 And you're here with us today to hear from three amazing community advocates about energy justice in Hawaii. The title of this show today is energy justice taking root or takes root or something along those lines justice takes root. We added an extra s in there. And we're we're going to be hearing from Todd Yamashita who is the president of whole who energy cooperative Molokai he's a fourth generation Molokai resident and a father of two. We'll also be hearing from Dr. Tavita Kaili, originally from Nuku Alofa, with ancestral ties to Tonga Samoa Fiji and Rotuma, and is currently dean and professor of cultural anthropology language and performing arts at Brigham Young University and a longtime resident of Kahuku and community advocate, as well as Auntie Kapua Kiliikua Kamai, who is a community leader, and in why and I and advisor to the White and I Valley Homestead Association Board. So I'm going to pass it over to them to do a quick intro, and then we'll dive into sort of a casual talk story. If anybody is listening live right now and has a question please drop that in to the chat or the website, and we will be sure to share it with our awesome panelists. So Todd first give us a little background what brings you to the energy justice conversation. Sure, so it was definitely my family my father was president of Molokai Electric back in the day. And so, you know I was brought up with this idea of hometown energy. You know, something that was owned by the community, something that served the community, and employed a lot of people and, you know, I remember back on my grandfather and the people who knew him and, you know, for him it was he wasn't a community man. He was known as a community man. And we have a whole different thing. We have a whole different thing today you know it's, we have the HCI who owns the utility here on Molokai and it's vastly it's it doesn't quite work that way anymore. And you mentioned my two children and I see a future for them. That's a lot like that of my grandfather's and I hope that in all of the work that that we can do here on Molokai and elsewhere. It can be in the spirit of community building. So that's that's what brings me here today. Thank you for the space. Thank you for joining us Todd. Auntie Kapua, can you share a little bit about your background and what brings you to the energy justice conversation. Long time resident of one night Valley Homestead, more of a community advocate than a community leader. Those things that I think are good for our community. I'll advocate for those that I think is not so good. I'm definitely going to make my position know and actually find others that have like minds to see what we can do about it because there's too much things that people want to put into why and I that they don't want in their own backyard. And so why and I definitely needs justice, not only on the side of environment, but also in social welfare economic. So there's many areas that why and I needs to be uplifted. Also been resident of wine I Valley Homestead. Let's see, for the last almost 30 years. I have two beautiful daughters, myself. I've grown no grandchildren yet but looking forward to leaving them a better place to live for our more as well. Wow. I love those generational parallels between you and Todd. Tavita, can you run this out with your intro and what brings you to the energy justice conversation. Thank you for the question and for the invitation to participate in this panel and grateful to be here with Todd and Kapua. At this from a cultural justice point of view as of my training is cultural anthropology so I'm an advocate for cultural preservation revitalization and so forth. And, you know, I have also background in social work so a lot of the work that I've been working on has been on social justice. And over the years, the two seem to intersect where energy justice and social justice came together. And I started to advocate for, you know, when I saw that sometimes the energy industry was also destroying some of the cultures, the beautiful culture here in Hawaii but also in other places. So I feel there's an obligation and a responsibility and a kuleana to advocate for making sure that cultural site, cultural practices are preserved and conserved in those particular areas. And especially with indigenous people and their rights to their land and so forth. You know, as a person from Tonga who have come here to Hawaii, I've spent many years advocating for Hawaiian issues. So, you know, the energy justice area that I have been focusing and working on it is that is that particular advocacy to make sure that the voices of indigenous people are, are valued and that they are heard, and so forth. And, you know, I teach courses as a professor that also advocate for these particular area. And, and I live in Kahuku, where we have 20 turbines, we carry 40% of the wind energy of Oahu. And so my professional life and my personal life sort of all intersect in where I live and perhaps live maybe a little bit later I will talk about some of the advocacy work that we have done here to to get our voices heard. But that's the, that's my, my specific area it's advocating for indigenous people and their culture. So, thank you. Hello to Vita. I'm amazing to hear that background. And I think what you said about making sure that local voices that indigenous voices are heard in energy is a big part of energy justice and I hope that that's something that we can