 There you go, 11 o'clock rock, the Trump week, the week of Trump, the next chapter in the history of the world. We're still trying to make sense of it. What does this mean? And to help us, we have Elizabeth Satoris from Shamanad University who likes to talk about, hmm, among other things, sustainability. Hi, Elizabeth. Hi, Jay. Good to be here again. Great to have you. Thank you for coming down. So are you in shock like everyone else? No, I prepared myself. I worked hard on maintaining equanimity through the election. And I have to say I felt very hollowed out right afterwards. And then the next day too, I woke up in grief and shame because I'm a planet person. I'm an evolution biologist. And I understand that we're going through our kind of adolescent crisis as humanity. And this is not unique to the United States. I've lived a lot in Europe and they're going through their own turmoil. And also we had to face our shadow. And we can't really get on with things. It's like the matter of transparency. We're going out first with Enron and then the Catholic Church and then the WikiLeaks. Our culture is hanging out at sturdy laundry, so to speak. We're facing our shadow again and again. And this is the big deal now. Isn't it destabilizing when all that happens? We have one sort of scandal after another and one revelation, negative revelation after another. Does that make you lose confidence in the future when that happens? No, we're just getting to know ourselves as the still adolescent humanity we are right now. And my evolution biology shows that young species are very creative and they multiply. They build growth economies. They're very competitive. And then there comes a point when it's too energy costly to keep elbowing everybody out of the way, bumping off your competitors. And you start to cooperate with each other. And oh my, you suddenly are saving all these resources and building cooperation. That's the mature phase. And the Darwinian theory, which our whole economic system adopted, is only about the youthful part. And it doesn't give you a story for the mature part. So we have, you know, all the hero's journeys, stories that Joseph Campbell taught us were in every culture. And what happens when Odysseus gets home to Ithaca? He gives his sword to his son to help bump off the rest of the suitors who have been after Penelope was her name. And then end of story. We don't know, does he govern Ithaca wisely now after all this experience? We don't have the story, the next story. But the title of this show tells it. The title of this show is, can we continue to rely on federal support for sustainability? No, I mean the part that says community matters. Ah, community matters. The show is community matters. And that's exactly what happens in the mature phase. You build community. You take care of each other. And nature is arranged in Holans, in Holarchy. This is from Arthur Kustler. Entities within each other. You have cells within your organs, within your organ system, your body, and then you're within your family, your community. It goes all the way up to the whole universe, right? And we have to make sure our economy works at all levels, or it can't work at all. And we have built a global economy at the expense of local economies. And you see that here. That's why we have homelessness. That's why there is no affordable housing for those who have no job. Can I, Elizabeth, can I ask you to go back with me? Go back, back, back, back, back to Monday. The day before the election, okay? Ah, yes, B-C-D-B-E. And, you know, B-T, before Tuesday. And relive with me. And you follow this because you're an evolution sustainability person. How our evolution in sustainability was going then. Just, you know, forget the election for a minute. How was it going then? Was it going the way you wanted? Was it going, kicking, screaming into maturity? Or was it stuck in some way? Tell me your perception. Yeah. If you can remember. Yeah. Well, I use the metaphor of butterflies where the caterpillar eats 300 times its weight a day and then gets so bloated it hangs itself up in the chrysalis. These imaginal cells, which are like stem cells that have been there all along, start coming out as the caterpillar doses. And they build the butterfly basically inside. And by the way, imaginal is a scientific word. It means it's for the imago, the developing butterflies called the imago. And those are imaginal cells. Ah. And so we used to think that everything would go downhill and then the phoenix would rise from the ashes. Yeah. And the caterpillar story shows that the imaginal cells are building the new entity while the old ones are dissolving, falling apart. Yeah. And that's where we were on Monday, you know, the day before. We have loads of efforts like our energy initiatives here in Hawaii. We care about community in Hawaii. We act on aloha values as much as possible. But we also have the behemoth, the caterpillar, is still here. And it's still putting condos up on the beach while we're saying, um, the sea level is going to come up and wash those away. So, you know, it doesn't happen overnight. There is no turning point. There is a new culture being built within the old and eventually the old drops away. So it's a metamorphosis, a repeating, continuing metamorphosis. Caterpillaring is Trump's business, right? That's what he is. He's grab it all and break it in and build it. And he's going to now frack the country to death and probably open up the coal mines again. Wait, wait. And the world is a gas. You're jumping past Monday. Oh, sorry. Okay. We were closing down the coal mines. We were developing clean green energy. We were working very hard with the Indigenous people at Standing Rock. We hope to turn our country clean and green. Yeah. There was a lot of aspiration about that. We now know that it wasn't universal, but there was a lot of aspiration among the people you and I know in our little world. Our little world is defined by the media that we choose