JONATHAN STARR

take that Maui Style with you cuz if you Ain Maui stying you just living on an island sty me down sty me down sty me down me down there is in your heart it’s been with you from the Starr lift your head to the heavens then again nowy down Downy down don’t let me down reach out your hand and help each other your mother your father your sister and brother there is love in this family pick your up and on your don’t me now don’t let me down sty don’t let me Downy down up country sty

01:44

sty sty sty sty Mo sty don’t let me down stying let me down sty St Aloha this is Jason Schwarz out in beautiful kipahulu cowo are we right on the edge well we call this place Kappa Kappa and I’m here with Mr Jonathan Starr many of you know Jonathan aloha aloha and welcome welcome to Kappa and we are between cowo and kipulu and you have got a beautiful place here well I didn’t create it but I’m very honored to be its guardian and uh the person who gets to utilize it for a short Lifetime well you

03:23

know thank you for having Airielle and I out here we U were looking forward to today not only to come out and enjoy your place but to enjoy you uh you’re uh what do they say a quiet but Mighty Force you know I think a a great example by what you’ve done here you were just saying you’ve learned to uh live lightly and to be able to honor uh This Land by doing something that uh I think is great your uh place is how big is this place well uh this property is um 65 acres and and um well my sister has property which is of an

04:04

equal size and there are not too many other people living in the vicinity there’s quite a few cattle and quite a few wild pigs but um we make up most of the uh the population of uh Kappa and uh NAU which is the the neighboring so you’re not from here you’re like me you sound like you’re from New York like me I was born in Midtown Manhattan oh I’m a Brooklyn Guy and um moved to the Bronx and uh actually left there quite quite young I left uh New York City when I was 16 years old wow and uh got an education

04:45

and a School of Hard Knocks and the school of the road and learned how to work and learned how to uh build electrical and electronics and I was a printer and I was monk in India for a while and managed construction projects in Africa so I’ve done done a few different things and had the fortune to live all over the world and I was also fortunate enough to come uh here to Maui and to this part of Maui when I was still a teenager oh shortly after I left New York City and um I realized this was the best place on

05:29

Earth not only for the place and the land but the people and um from that moment on I I knew I wanted to live most of my life here and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do so well I I uh appreciate this beautiful Maui I’m only here 10 years and uh it’s gorgeous I imagine way back when it was what do they say more Primal well it’s still pretty element El Al out here but I mean other places were possibly a little bit more Elemental I remember I was a teenager working up in kapali in a

06:11

building the first of the hotels and condos up there and and it was still pretty wild country up there yeah and most of what we know is keii didn’t exist and the beaches were really uh a lot wider than they are now most of the most of those real wide wide beaches are on so it’s it’s definitely changed and it’s still changing but it’s still uh still the best place I’ve ever been I agree with you um I guess the the most important reason that I originally was coming out here is

06:46

because I wanted to show these guys the your photovoltaic solar system we took a quick tour which you’re going to see in just a little while as we walked around to uh look at your system that system some um what inspired you I mean you were talking as we were going but what inspired you to come out here and uh build this kind of thing rather than be in town well it’s it’s kind it it has to do with an ongoing philosophy that has I’ve been developing and it’s not I don’t think

07:18

it’s Unique to to me but uh it’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a long time which is uh oh we’re responsible for the way we impact the way we impact the planet and uh it’s our duty to try to keep it as good a place as uh it can be especially on a small island like this and if we want to criticize and a lot of us do uh criticize the um uh way uh oh the way um say the utility companies operate and a lot of our economic forces that affect us in life uh uh use of fossil fuel and uh

08:08

inefficiency and so on uh occurs then it’s our duty not to uh be dependent on it to be able to say well if we want to criticize this we shouldn’t uh we shouldn’t be using it in our daily lives we should make a statement and say well we can create our own from other sources which we prefer and so it was something I set out to do a lot of um the modern planners do say that uh for the best interest of society all the population should be clustered into small areas into towns and I understand

08:49

that and I think for General planning purposes that’s correct but there are some people who prefer to live a different lifestyle I know I do I I love to uh grow grow organic fruit trees and um I love to uh have big handam radio antennas I talk to friends all over the planet uh and um it’s those are things that are a lot easier to do uh when you’re out in the country when you’re out in the countryside like this um I like to experiment and build things and I love having the space but at the same

09:24

time it’s I don’t feel that it would be fair to me to go to the county or to the utility companies and demand that they come out here and give me an infrastructure to me if I want to well live an agricultural life and and and live out in the country then it’s my responsibility to create an infrastructure to my own liking for myself at my own expense and however uh efficiently I’m able to do it that’s how well I can live off of it um now uh I know that uh the average homeowner living in the middle of the

10:04

city is looking at what we’re going to show them here and think that this is more than they can comfortably do but I think we have uh found many of us who are in the environmental movement that when we look at the payback on all this kind of stuff it was quite a sensible plan um if you were bringing power here from the road not that far what is it maybe a half a mile a little bit more a little over a half a mile little over half a mile your cost for bringing the power here is just about the same as the

10:37

cost of developing your own system that uh doesn’t use any more fuel I mean so you have no additional cost except some Light maintenance the joy of local television yes you see we if we were shooting this for NBC or CBS or the national Geographic we might Starrt from scratch but I think it’s comfortable we jump in you know life sometimes can jump in and uh well we’re we’re evolving and so is the so is the discussion so let it let it move along I was just um you know mentioning that with so many of these

11:19

Technologies we found that they pay for themselves quickly where you could have chosen to have a line run and be on the grid yes you do have the the money to make that choice but in your own uh right you recognize and I’m putting words in your mouth but I know it’s so that to have your own self-reliance system to not have to rely on these things that we find so valuable all of us who live in cities you know become so dependent on Power and Water being provided from other places we don’t

