FREEHAWAII.INFO PRESENTS THE CONCLUSION TO A SPECIAL REPORT IN FOUR PARTS -
FROM INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY
Homeless In Hawai'i: More Land For The Military Than For Hawaiians
By Winona LaDuke - Guest Columnist
Clean up and the Range Readiness Proposal
Clean up is not the military's strongest suit. Of the whopping federal defense budget of $265 billion, only a fraction will be spent on cleaning up exploded ordnance at test sites, let alone sites in the process of decommissioning, like Wisconsin's Badger Munitions Plant, in which the Ho-Chunk Nation seeks some part in its recovery.
An Associated Press news story of Jan. 16 stated that according to congressional auditors "removing unexploded munitions and hazardous waste found so far on 15 million acres of shutdown U.S. military ranges could take more than 300 years." The clean up cost is now estimated at $35 billion and climbing rapidly from an estimate of $20 billion a year ago.
In the present environment and with leadership like Senator Inouye, it looks like the reverse: Build up, not clean up, is on the horizon. Under a bill called the "Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative", the Department of Defense is pushing Congress to give more waivers to the military for clean up. Last year, the Defense Department succeeded in gaining exemptions for the U.S. military to the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act. The Defense Department now wants exemptions from the Clean Air Act, Superfund Laws and others, all under the premise of national security.
At hearings this spring on the Range Readiness proposals, U.S. Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., said, "There is no reason to incur 'collateral damage' to our public health while meeting our military needs," referring to the present problems with military contamination.
All told, the Department of Defense is the nation's largest toxic polluter with over 11,000 toxic "hot spots" on 1,855 military facilities nationwide. If we are to look at Hawai'i's prospects as to what is in the pipeline, there may be some cause for concern. Sparky Rodrigues noted the irony. "They spend billions making Weapons of Mass Destruction but pennies on clean up." In short, being homeless in Hawai'i isn't as glamorous as being sleepless in Seattle, and by the next millennium, and the next conflict, there may be more Hawaiians in prison than on the beaches.
