Remembering ‘Doc’ Maciolek: Dr. John A. Maciolek (1928-2021), a career biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service and former zoology professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, died at his home last summer in Westlake, Oregon.
At UH, Maciolek regularly taught the upper division limnology course, which included field work in many Hawaiian aquatic habitats. He served as committee chair for doctoral and master’s students, most of whom went on to careers in state and federal resource management agencies and academia. His legacy and that of his students in aquatic ecosystem science is rich and diverse.
His own research focused on non-marine aquatic habitats throughout Hawaiʻi and the insular Pacific. He described all six natural lakes in Hawaiʻi, which are among the highest, deepest and saltiest in the country. Together with his doctoral student Amadeo Timbol he described the complex food webs in Kahana estuary on Oʻahu, one of the earliest research efforts to bring this approach to estuarine habitats.
In the early 1970s, when anchialine ecosystems were mostly unknown and unstudied throughout the world, Maciolek focused on these threatened habitats in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. With Drs. Richard and Julie Brock, he described many of these ponds along the Kona coast of Hawaiʻi and on Maui.
Among his most lasting accomplishments was his effort, together with Hawaiʻi state Senator Nadao Yoshinaga, to establish the Hawaiʻi Natural Areas Reserves System in 1970, and to designate the ʻĀhihi-Kīnaʻu NAR on Maui in 1973 to protect its anchialine ecosystems.
(Submitted by John I. Ford, senior associate at Haley & Aldrich, Inc., and Robert A. Kinzie III, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Hawaiʻi-Manoa.)
Hu Honua Rebuff: On June 24, the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission issued an order denying Hawaiian Electric’s motion to have it reconsider its decision of May 23, which rejected the utility’s proposed power purchase agreement with Hu Honua, owner of a nearly completed power plant north of Hilo. At the same time, it also denied Hu Honua’s motion for “reconsideration, clarification, and further hearing” of the May order.
The commission had ruled that Hu Honua, which would burn wood to produce its energy, did not show that it would sequester more greenhouse gases than it released, describing its claim as based on speculative assumptions and unsupported assertions. It also found that the proposed power purchase agreement “is likely to result in high costs to ratepayers, both through its relatively high cost of electricity and through the potential displacement of other, lower cost, renewable resources.”
Hu Honua has undertaken an expensive public relations campaign to win public sentiment, but the PUC was unswayed. Hu Honua’s claim that it relied on a previous and overturned approval of an earlier power purchase agreement to move forward with construction – an equitable estoppel argument – had no merit. “Hu Honua did not have a reasonable basis for proceeding with the project during the appeal period, given that the commission’s alleged ‘direction’ to proceed with the project was made within the context of the terms of the amended [power purchase agreement], which provided for a tolling period until a final, non-appealable order was issued, which Hu Honua acknowledged,” the PUC found.
Warren Lee, president of the company, which now calls itself Honua Ola, released a statement following the PUC decision: “We are disappointed … but we are not giving up because Honua Ola is in the right on this issue.” In late June, the company appealed to the state Supreme Court, which has already heard three appeals on the matter.
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