11:55

often get into the uh like like I know I do visioning a future where we can use renewable Technologies where our cost of power goes down because once the equipment is paid for the cost of fuel is eliminated you know that factor I know isn’t really um he a little bit of tractor little bit of tractor it’s what happens on a farm um when I was I still am involved with the integrated resource plan anything in Maui Electric I know that I always consider environmental factors important and um I’d like to see more

12:37

people getting involved in these infrastructure decisions way before they become crises I know that uh this is is a great example what you’ve done here that’s always been what I wanted to do well the cost has come down tremendously uh the basic price of a solar panel is the same as it was5 years ago when we bought our first panel the difference was that that was a 25 watt panel and now we’re buying 855 watt panels for the same price right and they’re much better quality and the value of a dollar is uh changed that

13:18

much as well so that um the real cost per watt is about one6 of what I remember it uh being when we first Starrted uh buying photo voltaic equipment and photo voltaic simple photo is light voltaic is electricity so photov voltaic and I think it’s always interesting that here you have a photovoltaic system and yet you’ve come to understand like I have that when you want to heat water why use photovoltaic when you can just use a regular solar water eating panel which again those prices haven’t

13:57

changed in 15 years terribly much either except the cost of fuel’s gone up so dramatically well solar hot water it it it amazes me that virtually every house and um commercial institution doesn’t have solar hot water on this island at this time the concept of burning fossil fuel coming from uh Saudi Arabia to heat water is just uh it’s just insane uh just economically why uh why spend the money to do that solar H Water Systems every plumber on this island knows how to spec them out how to install them and how to

14:43

maintain them the uh the equipment is so good it lasts uh for many many years without uh having to uh do anything more than change anodes and uh inspect it periodically an anode an anode is a rod in the middle of your water heater it’s made of magnesium and it disintegrates over time so the inside of your water heater doesn’t disintegrate over time it’s a lot easier to change anod than it is to change tanks and you’re out here off the grid so you may not even be conscious that Maui Electric actually has a

15:21

$1,000 co- payment that if you look at the utility bills people are paying for this and yet many people who don’t have solar you wonder why are they paying for something and not taking advantage of a program created to give them the the chance to uh convert to this technology when they building new power plants if if 40% of a utility bill is water heating seems like we could slow the growth of these power plants dramatically through our own initiative very exciting and save money I I understand that uh the economics of it

15:59

to make a solar hot water system pay for itself in less than 3 years yeah it depends on the family I did one for a gentleman the other day who’s 84 years old single and he got a system again cuz it came from his heart he recognizes that it’s the thing to do oh he’s pretty remote I best imagined we can hear you can hear us can’t you are let me move him away from us Jason sure we’re going to move him away hang on we’ll be back large large number of panels but you know not that much considering what

16:42

it puts out no it’s really not that much considering what it puts out yeah and it tracks nicely yeah they work well and I don’t see anything unattractive about them you know when people argument is that they’re not attractive I I don’t get it well I guess everyone’s welcome for that sense of athetics I I Haven to like the way they look too I sure being able to harvest the sun is a a very uh beautiful concept right harvest the Sun and you don’t need a plow you don’t into R I never thought

17:29

about it I love it wow your Workshop what a great space every tool I have here they all run off the uh off the inverters that’s pretty amazing the power saw the air compressor and the uh arc welder you’re a self-contained World out here yes that’s a great argument for people who say they can’t do what they want to do yeah without electric power is good it’s like how you get it is what counts and um what a great Workshop yeah did you build a lot of your beautiful wood things out of here on everything uh

18:16

everything we made out of wood in the house was built and finished in here there’s a battery in the generator and I have to charge that battery up every 2 months off of the solar system oh yeah it’s kind of change but I I end up charging up the the generator from the uh the solar cuz I never used the generator that’s tough look at those batteries Airielle now you see them holy that’s it that’s where the power gets stored wow wiring is a very heavy heavy gauge yeah for low loss and a what’s this next to it a

19:00

compressor yeah that’s an air compressor 6 horsepower air compressor don’t one of those in the garage and um The Ark weld all of that stuff that sure I would love to have a house that was built like this oh yeah absolutely now there’s this little room in here just oh this is the power Palace this is the power Palace where our control equipment is we have a little bit of metering out here metering is really important part of uh uh alternative uh Power system right this uh you have to know what the status of

19:33

the system is you have to be aware of it too much maintenance little bit of Maintenance very little maintenance but um we’re aware of it so that if a problem Starrts to develop we take care of it before it happens that sounds like a good policy for all government and um you know I the main the main thing with power is every day we check you know we check the uh uh the the balance did you know much about this before you came I guess you had some kind of business on the mainland that were involved in power but I guess

20:07

it was not exactly related yeah I’ve been involved with uh electronics and electrical equipment my whole life I see I was in experiment when I was a little kid but this is the kind of thing that people can not have to worry too much about being too technical huh no it’s in fact this meter here this is a simplest type of metering uh and all it is is like a fuel gauge and right now it says if you have it set on AMP hours and it says minus 36 which means we’re down 36 units or amp hours from zero from

20:43

absolutely full I see and that’s that’s almost nothing and in about another half an hour the batteries will be 100% full and will Zero themselves out so uh and then what happens to and then it just sheds then it just sheds the Excess power it basically turns off the solar panels and if we were near a grid you could quote sell it back to the utility company and be part of the large grid yeah so you’re able to use all this equipment and live a and like you say An Elegant lifestyle with music and

21:15

computer and communication and ham radio it’s pretty significant well as long as the Sun’s shining there’s no need to conserve right and on uh cloudy days you’re still getting output yeah yeah we still get output I we just um I wouldn’t run uh I wouldn’t run the ark welder for 5 hours on a cloudy day I wouldn’t I wouldn’t run the the washing machine on a on a cloudy day I got or my water pump I thought my little system in kipahulu was cool because at 9:00 I I would just barely make it

