In her stunningly beautiful collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer opens with a stunning essay called “Skywoman Falling.” She explains that she gives her General Ecology students a survey every semester. When asked to rate the negative interactions humans have with the environment, the students are quick to identify the ways in which humans negatively affect the environment. But when the same students are asked to identify any positive ways humans interact with the environment, the students are often at a loss.
Kimmerer observes that modern conservation must not be the story of the “Fall,” a replay of the Adam and Eve story where men and women’s actions exiled them from the garden. Conservation must come from a position of abundance, one of healing and forgiveness, atonement and hope.
When the ancient Hawaiians arrived in this archipelago around 1,500 years ago, they transformed the natural environment, clearing forests to grow food, bringing with them imported plants that changed the natural ecology of the island. When you look at Hawaiian agriculture, the goal was not for humans to be invisible, but rather, to live sustainably on the land. If you overfished, you had no food. It was imperative that resources be managed.
Conservation is an action, but the foundation of any action is a story.
Joan Didion famously wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” and indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about conservation may be just as important as the acts of conservation themselves. If we tell ourselves a story of a hopelessly destroyed earth, we may feel that conservation is a hopeless and futile act, the voice of one person alone crying in the wilderness.
But what if our stories were different?
Humans are just like any other creature on this planet. Just like any other creature we are subject to the laws of nature, though the fancy concrete boxes in which we live and metal boxes on wheels that get us places might tell us otherwise. When there are more people than food and water, people die. This is a simple fact. When there is disease, people die. This is a simple fact.
If we begin to view ourselves just like any other creature subject to the laws of nature, we might begin to look at how other creatures survive in their environment and maybe search for ways in which we might, as humans, co-exist in our environment, giving as much as taking, healing the rift.
I have always believed that individuals have a powerful rational and intellectual inborn ability to do the right thing. We each have a frontal lobe that helps us understand what is right and what is wrong, but as a culture, as a society, I have often believed that we don’t have a frontal lobe. Culture is not a person. It is more like a mold, growing wild in all directions, subject to whatever environmental factors will eventually lead to its demise.
Perhaps the way out might be through storytelling. With the right stories, with the right values, maybe we can find a cultural frontal lobe that can carry us forward.
To heal a landscape, we must hear its stories. The ecologist Gary Nabhan uses the term “re-story-ation.” More than that, to heal a landscape, we must tell the right story.
In ancient times, Hawaiians built rock walls out of lava rock that protected parts of the ocean from the vagaries of the Pacific Ocean. Within these “water pens,” Hawaiians farmed fish. Ancient fish ponds could feed whole communities along the coast, and allow those communities to trade with upland farmers.
Today, across the island of O’ahu, groups of people are coming together to rebuild these ancient fish ponds. They are doing the work by hand. They are doing it in the old ways.
The fish ponds are acts of cultural and ecological healing. They heal the landscape, because communities come together to remove invasive species like mangroves from the coastline. They heal the communities, because people come together to do the work with their hands. They heal the people, because in coming together, the ancient stories are told, the practices are revived, and the gods are once again called forth from the deep to feed us. And through the fish ponds, we can perhaps once again feed our communities and make Hawai’i more sustainable. Atlas Obscura writes about a fish pond in He’eia, but there are others, including one I have been granted permission to visit in Pearl Harbor, whose Hawaiian name is Loko Iʻa Pāʻaiau.
When we talk about conservation, we must be creative in how we manage our resources and co-exist with nature. Kimmerer writes that it is each of our responsibilities to use the gifts we have been given for good. Perhaps if we want to be better conservationists, our first step should be to look within ourselves, for our own talents and gifts. What can we give the earth for all she has given us?
Kimmerer writes about nature’s gifts in her breathtakingly beautiful essay “The Gift of Strawberries.” She writes: “Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning it. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.”
But Kimmerer notes that gifts come with immense responsibility. The gift changes hands and ties together each hand it touches. “A gift creates ongoing relationship.”
Gifts can exist within capitalism, but in a system where ownership is a method of exclusion, gifts once given are excluded from the system of gift giving. Kimmerer explains that “the fundamental nature of gifts” is that “their value increases with their passage.” Sharing is fundamental. In a gift economy, reciprocity, not rights, are central.
We conserve the earth, because the earth is our gift. But we live in a world detached from this gift. Kimmerer notes: “When the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.”
What is the answer to all this? Kimmerer offers a solution I have long thought about and considered. She explains, “Refusal to participate is a moral choice.” We can choose not to buy it. We can choose not to buy the suffering, the plants irresponsibly grown. Or we can buy what otherwise would be thrown away, which is what my boyfriend and I do when we buy vegetables in Hawai’i. We buy the ugly food. The food in the discard pile. The food that would be wasted. Sometimes, the food is freely given to us—a gift. And we are learning to forage, not because I think that all of us foraging would become a sustainable solution, but because foraging connects me to plants, earth, and to the place my food comes from. It makes me think more carefully about the choices I make, and how they impact the planet.
“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
I was not born in Hawai’i, but Hawai’i matters to me. Its people, its land, its culture, its history, its animals. I am tied to them. I have put the food of the trees in my body, and the island is my body. I have put its water in my body, and I am its water. I have heard its stories, and its stories are my heart.
In Waikiki, a baby bird once fell out of a tree and landed on a man’s shoulder, while the woman was out in the sea. When the woman returned from the sea, the couple tried to return the bird to the tree, but its nest couldn’t be found, so the man and woman raised the bird as their own. The bird was demanding. It needed feeding every hour or two. When the time came to release the bird, the couple met a kind man and woman who had turned their home into something of an aviary. The man and woman took the caretakers of the bird to a valley where the birds lived. There they met the keeper of the valley. He was a wise old man. He showed them, directly and indirectly, how they might feed themselves. He brought them to the fish ponds.
Sometimes, when we give gifts to nature, nature reciprocates in strange ways.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.