to look to by the institutions we choose to believe, or at least to some extent believe. And so it all seemed to be on a certain track. But it wasn't perfect, was it? I mean, if I'm looking Monday, what were the challenges? What were the problems that would have worried you on Monday? What worried me was that I had to vote for a lady whom I have a lot of admiration for, but who was more Republican than Democrat. We haven't gotten there. It's Monday. No election. Yeah. I'm thinking about the election. It's really between a Republican and an extreme rightist. And where are we in this picture was troubling to me. We community builders. What else? I have to say, Hillary has a very strong community caring. Yes, I agree with that. But where were we on Monday in terms of the imperfection, the flaws in the direction towards sustainability? Yes. There was resistance in Congress. There was resistance among a number of people, a lot of people in the country. Some countries couldn't care less about it. What else? We had a beautiful dignified couple in the White House who couldn't do what they wanted to do and who was stymied by that Congress and Senate and it was very, very difficult. And I have to say they kept their grace and cool through it and are continuing to do so. But the hollowed out middle in America is the problem. We who want a bridge to divide can't, the bridge is so big that has to be built now that we've hollowed out the middle class, right? And everybody's been driven into rich and poor, miseducated and maybe miseducated at the other end too. But a difference and a huge difference in education. You know, kids learn what they're taught in the environment that they grow up in. So we have this hollowed out middle and we have to face our shadows at the same time to grow up to get through this adolescent crisis. So now we're deep in the crisis. Okay, so now I think we've examined how it was on Monday. Right. Now Monday comes and surprise of surprise. Before I ask you that, what would you have expected? I think you've answered this in part. What would you have expected from Hillary Clinton had she won? How would you have expected her to take the mantle, deal with some of the problems that Barack Obama has had, and go forward in sustainability? Well, I think she would be as she has been. She would be very strong on family, community, social welfare, the health care and social security, things like that. And she'd be a military hawk. That's an odd combination of positions. Yes, it is. It is. It's a strange combination of things. But she certainly wouldn't have reopened the coal mines, right? And that's what I fear now. So she would have been, what, okay, excellent? It would have kind of been business as usual in a way, by the way, happy 11-11. We are in memory today and I see the clock at this moment is saying 11-11 and it is Veterans Day and we care deeply for all those who suffer everywhere. And more will now. And that was my grief was for the earth and for all the people that will suffer under this administration. The earth, the fracking, the coal mine, going back to the dirty energy when we were so close to coming into green energy. Okay, so now, had Hillary wanted, it would have been pretty much business as usual. Okay, Trump comes in. Boy, is he in. I'm still not used to that. And the question is, you know, well, A, he hasn't been kind in his campaign comments about sustainability. He doesn't even believe in global warming, really. Meaning to believe maybe, but it's perfectly natural. It has nothing to do with us. You think, this is a hard one and I don't know how I feel about it. Do you think he's capable of maturation just as your maturation phenomenon for the world? I think he's an eternal child type. Not capable of maturation. He's at his birthday party right now, so he's being real nice. He just got a lot of big presents. And those who voted will reap what they sow. I mean, you know, I don't expect that he's had a character change because he got elected. And we're going to have to work much harder now on community because community matters. Okay, all right, community matters. We're going to take a short break. We're going to come back and talk about how much harder we're going to have to work and what can we do in order to achieve some outcome, some desirable outcome. We'll be right back. Aloha. My name is Carl Kampania. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I hope you join us as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii over the coming weeks and the alternative fuel supply chains necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. We are going to invite in and we will have significant interviews with various stakeholders, including our producers, which are our farmers and our scientists, our conversion technologies, including Tarviva, who we'll see in two weeks, as well as our consumers. Within there, we're also going to have the investor groups necessary to make sure that this can advance. So I do hope you join us as we explore our deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii. Community matters with Elizabeth Satoris of Shamuna University, a person who follows the evolution of sustainability. We're talking today, ultimately, the ultimate question is can we continue to rely on federal support for sustainability after the Trump election? So, you know, I mean, just on the changing your spots issue, you know, apparently Trump took down his remark on his website that called for removing all Muslims from the country. Maybe he's relenting, maybe he's softening, maybe he's becoming, what may I say, presidential? Well, he will have to make some concessions here and he can kind of afford them now. He's going to be in trouble. I guess he's got 40 law cases coming up in this next 100 days that he has to get to. But I don't expect to see, he claims he's going to take subsidies away from all energy that private business shouldn't be subsidized by the government. That may be a good thing. