George Cooper’s passing in late November 2023 leaves Hawaii without one of its most prolific thinkers. In the months since his passing, I’ve reflected upon his legacy.

The foundations of my education as a graduate student with the University of Hawaii’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning grew from Cooper’s co-authored work “Land and Power: The Democratic Years.” The book, Cooper wrote in November 2022, was “based on what I researched, mainly from the public record, and what Gavan Daws shaped into a book.”

Cooper’s legacy, however, should not be tied only to “Land and Power.” As he suggested in 2022, the work arrived as the culmination of a journey that did not end with the book’s publication. Instead, “Land and Power
was only one chapter of a longer story.”

Corruption And 1970s Hawaii

As disclosed in a series of interview emails with Gary Kubota in 2017 and thereafter reinforced in his 2022 essay, Cooper’s views on Hawaii were informed by the eviction struggles of Kalama Valley.

The struggles he found in the Hawaii of 1970 “put me on a course in life that led to working in land struggles on Kauai and Oahu, to co-writing “Land and Power in Hawaii,” and to today working in land struggles in Cambodia.

A mechanism for comprehension emerged in February 1973, when Cooper took notice of a 13-part series on political corruption running in the pages of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Known as “High Price Politics,” the series was one of the most consequential investigations of political corruption in state history. While largely forgotten by contemporary audiences, Tom Coffman’s series arguably stimulated the State Legislature’s passage — and the ailing Gov. John Burns’ enactment — of a comprehensive Campaign Spending Act on May 24 that same year.

Corruption in the Hawaii of the ’70s thereafter evolved with the advent of the Kukui Plaza Scandal, a case that connected instances of blatant bribery to Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi’s political machine. The case’s enduring controversy is well-documented in retired Honolulu Advertiser reporter James Dooley’s “Sunny Skies, Shady Characters.”

By 1975, Cooper had joined one of the earliest classes of the newly established University of Hawaii School of Law. While he continued to follow disputes over development and the eviction of tenant farmers, as documented in disputes over the development of Nawiliwili on the island of Kauai in May 1977, Cooper built on Coffman’s work in two consequential steps a few years after the publication of the “High-Priced Politics” series.

In the August 1977 edition of Hawaii Architect, Cooper furnished legal analysis regarding the relationship between awarded contracts and political contributions for members of Honolulu’s architecture community, who certainly maintained a professional interest in the topic.

From late August to early September 1977, Cooper thereafter published a seminal eight-part series on the role of “Campaign Contributions as Bribes” in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The pertinence of Cooper’s attitude was reflected in the 1978 Constitutional Convention, where constitutional amendments resulted in attempts to strengthen the Campaign Spending Commission through an overhaul effectuated by Act 224 of 1979.

‘Land And Power’ Arrives

Cooper’s work did not conclude with the passage of the 1970s. In Hawaii, the societal impact of the relationship between “Land and Power” was evident in the opening months of the 1980s. In popular culture, Andy Bumatai’s “All in the Ohana” followed a presumably Native Hawaiian family whose house lot was located on leased lands slated for development. Among the skit’s (and Hawaii’s) many ironies, the father (and head of the patriarchal household) was a construction worker.

In this Hawaii, Cooper initiated a comprehensive investigation into the relationship between “land and power” in Hawaii that grew to a massive, unprecedented scope. His work stretched into many years of meticulous research, tens of thousands of documents, and hundreds of local profiles.

Where Cooper conducted the bulk of the investigative research, Daws refined the language — and Cooper’s dogged research — into a tangible, finished product. At the end of 1986, Dan Boylan observed that the authors had forced Hawaii to re-examine “a generation of Island political leaders who have, until now, been celebrated — by themselves, by journalists (this one included), and by historians.”

The publication of “Land and Power” culminated as a politically explosive reaction to the ’70s. The New York Times joked that the investigation of “Dry Data on Land and Power” had made for a surprise bestseller.

While the authors “did not label any transaction as a criminal act,” their documentation of “a pervasive way of conducting private and public affairs” invariably struck a nerve across Hawaii. In its tone of resignation, “Land and Power” was quiet but effective.

Hawaii, nevertheless, was not unique in terms of the documented political relationship between land and power. As Cooper later saw in Cambodia, land’s treatment as a commodity informed decision-making across the Asia-Pacific region. However, the pace of the phenomena — and the phenomena’s ties to Hawaii’s formation as a state of the American union — was undeniably unique.