chat about today I think that shows up in a bunch of different parts of our landscape both projects that that do not listen to local values or do not match local values and then on the other end of the spectrum are projects that are are built up purely by local voices and built from the ground up community and I love this the spectrum of voices that the three of you are bringing to the conversation, each kind of participating in different parts of that whether you're partially down the road for a community led community owned energy which would be Todd, or starting the conversation around community led energy which hoping Auntie Kapua can tell us a little bit about and then to Vita with hearing about the winter vines in Kahuku and what it looks like to be thinking about a fresh project that did not match community is in shifting over so Todd can you tell us a little bit about start start us with the story of more history of extractive project proposals and how that grew into a whole often. Thank you. You know it's interesting because I guess our Genesis story starts off similar to to Vitas and Kahuku's more than a decade ago now they had somebody had this really great idea to build more than 50 of the world's largest windmills it was proposed that they would build these here on Molokai and that they would transport the energy with a undersea cable over to a Wahoo and you know you can imagine how that was received here on Molokai, but you know the conversation was important because this is more than just don't build this in my backyard. You know this is a concept of oh my gosh, you know this this appetite for energy. If it is so voracious that you have to go beyond your boundaries, you know outside of your Wahoo and into your neighbors backyard, not even to ask but to say this is what we need and we're going to take it. You know obviously for us in the values that we try to live by a Molokai, you know that struck us the wrong way and so it created this it created a movement. And through that movement over the years we've slowly educated ourselves about our energy environment and what's at play here. And if you think about, you know we have the highest electricity rates here on Molokai and, and we use some of the least amount of electricity for anybody. So if you think about that and if you think about $2 million bonuses from the utility CEO, if you think about the fact that this is a publicly traded company, you know it's a hard it's a hard truth to swallow. You know the fact that this basic necessity is, is, is kind of being profited off the backs of our owner. And so that's that's where the passion comes from. And it's more than just that. You know, for us, survival is everything and so we don't have the same kind of economy as other places and so when your utility bill is a huge portion of your income. You know, it's everything you can do just to make it to the next month. And so this is more than, you know, just fixing, you know, something that's broken it, it's, it's, it's trying to build equity on behalf of our community. And so fast forward, you know, we, we've, we've heard of these new energy projects that are coming out and that's called community solar or community based renewable energy and you know so basically the utility said hey there's a project that can benefit your community and and you can choose potentially for it to benefit whoever you want, low to moderate income or Hawaiian homesteaders here, which, which make up a good portion of our island. And so that, that set us into action, you know, this group of people that have been meeting over the years. And just this year, we unified and created a cooperative. And it's a consumer cooperative and we created a consumer cooperative because we believe that, you know, if, if, if we are taking control of our energy destiny and we're using something like the sun that shines on all of us. It is not right to profit off of that. That's something that, you know, we need to take to empower other people. And so that's, that's precisely what we've done and in the spirit of, of bringing equity to our community. We hope to succeed. Amazing. It's just an amazing transition to be witness to Auntie Kapua. Can you tell us a little bit about where you and some of your neighbors and like minded community members are thinking about and just starting that conversation what has that been like so far. So what are you finding powerful about that conversation about thinking about community led energy. What, what led you guys here and yeah, I'll stop there. That's a lot of questions. Okay, so I was just saying about how I totally agree with Todd, you know about capacity and overwhelming, and then having to depend upon the next, the next guy for it. In this case, it's when Oahu had wanted to cable out to La Nati for energy. And, you know, I was like, okay. That just means that Oahu has too many people, or else we need to take care of our own needs. And if we can't take care of our own needs we're exceeding our capability our capacity. You know, to that extent, I think each community, each, each island needs to take care of yourself and not depend upon the other guy. And I heard what you said, Todd, you know about helping the next guy. That's true. But when Oahu is looking to overwhelm another area, another island to meet its needs, that means that Oahu needs to look inside, look at ourselves. And so that's where Waianae, you know, we're very grateful to