03/07/2022
Invitation to Dialogue on Red Hill by the UHM Graduate Student Sociological Association
Co-authored by Jason Mark Alexander, Alena Shalaby, Clarice Handoko, Jake Atienza, Rachel Engel, Omar Bird, & Morsaline Mojid
In November 2021, Oʻahu communities were viscerally confronted with an increasingly critical threat to the island’s main source of freshwater. The U.S. Navy Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, located at Kapūkaki ridge directly above the Moanalua-Waimalu aquifer, leaked many thousands of gallons of fuel, directly poisoning families and the ecosystem in the Pearl City area. As concluded on 27 December 2021 by the Sierra Club, Honolulu Board of Water Supply, and Hawaiʻi Department of Health, the Red Hill facility is an imminent peril to life on Oʻahu.
The Navy has often neglected or avoided responsibility for fuel leaks from Red Hill over the past seventy years. The Red Hill crisis has exposed the false claims at the heart of the Navy's national security rhetoric. Certainly, fuel does not keep Hawaiʻi safer than fresh water. Rather, by opposing the State of Hawaiʻi's emergency order to defuel the tanks, the Navy demonstrates its willingness to sacrifice the people and environment of Oʻahu for its illusory pursuit of military supremacy. Complete contamination of the Moanalua-Waimalu aquifer would seriously upend living conditions in Oʻahu, resonating with ongoing gentrification, exclusive land leases, and rising sea levels that make it increasingly difficult to afford to live on the island.
In response, the Graduate Student Sociological Association (GSSA) urges everyone from all spheres of society to learn about and have conversations about the conflict over protecting Hawaiʻi’s local water sources from military-industrial polluters. We echo the collective demand of local and transnational organizations for the Department of Defense to permanently drain and shut down the polluting fuel tanks at Red Hill. We believe the Red Hill water crisis is not only an environmental issue that only environmental scientists can address. Rather, we as students of sociology want to highlight how this decades-long issue reiterates the discourses of military and state politics in perpetuating hegemonic power, affecting intersections of social inequalities in Hawaiʻi and beyond.
To find out more about ways you can engage with the Red Hill issue, you can visit https://www.redhillpledge.com/, which includes links and lists of the people and organizations involved in the developing social movement coalitions.
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To learn more about five parts of our sociological stance, please see the attached images for the full statement.
