Rural, not Suburban, Kauai

SUBHEAD: It's time to get off the Grid, out the Matrix and live on Kauai.  

By Juan Wilson on 2 April 2009 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/04/rural-not-suburban-kauai.html)


Image above: Unidentified home off the grid on Kauai agland. A charming cottage or illegal domicile? Photo by Juan Wilson.

This week the County of Kauai is engaged in determining what exactly is happening on the farms in Moloaa. The suspicion is that many government regulations are being ignored and somebody needs to put a stop to that.

Last week the Planning Commission was considering a change in regulations that would allow farmers to provide housing for their workers and not permit residential suburban sprawl on agricultural acreage. It seems that there is a fear amongst some that a new arrangement of living on Kauai is coming about and somehow the county government won't be in control or have power over it.

There are ways to accomplish providing adequate housing for farm workers and ensuring that rich home-speculators don't become farmers in name only. Here are a few techniques I think might work here on Kauai: 1) Do not provide the standard suite of suburban auto infrastructure. That would include public two-way hard-surfaced roads designed for automobiles. This would reduce or modify county services delivered now by bloated police cruisers, firetrucks, and ambulances to everybody's front door.

This is crucial, in that today's suburban sprawl is totally dependent full access to all places by automobile. This means that limited access to inland farm areas would be allowed on driveway size "roads" by small service vehicles. You walk a distance to your front door. You don't enter your home from the garage. 2) Don't bring in the Matrix of services that will fail and have made the American Dream a nightmare.

That means no KIUC power grid, cable TV and phone lines threading through our landscapes. It also means no water department hookups or trash pickups. Each farm will catch and store water. It will use off-grid, alternative energy (wind and solar generated with maybe some cases of micro-hydro). 3) Provide "collective" housing in some form or another. Ranchers for years did such a thing with bunkhouses.

Inversely, provide private sleeping cottages and collective eating and living areas, like at summer camps. This should scare off the AIG bonus babies seeking asylum in paradise. Surely, the county is supported by property taxes and the whole apparatus of planning and building and tax assessment is geared to keeping the coffers in Lihue filled.

That means if you want to keep feeding the county coffers, you cannot let the people just live anyway they please on thousands of acres of "wasted" land. Just to see what it would look like, I have been working on a layout plan to divide unfarmed cane-land into half acre permaculture sites that are off-the-matrix. More on that in another article.

 .

1 comment :

Faith Harding said...

LMAO, I love the "AIG bonus babies seeking asylum in paradise" that's hilarious, but true!

Post a Comment