get in contact with a group of energy conscientious folks that far exceeds the three of us that you see here. Oh, I'm sorry for including you, Allie, the four of us, but from conversations like that, and learning about community based renewable energy, and how that is something that could be done in Waianae, because Waianae has, I think to this day we still have the largest solar farm out here helping everyone. But it doesn't benefit our community to help everyone as much as we'd like to. We'd like everyone to help yourselves. You know, you need the energy to put it up in your area. You need to take care of your trash, take care of it in your area. You know, so it's a community that takes care of your community, not putting it all in one area, because it's at the end of the road. It's where you have your native peoples and part of your lowest income, or wherever we may be, because this also pertains to Kahu'u area as well. You know, trying to put all of our needs on the next community, whether it be energy or Opala, you know, so it's community taking care of itself. And so we're fortunate to be in discussions with other folks and bringing it to our board and our community. So we just started this discussion about having our own community solar farm that can benefit our community, as well as others on this island. We're just glad for sky's the limit. You know, it's just a matter of the capacity that we have in our community to take care of ourselves. Mahalo. I think I'm just as you mentioned, I'm going to transition over. I think that the echoing there of projects being placed and burdening other communities disproportionately to Vita. Can you tell us a little bit about how your advocacy in Kahu'u and thinking about this wind farm project and how it doesn't match community values, how are you, where are you guys at in that advocacy and how are you thinking about what community energy could look like? Yeah. You know, originally we had 12 wind turbines, they're about 400 feet, 400 plus feet. The new ones that we have are 560 plus. You know, these are industrial, massive turbines. We know the energy as far as we know do not go to our local community but are taken extracted from our community and taken to Honolulu to power many of the hotels and so forth. So, you know, from from the beginning, we've always asked the question, how does this benefit our community? We are completely surrounded by these massive, we call them the monster turbines. Because they're not only massive but their footprint as far as clearing so much of our Aina in order to build one of these. You know, we had, you know, some of our trees, our forests were cleared just to build one and then also it's impact on our wildlife. So, you know, the Ho Pepe, the Hawaiian Ho Rebats and then many of the other native Hawaiian culturally significant. This is where I came in because these were culturally significant. The Ho Pepe is culturally significant because it shows up in the Hawaiian kumulipo and Hawaiian creation story and many of the other birds, which to me, this was a form of, you know, a form of ethno site, a killing of the culture through the industrial turbines. So many of our advocacy was to say, hey, we don't want this. You know, we've already have 12. We think we've carried our, you know, the number for, you know, for Hawaii, you know, perhaps it should be in another community. But many of us were also saying that, you know, the turbines just didn't fit here. You know, we were all for renewable energy rooftop solar. We refer that because we think that's wonderful. It doesn't take up some of our land, our ag lands or any of our other land and so forth. And, you know, one of the things that we really wanted to do was to get consent. You know, oftentimes the conversation is about consultation. We have consulted with these community and to us, it feel like it was just going through the motion or say, yo, we came and talked to you and told you this, but there was no option for us to say yes or no. It was like, should we make the turbine this tall or make it short? Should we move it a few more feet? So that was the conversation. It wasn't like, no, we do not want. And so, before for us, that was part of our concern that we've never been given a consultation. So, so now where we're at now is that we're just fighting, you know, these corporations. The latest one is AES, Big Energy Corporation that is, you know, multinational. And we are basically saying, you know, there's got to be a better way to do this, where our local communities are involved in this decision and also, you know, have a saying of what to do with this energy. Here in Kahuku, we have really good wind and we also have really good sun. So we're sort of kind of blessed both of them. It's almost also a kind of a curse for us because other corporation outside wants to extract this to use for other things. And I just want to say we're not against renewable energy, green renewable energy. And therefore, we believe in climate change. We just want to do it in a way that it's responsible and porno take into account the, you know, most of indigenous local communities in the process of creating these, you know, these energy project. We've started having some conversations similar to what they're doing in Molokai, but we're kind of looking at Todd and their work there is sort of kind of the model for us as we move forward in this process. That's amazing to meet. Hello for