21:49

through the dishes and I would lose light and this is my uh power system monitoring computer I see which is kind of an ancient pre- Windows laptop that um we retired from house usage and now I just have it connected up to the uh to the power system and I can log uh log the power system and I don’t use this every day sure I would only use this um if there were a problem in the system and I wanted to uh diagnose it or or something like that what it um uh allows me to do is uh look at um all the

22:40

uh different uh activity that takes place in the system the screen is getting a lot of blur on it but that’s okay it’s just a one of them things so you can just log all kinds of data that you see yeah just to basically let people know that it’s it’s POS possible to create your own infrastructure the one does not need to wait for the county or the utility company to come along and do it for you it’s possible to do it uh to do it oneself and to do it well and uh do it maintaina right to me that was uh the

23:18

most important aspect of the project was planning on how the systems would work and to build them efficiently not to have to keep rebuilding them year after year after year but to do them one time properly and then to just uh put them into a maintenance a maintenance cycle that was uh coste effective we’ve done our own water system our own U uh septic system our own we build our own roads we’re still in the process of building uh building our road we do it um every few months we do a few hundred feet of

23:55

uh cement strips and we do that all with hand mix with with uh our own tractor and uh you’re a small But Mighty crew yeah yeah it’s Helen and myself and Sean and uh maybe one or two other friends will come and work with us we’re you know we’re definitely doing it low budget and efficiently we every hour of Labor is a very important important unit to us right number one and number two yeah those are the inverters and they um convert the 28 volts of DC power that comes from the battery uh into uh a 120

24:36

240 volts alternating current which is what we uh use for uh all of our energy usage and it creates um sine wave uh Power that’s very clean in fact cleaner than uh we often get from uh from a grid and it’s Dependable we don’t have have to worry about uh a power line going down or something happening somewhere else to affect it and um these are really what make it possible to live as well as we do off of the alternative power right because um in the old days we used to live have to live off 12 volts DC yeah and that

25:21

required special appliances large wires special switches and it was not as efficient these are 95% efficient and um so far uh I’ve not had any maintenance problem in them at all and it looks like our kitty is happy no problem here from Power things huh there’s no radiation or any kind of challenge with these big units around well I’ll tell you the one challenge with them uhhuh uh the one challenge is to keep the Geckos out of them it uh it’s true technical problem that’s that’s the that’s the biggest problem

25:58

that people have uh in maintaining them is that uh geckos will feel the warmth of them and try to crawl inside yeah so it’s very important to keep them well screened and to maintain the screening because when the geckos crawl inside they’ll crawl across one of the uh uh the contact transistor Terminals and short it out but really that is the maintenance problem with inverters of today if there if as long as they have air flow and they can stay cool and you don’t have geckos getting into them

26:33

there they’ll last for 10 20 years without any hitch great setup water to your batteries every uh few months right normal things that you should do anyway how long did it take to build this place it’s beautiful well I spent a year building infrastructure and I spent a year building the house and to me the infrastructure was more interesting than building the house was well like you said if you build the power first then you don’t have to use Alternatives you can go right straight and use the power good one Tom boo is in

27:11

process huh yeah that’s beautiful it is so many things can save energy that are easy and you don’t have to change like you say no inventing any new technologies using what already exists no and if you do it well the first time it’ll last for decades oh yeah um so this is a big boy system huh 240 G 40 gallons which gives us um we’re good for oh about 5 days of cloudiness and even after the after 5 days of cloudiness we still get enough warm water to um to shower and to do dishes it’s not piping hot but

27:59

there’s enough panels up there that um it uh it’ll still make a warm do you have an electric backup or you no I don’t you just strictly on you know it’s funny I have a gas um an instant gas heater that I used to use in the old house right and I was going to put it on on the system it’s a backup and I’ve never needed it so I never installed it that’s great it um the system is just big enough that it it that it creates a surplus that’s so fabulous his his water heater is a solar servant it is you me

28:34

it is it’s a solar servant solar servant and you can see we’ve got a lot of instrumentation on it yeah these are the same kind of panels and tanks the same kind of stuff that we’d see on a standard system in the yeah in town yeah I don’t watch it I’ve got a flow meter which a lot of people don’t have it’s kind of hard to see that that’s all right so some of these hotels in Ina had this kind of system how how they would have to have a backup well probably so they they would

29:07

need they would need that but in a tank a tank tanks are made to have electric elements so it doesn’t really cost anything to install yeah uh a real electric uh backup but in a place like Haw Lea there’s so much insulation insulation being uh the amount of solar uh uh heat of available insul so not insulation see how much sun is hitting the ground yes like you remember that map with all the different zones that is like the highest Zone there and a couple of other spots here in the island yeah and that would be the

29:43

first candidate location on Maui to use to use um solar it seems so crazy that they don’t have well you know it was 10 years ago I talked to them but I guess the old expression we’re too fat and happy to really be seriously looking at conservation well I really think the problem is a very simple one it’s the people who build the the uh hotels and condos and and buildings are not the people who are going to be using them and operating them and living in them and it’s unfortunate um but they have absolutely

30:17

no incentive to install uh install Renewables also they were telling me they would be destroying the look so we were uh talking at way back when about systems that were remotely installed and piped in even then it made sense well I I don’t think that’s a feeling I know that for example the W Community Association design committee um you know they’re very concerned with how buildings and structures look in whilea and not only do they say that um solar properly installed is not destroy the

30:53

look but they are in every possible way trying to get it installed and trying to create incentives for people to use it that’s funny that I and I’m just saying 10 years ago before the golf course was up there was conversation I had with uh some of the W Resort people it was just a different time I guess uh it shows that everyone is growing and it sounds like in the right direction are they getting any progress toward uh uh movement and such like that well I’m I think we’re going to we’re going to have

