Riding Gonzo With Dustin Barca: The Hawaiian Pro-Surfing, Cage-Fighting, Anti-GMO Activist

Dustin Barca has lived a life of conflict. He's been in one fight or another for as long as he can remember; fights over waves in the heavily localised and often violent arenas of Kauai and Pipeline; fights for respect from his brutal polynesian mentors; and fights for survival in the Mixed Martial Arts arena. And while he's as good at conflict as anyone you'll find, with age and a young family behind him, he's better at picking his fights that he used to be. And he's picked a real humdinger of late.

"It's the modern day overthrow," he tells me of the Genetically Modified Organism corporations that have taken root in the islands. "They're poisoning my island, my kids' island."

Barca recently launched a crusade against the Hawaiian government and the GMO manufacturers he believes have corrupted it, culminating in a bid for the seat of Mayor on his home island of Kauai.

Dustin Barca does not have the face of a politician. If he showed up to kiss your baby you'd definitely freak out. He is missing one of his front teeth—lost after the fin of his surfboard hit him in the mouth—sports heavily tattooed legs and has the rangey, rippled build of a deadly fighter, which he is. Most haoles (mainlanders) on the North Shore come surf season will confess they're terrified of him and watching him interact you get the sense he is aware of it. But he doesn't toy with it. Sitting opposite me in a pair of military-khaki pants with no shirt on, he has a presence alright. Calm bordering on deadened, persuasive yet without even having to say a word, it is the presence of a warrior. And if this is how he looks when he's calm, I'd hate to see him mad.

Raised on the breadline by a single mother who worked three jobs to put a roof over his and his brother's head, Barca's early life was one of hardship. There wasn't always enough money for food. Instead they'd dumpster dive; collect discarded food from their friends who worked at the shopping centre; and grow their own organic crops in the backyard. On the days he ditched school to surf—which were many—Barca would hang out by the mall and eat food from plates the paying customers had left behind. "Andy (Irons) use to always tell me I had the biggest chip on my shoulder," he recalls of the words his childhood friend, the late three time world champion, Andy Irons. "And I did. Not having much growing up and wanting it all - I think (the chip) was my way of motivating myself to get it," he says.

With his stomach filled he'd head to Hanalei Bay, one of the most violent and localised waves in the world. It was also where a surfing movement was underway that would become one of the best in surfing history, featuring Andy Irons, Bruce Irons, Jesse Merle Jones, Reef McIntosh, Kala Alexander, Kamalei Alexander, Kai Garcia, Braden Dias, Jesse Merle Jones, Keala Keneally, Danny Fuller, Aamion Goodwin, Sebastian Zietz, just to name a few. All from one unexceptional little beach.

"Everyone who made it out of Kauai came from there. We had the most competitive people in the world in one place. Fifteen kids that were just trying to better each other, just on a mission to make it," he says.

Barca remembers fights almost every day. Not between them but with rather between outsiders and the local Polynesians trying to keep the place secret.
"They'd always tell us, 'It's for you guys, to keep it sacred for the next generation.' And I took it to heart 150%," says Barca. Though he admits he also overdid it. His teenage years became little more than surfing and fighting at times. He also had a mouth on him, and that was something his elders wouldn't tolerate. "I was a cocky kid so I caught my fair share of lickings I was the whipping boy of the (polynesian surf gang) Wolfpak," he says.

The Wolfpak is a story in itself. In the competitive world of surfing, where the best waves are a commodity, the Wolfpak hold down Hawaiian spots for Hawaiians. Born on Kauai, they arrived on the North Shore of Oahu in the late nineties and continue to hold the keys to the most prized real estate in surfing—Pipeline. Hated, feared or adored depending on which side of the fence you're on, it doesn't really matter. It's their way or the Kam Highway at Pipe, with many believing they are a necessary evil in what is unquestionably the most treacherous and crowded wave in the world. Interestingly, the Wolfpak might never have become what it was if it wasn't for a fight Barca himself had as a wiry 17 year old.

The North Shore had been simmering for a while. The presence of Da Hui—a forerunner to the Wolfpak—had begun to melt away under a glut of travelling surfers, police, and complicated dealings with the surf industry. Pipe was becoming a circus. People were dropping in, lives were being put at risk, the local law was not being followed.

Barca arrived on the North Shore after being kicked out of the NSSA American Nationals surfing team for cheating on his exams. The kids he'd been staying with ratted him out. He was gutted. It was meant to be his ticket to the big leagues but instead ended with him losing the support of his main financial sponsor, Rip Curl. Heartbroken and angry, the young Barca flew straight back to Kauai and took up a series of low paid manual jobs—landscaping, construction, painting—and seethed. "All the time I'm just thinking, 'fuck the industry, fuck everybody. I'm just gonna go to the North Shore and surf,'" he recalls.

