Before I moved to Hawaiʻi I gave my parents a book about a priest who turned his mango farm into a business to help and house orphans of U.S. Military stationed at Subic Bay. “Helping the poor” is how I have chosen to live the lessons taught to me by Jesus and the Catholic Church. After 14 years and many trips back and forth to the Philippines, my dad has sold off most of that land. Our connection to ancestral land is almost severed and sold off to help future generations of our family. The ultimate fate of that wealth transfer is a portfolio of market investments that will hopefully grow and feed our family for generations. Meanwhile, children are still being orphaned, exploited, and used for labor that is not contributing to their full potential. The land that we’ve sold is not distributing income to the families in that community, nor providing nourishment to the children of that place. These places are still experiencing “poverty.”
While Hawaiʻi did not teach me how to grow and market mangos, it did give me a new perspective about land and “poverty.” When we do not include the land as a stakeholder everyone will eventually suffer. Then who does the land belong to? Who do we belong to? We belong to the people who care for us, and those who we care for in return. The same is true for the land, and well that sounds like crazy talk to a family that just wants to take what is rightfully theirs, invest it, and provide for their grandkids. I get it. I’m on board, because my life was built on macro-systems driven by a resilient market that has fed me. I’m using this blog to explore my own actions and motivations. Hawaiʻi at many levels is land rich, but monetarily “poor.” The land fed all generations, but the sale of the land is not yet benefitting future generations in the same way. This is why in the middle of a global pandemic, I have brought my children to my piko, where I knew the education would feed their future.
To obtain my PhD in Natural Resources and Environmental Management, I studied the regime shifts of the ahupuaʻa of Hāʻena on the north shore of Kauaʻi. An ahupuaʻa is a water catchment and then some. From a physical perspective a water catchment is a space where precipitation hits land and all the water in that space collects and enters a larger body of water at the same point. I say an ahupuaʻa is a water catchment and then some because Hāʻena included some fringe areas on the coastal plain that were technically outside the catchment, but still important to the social structure of the early inhabitants. I used historical and modern data to look for the ecological and economic regime shifts over time. In my academic “discipline” of social-ecological system studies, regime shifts are marked by changes in what the environment provides as a result of the way humans interact with nature.
The people of a place become “poor” when they are not fed by their social AND ecological systems. They are severed from the resources of society and the option to be caretakers of land that feeds. The root cause of poverty is not lack of income, it is lack of a common perspective on how to distribute the resources of the land. “Poverty” that perpetuates low income for rural commodity farmers, started when we stopped reciprocating with the land, when people became farmers for income, instead of stewards of their places. Income distribution became distorted when we stopped prioritizing the most vulnerable people in the population, children and the elderly. Can we invite the oldest of stakeholders, the land, into a society that will richly nourish the minds, bodies, and being of all future generations?