INTRODUCTION

‘Ōlelo No‘eau

He ali‘i ka ‘āina, he kauwa ke kanaka.

Land is the Chief, Man is the Servant.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Humanity’s long history of exploitation of the natural world has reached a tipping point: wildfires burn across the American West, Australia, Russian boreal forests, and the Brazilian Pantanal, species extinctions continue to rise, plastic pollution spreads across the planet and enters complex food webs, trash piles up in landfills, and oil spills regularly cover beaches. Hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and droughts are becoming more intense and destructive. The world is on fire and environmental catastrophes are happening more and more frequently.

We have entered a period of geological history that some have named the anthropocene (age of man), in which human activities are reaching an unprecedented level of impact to major geological, biological, and ecological processes. The International Union of Geological Scientists is debating different markers of this transition in the geological record including nuclear isotopes from atomic weapon testing that cover the planet, or the accumulation of man made materials like concrete and plastics in the geological layers, or the 6th mass extinction as many species disappear from the fossil records and a simultaneous explosion of the bones of domesticated species like chickens and cattle.^[1] Each of these markers point to different, but equally dramatic ways our species has modified the planet to better suit our short term needs.

Considering the extent of this transformation, it is tempting to think about humans as dominating and masters of the planet but that is a mistake. While we have clearly impacted the complex biological, hydrological, and ecological systems of the planet, we have not yet figured out how to control or manage them sustainably. The global coronavirus pandemic has illustrated the fragility of so many of our complex global supply chains and how much one microscopic virus can disrupt the complex social and economic systems developed over the last few centuries.

The title of the book refers to a Hawaiian ‘olelo no‘eau, or wise saying, “He ali‘i ka ‘āina, he kauwa ke kanaka.” Land is the chief, man is the servant. We are entirely dependent on land to grow food, to provide clean water, and provide us with materials to build our homes, cloth our bodies, and heal our illnesses. Even though, as individuals, we feel disconnected from the sources of our food, medicine, and shelter, they all still come from the earth: from farms, fields, forests, and mines. We need to remember our inescapable dependence on the land. Complicated supply chains that extend across the globe make us unaware of this dependence which encourages indifference and creates the illusions of prosperity unconnected from our impacts on the planet. Rather than dominating the land, we need to serve, sustain, and protect it. The purpose of this book is to help teachers and students cultivate an awareness of our dependence on the natural environment so that they approach this relationship with an ethic of humility and care.

What is Sustainability?

Sustainability means creating a society that is “meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”.^[2] This means maintaining the biological and ecological integrity of the natural systems that we rely on so they can continue to meet our basic needs and potential future needs. Thinking about, planning for, and anticipating the future is a key component to thinking sustainably. Sustainability has also been described as taking into account the triple bottom line, planet, people, and profit. For something to be sustainable it must work for the ecological health of the planet, be equitable and fair for people, and maintain a profit within the capitalist framework within which most of our species currently operate. Given that many social institutions (governments, business, and educational institutions) are often only considering profit, even this more limited focus on sustainability is a useful correction.

One success of the environmental movement has been the general acknowledgement that sustainability is important. As a result many companies want to appear to value the environment, even if their actual impact is mostly negative. The term greenwashing is used to describe these attempts. As students of sustainability, we must be able to distinguish actions for show and those that will have significant impact.

Our current ecological crisis is at least partly a product of capitalism. Capitalism, by encouraging competition and trade, has unleashed enormous human productivity, but it has also narrowed our focus to making money and helped us ignore the growing ecological crisis. David Orr, in a speech to graduating college students entitled, “What is Education For,” explains that a college education is often promoted as a way to help individuals earn more money within our capitalist society.^[3] The ecological crisis has been created and perpetuated by the most educated people in our society. In that way, education has been complicit in creating the ecological crisis and also needs to be involved in its solution. Solving the ecological crisis involves challenging and remaking many of our most foundational social and cultural institutions, including our colleges and universities. Universities need to teach people about sustainability concepts and theories but also to practice sustainability and reduce their own water, electricity, and other types of consumption.

This textbook aims to help teachers incorporate sustainability across a wide variety of academic disciplines. If we are going to create a sustainable society, our only viable option long term, everyone needs to take responsibility, not just the students who will focus on careers in conservation, environmental science, or sustainability. We need people who understand our impact on the planet across all of the spheres of human activity that impact the planet. We need educators at all levels, business people, doctors, builders, architects, writers, and fashion designers who understand how their jobs impact the planet and are willing to work to reduce those impacts. Within universities, faculty are divided into disciplines. This specialization is necessary in a complex society but real world problems cross disciplinary boundaries. We need to have academic disciplines that are flexible enough to look at the complete problems and solutions and not just their own little piece of the puzzle.

For most people, the messages we have received around sustainability focus on our individual choices. While it is true that those living in the developed world are responsible for more carbon emission per person and emissions can be connected to lifestyle choices, ultimately individual actions alone will not stop the impending environmental catastrophes. There are no 10, 25 or 50 simple things we can do to save the planet. The solutions are not simple and they are not individual. Individual efforts, although they make us feel good and help us align our values to our actions, cannot achieve the solutions we need. In some ways, they even distract from the larger goal of advocating for the larger scale political and economic revolution that is necessary. The scale of changes we need are not individual but communal, national, and global. These issues of scale are essential to understanding sustainability.