31:25

the framework is in place with the whilea Community Association good uh we’re going to have to see what happens when the next development boom hits whether the um uh whether the developers are smart enough to realize that for a few hundred a unit more they can put in uh uh solar hot water it really makes a lot of sense I’m sure they can charge a little a couple of dollars more and like you said pays for itself in just a couple years anyway and that’s at present rate watch out what are we looking at out here well

32:02

that’s kipulu that um uh far Ridge and um there is quite a community over there and the area between kipahulu and this uh Valley right here is um uh in the process of being acquired uh for the national park I understand oh great it’s been the trust for public land has it and uh that includes probably the largest intact Village site uh ancient pre- contct Village site on the island uh at Lila and there beautiful waterfalls uh at L and the bay at Hana it’s just beautiful place so uh we’re going to be fortunate that’s going

32:52

to stay wild over there oh great oh where I’m looking at the big island of Hawaii across the channel that’s uh 40 m away it’s a little bit hzy but we can see it 2 and 1/4 in of rain will’ll fill up this 11,000 G tank yeah and then you can see this little house down there next to the tank mhm that’s got a pump an AC multi-stage horse and a half pump and on a sunny afternoon like today yeah when the this tank is full and my batteries are full from the Sun I’ll pump up 10,000 G bance to my large

33:29

storage tanks which are higher up the hill I see so I use water out of those tanks for uh irrigating the trees and for our all of our living needs what do you think Airielle could you you could enjoy it here huh you know we put in our own uh uh our own septic system out here and then we have the fruit trees down below it which uh uh you know after it all gets filtered out the give us fruit the nutrients it’s great out here jacuzzi that’s the P jacuzzi that’s my bathtub it’s A50 galon

34:07

stock tank wow and um it’s what you use to to uh water cattle or horses that makes a really comfortable hot tub oh yeah and um since uh our normal pattern gives us a a a large surplus of rainwater and there’s no need to conserve it since it keeps falling from the sky and we usually got plenty of power to pump it around I put in a giant hot water system big solar collectors on the roof and big 240 gallons of hot water storage tank wow and so I’m able to fill up this uh giant uh giant tub in the evening as long as

34:49

it’s raining and as long as the Sun’s shining which is most of the time here and it uh it’s free it’s free and it’s all natural so this is one area where rain water with no chlorine we don’t have to we don’t have to we don’t have to conserve whereas in town we would uh I would never use that much uh water out of the central system or uh pay for the electric to heat it great fun no it’s Kaa we we yeah all the woodworking we did ourselves here we bu the table and a lot of the

35:24

built-in furniture and a beautiful Skyline and it area what a great view huh yeah up on the very top vents they’ve got a solar panel on top and a little blower in them and on a hot day they will remove the uh pocket of hot air that tends to stay in the ridge of a house I’ve seen them with the attics MH I haven’t seen them on this kind they work very effectively this room never gets too hot I do have ceiling a Navajo rug book this is an ey dazzler pattern from a turn of the century Navajo rug and we did it out of

36:06

Kaa from this this property and bloodwood and wng from Africa wow how beautiful all different uh different Woods music and work what a beautiful spot really beautiful it really obviates a need for air conditioning in this climate if you allow the trade wins to do their job you have to design for it from the beginning right but it um very well insulated roof I have 8 in of uh insulation in the roof right and then um just remove the hot air pocket from the top with uh with vents and uh if there’s a place for the

36:46

trade ones to come and go then the room will stay comfortable yeah it’s beautiful today and like you say it’s a brilliantly sunny how D here mhm in Germany those lights uh and they 13 Wat each and give off plenty of light they give off the equivalent of a 60 W light bulb okay and they’re pretty they’re you know they’re cut glass and they are very pretty and handmade but um they only take 13 watts each each fixture I like the fact you you’re leading the charge rather than waiting

37:19

for them to tell you to do it and um that big antenna is the ham radio huh yeah a big power in the beams yeah and um we have friends all in Europe and Africa and Asia and we talk to them on the radio what fun and um makes the world a smaller place how many languages do you speak um I speak a few but but English is really the language of radio English and also Morse code either either use you know either speak in English or else uh um can also do it with moris code or can put the computer on the radio and send you know longer

38:00

messages on the computer if you want to do that but the to me the fun thing is to just chat to just um there’s a guy in the faulin that I chat with regularly he’s part of an oil exploration crew and works out of the Faulkland on a special vessel that must be so much we chat a few I have another friend in Kuwait and um you know we talk about the weather and talk about you know about work and politics and whatever things normalized there in Kuwait uh yeah uhhuh yeah so that’s a Pierro huh Pier Wester what a

38:35

versatile guy here is that I’ve never seen a piece from him like that it’s beautiful mhm has so many different moods like this uh particular AR it looks like a really different kind of waterfall to me when I look at it ah the sound of nature um you had mentioned to me when we were talking about coming out here and doing this show uh you’re interested in talking about alternative infrastructure and I can we talking about a little bit but I’m sure that there’s specific areas of passion things

39:17

that really uh you’d like to be able to help uh give to our viewers that are important to you well to me it’s it Starrts with the whole concept of community planning and um the modern concept of community planning is that people should live in small towns where they walk back and forth to the store and to work and um that the uh infrastructure of the community should be geared around toward servicing those small uh small urban areas well and to discourage people from living out in um uh more isolated areas

40:05

because it’s not efficient to uh run the infrastructure out to all parts of uh an area especially a county like Maui which has uh uh so many uh so many diverse and um isolated places but I also feel that people there’s some people who will want to live out in the countryside as we do because we like to raise fruit trees and um we have a lot of hobbies and projects and our ham radio uh which requires large antennas and Towers so that we can speak to our friends around the world and in doing so

40:47

I feel that we take on a responsibility for providing our own infrastructure because it would not be fair for me to have to go to the county and demand that the county come in at the general taxpayers expense and put in my infrastructure for me or that the utility companies do it either the uh the equity Equity lies in me saying if I want to live away from where the utilities are I should create my own and it’s uh been very fun project for me to plan and to actually Implement a full system of infrastructure here that works