After ‘Land And Power’

Following the publication of “Land and Power,” Cooper’s attention turned more directly towards the influence of water on land use decisions. The enactment of the State Water Code through Act 45 of 1987 required a Review Commission to perform “a comprehensive review of the state water code and the development of recommendations for its improvement.”

Cooper’s understanding of water policy, however, had already existed for over a decade. One piece of evidence lies in the late University of Hawaii School of Law Professor Jon Van Dyke’s papers, which contain a July 1978 draft of one of George Cooper’s briefs on the water case of Robinson V. Ariyoshi.
Cooper’s research as a law student, furthermore, was used by Carol Wilcox in her historical review of the relationship between sugar plantations, ditches, and water management in the Hawaiian Islands.

For the Water Code’s Review Commission, Cooper’s work, specifically on appurtenant rights and Native Hawaiian water rights, was evident in his role as a consultant to the Commission on Water Resource Management’s Appurtenant Rights Advisory Committee.

Following its first meeting on Nov. 13, 1992, the work of the Review Commission on the State Water Code was submitted as a final report of the Review Commission to the Hawaii State Legislature on Dec. 28, 1994.

Water, land, and housing were all connected as matters of planning in Hawaii. By the time Cooper sat for an interview for the 1997 work “An Autobiography of Protest in Hawaii,” he described himself as an attorney whose lines of specialization included “land and housing issues on behalf of low- to moderate-income people.”

Cooper’s Continuing Legacy

After he moved to Cambodia, Cooper’s work on land-use rights influenced scholars and practitioners concerned with the country’s “land reform” efforts against a backdrop of massive economic development, urban development pressures, and the displacement of tenant farmers.

From where I sat in Hawaii and he in Cambodia, I was fortunate to speak with Cooper in the last year of his life on the topics of agricultural lands, water rights, and the role of constitutions as planning documents for those societies built on the rule of law. It is a gift I’ll always cherish.

It was from these conversations that I sought to make some sense of Hawaii’s political evolution since 1970 — and how Cooper perceived the future of the research he left behind as he traveled to Cambodia. In the Cambodia of 2023, George Cooper still sought to rectify the injustices of the Kalama Valley he found in 1970.

The truth’s pursuit is a critical component of democracy where it invites uncomfortable questions. It invites progress where reckonings with inconvenient realities are prologue to reform. Today, development processes are more transparent by several magnitudes than they were a half-century ago.

While we no longer live in the Hawaii of 1970, modern Hawaii is still the product of the Hawaii George Cooper found in 1970. Nearly three decades after Cooper’s work on the Water Code’s Review Commission, the relationship between resource control and power in Hawaii remains a ready rhetorical device when offering critiques of power, ‘āina, and any vein of development — justified or not.

Most recently, Jonathan Likeke Schuer and Bianca Isaki invoked this approach to frame the relationship between water and power in West Maui.

The processes arguably fashioned in response to the Hawaii of 1970 struggle amidst walls of planning and bureaucracy to rectify the mortal, imperfect situations of contemporary Hawaii. Such reform, even when wrapped in bold, deliberate action, is never perfect. Institutions like the Commission on Water Resources Management, as demonstrated by the commission’s painful development over several decades, are imperfect drafts. While constitutionally sacrosanct, their process is never logistically final.

We no longer inhabit the Hawaii of 1970. The housing crisis that took shape in 1970, resulting in the passage of housing laws like Act 105, has exacerbated to a point where Hawaii’s housing crisis is a chronic condition with severe, debilitating impacts on Hawaii’s social, cultural, political, and economic health.

Furthermore, the expanding layers of bureaucratic regulation intended to check corruption have arguably become new sources of corruption. In effect, the very nature of corruption in Hawaii has radically shifted in the last 50 years.

The simplification of process to where it is literate and digestible — and not deliberately or unintentionally confusing and inaccessible to the average resident of Hawaii — is a central source of contemporary struggle. It is simultaneously dangerous where the truth is plural and open to abuse for political gain. In the perpetual battle for political literacy and transparency, George Cooper was an agent for democracy in modern Hawaii.

In Cooper’s eyes, there was a universal nature to the necessity of justice and fairness. Cooper, Coffman wrote to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Dec. 6, 2023, followed his passions and lived his dreams. He pursued the truth, however dark, dangerous, and inconvenient the process.

More than ever, the world needs more Coopers. In his dogged commitment to find the truth, George Cooper wanted to make democracy work for the most disadvantaged of Hawaii’s people. In his legacies, there endures this honorable nature.