. People in Waiahole argued the diverted water should return to the streams to restore native stream life and preserve traditional small family farming.
It was a David versus Goliath battle. But in August 2000, the Hawaii Supreme Court agreed with the community's demand that the streams be restored.
It seemed a major tide had turned. Stream restoration in Waiahole revitalized the environment. It also inspired people on neighboring islands to fight for the same control over their natural resources.
For example, as correspondent Robynn Takayama reports, the people of Maui are using the Hawaii State Water Code to restore their streams -- and communities.
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Jonathan Groubert
Posted on November 27, 2006 at 03:22 AM | Permalink
Review of Maui Water Struggles
Just prior to editing and scripting a new piece, all journalists, PDs and reporters should ask themselves "Why should the listener care about this?".
With this in mind, almost any subject can be made to be interesting, no matter how esoteric or distant. And it is here that this piece fails.
All the elements of something good are here. However, the piece opens with some wooden narration, mountains of facts and figures and an interview witha laywer from a PIRG, rather than, say, the local man whose home island is slowly being sucked dry by poor water mangement.
I suspect this item was made by a well-informed, well-intentioned cub reporter who cares about the subject and tried to cover all the bases. However, the typical neophyte mistakes are made: overwriting, jamming so much information in that the narrative does not flow and becomes impossible to follow.
Reediting and some serious paring down in terms of the scripting would make this story useful to environmental programs and Marketplace's Sustainability Desk.