The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii's Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism, and the Desecration of the Earth

by Koohan Paik, Jerry Mander

THE SUPERFERRY CHRONICLES is the first book to describe an historically unique, spontaneous, leaderless uprising in the Hawaiian islands. In 2001, an entrepreneur got the idea to start a high-speed, interisland ferry to connect Honolulu with the neighbor islands. Within a couple of years, his idea was taken over by a corporate entity with vast military ties, and the Superferry became prototype for an important piece of America's sea-based military strategy for the 21st century.

As the story unfolds, we see this project riding on a wave of deception and corruption-from the governor's office, to the federal government, to the military, to the Hawaii Superferry corporation. The Superferry deal was never approved by the people of Hawai'i, and this lack of democratic process and its profound environmental impacts enraged many. On Kauai, citizens took to surfboards and effectively blocked the vessel from entering the harbor. Governor Lingle traveled there to admonish the people and let them know that if the boat is blocked again, stiff penalties would ensue. Instead, she found an auditorium overflowing with people whose moving, eloquent, spontaneous testimonies told her that the boat would not be permitted to return.

THE SUPERFERRY CHRONICLES is a story of personal and political empowerment- thousands of Hawaii's people from all parts of the community taking part in an unprecedented showdown against the latest expression of a centuries-old corporate-tourist-military intrusion into the Hawaiian way of life, landscape, and local sovereignty. This is a grim tale worthy of any colonized banana republic, with just as much double-dealing and intrigue. It is also a story of hope, and love for the land, the sea, and righteousness.

Koohan Paik is a media-literacy educator on Kauai, an activist, and an award-winning filmmaker. San Francisco-based Jerry Mander is founder of the International Forum on Globalization and author of the bestselling Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred.

328 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2008

About the author

Jerry Mander is director of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a San Francisco think tank focused since 1994 on exposing the negative impacts of economic globalization. Mander was trained as an economist in the 1950s (Columbia University), but his early career was as president of a major commercial ad agency, Freeman, Mander & Gossage, and then as founder of the countrys first nonprofit ad agency in 1971, Public Media Center, which ran advertising and publicity campaigns for Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and various indigenous and antiwar groups. These campaigns included the celebrated Sierra Club campaigns (with David Brower) that kept dams out of the Grand Canyon, established a Redwood National Park, and stopped production of the Supersonic Transport (SST). During the 1980s, Mander also assisted Native Hawaiian campaigns on behalf of the Pele Defense Fund (Big Island) and the Protect Kahoolawe Ohana. He is author or editor of several bestselling books, including Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, In the Absence of the Sacred, The Case Against the Global Economy (with Edward Goldsmith), Alternatives to Economic Globalization (with John Cavanagh), and Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples Resistance to Globalization (with Victoria Tauli- Corpuz). He has been called the patriarch of the antiglobalization movement (Andrew Revkin, environmental writer, New York Times, 2007). Click on the globe, below, to visit the website of Jerry Mander's newest book, THE SUPERFERRY CHRONICLES."