In GTE Directories, Fingers Walk Through Ancient Canadian Forest
Telephone directories published in Hawai’i and elsewhere by GTE are printed on paper purchased from MacMillan-Bloedel, a wood products company based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Much of that paper comes from logs taken from what remains of ancient temperate rain forests of Clayoquot Sound, described in Macleans’ magazine (a Canadian publication) as “area of fjords and fog-shrouded mountains and temperate rain-forest boasting trees more than 1,000 years old and 250 feet …… breathtaking in their beauty, considerable in their commercial value.” According to a group that has organized to protest the logging, Clayoquot Sound “is the largest low-elevation coastal rainforest left on the planet. Three or four higher elevation rainforest tracts remain that are larger, but only a handful of areas in Chile compare in sheer biomass to these forests, with trees up to 1,500 years old and 15 feet in diameter.”
As in the states of Washington and Oregon, pressures to log what remains grows as the forested acreage diminishes. Unlike the United States, however, Canada has far fewer restrictions on what logging companies can do. Almost all decisions are left with the provincial governments.
Last April, the provincial government of British Columbia gave MacMillan-Bloedel the green light to log nearly two-thirds of an 864,000-acre forested tract of Clayoquot (pronounced “CLOCK-wit”) Sound. That, combined with the provincial government’s outright purchase of stock in the company sparked a round of protests last summer that resulted in more than 750 arrests of people trying to keep logging rigs out of the forests of Clayoquot Sound.
A group called Friends of Clayoquot Sound has organized to fight the logging. As part of their campaign, they are urging people who use phone directories printed on paper supplied by MacMillan-Bloedel to protest the use of this paper to their local phone companies, which, in Hawai’i, is GTE Hawaiian Tel.
Carol Huff, director of public relations for the phone company in Honolulu, said she had received several postcards from people in Hawai’i. She confirmed that the paper came from MacMillan-Bloedel, but noted that it was purchased by GTE Directories, a division of GTE separate from GTE Hawaiian Tel.
Nonetheless, she said, GTE has undertaken a “very aggressive effort to look into this.” For the record, she pointed out that next year’s directories will contain 25-30 percent recycled paper, a percentage that she said will be increasing each year.
For more information, readers may write to Friends of Clayoquot Sound, Box 489, Tofino, B.C VOR 220, Canada. An excellent description British Columbia’s logging policies and the history of its forests, including Clayoquot Sound, is to be found in Catherine Caufield’s article, “The Ancient Forests,” published in The New Yorker of May 14, 1990. A more recent account of the dispute appears in Macleans’, August 16, 1993.
Is Westin Maui Shoreline Artificially Fixed?
Following mild and last year’s heavy winter storms, the beach in front of the Westin Maui hotel was heavily eroded. As we reported last month, the hotel applied for and was granted a shoreline certification that fixed the seaward boundary of the hotel’s grounds on the same line that existed in October 1991, based upon photographs taken by the Office of State Planning at that time.
The recertification of a shoreline following damaging storms is allowed by law, provided it is done within a year of the erosion. The use of evidence, such as photographs, to document where the shoreline previously existed is also legal.
In the case of the Westin Maui, however, it turns out that the Office of State Planning had ordered the photographs made as part of a larger study of the Ka’anapali Coast whose purpose was to help document encroachment on state land. The OSP had received many complaints that hotels and condominiums along the coast had attempted to move the shoreline seaward – and thus move forward their setback line as well – by planting and watering vegetation on the state-owned beach. Such action is illegal.
The OSP’s photographers, from the state surveyor’s office, were instructed to retrace the most recent certified shorelines between Keka’a Point and Manakao’o, to flag those shorelines and to note where they were in relation to the seaward edge of the vegetation in October 1991. According to staff at the Office of State Planning’s Coastal Zone Management Program, at several sites along the Ka’anapali Coast, the photographs strongly suggested that landowners had encroached on state land in their plantings.
Copies of the photographs and maps indicating past certified shorelines were provided to the Maui County Planning Department and to the state’s Division of Land Management, within the Department of Land and Natural Resources. (The DLNR is the agency responsible for certifying shoreline surveys.)
Far from the OSP’s evidence being used by these agencies in the manner intended – that is, to help them document encroachments on state land – the evidence instead was provided to the Westin Maui. On the basis of the photographs, the Westin sought to have its shoreline certified along the vegetation line that existed in October 1991.
The Division of Land Management concurred and, in September 1993, the day the shoreline certification became final, the shoreline fronting the “Westin jumped 20 to 30 feet seaward of the shoreline that was certified in 1985.”
Nor was the Westin’s shoreline the only one to be established at a point well seaward of the prior certifications. According to OSP staff, the photographs taken in 1991 were used by other property owners along the Ka’anapali Coast to accomplish the same thing.
Although shoreline restoration is provided for by state law, the certification of shorelines where state land has been encroached upon is prohibited. State regulations require the encroachment to be resolved before the shoreline can be certified.
After-the-Fact Requests Not Penalized By DOH
On December 15, 1993, a legal notice carried in the Hawai’i Tribune Herald informed readers of a request made to the Department of Health for installation of a drywell in a new Hilo subdivision consisting of seven single family houses in an area of about three acres. The notice indicated that the drywell would be constructed to handle up to 2,700 gallons per minute of runoff at peak flow conditions.
What the notice did not say is that the drywell has been dug, framed, and grated months ago. There may be nothing amiss in the drywell’s design or installation, but the processing of the application as though it were for a planned facility, instead of one already built, does raise questions.
According to Kevin Wood of the Department of Health’s Safe Drinking Water Branch, it is illegal to build a drywell before the DOH has issued its permit, known as authority to construct. On occasion, he said, when wells are built without permits, the department will issue a notice of violation to the builder. Those notices are forwarded to the attorney general’s office for follow-up. No fines have ever been assessed for unpermitted wells, according to Wood, although state law provides for penalties of up to $25,000 per day as well as imprisonment.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 4, Number 7 January 1994
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