We discuss biocomplexity, the philosophy of community based and cooperatively managed farming, and some thoughts about re-wiring food systems infrastructure.
Dr. Noa Lincoln is Associate Professor in Indigenous Crops and Cropping Systems at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the Principal Investigator of the Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory. He is also a farmer and works with his wife on an ‘ulu (breadfruit) farm on Hawai‘i Island, as part of the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative which they founded.
We have a wide ranging and deep dive discussion about: the distinction between European and Hawai‘ian cosmology in relationship to earth; the impacts of foreign investment in Hawai‘i; the true value of community based agriculture; the benefit of cooperative and collaborative farming enterprises; and the need to reconfigure the social, finance, land use and hard infrastructure from the legacy of large scale, export based plantation agriculture to more localized infrastructure; and, we brainstorm some policy interventions as we touch on global economic issues and biocomplexity.
In other words, we get right to the nub of the matter. And it starts with the remarkable story of why his current position at the University of Hawai‘i was created.
For more info:
Credits:
Created, produced, and hosted by Paula Daniels
Sound engineer: Keola Iseri
Project support: Sue Woodard
Theme music: Caryssa Shinozawa
Music: "Monomer" by Leroy Wild, “Makapu‘u Pali”, “Waialua By Night”, “Kolekole”, “Kaaawa Ranch” by Pacific Sounds
Logo: Reiko Quitevis, Sue Woodard
Thanks to our sponsor, the Hawai‘i Institute for Sustainable Community Food Systems at the University of Hawai‘i - West O‘ahu
Thanks also to the students at Waipahu High School for sound creation (Caryssa Shinozawa, Landon Guzman, Syd Sausal) and graphic design (Ashley Alfaro, Erika Pagtulingan, Reiko Quitevis); and their teachers, Noelle- lili Edejer and Sky Bruno.
Paula: Welcome to the 30% podcast. We're a podcast about goals to create a good food ecosystem across the country…
[Music: Monomer - Leroy Wilder]
…from New York to Illinois, from Austin to Boston - and to the Hawaiʻian islands in the mid Pacific. Hawaiʻi's goal for a local food system is a thematic structure for this podcast, and is the focus of this first season. The goal is embedded in the Hawaiʻi state Aloha plus challenge, which aims to double local food production in the islands by 2030; by most accounts, that means to get to 30% local by then. The goal is important to Hawaiʻi for a number of layered reasons, one being a matter of resilience. The island state is currently heavily dependent on imported food to feed its over 1 million residents and 10 million tourists who visit every year. With recent experience of supply chain disruption due to hurricanes or pandemics, supply chain resilience is key to Hawaiʻi. But a more localized system is also important for many other reasons, which we discuss in this season and have particular focus on in this episode with Noa Lincoln.
Whenever I see Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, I also get a hit of ocean and forest. It just seems to be in the air around him. The son of a Maui fisherman, Noa grew up with a natural affinity for plants. He studied environmental engineering at Yale and received a doctorate in environment and resources from Stanford.
He returned home to Hawaiʻi with years of experience working in the American Southwest, central America and throughout the Pacific. We have a wide ranging and deep dive discussion about a few things, including the distinction between European and Hawaiʻian cosmology in relationship to the earth, the impacts of foreign investment in Hawaiʻi, the value of community based agriculture and the need to reconfigure the infrastructure of Hawaiʻi from the legacy of large scale export based plantation agriculture to a more localized infrastructure, including the social, financial, land use and hard infrastructure that would support it.
In other words, we get right to the nub of the matter, and it starts with a remarkable story of how his current position at the University of Hawaiʻi came about.
[Music]
Noa: My name's Noa Kekuewa Lincoln from the Big Island of Hawaiʻi and I wear multiple hats.But my main position is as a researcher with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and that's in a position called indigenous crops and cropping systems.
Paula: Hmm. And what does that mean? What what's your work entail?
Noa: Well, on the surface, I would say it entails bringing some agronomic perspective to our indigenous crops and also ways of growing food. In thinking about how and what roles they can play in our food system today, I would say a deeper subset of that as well.
When you look at the genesis of this position, it actually grew out of some substantial conflict between, in particular, our native Hawaiʻian community and CTAR, The College of Tropical Agriculture. And in early 2000, there was genetic modification and patenting of kalo, which was not only a major staple of traditional Hawaiʻian culture, but a centerpiece of our cosmology and identity.
And when there was this genetic modification and patenting, there was tremendous community uproar against it that resulted in substantial community opposition, that climaxed with some activists actually barring the Board of Regents, the UH Board of Regents, in their meeting room and refusing to let them out until they agreed to change their course of action.
And some of the outcomes of that opposition was a legislative moratorium against the genetic modification of kalo, the university publicly tearing up the patents. But a lesser well known outcome of that was the push for this position to really have a, a native voice within The College of Tropical Agriculture, to look out for the wellbeing of our traditional crops, which again are not just food sources but a core part of identity, of worldview, of religion and cosmology in the Hawaiʻian culture.
Paula: Unpack that a little bit. You said kalo is the centerpiece of our cosmology. Can you amplify on that a little bit more?
