It's all about the land
Aloha travel edition
Yesterday our group met at the 1st Presbyterian Church of Honolulu, which is no longer in Honolulu. About 15 years ago they were growing out of the property in the city and were able to sell it for a handsome price. That let them buy a golf course up on the northeast side of Oahu, that came with a nice building with a big ballroom that became their church.
The golf course been designed to be the hardest course in the United States, and it rains a lot on this side of the island, and there is no hotel associated with it. These factors led to the golf course not thriving as an independent business. Like everything else on this island, the circumstances under which the land was claimed for a golf course were sketchy at best, and probably more outrightly unjust for the native Hawaiians. Because of these things, the church decided to partner with some native Hawaiians to restore the land.
So now there is a separate legal entity doing the long-term work, and they have partnered with A Rocha to do this, and we’ve partnered with A Rocha to tell a story about it. We spent about 3 hours there on site yesterday hearing about the project and its history, and then walking out around the grounds. The goal is to make the land usable for the community again (none of whom care much about golf). There will be some agriculture, some fish ponds, and some educational lands set aside according to the best way to use the land.
One of the big ecological problems are the invasive trees, “albizia”. They were brought here a hundred years ago (not by native Hawaiians, of course) because they grow quickly and produce timber for building things. They proliferated widely, and it turns out that they don’t stand up so well to tropical storms. They are brittle and snap easily. So one of the projects is to girdle these trees, so they will die, deteriorate, and not produce new seedlings (which would happen if you just cut them down). We traipsed out through the forest to see them.
They also have collected more than 20,000 lost golf balls from doing this. I saw about 50 more while walking through the dense brush.
Our next stop in the afternoon was a taro farm. Taro is a root vegetable that is dense with good carbohydrates and has been the staple crop for Hawaiians for centuries. But now with the influx of outsiders and the land grab, there has not been enough land left to grow it in sufficient quantities. Hawaii has pretty extreme food insecurity because 80-90% of the food consumed on the islands is imported from elsewhere. So Dean and Melissa sold their suburban house 10 years ago and bought 8 acres of unimproved swampland, where they started clearing the brush and planting taro. Dean says, “I’m not a farmer. I’m in the people business.” He employs primarily young Hawaiian men who don’t have much purpose in their lives and teaches them the traditional ways of planting, harvesting, and pounding taro. All this is done by hand, wading out through the mud.
Dean talked to us for about an hour, telling us stories of his life and the farm. He was a master storyteller. Then we walked out through the fields a bit (and heard more stories).
What comes through so clearly in listening to native Hawaiians is their concern, respect, and care for the land. They treat it as a member of the family, not as some commodity to be used (and abused) for what we can get out of it. The Hawaiian worldview, we were told several times yesterday, is that the good life consists in being in right relationship with God, your neighbors, and the land. And people who think you can do just one or two of those, don’t actually do any of them properly.
It was a really thoughtful and provocative (in the best sense of the word) time. I worry that the link between most of us and the land in our “modern” societies has been broken beyond repair. When we don’t know where our food comes from (besides the grocery store), there are a habits of mind developed that end with us not being too worried about how is used. Pour pesticides onto the soil because we need higher yields. Blow up this mountainside because we need the minerals that lie beneath it. Drill baby drill.
I know such practices are what make much of our modern lifestyle possible. But they aren’t sustainable over the longterm, and we’re simply bequeathing a planet to future generations where the modern lifestyle will not be possible any more, and the sustainable ways of living with the land will be much much harder because of what we have done to it. Furthermore, if the Hawaiian worldview is right, such practices prevent us from actually living in right relationship with our neighbors and with God.
The third act of our day yesterday was snorkeling. Colin and I have been making a podcast episode about octopuses (yes, that’s the properly plural, not octopi). An octopus expert on Maui told Colin that our best chance to see them around Oahu would be around sunset at Makapu’U beach. That is only about 10 miles from where we’re staying so I borrowed some gear from our host (Colin brought his own) and we headed out there hoping to catch a glimpse of one (or even record an interview with one for the podcast?). There’s not much a reef, but lots of boulders strewn about the sea floor, and we let the waves push around for 90 minutes or so until it was dark, but no octopus sightings.
My dad is a fisherman, and I always thought it strange that he could go out fishing all day and not catch anything but say, “it was a good day.” I felt that way about snorkeling for octopuses without seeing any. And it seems like that sentiment is in the neighborhood of how Hawaiians feel about their land: the point isn’t what you get out of it, but interacting with it is rewarding in and of itself.