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, if he undoes that, I don't think that's all bad. I've been opposed to those trade deals for a long time because they're not good for either the working people or the climate change people. But we're going to go on building clean green energy here in Hawaii, aren't we? And we have to go on with doing the good things we were doing, whether or not he gives us favors. Let's talk about what, and you mentioned it, talk about the tax credits for solar. If he removes those energy credits, that's going to have a direct effect on the market. Do you think the market can continue and everybody gird his loins and say, I don't care if I'm getting a tax credit, I'm going to build this facility anyway? No, not at all. I like that he's going to do the FDR thing in a way of creating jobs by building infrastructure, but I immediately go to who's going to benefit the most or the big companies who are his best friends, right, who will be hiring the labor. So there are two sides to that picture again. And we have to work with what we have right now, Jay. And my favorite thing right now because I'm an evolution biologist who teaches living economies and I teach in the business school at Chamonaut. And in the past year, four of us, Dean Schroeder of the Business and Communication School at Chamonaut and Ramsey Tom, you've probably had him on as a guest. We have, yes. And Kauila Clark. We were a team of four. We designed four new courses called Island Business or Island Economies. And I'm just teaching the first one of those now called INA. It's our relationship to our land, to our ecosystem, us within our ecosystem and how are we going to build that clean green future. Now the other thing that's come down the pike that I'm very excited about is that Honolulu was now chosen by the Rockefeller Foundation to enter its program of 100 resilient cities in the world. And two years ago, the first cohort of 33 was chosen last year, another third of them, and this year we got in. What's a resilient city? And a resilient city, they had to apply to get this status. And we got in on the last cohort. Our mayor wanted very much to have us in the program, and he's still our mayor, so there'll be continuity there. And the two things that a resilient city has to demonstrate they can do is solve chronic problems and Honolulu-listed homelessness as one of its top problems and build resilience against oncoming disasters. So this is so up my alley. I love this. I want to work with it and I want to build an arm in Shamanad that can support City Hall as it develops these projects. And I particularly like to get everyone in Honolulu to know about this project, which they don't yet. The first meeting with the Rockefeller team is going to be December 12th, and that's a closed meeting in City Hall. But we can start letting people know and getting the kids in schools excited about this because, let's ask little kids, how would you solve homelessness and things and get the families talking about this over the supper table and build some town hall meetings where anyone who wants to work on visioning the future of Honolulu can come. And I was at a meeting like this in Jacksonville, Florida, which is a comparable size city. Back in 1991, 1,100 people showed up on that Saturday morning to stay all day in workshops and design the future of the city. So I think this is a wonderful opportunity that we can have to build our clean green energy no matter what comes down the pike from the feds, right? For us to build our local businesses up to develop our own resources, to develop our food supply, which is on our agenda, you know, it's crazy for us to be importing 95 to 99% of our food energy and stuff. Well, it's from our Institute Foundation. Is that going to give us money? They're funding a resilience officer in City Hall and they're claimed to be giving millions of dollars of services, in-kind services and consulting and stuff to make sure we get this off the ground. Consulting on, consulting this coordinator? I don't know yet because I'm not on the inside on this project. You know, I worry about it. You know, we have a homeless coordinator and we had him on the show one time. And I said, well, you know, you've got a staff that actually executes a plan. We said, no, I have no staff. I just sit alone in a little desk on the fifth floor near the governor and I coordinate. I make calls to say hi. And I try to get other people to do things. Myself. And I said, gee, that's really not going to go anywhere in my view. And so, I guess the question is, in this model, Rockefeller, you know, provides someone who can be coordinator or take a look at this and be sort of... Well, our mayor chooses that person, I believe. It's not they don't choose the person. Whoever. And it funds the position and it gives millions of dollars of consulting and reports and data, whatnot. Is that model proven to be effective? This is a new model. This resilient city is a new model. And I have a friend who's been working on it for a long time called Integral Cities. She has great handbooks. I love that word, Integral Cities. Yes. And, you know, I think back to China, there's a Chinese delegation coming over and I'm on the board of the Zhou and Lai Peace Institute. Oh, sure. And we're going to have an exhibit here in Honolulu, December 12th, 13th. And when I was there in 1973, there was this huge push to get ordinary people to feel empowered and to be empowered to actually accomplish things. And we've already got so many people working in Hawaii, all over the state, all over this island. We've got people, there's a gal named Dadi up the coast south of Lai Ye who has organized everybody in resilience to know exactly what to do when the road washes out and gotten the rich people to agree that the poorer people can come up and camp in their estates if necessary and, you know, doing wonderful work like that. Without seeing... If we can pull all these grassroots