41:36

and in some ways Works uh more efficiently than um the systems that are available in the towns so to me that’s been the fun the fun part of of this whole this whole project out here which uh are you retired um well I uh I wasn’t in business and I’m no longer in the business I was in I was going to say it seemed that now a lot of the time when I’ve seen you you’re very involved in community service and very much involved in in U putting this message out in the old days uh in Rome for

42:19

example yeah it was certainly old days of our civilization uh okay it was expected of people that after they um live their business career then they um go and spend a portion of their life trying to uh either do science art poetry or community service and I take that as a responsibility to spend uh about two days minimum of my life trying to uh do some service for the community two days a week you me not just two days yeah two days a week I’m sorry that’s okay two days a week we have a but we

43:05

have such a great large retired Community imagine if we had that man and woman power getting involved in things how incredibly valuable I know that’s that is something that I tried to express to some people I know especially in areas such as keii and whilea where there are a lot of retired people with time on their hands and many of them sit around without too much to do and uh you know argue with each other and feel bored and there’s so much to be done there there there’s so and um the brain

43:37

power and the experience rests with uh those of us who’ve uh led a successful career I I ran uh a number of very large uh uh Contracting and uh electrical and electronic uh display companies in New York for some years and Done Construction and uh in Africa and other places and uh so it’s uh to me it seems natural that uh I try to put some of that experience to use in a positive way are there any issues going out here in this area that uh um I you know we have a community Forum here so I always feel

44:19

that it would be I think an opportunity to uh talk about things that may be particularly important to the people of this area well um I know to me the the incredible wild beauty of this area is is unique it’s a very it’s a place where the wind blows strong and when the rain comes the rain drives hard and it um it’s just it just really seems to inspire inspire people whether they’re local or visitors from someplace else people seem to travel around this part of Maui with almost a shocked expression on

45:03

their face by just this the strength of the beauty and I know for me I I’ve seen the prop large property next to us is um being acquired uh by the national park it’s uh I understand under the control of the Trust for Public Lands and that’s a wonderful thing and I know I would love to see nuu which is a place uh that uh has a lot of archaeological significance uh also uh put into the uh put into the public domain and uh maybe other areas out here as well I really think that this is one of the places

45:47

that has not been um it has not been built up yet so it’s a it’s a very good candidate for uh uh for being preserved so that in future Generations can know what this island uh once was and uh perhaps may still be if areas like this are are kept wild and kept uh kept natural you know I um I see you I get the large overhang that’s because you’re doing water right you’re doing water catchment well um I’m only looking and wondering you I haven’t seen too many gutters around I

46:28

always thought that that would be a natural here on this island especially when they’re squawking about no water all the time it surprises me as well I I see uh oh half of our Island geographically gets 100 Ines of rain or more per year and yet very few people really uh collect that rain and the rainwater that falls out here uh on East Maui and some parts of w W Maui as well is wonderfully pure uh wonderfully pure water it hasn’t uh had a chance to be polluted by any man-made or landbased Source

47:10

uh for many many thousands of miles that it’s traveled over the uh Pacific Ocean it’s clean pure water and it’s falling down from the sky for free in trying to create our own infrastructure here water was uh of course at the top of the list that’s you can live without electricity but you cannot live without water I certainly can’t grow uh fruit trees and vegetables without water and so in my own plan I figured out what I would need to uh have an adequate uh supply of water what it

47:47

turned out uh to uh to be required was uh almost 8,000 foot of square foot of roofing which I have I have a very large roof on this house with a lot of overhang and teally that’s a bunch more roof than uh I would have uh built had I just been thinking about living space so you don’t need any other roofs to catch the water then no it’s all done with this roof this roof is uh it’s also a very uh stable material it’s aluminum with a uh uh a triple coating of epoxy on it but that’s very stable and won’t

48:28

create any health problems from drinking off of it and all the sealants uh I used in putting it together were uh also friendly uh friendly materials and what I do is I catch the rain it comes off this roof in very large gutters and it flows into larger and larger pipes I we did a flow analysis at different uh rates of rainfall and um you know designed all the piping for so that there would be very little wasted even a very heavy heavy rain and the water goes off the roof and fills up an 11,000 gon storage

49:10

tank that’s slightly lower than the level of the house and um I have a pump by that tank that pumps the water up to uh two uh much larger tanks higher up the mountain solar power powers of pump on days when the batteries are full and I have no other use for the power and it fills those tanks and then I use those tanks to uh for our drinking water for our household use and also for all of our irrigation we have drip irrigation on in the garden and all of our fruit trees so um we have uh almost always a surplus of

49:53

water coming from the rain there’s I would say about three times as much rainfalls as uh we’re able to utilize this dry season that we’ve had here on Maui has it been dry over here this side as well it was dry um at one point we were down to uh 111th the amount of rain that we had received the previous year which was a very wet year and so we were definitely conserving um I uh I know we one thing that Helen and I do our lifestyle is we modify our lifestyle to fit um to fit um what’s available to us and

50:35

there was less water so um we reduced a little bit of what we’re planting in the garden and we took showers instead of baths and just uh conserved and our tanks still uh um still had a little bit of water on it when it in then when they uh when it Starrted to rain again we do have a backup we do have a a backup pipeline incidentally so that uh we did have a flowing pipeline but uh we prefer to use the rain water because it’s a lot fewer than the water that flows flows down the pipe there’s an off-the-wall

51:13

question um I imagine in this area running for Council would uh be a challenge because there such a small community and you got Kanani here who I know is a good friend have you any political aspirations I know that you’re leadership and what you’re doing is uh quite welcome any thoughts of that stuff well I um I’m not I’m certainly not running for uh for Council from East Maui I because I feel we’re very well represented right but um I might some I might someday I feel that that’s