While we need to think about our own individual choices and actions, we need to focus on larger systemic changes that structure and enable our individual choices. Most people will not ride a bike to work because there are no bike lanes and they don’t want to get hit by a car. You might buy an electric car, but can’t develop your own charging stations. The focus on individual choices can often generate guilt at our own contribution to environmental problems or resentment against those who try to hold individuals accountable for the challenges we have inherited, without putting responsibilities on the companies and governments that have gained the most from the status quo’s criminal negligence and willful blindness to developing future catastrophes.

Island Living and Environmental Justice

Living on an island, we can easily see the limits to our current globalized economic system. In Hawaii, our systems of energy are dependent on oil and coal from abroad. Our food systems are dependent on the constant arrival of container ships. If global shipping was interrupted or the equipment to unload container ships were damaged, Hawaii would have food for only two weeks. At the same time, much of our agricultural lands are not being farmed. We are using water faster than our aquifers are being replenished. We need to learn about and recognize these limits and then create systems that work within these limits instead of ignoring them.

This textbook is designed to be specific to Hawaii and the unique challenges, history, and processes at work in Hawaii. The solutions to global problems are often local. The kind of energy, agriculture, or water solutions that make sense in Hawaii might not be a good fit for another place and vice versa. Solutions are created by people whose perspectives are shaped by their history and culture. If we just look at the technical issues, we fail to understand the importance of culture and politics in addressing these challenges. In many cases, we actually have solutions but the failure to implement them has more to do with politics and culture than technological ability or scientific knowledge.

The failure to create real changes is primarily a political and cultural problem. Those who have contributed the most to climate change and gained the most from the burning of fossil fuels are the richer, more developed countries and the wealthy from around the world. By definition, these are the people who have clearly benefited from the status quo. These are also the people who are most capable of avoiding the impacts of climate change because they have the means to install AC to ignore heat waves, move to a new location to avoid sea level rise, and purchase food and gas even as the prices rise. They are also the ones who have the most  influence over governments, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and other organizations that have the power to make huge impacts on climate change policy and other forms of environmental degradation. Those who suffer the most from the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are those who have contributed the least to these problems. Solving for climate change without addressing these core inequalities between groups of people will create even wide divisions between the have and have nots. Environmental justice recognizes these connections between global undevelopment, poverty, and environmental degradation and encourages us to simultaneously address social justice while solving ecological problems. This environmental justice approach is another central theme of this textbook.

The first step to creating solutions to the challenges of living sustainably on an archipelago is to learn about the problems and potential solutions. Everyone needs to be knowledgeable about kilowatts and water efficiency and the benefits of composting just like we need to know how to drive a car or use a computer. We need a new ecological literacy in which this knowledge is as widely distributed as possible. We can never have the necessary cultural and political shifts unless people understand the issues and what is at stake and are willing to then hold politicians accountable. If we want people to understand these issues, we need to start teaching them in the schools at all levels and across all disciplines.

Organization of the Text

The purpose of this book is to support teachers and students in understanding the most important and basic challenges to living sustainably in Hawaii. This book is organized so that it is modular. You can use all of it, or just single chapter or sections, and adapt it to the needs of your class. Because it is an Open Education Resource with a creative common license, it was created for instructors to adapt it to the needs of their courses and add to and develop it as they see fit. It is designed to be supplemental to other course material that are core to a specific discipline.

Each chapter is organized in the same way. The chapters begin with ‘ōlelo no‘eau, or a wise saying to ground the concepts in Hawaiian knowledge and perspectives. These are all taken from Mary Kawena Pukui’s collection.^[4] These can serve as a small way of introducing Hawaiian language and cultural knowledge into the classroom. As relevant, we will draw upon traditional Hawaiian practices and cultural knowledge to inform our discussion of different topics and their solutions. In addition, understanding the current ecological crisis in Hawaii requires understanding the history of colonization of Hawaii and the transformation from a traditional agricultural society to a globalized capitalist economy. In some instances, the best solutions come from traditional Hawaiian practices that were developed to provide for the hundreds of thousands of people living in Hawaii prior to Western contact.

Next, each chapter has learning objectives that clearly state the purpose of each chapter and what the reader will learn. Then there is a description of the topics in Hawaii and the unique challenges here. These descriptions are purposely brief and introductory, to present an overview of the main challenges and considerations around that topic.

The next section provides suggestions on how to implement and discuss these topics within and across different academic disciplines. By connecting abstract concepts to concrete and relevant problems, this can strengthen the learning in the classroom. This section, primarily written for instructors, begins the work of adapting the textbook to different courses. If a chapter is directly assigned to students to read, this section can be skipped over or deleted, or modified to include the assignments or questions associated with a specific course. This is an excellent area for instructors teaching sustainability within their discipline to add ideas and materials to share with other instructors.

The final chapter sections include supplemental material for students and instructors to deepen their understanding of core concepts as needed. This is another section that should be added to and expanded as necessary as instructors and students do their own research on these topics. The book is designed to be a work in progress and will serve its purpose best if instructors and students are willing to modify, develop, and expand it.

The author, Christian Palmer, is an environmental anthropologist, whose work focuses on human and environmental interaction in Hawaii and Brazil. He can be reached for suggestions and comments at christiantpalmer(at)gmail.com