Butts off our beaches!

[kimo55]

Ok, Duke Aiona. Here's your next assignment should you choose to accept it.
It is a similar politically correct stance and cause, but much more caring of the aina.

It's the new smoking ban on Hawaii's beaches.
Oh, I know whatcher thinkin' "oh that'll scare away the tourists".
Think of the tourists it will attract. Think of the more and more 'pristine' condition our beaches may attain.
It must be done. Each day I venture through the Waikiki beach, buffeted by puffy glowing white bodies and try to enjoy swimming around the boats I like to sail on or just hang out on da beach with my buds, I am disgusted by the trash and cigarette butt quotient in the sand and the crap washing up in the water. Cigarettes, straws, cups, candy and food wrappers...
This junk doesn't just appear magically from some mysterious source. IF it did, then you can conveniently ignore this problem and direct your energies to an 'issue" that your fellow churchgoers would be fully behind.
But on any given day at any given moment, we see tourists smoking on our beaches and putting out their cigarettes in the sand . You may be witness to groups, couples or individual tourists (inexplicably fully dressed in shoes and socks) walking along the shore with scrunched up faces, puffing away like a chimney, and they toss their cigarette butt straight into the water or squish it out in the sand. Why do they do this!? Does it matter why? Would any answer satisfy the question? Or justify the infraction? No, of course not. They do it this way "at home"; they throw trash and butts out their car windows, at the park.. who cares. Point is, this is our home. And it will not be treated as an ashtray. Our aina is not a trashcan.
The ancients, and still, to this day, many... consider the ocean a living being, as it were, the source of food, the embodyment of Lono and other 'gods' of Hawaii. The land and ocean is our playground, where our keiki play and learn and grow. The land and water is the source for our food.
To have it desecrated in this manner by anyone; kama'aina or malihini, is something we should not stand for.
Santa Monica, San Diego, Manhattan Beach, Santa Cruz, and many other California shores now prohibit smoking on beaches. These are destination points, for visitors and residents. As our beaches are voted the most beautiful in the world, (not that we need any justification for THIS prohibition) it is time we take a stand and show a little respect to our aina. ,
California is NOT the only state that has got a clue:
Smoking was banned on Manly, one of Australia's most famous stretches of surfing beach, in May 2004. And the world-famous Bondi Beach - is considering the smoking ban.
IF... Australia, a major tourist destination, can do it, certainly we, as a 'state' with much traditional history of respect for the land and sea... We can and should do it, too.

[Kilinahe]

What Kimo said.

[Fondoo2]

how about
Smoking is permitted but smoker is required to eat all ash and butts,poop will be checked!

[Miulang]

I wish it was all the fault of the tourists, but I don't think it is. I think locals are just as guilty (if not more so) than the tourists are in this case.

On Maui, most of the roadside parks that are maintained by the State are actually very clean and well kept. If you go to the beaches only frequented by locals (the ones maintained by the County), you'll see all kinds of trash, including dirty diapers, beer bottles/cans, mattresses, cigarette butts, needles, condoms, you name it, it's in that pile of garbage in the parking area. Of course, maybe it's just the mentality on Maui...I mean, people do abandon their junkers on the side of the road there and don't care that they're creating eyesores for everyone. :mad:

Miulang

[kimo55]

I wish it was all the fault of the tourists, but I don't think it is. I think locals are just as guilty (if not more so) than the tourists are in this case.

Waikiki = tourists
tourists = Waikiki
i see it. I am there.

[Surfingfarmboy]

It is doubtful, that wherever one travels in the expanses of our nation...be it from Quoddy Head, Maine to Kekeha, Hawai'i..from Barrow, Alaska to Key West...it is nearly impossible to find a road, a highway, an avenue, a street..that has not been littered with a cigarette butt.