51:46

uh that that’s a place that uh I have a lot of respect for the people who serve us on the County Council I think that uh they’re people who really try to do to do their best and um my own political interests and aspirations really aren’t in that direction they’re they’re more to just try to bring Common Sense uh to the Forefront and unable uh unable the best uh decisions to be made I there are a lot of certainly a lot of areas where uh I I think uh our government needs to hear from

52:30

people about uh what what can be done to uh improve and make our lifestyle the best it can and U keep the environment uh the best it can to me one of the very important issues is uh is um Beach recession the fact that uh we’ve lost onethird of our beach sandy beaches one onethird of our sandy beaches in the last um 40 years and uh they’re gone for good is that related to uh things done on the beach development one uh yes it is um and it’s the this island is basically um shrinking and it has been shrinking for

53:20

uh over a thousand years and that’s due to the fact that we’re in a period of uh sea level rise each year uh the sea level rises uh uh a little bit several inches and the island is also sinking because the lava the magma underneath Maui is being pumped up over by the big island so since the sea water’s coming up and the Island’s going down the island is shrinking it was quite a bit larger a thousand years ago there were times when the island was getting larger because the sea level was going down

54:02

right but for at least the last 2,000 years or so the trend has been for the island to shrink now when the island shrinks the place where the ocean intercepts the land moves Inland steadily every year and what that does is the beaches recede and so most of our beaches there there are a few spots where it uh sand being moved around it’s causing a different effect but they’re rare most places the beaches are move are receding Inland at a steady Pace the average is about 1 foot a year and you know as I said that’s been

54:40

happening for a thousand years if you looked at a photo map taken a thousand years ago would show the it would show the same kind of beaches but further away from the center of the island now that process could continue for a long time with our pocket beaches but the beaches would be in a physically different spot each year the problem arises when we build something behind the beaches and then the beaches move back and once they hit whatever we’ve built then basically the beach goes away and

55:18

the surf breaks against whatever’s been constructed behind the beach whether it’s a seaw wall or a swimming pool that uh the Shar in kopali I mean kopali beach by the Sheridan is gone this when I work construction as a teenager in the late 60s over in kopali kopali was hundreds of feet wide you go over there now it’s gone and it’s gone because the it’s naturally tried to move Inland it’s a very H flat sloping Beach and um it’s tried to move Inland and it hit up against uh the stuff that was built too

55:56

close to uh to the uh Shoreline to the Shoreline so that um is there anything we can do now to reverse that Trend well the first thing we can do is to look at those beaches which have not had anything built behind them yet and realize that at a certain point in time whether it’s 50 years or 100 years those are the only beaches that are likely to still be viable like go hwaya Beach maybe H it’s a very North Beach there K Kaka is a good example um big beach is another example right people think big beach has been uh

56:38

uh permanently saved but there’s still uh a large port a large private property on the southern the the whole Southern portion of big beach and um we’re looking at that being developed with houses built right behind the beach so big beach is still in danger there still that’s another one black sand beach just around the corner from big beach that has a uh uh a whole slew of uh uh buildings uh for a a health spa that’s being planted right in the middle of that beach and in time that beach will

57:14

move back against those buildings and then cease to exist so to my mind the the beaches that we have that are still unencumbered and they’re very few are Priceless and if we really want to feel that our grandchildren great grandchildren can someday buy a ticket once a year to go to the beach then we’re going to have to save at least a couple of beaches for them to be able to to go to because the rest of them will be gone any beach with a road behind it unless those roads get moved we’ll be

57:46

gone um so to me that’s very critical I’m not saying that we should tear down the houses uh at this point that are causing the beaches to go away but where those houses don’t exist we should know better than to allow them to be built you’re that planning people you know that’s a good point uh you know it’s now that we can save our future beaches it isn’t for us at least I’m sure you can agree with me uh some people say well you know I worked hard in my life I had to earn let’s leave

58:24

these problems for the future people Tech technology will be here I think Nature has shown us that that technology can do what it will you can’t replace something that you’ve already uh set up to get rid of um you know we talking about future you talk about future development and what future development will do I guess it’s one of those times that we have to really make a conscious Choice what do we want to do with this island do we want to just use it up until it’s gone or do we want to you

58:58

know honor it like this neighboring land here or you were talking about in this other direction there’s more land available that might be acquired to keep natural huh yes and I I feel that that’s certainly a place for it I it’s hard for me to uh think that there’s not a place on this island for some large areas left natural and undeveloped so that people can experience it but um I do believe that I believe that increasing population and development here is one of The Facts of Life that we have

59:36

to accept sure it’s unfortunate that the only way we can stop more people from coming here would be to would be to make this place so terrible that they would not want to live here and I for one wouldn’t want to see that I think this is a most beautiful spot on earth and other people are going to see it and want and come and want to live here just as uh as we all have whether uh we came here um as Polynesians in canoes or we came here on ships or jet planes um we’ve come from other places and found

01:00:09

this to be the the best spot on earth so it’s really our responsibility to create a process where as we are population enlarges and as more and more gets built it’s built so that it is the most um efficient and uh beneficial uh uh yeah use use possible have you uh given much thought to Urban Redevelopment I know that you know you can think of that in an inner city of New York or Detroit but um I know I keep looking at kahalui and saying okay how can I redesign kahalui or wuku uh not destroying the Integrity of what

01:00:58

was here before but more efficiently using this land cuz the numbers that are you know there I guess I don’t know how the population growth rate is going this week maybe you’re conscious of but um I don’t know unless you stop making as many people we seem to accumulate them we do and we’ve got slow steady growth right now people a lot of people are complaining about the economy meaning to me they’re complaining that we’re not still in a period of boom and I’m I for one I’m glad we’re not in a period of

