Hawaiian Land Tenets for Resilience
Resilience is the ability to recover from trauma. Kamuela Plunkett, a Hawaiian land-use planner, has had to do this. His story is about “pono,” a Hawaiian word that can describe “right relationship” — something he’s had to find within himself, and something he strives to create in the world around him. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in society, his insights offer a way to rethink how we recover from trauma and build resilience.
When Kamuela was six, his father passed away from a heart attack. His mother had an emotional breakdown. For the rest of his youth, Kamuela grew up in a Calvinist religious compound. “Anything cultural [Hawaiian] was pagan and against God. It was totally banned and something to be feared,” says Kamuela. He and his mother had to renounce their Hawaiian heritage — told that the cause of their suffering was based on the deeds of past paganism. “There’s a whole generation of us that got really screwed up,” said Kamuela, of a moral foundation that meant renouncing his own identity.
The compound disbanded when he was 18, leaving Kamuela to reconcile his Hawaiian lineage and his faith. In reconciliation, Kamuela found resilience, leading him to be the bridge between cultures, tradition and modernity, that he is today.
Now, Kamuela brings his Hawaiian heritage to work as a land-use planner at the County of Hawaiʻi Planning Department. The first in his family to attain higher education, Kamuela is one of two ethnic Hawaiian Planners in the office and one of five in the department. His work is dedicated to including community voices in land-use planning. Drawing from an array of influences — Hawaiian roots, research, life experiences and even Star Wars — Kamuela is helping Hawaiʻi to be resilient as well.
Like Kamuela, Hawaiʻi has faced trauma. Western contact in 1778 brought diseases that ravaged the Hawaiian population. In 1893, Hawaiian sovereignty was replaced by U.S. business and military interests. Hawaiian land rights and livelihoods off of taro, breadfruit, banana, mountain apple, coconuts, awa, pig, and a host of foods from the sea, were subsumed by sugar plantations, cattle ranches, and an industrialized form of agriculture. Today, Hawaiʻi, an archipelago of ecological abundance, now imports more than 85% of its food supply. Not only are food prices high, but the dependency on external supply chains makes Hawaiʻi vulnerable to disasters that disrupt shipping. And as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, risks from supply chain disruption and the need to build resilience, is not unique to Hawaiʻi.
Yet for a millennium, the people of Hawaiʻi were able to sustain themselves on the islands. “It’s not like we felt restricted to live on islands,” says Kamuela of his people. “We chose to live within the ecological confines of island environments. Our Ancestors learned a form of balance over the course of their 4000-year migratory history through varying island environments.” It is that knowledge of living in balance that can be applied to resilient land-use planning today.
Kamuela is four. It’s 1983. His father, still alive, is collecting coconuts in a grove along the South Kohala coast of the Island of Hawaiʻi. His mother is “throwing net” to catch fish. His father will later steam the fish and make a coconut candy, shredding and baking it in the oven.
Today, that coconut grove no longer exists. “Most of the coconut trees are gone, it’s jam packed with homes one next to the other,” says Kamuela. “The coral reefs are dying due to climate change, and hundreds of cesspools leak right into the place that my mom would catch mullets.” Million-dollar homes, resorts, and golf courses that line the shore have replaced the coconut groves, fishing, and saltworks that the area was once known for. Now, for Kamuela to get coconut milk, it comes in a can from Thailand.
“The shift in land-use is a shift in resilience,” says Kamuela of the natural resources and foods being destroyed and outsourced. “These are the things that would make our community more resilient but now we’re dependent on a barge.” Kamuela sees regaining land for local food and regaining self-sufficiency, as “the Resistance” for greater resilience.
The Island of Hawaii’s current land-use plan, the invisible lines of zoning that dictate development, trace back to decisions made by colonizers to support “productive” land-use, writes Kamuela in his Master’s Thesis. In his thesis, Kamuela uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to create a heritage landscape resource inventory that can inform land-use planning based on cultural and environmental resources. “These are two different ideas of land-use,” explains Kamuela: one type that maximized revenues, another that sustained people off land and water.
Hawaiian land-use stemmed from a deep understanding of the environment and was shaped by needs of the community. Land divisions were based on the weather patterns of the island, the geology, watersheds and subterranean water flow. Traditional land parcels, known as ahupuaʻa, which spanned from ocean to mountain, each encompassed the resource needs of a community for food, water, and access to building supplies for shelter. “There is planned equity,” said Kamuela. Meanwhile, trails between the ahupuaʻa also enabled resource sharing between land divisions.
Within the ahupuaʻa, different wao, or moisture gradients determined land-use — reflecting a nuanced form of planning based on the environmental context. At the top of the mountain, the forested wao, encased by cloud and mist, was a place for gathering resources to build homes, canoes, and other materials, but not for living. Watershed management was built-in to this type of land-use planning: protecting freshwater streams originating from the mountain.
Deep understanding of land, water, and climate patterns stemmed from a relationship to the environment. “It’s acknowledgement of how you’re connected to the resources,” says Kamuela, “it’s reverence.” Today, reverent relationship has been replaced with waterfront property.
Land-use planning based on an understanding of natural resources and a reverence for them had the practical result of protecting watersheds. What is perhaps unique to Hawaiian land-use planning, is the millennium of accumulated knowledge behind policies and practices for resilient land-use and living in balance — knowledge that can either be marginalized or brought to the table. Mainland U.S. eventually developed policies that would protect watersheds too. However, it was only after the degradation of forests and public outcry over the effects of logging on water pollution, runoff, and flood damage, that U.S. legislation was passed to protect national forests.
For development in Hawaiʻi, and other parts of the world, resilience may depend on right relationship and reconciliation with the people who know the land best. For Kamuela, Hawaiian land-use is based on equity not just productivity, community needs, not just capitalism, and reverence of natural resources, not entitlement. “Something fundamental to being Hawaiian is that it’s a people that were able to maintain and find balance…if you use these strategies, you are Hawaiian as well.”
Michelle Winglee is a Consultant on the World Bank climate change team. She is a graduate of the Yale School of the Environmental Studies where she researched indigenous agroforestry systems and climate-resilient forms of agriculture. Views are her own.