I once read that cigarette butts are the most commonly found article of litter found along our nation's byways, and that one would be hard pressed to find a single public right-of-way in America that has not been defiled by a ignorantly tossed cigarette butt. I challange anyone who reads this to go outside their place of domicile, look at the street it exists on, and then come back and honestly report if they did or did not find at least one cigarette butt. I'm betting on the first noted possible outcome.

Those damned things are everywhere. In my years as a distance runner, tallying thousands of miles in a given year, over many roads, bike paths, and running paths, I can say I that I've never seen a route that is free from at least one. You name me a street to find a cigarette butt on...any street... and I guarantee I will find you at least one.

The problem with cigarette butts is that they do not rapidly decompose; it takes years for the man-made fibers found in the filters to break down.

I remember standing on Pupukea Beach one cool winter day after a night of heavy surf, looked at the high tide line in the sand, and was somewhat amazed with all of the cigarette butts that had washed ashore. Those butts could have come from anywhere with their propensity not to decompose...toss a cigarette butt on the shore or in the ocean, it's going to be a problem for somebody, somewhere in this world.

We have to get the unenlightened who still smoke to be more responsible about where they dispose their butts. We've got to get them from using the beach, the intersection their car is parked in while they wait for a left-turn signal, or the own street they live on, as great big ashtrays.

Seeing that they smoke though, with its manifest illogicality, we may be asking the impossible.

[Miulang]

Some smokers are being penalized (if they can be caught) for starting brush fires with their carelessly tossed butts. There have been instances where the State and the Feds have tracked down people who have tossed lit cigarettes out their car windows and fined them for the time it took for firemen to douse the brush fires they've caused. There was even one instance where somebody driving a camper tossed a cigarette out his window and caused a forest fire. That guy ended up having to pay thousands of dollars to pay for the firefighters. Wonder if he's still smoking today? :rolleyes:

Since butts with filters are non-biodegradable, I'm just waiting for the ciggy manufacturers to come up with a biodegradable filter. Or maybe we should ban filtered cigarettes altogether and force smokers to inhale all the noxious fumes from unfiltered Camels and Gauloise. Would that turn some smokers into nonsmokers?

Miulang

[newroots]

mission accomplished

[kimo55]

...toss a cigarette butt on the shore or in the ocean, it's going to be a problem for somebody, somewhere in this world.


exactly. and although many bipeds care not a whit, that our trash, butts, soda can rings, disposable lighters, (by the thousands) end up in the ocean, this manmade man-disposed flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives end up littering the home of, and being ingested by sealife, and of course, killing it. Just because we, as thoughtless ethnocentric mammals assume we have been handed dominion over all the earth and it's denizens, doesn't mean while we are happy to pollute our own home, we can then proceed and pollute the homes of all sea life of the oceans of the world.

http://tinyurl.com/d9o7l

[kimo55]

ok, gang;
IF... anyone is so inclined to let off steam on any important "issue" appropriate for our Lt.Gv, here is his contact page:

http://www.hawaii.gov/ltgov/ltgov/email

[craigwatanabe]

I cannot see any justification for smoking. It's a filthy habit both for the smoker, those around them and the environment. Smokers need to understand that they pollute the air we breathe...Okay so do automobiles, but in this modern world driving a car is at times justified. When is smoking?

And those butts! When a smoker flicks his/her butt out of a car or even while walking or in our sandy beaches, they do a deliberate act of littering making them even more guilty. The smoke, the ash, then the butts. In all a very bad thing for the Aina. Then they get lung disease and raise everyone's health insurance costs all the while suing the cigarette manufacturers for not allowing them to exercise self-awareness.

And for their arguement that they have a right to smoke...ummm where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that!

[Fondoo2]

smoking is a drug addiction problem for most,many started as kids wanting to look tough,fit in whatever and now they as an adult know better but can't stop.I lost both my parents to cigs and whitnessed how hard they tried to stop and will take issue with anyone looking down there nose at a person with a problem like that as if they don't have as bad or worse things in there life.