COMMUNITY /
ISLAND EARTH A CYRUS SUTTON DOCUMENTARY Words By Shawn Pila Photos By Cyrus Sutton
Sunshine and soothing trade winds combine for year-round comfy weather conditions in Hawai’i; mild temperatures, openhearted rainfall, welcoming sea breezes and colorful rainbows. Weather-wise, Hawai’i surely rates a 10. But with perfect year-round weather for tourists, surfers and sun lovers come pests and uncontrollable weeds, which poses a major problem for farmers and agriculturalists. It’s problems like these that have scientists and chemical companies on the leading edge of experimentation with food biotechnology techniques, used to improve food production. There are many different biotechnical processes aimed at improving new food and beverage products, including industrial fermentation, plant cultures and genetic engineering (GE). Professional longboarder and Southern California filmmaker, Cyrus Sutton, addresses these subjects in his latest documentary, Island Earth. Cyrus has been using his film and photography skills for more than a decade to document his travels and surf lifestyle, and create health and educational resources that help spread awareness. After visiting the Hawaiian Islands and experiencing firsthand the struggles families have gone through who live in the direct wind pathway of chemical companies and GMO crops, Cyrus decided to bring forth the problem with industrial agriculture and Hawai’i’s resurgence toward sustainable food practices. “This one issue on these tiny islands affects the way food is grown and consumed all over the world,” explains Sutton. “There’s no other issue in the world that has citizens, farmers, scientists, economists, and policy makers all discussing where our food comes from like GMO’s in Hawai’i. By sharing Hawai’i’s struggle, we aim to create a film which can be used to inform and inspire people to go beyond the issues and the activism and actually participate in taking back our food supply.” 72
Per acre, the Hawaiian Islands have more kinds of genetically modified crop experimentation than anywhere else in the world, and 90 percent of the seeds that are used in the world today are owned by six chemical companies. Most of the companies manufacturing these seeds also produce the pesticides and other chemicals that are used in the growing process. While some say that the dangers of genetic modification are insignificant, many of the pesticides have long been proven to be harmful to public health and the environment. According to Sutton’s film, many local farmers feel that GMO’s are a potentially valuable tool for combating year-round insects and plant diseases without pesticides and think that to judge the technology with chemical farming is unfair. Other farmers want to ban the practice altogether, in fear of uncontrolled cross-contamination of their organic crops through pollen drift. People on both sides of the debate agree that the pesticides, long used in industrial agriculture, have been toxic to public and environmental health, and our culture’s reliance on fossil fuels to grow our food is unsustainable in a peak oil economy. “I’m not taking sides about GMOs in this film because I am not a scientist,” says Sutton. “What I am taking a stand for is the untapped potential of local and diversified agriculture. 100 years ago, one in three people were farmers; today it is less than one in sixty. Whenever you outsource any part of an industry to large corporate interests, you are going to sacrifice quality for efficiency and convenience. We have a large problem with unemployment in my generation and more and more of us are seeing the connection between our health and the quality of the food we eat. Because of this, we are seeking to take back our power by