For a Modern Day Ahupuaʻa
I ka wa ma mua, i ka wa ma hope
WE LOOK TO THE PAST AS A GUIDE TO THE FUTURE
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times
“Ancient” connotes history; something left far behind us as we follow a theoretically linear progression on our journey toward the modern; something we can study as a precursor to today; something to depart from. After all, Santayana warned us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned, he said, to repeat it – as if to say that it should be a point of departure. In some important ways, that is quite valid.
But to erase the past, or examine it only under a laboratory kind of lens, is to ignore what lives on in our DNA. We marvel at the bird, delight in the flower, relax into the smell of cooking. We still find meaning in simply sitting by a fire, in the glory of song, or dance. In eating a ripe fruit, just plucked from its tree.
We are everything, and everyone, and every time, that came before us. There have been lessons learned along the way: we have learned to develop democracy from monarchies, to create systems of rights and justice, to harness the power of the sun. And we are learning to remember what we seemed to have forgotten or conveniently overlooked in the recent century of exponential industrial growth: that the earth is a partner, and should be treated with the utmost gratitude and respect.
Ahupuaʻa Approach
I don’t need to list the reasons why we need to restore this respectful mindset, as the problems from the decades of dissociation are now too painfully self-evident. But I will call forth here, a traditional wisdom that harkens resurrection: the Hawaiian moku/ahupua’a approach to managing a healthy ecosystem from mountain to deep ocean, encompassing sustainable food production, economic vitality, and community well being.
This is not utopia. This is past as prologue. We don’t all need to learn how to farm, but we do all need to remember where our food and water come from, and exactly how.
The “biocultural resource management” (BRM) approaches developed and employed by Hawaiians to manage an archipelago-scale social-ecological system—in the pre-contact era—sustained an abundance of resources for more than a millennium [6]. This state of biocultural resource abundance is known in the Hawaiian language as, “ʻāina momona”, and is a term that was particularly attributed to lands that employed aquaculture technologies to increase fish biomass [7]. The word, “ʻāina”, is a derivation from the word, “ʻai”,which means, “food, or to eat”, with the nominalizer “na” added to literally mean, “that which feeds” [8], but is generally used as a noun meaning, “Land, earth” [9]. The word, “momona”, is an adjective meaning, “Fat; fertile, rich, as soil; fruitful...”, [9]. Thus, the term ʻāina momona is commonly translated in the contemporary period as, “fat land”, or, “abundant land”, in the context of food production. ʻĀina momona was achieved and maintained through careful management on a landscape scale, which extended from the mountains to the sea [6,10].
Why is it important?
Why is it important? The world is currently engaged in a multinational, global effort to transform our food system away from its mid-20th Century, post war, cold war, rapidly industrialized design.The negative impacts have been well documented. The way forward has also been documented. From the United Nations to urban centers, from Boston to Brazil - policy goals have been established to achieve a greater degree of regionalization of the food system. Many such places have metric based targets for local food, similar to metric based targets for renewable energy.
Why the concerted effort in this direction?
We have learned from the hurricanes, the fires, the recessions, the pandemics, that our globalized supply chains are as impressive and yet as fragile as a spider’s web. We have learned that we need to build, as a substantial subset of the whole, shorter and more localized supply chains, that operate as a robust system of relationships and practices that derive from and benefit our local communities, while focused on serving in regenerative partnership with the earth.
In this, Hawaiʻi has the most recent history in the world, of unparalleled success to learn from.
Once, and not too long ago in terms of human existence, Hawaiʻi had the ability to sustainably feed a population of about one million (similar in density to its contemporary size), within the socio-ecological context of its remote island archipelago. And it did so, for millennia, until the 19th Century. Hawaiʻi’s moku/ahupuaʻa based system is a model for our modern times. We can draw on this wisdom as a fundament, into which we incorporate modern tools and science.
This is a form of wayfaring. The first Hawaiians once navigated the ocean with fluency in the language of wind, stars, and waves; modern Hawaiians have relearned those traditional ways, and are incorporating modern materials into traditional designs. We can create modern systems of wellbeing for people and planet, that navigate by the guideposts of the best of traditional wisdom. In the modern western vernacular, this concept is called agroecology, and is recognized by the United Nations:
“Agroecology is a holistic and integrated approach that simultaneously applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agriculture and food systems. It seeks to optimize the interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment while also addressing the need for socially equitable food systems within which people can exercise choice over what they eat and how and where it is produced.”
Food as a public good
It is also a recognition of food as a public good, embedded in the Right to Food (“The right to food is not about charity, but about ensuring that all people have the capacity to feed themselves in dignity.” - Jean Ziegler, inaugural UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, 2000); and in the more recently articulated conceptual frame of Food as Commons. I think of it as The Hawaiian Way.
This framework envisions a better design for a healthier-for-all food system – from soil and sea, to our souls - that we can, and must, achieve.
Let’s work together on the ways to get there.
NO TASK IS TOO BIG WHEN DONE TOGETHER BY ALL