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Our Sacred Earth--balancing human needs and nature was one of the greatest accomplishments of the Hawaiian people, and recreating this balance in these modern times is one of our greatest challenges. Our western thinking is that we can dominate and consume our natural environment. We know that isn't working. One of our greatest challenges today is our population growth and human demand on finite resources. In Hawai'i, we live on small islands. What a great classroom for us to understand the issues of sustainability and understand that we don't dominate the world, we're only part of it. For our lives to be of a high quality, the environment we live in needs to be of a high quality. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 1.6 billion people on earth. In 1998, the 6 billionth child was born. By 2023, there will be ten billion people on this planet. Our exponential population growth has been accompanied by an exponential depletion of the natural resources that support that growth. A grade school student can do the math--such a relationship between man and his natural environment must change. When I was in school there were no classes in ecology, and "sustainability" wasn't even a word yet. People thought that the solution to world hunger was to harvest an infinite amount of protein from the ocean. No one believes that today. I think one of the real basic shifts needs to be in human values--we need to be educated about what our situation is, what our relationship to the place in which we live is; we need to give back as much as we take. In its simplest form that is what Malama Hawai'i is-taking care of this place, this special island home as an obligation to future generations. The people of Hawai'i have a unique opportunity to help bring about the right kind of changes in our values because of our place in the world--first, we are islanders and understand the limited resources of our island home; and second, we have a strong link to our native heritage. Native people throughout the world believe that the natural envrionment is sacred and that they must live in balance with it to survive. --Nainoa Thompson See also: Sacred Forests (1990)--A 9-part article on the Search for Logs for the Voyaging Canoe Hawai'iloa by Sam Low Sea of Islands (2000) by Sam Low |