Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [53]
I’ve had a relationship with islands since I was a young man. My attraction has not been to the clichéd tropical fantasy of palm trees and white sand; it is something much deeper—island as metaphor for our existence on earth, representing independence and interdependence, natural limits and boundless space. Island as paradox.
Living on an island as I have for the last ten years, I’ve realized that you can’t get away with anything. The feedback loop is pretty immediate; there is no vast landmass where the ripples of one’s actions and interactions can radiate over long distances and large populations in a grand anonymous dilution. If we consider the earth itself as an island floating in a sea of space, in fact “our only ship at sea,” as my friend David Brower described it, we might reconsider how we take care of it.
One of the most emblematic places to start, I believe, is with our food. There may be nothing more central to our lives than how we secure our food. Yet the responsibility has been handed over to an industrial system where farms have become factories and food has become a faceless commodity. The results have been disastrous: epidemic levels of childhood obesity and diabetes, polluted groundwater, soil degradation, food that no longer tastes good or is good, and most profound—an almost complete disconnection from the social, cultural, and ecological connections that were once part of agrarian life.
The Polynesian people who first settled the Hawaiian Islands understood how to live within ecological limits. They supported a population of a million people on those islands without any outside inputs. There was a well-prescribed way of living and of managing resources. If someone caught a species of fish out of season, that person was punished. Sounds pretty radical, but they understood something that we have forgotten; that the survival of each one of us is inextricably tied to each other and to the natural world we live in. Those original island peoples knew that the greed of a few could unravel the survival of an entire society.
Hawaii is the most remote populated landmass on earth, and yet it now imports close to 80 percent of its food from the mainland. Food is traveling close to three thousand miles to reach its shores. The costs of this system go well beyond what is being paid at the checkout counter. A place that has such a feeling of wealth and fecundity has become one of the most food insecure places on earth.
When I was sixteen years old, I spent time on another island, the island of Jamaica. My brother and I were taken in by Gretel Hilton and her partner, Uncle Will, who patiently instructed us in some basic survival; how to sharpen a machete and open a coconut, what herbs to use if we were injured or sick, how to cook breadfruit, and how to fish from the cliffs along the sea.
At that time I had no idea that I would eventually devote my life to learning those very skills, writing and teaching about the critical importance of rediscovering our place in Nature and knowing how to grow food. My generation was in the early stages of what is now a total worship of technology; we were invested in our own cleverness, abandoning the intelligence of Nature that had guided humans for thousands of years. We didn’t realize the ecological and social price we all would pay for this arrogance.
But Gretel Hilton and Uncle Will were still immersed in the natural history of a place and they were not alone. At that time, most rural families in Jamaica were fairly self sufficient, still had chickens and goats, a breadfruit tree, coconut trees, mango, some cultivated yams and greens and, if they lived near the coast or a river, they fished.
While poverty in the economic sense of the word was endemic then as it is now, this diversity and food quality was a form of national wealth embodied by rural communities that prided themselves on the variety and quality of their fruits, and knowledge, and an intimacy with a place.
The potential for abundance is still there, supported by a tropical climate,