The winter rolled around and he shacked up at the home of notorious Hawaiian enforcer Braden Dias, an early Wolfpak heavyweight, also "The Guy" at Pipeline back then, says Barca. Half a dozen of Kauai's best surfers and hardmen were in the same house; Kala Alexander, Chava Greenlee, (world juijitsu champion) Kai Garcia, Andy and Bruce Irons. All from Kauai, all in the one house, all trying to get the wave of the winter at Pipe. Dias was on good money from Hurley and supporting them all; providing three meals a day plus beers. Barca, aged 17, arrived in a rage. "I was at a point in my life where I was trying to prove myself, I was a young punk and I wanted to be the man," he says.

One night Barca runs into his former Rip Curl boss at a Triple Crown surfing contest party at Haleiwa Joe's, the local nightspot. They almost brawl. Current World Surf League commentator, Strider Wasilewski pulls them apart. He talks some sense into Barca who then goes home. But there's no one to stop him in the morning.

"The next morning I see him in the yard next to Sunny's (Garcia) place and we ended up squaring off and scrapping…I ended up beating him up and then afterwards we have the who's who from his company on the porch, all the bosses, everything. I told them all, 'All you rich fucken pricks, fuck you. While you're driving your Range Rovers I'm eating Noodle soup. Fuck you.' And I walked out and that was the beginning of the Wolfpak overthrow. The company reps started coming in the house and saying you can't do that and Chava was like, 'Brah, fuck you. Don't tell my boys what do!' Right there a lot of people, anyone who dropped in, it got super heavy from that point on. That's how the regulating started. It was always going on somewhat but that kicked it to the next level. A lot of people who dropped in got slapped."

As Barca's explains how it went down he demonstrates a quick flurry of jabs for me. "Pop-pop-pop, I tune him up good," he laughs.

Fighting and surfing have a strangely intertwined history, especially in Hawaii, where local Polynesians have long fought to preserve the sanctity of the ancient and culturally significant art of surfing.

The Busting Down the Door saga, in the winter of 1975, is the most infamous chapter of Hawaiian surf-violence. It saw Australian surfers, Rabbit Bartholomew, Peter Townend and Ian Cairns harassed, beaten and threatened with death over a series of statements made in the surf media, which expressed their desire to takeover Hawaii's waves and demonstrate their supremacy over local surfers. To native Hawaiians it sounded like another attempt by foreigners to take dominate their culture. Since the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani by American revolutionaries in 1893, native Hawaiians have long fought a losing battle for autonomy. Surfing, a sport which was first performed by ancient Hawaiian royalty and later exported around the world by Duke Kahanamoku, is seen as one of the strongest preserves of traditional Hawaiian culture. Any slight against it is taken seriously.

"Our queen was overthrown, hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians died when the white man came here from all the diseases they brought, and people come here and wonder why Hawaiians are so hard to understand or this or that?" begins senior Wolfpak figure, and Kauai pro surfer, Kala 'the Captain' Alexander.

"It's because we've been fucken exploited for years and one of the few things we have left have are our waves. And you're not gonna come and take our fucken waves, too. You took our land, you took our fucking monarchy," he says.

As the years passed more and more foreign surfers made their home in Hawaii, including Brazilians, some of whom were masters of the traditional Brazilian fighting of jiu jitsu. One such master made his home on Kauai, opening a gym and teaching a number of local surfers the fighting style. Among them was North Shore enforcer and former Kauaiian pro surfer, Kai Garcia, who would go on to win the World Championship of Jiu Jitsu in Brazil. Another jiu jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts expert from Hawaii is BJ Penn, regarded as pound for pound one of the greatest MMA fighters in the history of the sport. Garcia and Penn turned MMA into something of a national past time in Hawaii, particularly within the alpha-male dominated surfing community where it became the weapon of choice for settling disputes on the beach at Pipeline. Barca was a keen enthusiast, merging his proficient kickboxing and street fighting skills with Brazilian jiu jitsu to become a world class talent. He hoped to one day emulate his fighting heroes, Garcia and Penn, and make it all the way to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but surfing came first and his Kauai boys, Andy and Bruce Irons, were dominating the World Tour. Barca wanted in.

"They were like my big bros. I just wanted to be like them, be as good as them," he says.

Qualifying for the surfing's World Tour is an achievement in itself. In order to get there a surfer must travel the world, competing in poor conditions, in excruciatingly tense four man heats. Once you've qualified you're rewarded with the best waves of your life on what is known as the Dream Tour, with events in Fiji, Tahiti, Australia, Hawaii, South Africa and Europe.