01:01:32

intense rapid growth but that we’re steadily Year bye growing slowly which to me is uh um as fast as I’d like to I’d like to really see us grow I agree with you I I believe wuku is um Wu’s day is coming very soon as the uh fashionable and um uh cultural community that uh that one day will be I uh I kind of look forward to that but infrastructure is uh is going to be our problem we have to plan what we need I know here in my little microcosm I figured out how much water I was going

01:02:20

to need and I found what I would need to do to get it and engineer it and built it and it was it was finite I was able to do that we’re not uh doing that islandwide and um we’re about to uh realize that we’re in a complete and total state of crisis with our water supply system we um are basically using more water in the central system than the aquafer is capable of providing so that we’re harming the aquifer and at the same time out of the 19 something million gallons a day of water that we’re extracting

01:03:01

from the Central Maui system the county actually owes a certain amount approximately half of it to the uh Central Maui joint venture Partners do you do you know about that Jason in other words that the land down in McKenna where they at least as I understand it the partners that had land that are mod location is that it well no it wasn’t just it wasn’t just there it was in the mid ’70s right there was the county was way behind in water development and not having the ability to develop water source five large

01:03:44

landowning companies came forward and frankly we’re lucky that they did and those includes Sabu a w lier Resort company A&B um hcns and um uh Brewer or wuag and they put the money up to develop the eow aquifer and to drill the wells that um provide virtually all of the water in Central and South Maui right now and as part of that agreement they drilled the wells laid the pipe and then when the county uh received this they turned over to the county this water infrastructure for for a dollar with a Proviso that in the future

01:04:40

when they needed water to develop the property that they own into new housing developments or new industrial and golf courses whatever then the county would have to turn over most of this water to them for new development in other words the county could not later say to them we’re sorry but we don’t have water for you to develop so we’ve been borrowing on this bank account for a long time huh right and recently these companies have asked for their water back and they say that I understand you know this is in the

01:05:17

courts now and what I know about it is is hearsay I’ll I’ll preface it with that but from what I understand these compan say that they’re own 133 uh million gallons a day and the county says they only owed 9 million gallons or something so they’re arguing about how much they are owed but basically there doesn’t seem to be any way that the county is going to be able to repay the water that is owed to these companies have we uh explored have you explored here any kind of maybe because

01:05:51

you had need you have decentralized water desalination have you seen anything things going on it’s very expensive i’ I’ve read several books and studies uh uh Israel of course is the uh the leader in that it’s it’s very very expensive I I don’t really think that our situation is going to call for that there are there’s a much better solution that would be a lot more economical but the first thing we have to do is admit that we are in a crisis which our unfortunately our water department still

01:06:25

refuses to to do and to go and create a plan for uh a an entirely new water infrastructure which we desperately need to Starrt planning and building if everything that our water department plans for the future were to successfully work out and so far none of it has worked out because of numerous lawsuits that um and the fact that the wells they’ve drilled so far are polluted with dbcp that causes cancer of the testicles which is now being pumped into our UpCountry water system by the way wow um and also in npil it’s being

01:07:07

pumped into the public system there but um if there’s if everything they planned were to work out I don’t think any of it will but if any if all of it did that water would be absorbed immediately um so basically we’re in a situation where our uh board and Department of Water Supply have no plans and no nothing in the books that will create the new source that we need is that going to be the limitation of population on This Island water I think that uh it will for a certain period of time I think that

01:07:48

we’re headed for a period of moratorium which is unfortunate because it should we shouldn’t there is the water does exist but so under the present uh mechanism there’s no there’s no one planning and there’s no one creating uh new source and uh to me that’s a very a very scary position to be in we had an interview with um Hannibal tares maybe uh a year before he passed away and he was telling us that way back in his regime he was jealous of mik and its billion gallon storage and that they

01:08:27

Starrted things in motion then where do you think was this going to ride other priorities the old uh sometimes it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp when you’re up to your eyes and alligators I I can’t myself understand how we’ve let this kind of stuff get to crisis Point well what do you think well it’s interesting I I go and try I try to attend the water board meetings when I when I can and and I’m amazed that you know they’re dealing with some very very

01:09:00

trivial issues when there’s this giant issues sitting in front of them that they’re not acknowledging and I really think that we need a uh a shake up in that area perhaps the uh um I know some people have been discussing a uh a possible Charter uh Amendment this next year that would take the uh water department and put it under the administration so that uh there would be some uh some responsibility there but I I do believe the problem solvable there’s an enormous amount of water that

01:09:37

flows through the uh East Maui ditches and the way it’s being operated now there are virtually there’s no Stream flow standards being maintained in the streams or every single stream on East uh Maui is being intercepted at 4 points across um uh across the mountain and during dry periods all of the water is being taken out of the streams which as Skippy how and other experts will tell you is causing uh problems all the way down the uh ecological chain you know from the uh whether it’s the Taro

01:10:18

Farmers or whether it’s the uh the shrimps and noay and other small creatures that live in the streams or it’s the re Le or everything is being affected down the line from that but there’s an enormous amount of water that flows in those ditches and we have to be thankful to cloud spreckles and uh the old-timers who built who built that uh that infrastructure that it’s still there the only thing is the way it’s being handled and managed is really uh wrong to me what we need to do and this

01:10:55

is something that uh people seem to think is radical on Maui but every place else that I’ve ever been has large water storage reservoirs as you said uh the first thing that we need to do is we need to uh create multi-billion gallons of storage reservoirs which will cost money but what’s the alternative there is no Al there is no and it does not make sense to drink the water today that fell as raining yesterday you don’t you there has to be a buffer because the rain rains more on one day than another

01:11:33

so reservoirs are Force multipliers Source multipliers there’s plenty of source but because we need the same amount of source every day because it’s being used every day we’re always at the uh limit uh of our resource so the first thing is large huge amounts of storage and treatment uh facilities and then the next thing would be to uh for the county to work with the uh State the uh uh Board of land and natural resources and take over the control of the East Maui ditch and higher Emi to operate the ditch since it’s

