A Model for Food Sustainability

Hawaii is abuzz with sustainability talk, fueled by the high price of importing food, the special challenges the recession brings to a community dependent upon tourism. Our consumptive, speed and greed culture is going through the world’s resources at an unprecedented rate. People are starving in huge numbers globally, and things are only going to get worse. I am very eager to see what the small, affluent island community does with the opportunity. There is plenty of arable land in the state; indeed there is a great deal of agriculture there already. Hawaii’s second largest city, Hilo, is abuzz with fresh, locally grown food, which is one of the city’s biggest draws and the reason I purchased property there years ago. You can learn more about Hilo’s food resources...

Hawaii’s climate makes possible growing a wide range of crops, including papayas, bananas, tomatoes, ginger, avocados, lettuce, sweet potatoes, oranges, lemons, garlic, onions, peppers, cucumbers, jackfruit, breadfruit, lychees, pineapple, rambutans, and more. There are also specialty crops like cacao, coffee and macademia nuts. In addition, of course, Hawaii is smack dab in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and whatever difficulties that location creates in terms of imports is more than offset by the riches of the local ocean, which draw fisherman from the entire Pacific Rim. While that ocean’s fisheries are in a dreadful decline, there should still be enough to feed the islands if conservation laws are enacted and enforced.

An interesting dimension to the Hawaii sustainability issue is also the plant wisdom of the Polynesians. It turns out that the Polynesians who populated the island were master gardeners and botanists. They knew how to keep seeds such as breadfruit alive for months during an open ocean canoe voyage, and how to graft plants, enhance growth, and most importantly how to utilize the botanical resources of their islands to maximum effect. In addition to finding survival value in a wide range of fruits and plants, they made sails out of pandanas leaves and used bamboo for building beams, walls and more.

The state of Hawaii is remote, small, and blessed with a 12 month growing season and a climate suitable for a wide range of food plants, but perhaps just as interesting is the fact that it is part of the USA. Watching the local population overcome their justifiable resentment toward their Caucasian conquerors enough to join with American immigrants (haoles) and rebel constructively against our mainstream anti-culture is going to be fascinating to see. The conservation movement is alive and well in Hawaii, and with any luck sustainability will soon rise from a grassroots to a popular movement. When it does, it will provide a model for the rest of us, and one which I can already sense will be right in line with the Daoist precepts of taking no more than we need, using our resources in an equitable fashion, and living in harmony with nature rather than in dominion over it.