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This March 1996 episode examined whether Hawaii's environmental regulations were appropriately protective or had become an unworkable burden. Lisa Munger, an environmental attorney who advises businesses on permit compliance, argued that regulations written in Washington for national application could not adequately account for local conditions and called for greater local discretion; she also expressed concern that highly technical rules placed smaller businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Paul Achitoff, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, took the opposing view, arguing that Hawaii's island environment — ecologically fragile, densely populated, and without an escape valve — required strong federal oversight precisely because local regulators were vulnerable to political pressure from developers and polluters. Cheryl Okuma-Sepe, director of wastewater for the City and County of Honolulu, offered a middle position: uniform national standards could be poorly suited to Hawaii's ocean-discharge environment, she said, citing expensive wastewater treatment requirements whose necessity she had successfully contested in federal court, but she did not oppose strong environmental goals. The standing question is whether an island state with unique ecological vulnerabilities should rely primarily on federal environmental standards or trust local authorities to set equivalent protections.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