Noa: Well, a few things I would say to that. One, Hawaiʻi is an extremely diverse environment and kalo was not the dominant staple everywhere in our state.
Paula: Kalo was also known as taro?
Noa: As taro. Yes. But when you look at not just Hawaiʻian culture, but pretty much every indigenous culture in the world, there's a very strong relationship with the environment, and that relationship is not just a feel good kind of thing, but was deeply embedded in religion, in worldview and was deeply internalized to the point where elders will literally sit and talk to plants, will literally exalt a stone as being endowed with mana - with spiritual power.
And so, probably the most commonly referenced example of this in Hawaiʻian culture is that, when you look at our genealogy and some of the creation stories, the way some of the wording goes, is that Kalo or Taro is literally an elder sibling of mankind: the union of Papa and Wākea gave birth to Hāloanaka, which was literally a stillborn child that when buried became the Kalo plant.
And when Papa and Wākea had other children, those became the initial Ali'i lines, the chiefly lineages of Hawaiʻian ancestry. And so in that particular story sense again it provides a direct familial relation to kalo.
Paula: It's a respectful relationship with the earth, right? It's a partnership.
Noa: It is. And I mean, not only is it a relationship, but when you look at the nature of that relationship, humans are the younger sibling. So not only is it a direct familial relationship, but we are the lesser sibling. We’re the younger one whose role it is to listen to and learn from the elder brother. This is just a, a completely different perspective and worldview than I would say has kind of become the global norm. Eurocentric belief systems have come to dominate. When you read European cosmologies, embedded into Christianity and other religions, man is literally in a dominant position. Man is given dominion over all other living things in the Bible. And again, that's a 180 degree reversal from Hawaiʻian culture that, again, places mankind as subservient to our natural environment.
Paula: Thank you for sharing that story.
[Music: Waialua By Night - Pacific Sounds]
It's wonderful to hear the deepening of the knowledge that's carried through generations to you.
Noa: I always had much more of a calling to the mountains and to plants and had a very strong affinity for plants from a young age. And that kind of led to going out in the forest with elders and really having a lot of one on one time with elders who really embodied the ways of knowing and thinking and seeing the world, that are part of our culture.
And so, I spent a lot of time in the forest, learning plants and learning how our ancestors saw plants, as well. For high school, I went to Kamehameha so we grew up pretty rural on Maui and then came over to Honolulu on Oahu; and that transition to me was really important and I became kind of hyper aware of the massive amount of alteration and impact we've had on our environment.
It's… coming from a place on Maui where we would go and play in the streams and catch ‘opae and go down to the coast and fish and harvest, and then coming over to Honolulu where every single stream is canalyzed and polluted and litter and – just that transition from Maui to Honolulu really hit me in terms of the environmental impacts that our societies are having on the world.
As I became more aware of those environmental issues, I also became increasingly aware that a lot of the decision making and the power and the larger forces that were driving a lot of that development and impact were not necessarily situated in Hawaiʻi; that there was tremendous influence from the outside as well.
And so, my main motivation for going to Yale was to, one, really want to see the east coast and New York City. I think at that time, 25 years ago, it was still kind of the undisputed center of the planet in a way. And also the blue blood wealth - for a lack of better term - that long term power of America. A lot of the people who were at Yale with me are extremely influential, whether they want to be or not. And the decisions that they're making in their lives as a function of the amount of resources and money they control, have big impacts on the course of our society. And so I really wanted to understand that with the idea that you need to understand that, to start to influence it and potentially change direction.
Paula: What kind of things were you seeing? You said the influencers from the outside, causing problems on Oahu. Can you point to some of those influences?
Noa: Oh, well, I mean, the large scale tourism industry for the most part. These aren't local developers investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build out these big resorts.
There's money from the outside that sees a business opportunity in Hawaiʻi and comes in essentially to do an extractive form of economic development. And they're the ones who are working with the politicians to get the zoning change. They're the ones bringing the capital resources to build these huge buildings. And they're the ones who are ultimately selling and profiting from these changes in Hawaiʻi.
Paula: So you talk about it as extractive, meaning they take profit out, but they're not giving things back into the community.
Noa: Yeah. Essentially that. I was less aware of it then as I am now. But yeah, I would say most of the money, the profit that's generated from tourism doesn't stay in Hawaiʻi because those who own, and even those who manage a lot of these hotels are absentee. They're not even part of our community.
Paula: And that was true of the agricultural phase of Hawaiʻi too, right? The American agribusinesses overthrew the government of Hawaiʻi to begin with, in order to advance sugar production and to have unfettered trade with the rest of the continent of the United States. So it was extracted sugar from Hawaiʻi, right?
Noa: It was. Yeah.
Paula: So your efforts then with indigenous cropping, what's different about that? Explain how you want to reorient - or I'm assuming you want to reorient - how agriculture works in Hawaiʻi.
Noa: Yeah. And I mean, we're still trying to figure out some of that. You know, one good learning moment for me since I started this position a few years ago…in my graduate seminar, we just asked the simple question: what is indigenous agriculture today? You know, in the past, it was very obvious: you had native people growing native crops, using native methods on native lands. Very clear cut. But today, it's not as clear cut. You can have a native Hawaiʻian using native practices, growing kale. Was that indigenous ag? You can have an absentee landowner growing lots of kalo and using pesticides and fertilizers. Is that indigenous ag because it's an indigenous crop?