By the time Barca had qualified, however, Andy and Bruce had already quit. Bruce was never really wired that way while there was little left for Andy to prove—he'd beaten the greatest of all-time, Kelly Slater, again and again on his way to three world titles and a place among the sport's all time greats. Alone, homesick and struggling for motivation, Barca's debut year tour was a disaster. A string of poor results were capped by a sensational boil over with then-Brazilian world number five (and now world champion) Adriano De Souza, resulting in a physical altercation in Tahiti.

"I got so burned out that year. I didn't feel like anyone was my friend. I was an alien on that tour," he says.

While travelling through the European leg Barca was given some literature pertaining to the activities of GMO corporations in Hawaii. "I just started diving into it, looking at the science from both sides and finding common sense in the middle and just being like, wow, this is fucked up," he recalls.

Barca was relegated from the World Tour after his debut year but he wasn't bothered that much. He was jack of competing, the waves were better at home, and now he had an excuse to focus on his other passions: surfing Pipe, cracking heads in the MMA ring and taking on the world's biggest food corporations. First the fighting career.

There was no doubting Barca's aptitude for brawling. His early years at Hanalei Bay ensured that. A lifetime spent surfing the heaviest waves on the planet, meanwhile, had honed his reflexes to a superhuman level. The lip at Pipeline moves much quicker, and with more force, than any human fist or leg. His rise through the Hawaiian fight ranks was meteoric. His first major outing came in the all-belts, all-weights Absolute Division of the Kauaiian jiujitsu league. He beat five men in an hour to win the event outright. He was still celebrating a few days later when he turned out at a friend's wedding and ran into Andy Irons, his childhood friend, with whom he'd fallen out recently and not spoken to in six months. When Andy saw Barca, beaming with pride in his fighting belt, the tension melted away instantly. "He was like, fuck brah, you gotta fight (professionally). It'll be nuts," he recalls.

A few days later Andy was found dead in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, killed by a heart attack and a cocktail of prescription drugs and illicit substances. This was a different kind of madness to any Barca had felt before. Guilt consumed him. Then Andy appeared to him in a dream.

"He told me basically, 'Brah, get over it, there's nothing you can do about what happened.' After that I was kinda just, 'I'm gonna fucken fight, I'm gonna fucken do it, I'm gonna live my dreams, I'm gonna do everything I wanted to do,'" he says.

But the heartache wasn't over. While preparing for his first professional fight another of Barca's close friends, Kauaiian big wave surfer, Sion Milosky passed away. This time in a big wave accident at the Californian big wave spot, Mavericks.

"I was just like, hooo…" says Barca. "It fuelled my fire to fight. Now I was representing my island, my friends and family and my friends who weren't with us anymore," he says.

His first opponent already had nine fights—a terrible mismatch on paper for a vastly less experienced Barca. In the ring his opponent didn't stand a chance. "I choked him in under a minute," he says.

A pro surfer from a tropical paradise with Barca's backstory was a tantalising prospect for promoters. His second fight was scheduled on one of the biggest undercards in Hawaiian MMA history—the Arlovski vs Lopez card at the Blaisdell arena, also featuring BJ Penn's brother, Reagan. His opponent owned every amateur MMA and kickboxing belt in Hawaii. It went longer than a minute but it was the same result."I beat the shit out of the guy," says Barca. His patented flying knee and jab-fake-elbow did the damage earning him a TKO in the third. It ranked among the biggest upsets in Hawaiian MMA history. "My name just went pewwww!" he says, waving his finger through the air like a rocket.

His third fight against a young kid from Oahu's west side was a demolition. Barca slammed him 15 times before knocking him out on his feet. The kid was tough. That's how they breed 'em over there. He went the distance but he was sore by the end of it. By his fourth fight, Barca was already calling the shots. He scheduled his dream fight: a bout on the North Shore in the middle of the season ending Hawaiian Triple Crown surf contest series which attracts the world's best to the island. He arrived on Oahu that winter beaming. "I was too happy," he says now. On his first day of preparation he opened with a surf, followed by a striking session before rounding out the day out with some jiujitsu. It was too much. A fatigued Barca blew out his knee in the wrestling session, tearing his MCL and icing any chance of the fight. Injuries are part of the MMA game. Barca knew that. But not being able to surf for an entire winter, that was a cruel kind of torture. He needed something to take his mind off it. He began immersing himself in a new fight: the fight to rid the islands of GMOs.

The island of Kauai evokes a prehistoric kind of beauty. Its craggy cliffs, luscious greenery and abundant natural resources drew Steven Spielberg here to film the big budget classic, Jurassic Park. Barca grew up in Kilauea, the island's organic farming capital, where he was surrounded by fresh produce and farmers who swore by it. Today, the island is famous for its grass fed cows and organic foods, only most of it is exported for big profit to the mainland leaving the island to import 90% of its food. More concerning for Barca, however, is the presence of GMOs in Hawaii and the large scale spraying of pesticides throughout his island and the rest of Hawaii. Some of the pesticides, like Aquazine, have been banned by large sections of the international community, including the European Union, forcing the chemical giants to double-down on their testing in Kauai. Barca claims school children near one of the testing fields have been poisoned, large scale die-offs of sea urchins have been recorded while hunters have told him of finding pigs with giant tumours. Barca wants to rid the islands altogether of GMO testing—a practice he believes is not only putting the future of farming on his island at risk but the human race in general.