sharing and I just also want to acknowledge all three of you the level of effort, time, energy, passion that goes into all forms of advocacy whether advocating against projects that don't fit local culture that don't respect local values and then building up projects that do like equally so taxing on on time and energy so thank you so much for the work you do. Todd, I want to, I want to ask you to reflect on hearing Tavita and Auntie Kapua share a little bit about how they where they are in the process and maybe who are who being a little farther down that line. What are some reflections on some of the obstacles that you guys have gone through forming a co-op what are some of the resources that were helpful in getting over some of those obstacles. Sure, thank you. You know, I think Molokai is a little bit different so our obstacles have been a little bit different and some of our challenges differently different as well. You know, before I go forward, I want to acknowledge that Molokai is very different and special because of the very, very hard work that our kupuna did before us. They really helped keep this place intact and we're lucky that we're a community is close enough to be relatively united. And there are also many, many people not in this room that are actively at my at all of our sides working together to make all of this go and I just want to really acknowledge them in the thousands of hours that have got us to where we are. But to answer your question, you know, we know what it's like not to have the bandwidth. We know what it's like to have to where all it's all you can do just to push back against something that is not right for your community. And Molokai has really been lucky. In the past decade it's been relatively controversy free here and, you know, instead of just kind of taking a breath we've really used that time and filled that time with being proactive. And it has not been easy for us to get to this point where we are it's taken a lot of hard work and what we've done is we've surrounded ourselves with any energy professionals, pro bono lawyers, leaders who have come out of the woodwork to root for the underdog, and we're not. We're not going to be selfish about this amazing support that we got. I'm here today to pledge to everyone here that everything that it is that we are doing is available to every other community out there and and in fact you know I know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We've been meeting here and there. There is a movement. Energy justice movement that is going statewide is talking about these really hard things that we're talking about trying, trying to figure out for ourselves. To do whatever it is that we can to contribute to that movement in any capacity. Thank you. Todd, we have just a couple minutes left today together. Can I ask you for what are some of your takeaways and maybe even asks, as Todd just said, we've got a lot of resources out there. Is there anything that we on the call or the audience could help support the community and in pursuing their advocacy. We, you know, one of the things we've always, I mean, we're grateful because we've received so much support from many different communities and I want to acknowledge, you know, why am I not a Cooley, you know, all of the communities. Native Hawaiians community came in in full force to support us doing our stands. You know, I was arrested along with 200 others. During the whole one month that we were protesting or protecting, I'd like and we know we refer to ourselves as Kiai, you know, really inspired by Mauna Kea as protectors of culture and Aina and so forth. So, you know, one of the things that we've always, so we're grateful for all that supported and, you know, we'd like to just ask people to continue to support us in our, most of our fight now is in the court and we're in, you know, several different court fights that we are involved in trying to to right the wrong that, you know, or the injustices have been to us. But moving forward, we are also sort of just trying to consent to some, you know, thinking about, you know, how do we work as far as making this more community-led, community-based, and so forth. So I'm, you know, I'm grateful for the partnerships that and the meetings that we have, you know, I met meeting with Hohahu and others in this and if other community members out there are doing similar things, you know, help us. Mahalo, Tavita. Amazing. Ask. On to Kapua. We've got, I think we only have 30 seconds left. Do you have any takeaways or next steps you want to share and you're on mute just to put a warning. Okay. Um, yeah, I just want to thank the energy fully that again is more than us that allowed us to come into this discussion and to even realize that there are opportunities for our community to actually benefit from the energy that we can create. And I encourage other communities to consider that likewise, and we welcome everyone's assistance. Mahalo. Mahalo, on to Kapua. Mahalo, Todd and Tavita. I think we're right about at time where that's what they're telling me anyways. Um, this was an awesome kickoff to what will be a bi weekly, once every two weeks, community conversation around energy justice so we'll have more folks from our Hui come join us and and we'll tackle new topics. Anybody listening has any specific questions they want to ask, send us an email, but you'll you'll see us in two weeks. Energy justice in Hawaii. Thanks guys.