initiatives that are already happening together, we've got a huge workforce that isn't asking for money. Volunteer, you mean? Yes. Those Chinese people weren't paid. I saw the youth of a valley with 200 villages in a valley dying of drought for centuries. It was dry there. And the young kids saying, we're going to bring water from... There's a river 70 kilometers as the crow flies across these mountains and we're going to bring that water over here. We're going to build aqueducts and blast tunnels and get that water over here. And the government engineers, when they proposed it, said, are you crazy? There's no way you can do that. They had no money. They had no equipment. They built kilns on the dry valley floor and smelted the iron in that red dirt and made chisels and pickaxes and shovels and hammers and chisels and pickles and pickaxes and shovels. And I saw the black and white movie of them with homemade ropes swinging off these barren cliffs for the first toehold. And this is now the eighth wonder of the world. I did it against orders. These kids with no equipment and no money built Red Flag Canal and that water came across... it's 144 kilometers of walls. The people were all chiseling the rocks and passing them up into the mountains. I interviewed the Iron Girls Dynamite team. This changed my life, Jay, because suddenly I realized that motivation matters more than money. If you can get people, of course, when they're in a life-death situation, they're highly motivated. And we are going to be highly motivated when the beaches wash out. And I asked Jim Hansen, our best climatologist, years ago, what will really wake the world up to climate change? And he said, the sea level rises a couple of meters at once. This can happen. Nature doesn't do nice, slow, predictable curves. Well, this is the frog in the water. You could have the collapse of ice shelves in Greenland and the sliding off Antarctica, and suddenly we've got a giant tsunami and when it goes away, the water is still two meters deeper. Is it possible? Yes, it's possible. The Earth is big. Oh, yes. And we haven't seen anything yet. I agree. I always say, every beautiful day in Hawaii is one day closer to one of those storms. Well, we need as one. But you say life and death, it really means a lot to people. In an island state like this, you get on a plane, you get out of town. You solve the problem for yourself. The airports will be first to go. If the water is two meters higher, I guarantee you there won't be any planes coming in, nor ships. Consider that. Consider that possibility that we could lose our airport and our peers at once. I have to go to Safeway now and stock up right now. But let me pose this to you, because we have to get to our title question. Can we continue to rely on federal support for sustainability? And what I get, I'll ask you the question, can we continue to rely on federal support? I don't believe in relying on the feds for anything right now. I want us to build our sustainability from the ground up, all over this country, and especially in Hawaii. We have to motivate them, and that's what I want to do. I want to be involved in having the school kids understand what it means to build within your community, to build your own jobs. Every time you shop at Walmart or big box stores, the money you earned here in Hawaii is going offshore. And our economy relies on tourism and bringing new retirees into new condos. And that is so unsustainable. It isn't funny. You're not kidding. It is really serious. So I take the kids in a given school, grade school, high school, no matter. And I say, my name is Elizabeth, and I want to motivate you kids to go out there and do... No, don't tell them that. Okay, motivate. That's not how you motivate. I come in all excited and say, wow, you want to see a great movie about what kids did somewhere, right? Well, that's true. The 1973 China thing. But I'm going to run into some things. The first thing is, the teachers say that that's overtime. I'm not going to be around for that. The second thing is, the union says, don't touch our teachers. Do you know what? When the floods come in, ain't no overtime, non-overtime. Were you on Kauai by any chance when the big storm hit there, and every pane of glass on the island was broken? My wife's family. Did you think anybody was saying, I don't work overtime? As they were barbecuing what was before the freezers, you know, rotted the meat. And for all their friends and neighbors and building for each other. And, you know, Hawaii could be so great if we did bamboo architecture. It's spectacular these days. If you look at Southeast Asian bamboo architecture, the food variety, we could be doing green wave ocean farming, hanging so that tsunamis don't destroy it, right? Farms. We haven't even begun to explore the number of seaweeds that would make great veggies, and we get chefs going on making spectacular new meals. There is so much fun to do. Tell them what you want them to do today. I want them today to know that we are growing up because invariably, you know, you die or you grow up. You stop growing taller in adolescence and your body stabilizes. The cells don't keep on multiplying. It's inevitable. We have a choice. Do we want to grow up into a clean green economy where we can actually have fun, or do we want to sit there and go under? Well, you know, the interesting thing about this is that the Trump election and this prospect of not having, you know, federal support for sustainability does give rise to the notion that maybe we should be independent and we should find a way to do things ourselves the way islands customarily historically have done. So there's a bright side to that. It's a hard side, painful, but I think there's a bright side. That's Elizabeth Centaurus, Shamanide University, Evolution of Biologists, as it were, here on Community Matters. We're talking about federal support for sustainability. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. Aloha, Jay.