Crown flowers help butterflies
Growing up in Hawaii from the l940s, I remember abundant numbers of monarch butterflies ("Pesticides causing butterfly deaths?" Star-Advertiser, Letters, April 27).
An old-fashioned plant was the calotropis gigantea, better known as the crown flower, which is disappearing along with the butterflies.
Their tall stalks and large milky leaves attracted monarchs by the hundreds to lay their eggs on the leaves.
After hatching, the black, yellow and white caterpillars ate the leaves to their hearts’ content all day long, then miraculously turned into cocoons.
Cocoons hung by the hundreds like Christmas ornaments under the leaves. As children, we watched and waited for the beautiful jade-green, inch-long cocoons with a golden halo to burst into beautiful monarch butterflies.
We still have hope in Hawaii. We need people to visit their plant nurseries and purchase a crown flower plant. They grow tall and are less likely to be sprayed and killed than the pesky milkweed.
Iris T. Mudgett
Mililani
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GMO companies shift debate focus
Good PSYOPs move for Monsanto to shift the GMO (genetically modified organisms) debate from whether or not the consumer should know what’s in the food they’re eating to whether or not GMOs are "safe."
Safety is not the current issue. It may take decades for problems to be identified. Who today knows what causes autism?
The current issue is whether food companies have the right to keep GMO ingredients secret from the public.
Roy "Sky" Wyttenbach II
Waikiki
Use idle ag lands or see them go
For decades, preservation of agricultural lands has been a hallowed principle in Hawaii politics. This has translated into resistance to home, commercial and industrial development on land deemed valuable for farming. However, little use has been made of that land for agriculture.
The demise of the sugar industry left many thousands of acres available, but little progress has been made toward the goal of self-sufficiency in food production. Only a few thousand people are still employed in agriculture — a small fraction of the number 50 years ago.
And some of those workers must be imported from Asia and Mexico because Hawaii’s people spurn farming jobs as low paying and too strenuous.
Hawaii farmers can grow many crops but often cannot compete in price with imports. They are left with niche markets for local consumers.
As Hawaii’s population increases and people find jobs in non-farm occupations, the demand for housing grows. That means more pressure to build on agricultural land.
It will be difficult to resist that pressure unless the land is actually farmed and not largely left unused.
Carl H. Zimmerman
Salt Lake
Teaching safety is parents’ job
I am sorry, but I do not want my money to fill a parent’s responsibility to teach children how to live in a safe manner and wear helmets and knee and elbow pads or any other necessary safety equipment such as safety glasses or goggles when doing something for fun where hazards abound ("Helmets are cool for skateboarders," Star-Advertiser, Letters, April 29).
It is the parents’ time and money, not my taxpayer money, that should be doing the teaching.
Helmets, elbow and knee pads are not "cool," just necessary. Helmets are hot, heavy head ovens and really mess the hair and get you all sweaty while riding during September afternoons after school.
They also help keep you alive, so you can ride tomorrow.
Carl L. Jacobs
Aiea
Adding beach good for public
A beach for the public. Hooray!
Think of the many people over the many years who will swim and picnic without having to pay admission.
The Natatorium memorial arch moved next to the stone with the World War I veterans’ plaque would be a magnificent view without the crumbling Natatorium behind it.
Mandy Bowers
Manoa