01:12:22

their own fac they own the facility and uh are in a position to uh to operate it and to work um the proper agreements with A and B who utilize who get most of the most of the water now so that they can still get enough water for uh their sugar operation and other rag operations but with enough storage to buffer it so that Stream flow standards can be maintained some water can be left in the Stream so that the stream life doesn’t die and so that uh there’s recharge in East Maui into the aquafer which uh is

01:12:59

really diminished now and meanwhile the county would be in control of it and basically that would solve all the UpCountry problem and that would solve the Central and South Maui problems for uh generations to come how’s that sound sounds like we’re we’re talking the right stories you know we could go on and I hope that you’ll consider coming on back with us here at some some point for some more show but I know the time can run on and uh I think we’re competing with uh the last episode of

01:13:36

Seinfeld and you know how that so I’m not fooling but I know that there’s so many things we could be talking about because this kind of stuff takes a lot of conversation and sometimes you’ve seen a few of my shows you can see I’m not afraid to repeat myself if it takes a few times to say it again and maybe a few times again it’s just like my pitch about District voting or all that politics stuff I don’t expect anything to change overnight but trying to soften the ground and get people to be open to

01:14:07

these things so that those that do have the energy and are interested in getting hands on to make that difference have the reception of the public I really have appreciated having you not only here but having you on this island I have um uh nothing but respect for the hard work that that you’ve done uh both here to be an example and also in sharing your word with others around the island and uh creating an environment where people will come to you you know with ideas like I’m going to come to you

01:14:40

with an idea I’m going to be talking to Jonathan about solar Thermo Acoustics imagine using the sun having that sun create heat that creates sound in a tube and using that sound in a tube to create cooling to be able to cool produce produce so that farmers can have it longer in the fields and then use the waste heat for drying produce creating a whole Alternative Market for shipping of tropical exotic fruit to tons of places in the world all from the Sun the largest single growth well they say the

01:15:20

largest single area of growth for power in the tropics is for air conditioning and some system that could do major air conditioning besides the smart solar vents like you’ve done you know there’s lots of things that can be done well I I have heard of systems like that and and it makes sense because the more heat that you get from more sun the more cooling you need so it um it is uh solar and air conditioning make it actually make a good uh good marriage a good marriage um as as far as as sound as a

01:15:56

storage and generation medium I think that that’s something that’s a few years away but but it was done in a submarine that’s where it all came from from the uh how different from the military from military used the magic of Television yeah there there’s certainly a lot of technologies that um will make the future exciting and interesting and uh I hope we’re uh able to uh uh utilize them and experiment with them on a large enough scale on this island what one of my private peeves is that

01:16:36

um the Air Force gave us a very generous gift a few years back super computer well like the superc compu I mean that’s a wonderful thing but um when they did the super super computer they gave us um the power to operate a very large portion of it from the Sun not too many people are aware that there’s a 20 Kow um photovoltaic system installed in t in the Hightech park near the super computer you mean the one that was a demonstration for Maui Electric for so long that yeah it’s a demonstration

01:17:13

basically it’s um 20 kows uh of U of photo cells on stationary uh right it’s uh stationary mounts I remember coming and seeing and wondering why they didn’t put it on a tracking system they used the least efficient panel of all that had been tested actually but it’s still delivered it’s still it’s still it’s still a good a good system and well you know I’m not uh there are pros and cons of trackers uh which I’ll get into with you sometime they’re they’re so how did they

01:17:48

de so hard what was the problem the problem is is that it it’s not being utilized and it hasn’t been being utilized for several years and um the reason is that moo is not capable of maintaining it or has no desire to maintain it I know at some of their recent hearings they uh uh showed all kinds of studies why uh uh solar power is not uh is not good and uh why the panels degrade over time and so on but I don’t know I I have firsthand experience in maintaining uh photovoltaic Power Systems and the maintenance cycle of the

01:18:29

panels is kind of uh has the excitement factor of watching trees grow it there’s just not a heck of a lot you can do uh you need to go and check the terminals once a year and clean any corrosion and uh look for any place water is leaking and and that’s it um it’s uh it’s really sad that uh Maui Electric does not uh uh feel it important to maintain that system system and to and to utilize it and produce power with it maybe we can find someone to take it over do something with it yeah I hope so I I bet

01:19:04

there are some entrepreneurs on the island any of you out there interested give us a call right you can call if you have anything that you’d like to be uh finding out from us from Jonathan or otherwise you can always contact us at 573 3100 you want to give your a number you’re welcome to if you like yes my my number is 48 7618 and I’m happy to uh share the fruits of my experience and I’m even more happy to share the many mistakes I’ve made in the past which to me are the most valuable fruits of all speaking

01:19:42

of fruits we’re going to go out on this fruit Orchard and find the most incredible all kind not only regular m i call they regular mangoes hayen mangoes but all kinds of exotic mangoes and cam cherries and figs you’ve done quite a job here well one Proviso there were for the mango we’re going to have to wait about 10 years but the seram cherries and the papayas I can promise you today okay Jonathan it’s been a pleasure having you here I uh hope that you’ve had as much fun as I’ve had coming out here doing it

01:20:17

with Airielle I know that we uh appreciate you very much and it’s an honor truly it’s an honor to have people in our community that we can have on the show where it comes from the heart you know we uh we were thinking only to get uh Kris Kristofferson but we couldn’t seem to get him as easily so uh maybe next time we’ll all be on together and be talking but you’re a celebrity in your own right all the good work that you’ve done I know I appreciate it and I’m sure many of you out there if you

01:20:47

don’t know about it yet you’re going to know more about Jonathan Starr thank you for joining us here oh it’s really been it’s really been fun to get together and I hope we’ve inspired a little bit of thought and um I know certainly I’m available any time to talk talk story about this stuff because uh the more people uh were interested and the more people who are experimenting uh with um homegrown infrastructure and systems uh the better uh the better our future will be because it’ll allow uh the