Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 274 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$45.00, cloth . ISBN 978-0-8248-4761-6.
What can islands—the Hawaiian Islands in particular—teach the world about sustainability? The eleven chapters in this book all provide answers to this question from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, which despite their eclecticism, share an attention to culture and an emphasis on collaborative, systems-based approaches.
Islands in general provide powerful models for theorizing and developing sustainable approaches to resource use, simply by the nature of their geographic boundedness, isolation, and finite resources. As the book’s editors point out in their introduction, the problems of sustainability of island communities can be imagined as a parable for the sustainability of the island earth. The Hawaiian Islands bear an especially important message for sustainability advocates; traditional Hawaiian ecological knowledge sustained an abundance of resources for a sizable, self-sufficient, and healthy native population prior to European contact; today the modern State of Hawai‘i imports over 90 percent of its food, and the island state’s requirements for imported food and energy raise the stakes for the sustainability movement. Responding to the challenge of its island geography, Hawai‘i “is becoming a sustainability showcase: a model for sustainable living that is also applicable to isolated communities worldwide” (1).
Three chapters pay particular attention to Hawaiian culture and to the preeminent role of water in Hawaiian cultural ecology and customary moral-legal understandings. The first chapter, written by Scott Fisher, director of conservation for the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, outlines the conceptual foundations of sustainability in Hawaiian culture: an island worldview, a religious connection to the natural world, and a sense of communal interdependence between social classes and between the people and the land that supported them. Fisher briefly chronicles some of the post-contact transformations that disrupted established patterns of resource use—the sandalwood trade, the demographic shifts through depopulation and the growth of harbour towns, and the introduction of a western religious paradigm of “human’s intrinsic right of domination over the natural world” (17). Fisher notes the Hawaiian renaissance and recent reassertion of Hawaiian culture: the Protect Koho‘olawe ‘Ohana direct action movement and the “attempt to retrieve traditional Hawaiian values” (19), including Hawaiian language immersion schools, the revival of hula, and the recovery of celestial navigation knowledge. Fisher describes one successful case study for sustainability: the Waihe‘e Coastal Dunes and Wetlands Refuge in Maui, which restored more than 55 acres of coastal strand and wetlands habitat, including numerous historical and cultural sites.
Penny Levin, founder and project coordinator of E kūpaku ka ‘āina (The Hawai‘i Land Restoration Institute), contributed two admirable chapters, both focused on kalo (taro) farming, “the first, oldest, and culturally most significant food crop in the state” (46). She explains how the resurgence of kalofarming is redefining and restoring the concept of sustainable agriculture in Hawai‘i, and she lays out “lessons from the taro patch” (79) in terms of five axiomatic “foundations” and their constituent elements that form the Hawaiian traditions of growing kalo. Both Fisher and Levin discuss aspects of the Hawaiian ahupua‘a, an integrated system of habitats and watercourses from montane zones to reef flats, which emphasized whole systems thinking and management.
Political scientist George Kent, in a chapter on food security, faults the state government of Hawai‘i for giving inadequate attention to overall food supply and related disaster planning.
Discussion of sustainability-related issues throughout the book are grounded in recent case studies and provide practical insights and lessons. Two chapters focus on island water systems. Lauren C. Roth Venu, the founder and president of Roth Ecological Design, explains the Pilot Living Machine, an ecologically engineered wetland technology and one of the state’s first bioremediation projects for treatment of wastewater. Steve Parabicoli, the water recycling program coordinator for Maui County, reviews successes and challenges of the county’s Wastewater Reclamation Division. Luis Vega and Reza Ghorbani, both at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, discuss the potentials and impediments of wave energy converters and estimate they could provide up to 90 percent of energy needs of some Hawaiian communities. Green-building specialist John Bendon and architect Matthew Goyke write about the Kumuhao Development in Waimanalo, a case study in sustainable design of residential housing. Linda Cox and John Cusick, both at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, discuss sustainability efforts within Hawai‘i’s tourism sector, particularly the mixed success of attempts to develop a certification program for ecotourism. Educator-consultant Shanah Trevenna describes a case study of a student-led movement at the University of Hawai‘i to reduce campus energy use. And a case study of a Maui elementary school’s successful development of a school garden project was contributed by landscape designer Susan Wyche and the school garden project coordinator, Kirk Surry.
This book will be of interest to a wide range of students and practitioners of sustainable resource use, cultural ecology, Hawaiian Studies, and urban planning. The authors bring a great deal of knowledge and expertise, hands-on experience, and celebratory optimism to their contributions. L.C. Roth Venu captures this tone in the concluding lines of her chapter: “In the end, humanity has the ability to collectively decide as a society how to forge forward. Fortunately, a global renaissance is upon us, and fortunately all the solutions are abundant in nature—all we need to do is look around” (140).
Donald H. Rubinstein
University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam
pp. 216-218