"They're splicing the genes with the chemicals they make, into the genes of the plants. Bugs will eat it and they will die instantly and they will be weed resistant, but after two years what they don't tell people is that it creates super weeds. So now they have to make even heavier chemical resistant crops," he says. Not to mention the potential consequences of consuming food that's been genetically engineered to kill organic creatures. "What a biotoxin does is it kills a bug. When a bug eats a plant and the biotoxic gene, they pretty much implode and poop their whole stomach out and die right there. Basically, we're giant bugs!" he says.

The science is still inconclusive. Three of four Hawaiian counties have attempted to pass laws regulating pesticides, GMOs, or both. Despite an attempted veto by Mayor Carvalho Jr, in 2013 Kauai still managed to pass a law requiring large farms to establish a 500 foot buffer around their operations and disclose the pesticides they were using; a move brought on in no small part by Barca's grass roots activism campaign, which brought together a who's who of the international surfing community, including Kelly Slater, alongside local residents and farmers.

A year later, however, it was overturned by the State in one of several important agriculture and food bills shot down by local, state and federal governments in the last few years. When Barca chanced upon a rally for the Mayoral incumbent Bernardo Carvalho Jr and found a number of GMO industry figures in the crowd, he cracked.

"All you corrupt fuckers! This shit's over! I'm running for mayor already!" he yelled from the back of the crowd before storming out. The fight was on.

With no financial backing, no campaign experience and no real idea of what being a politician entails, Barca was facing an uphill battle.
But as he puts it, "I'm scared for my kids future and when I get scared, I don't run away, brah. I face my fears."

He did run though, and paddle, and swim, all the way around the island of Kauai. In scenes reminiscent of Forrest Gump, Barca's main campaign weapon was simply to pound the pavement, drumming up local support as he ran a loop of the island. After paddling off the coast of a Kauai in a traditional three man canoe, he swam to shore and began his remarkable journey—running 16 miles the first day, 28 the next, 26 the day after and 17 to round it out. He would conduct "listen-ins" with community leaders as he went explaining to them the threat posed by the GMOs. By the end of it he claims he"shaka'd every car on the island" and calls the experience the "most enlightening of his life."

"It was just conversations with god for four days straight … It brought me closer to the people, brought me closer to myself, brought me closer to god, and it brought me closer to the island," he says.

It also brought him close to a remarkable upset. By the end of his campaign he was polling at 31 percent of the vote, earning him second place in the primaries and a shot at his nemesis, the GMO-backed Bernard Carvalho Jr for the seat of mayor. It was more than most could have hoped for.

By the time I meet Barca another day is setting on Pipeline and the race for Mayor has long been lost. His grass roots campaign was no match or the millions of dollars in political donations his opponent had to draw on. In the end he fell 27% short of the vote required, totalling 8,195 to Carvalho's 14,688. Still an incredible result for a completely self-made politician from a street-fighting pro-surfing background, but Barca isn't used to losing. "I'm always disappointed. I always like to strive for perfection. I'm in no celebration whatsoever. I'm just learning from our mistakes," he said.

As the sun sinks below the horizon Barca emerges down the concrete steps of the Oakley House onto the sand he first set foot on as a 12 year old when he was sleeping rough and eating out of bins with with fellow Kauaiian pro surfer, Danny Fuller. Today Barca can wave to Fuller from the balcony of his top floor penthouse overlooking Pipeline. Fuller lives in the corresponding room next door while Kauaiian pro surfer, Reef Mcintosh occupies the same room in the Quiksilver House after that (and surfing and jiujitsu legend Kai Garcia in the same room in the Volcom House beyond that). Barca's wetsuit is scribbled with dirty hand-drawn graffiti with the name of his sponsor RVCA. As he makes his way to the water, wolf whistles and howls ring out across the sand. The Wolfpak boys still own the North Shore and he lifts one arm in acknowledgment, letting his hand sag in a gesture reminiscent of their totem animal. Barca's not proud of his past, but he's not ashamed of it either. It just is, and now he's moved on to a new fight, a righteous fight in his eyes. He might be a little rough but when there's this much on the line, who else would you want in your corner. "With the political thing, I'm always gonna be here," he tells me. "I'm gonna be a thorn in these guys' asshole till the day they fucken start doing some shit for this island … I'm ready to die for the future of my island."

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