So we asked this question and we didn't do a very formal analysis, but we took all the notes from all the students and we dig a big word cloud of what came out of that question. And this was surprising to me: the number one things that came out were words like community, lāhui, family.
And in essence, a lot of the practitioners were saying, who you're growing food for and why you're doing it are probably the most important things that define it as indigenous agriculture. One of the practitioners who came in, I thought summed it up really well. He's like, if you can't involve your kids in it, it's not indigenous ag, no matter what you're doing. You could be out there in a malo, a traditional dress and farming kalo or a traditional crop and doing it in a traditional way, but if you're just out there like doing it for the money, or doing it for reasons that aren't situated in place and in people and in community, then it just – it doesn't matter.
It's not just the practices. It's not just the crops. But there's a lot of “why” in that.
Paula: That's so interesting. So it kind of removes it from the global export commodity type way of thinking about food production and centers it in community. And what I find interesting about that is it parallels with what the United Nations has defined as its principles of agroecology. There's 10 principles of agroecology that they've articulated. And it does speak to – when I saw it, it looked familiar to me as some basic Hawaiʻian values that we've held onto all this time. And many people have maintained a thread of relationship into, and now it's more flourishing, but I feel like the rest of the Western world is now coming around to what Hawaiʻians pretty much knew all the time is – it has to be rooted in community and relationships. Respectful relationships, not only to the earth, but to the people who grow the food and then who's going to receive it.
Noa: Yes, absolutely.
Paula: So how does that fit into a global context of like, growing indigenous crops for a school in Hawaiʻi, for a large school system in Hawaiʻi? Would that fit in that frame, do you think?
Noa: Yeah. I mean, that's a - becomes an increasingly challenging question. I think, you know, you can think of community at a lot of different scales. And I think in Hawaiʻi, we're a fascinating case study, right? Because we have very clearly delineated boundaries, right?
I mean, obviously there's the communities, but you know, we have an island, we have a state that's separated from the continents by over 2000 miles. And so, there's a little bit easier maybe to have those discussions around, how local is local? Which is a question that gets asked a lot on the continent, and you end up drawing arbitrary lines of like, okay, a hundred miles is local, but what does that mean?
And because of our extreme isolation, thinking about the archipelago, thinking about the state is a good final boundary of what is local, but I also don't think we should start there. I do think it needs to start at a true community level and all the practitioners we talked with, they didn't have any issues with food going outside their community or with food going, even outside the state.
If you're satisfying the community needs first, right? So you don't grow and then just start exporting; you grow and you feed your community and then, okay, our community's fed. Now we can expand outside of that. Then maybe we feed our island like, oh, okay, the Island's fed. Then we can expand to the state, then we can expand outward.
But you know, starting from that community foundation and working up. Whereas the global model is often the complete opposite, seeking, to satisfy the big markets first. And then considering communities like a niche market, that's kind of a last thing filled.
Paula: That's a good reorientation.
If we could stay on that for a while. So there's the Aloha plus challenge in Hawaiʻi of trying to double local food production by 2030 and by many accounts, local food production - obviously it depends and this is sort of an average across crops - but is anywhere from five to 15%. So it would be getting to 30%.
What does that mean to you in this context of being local and feeding community first? That percent, is that meaningful to you? And also then what do you think it would take to get there? What do you think about that goal?
Noa: Well, I mean, I think any movement in that direction is meaningful, so I don't want to dissuade us from that goal.
Although I do think it is a small step. I would like to see our state think more ambitiously and be a leader much as the way that it prides itself in having been a leader in the renewable energy goals and being the first state to aim for 100% renewable energy commitments. And given that agriculture is a deep part of our Hawaiʻian culture.
It's a deep part of our state's history. It's very prominent in our state's constitution. You know, it's an area that we should be a leader in. And Hawaiʻi is blessed with tremendous resources in the agricultural sector.
[Music: Kolekole - Pacific Sounds]
You know, our ecological diversity means that we can grow pretty much every crop on the planet. You can find its appropriate habitat here in the islands and could grow it. We have generally really quite fertile soils. As a whole, we're fairly rich in water resources. And so there's just a tremendous opportunity for us to be leaders and demonstrate what true food self security, and sovereignty look like in a state.
In addition, I think we're also among the most at risk when you look at food security. Our extreme isolation, our local food system. In addition to importing a vast majority of our food, the way we import it is extremely tenuous. And, we essentially rely on a “just in time”, almost an in real time, balancing of food consumption and importation, because we don't have extensive storage in the state.
So I think Chad Buck said that, at any given time we have about three days stockpile of food.
Paula: Chad Buck is an importer of food.
Noa: He is. Yeah. One of the major importers. Hawaiʻi FoodService Alliance. And so, he knows firsthand and also had to deal with it firsthand in what he calls a test run emergency with COVID when supply chains were breaking down, and what it took to get food to Hawaiʻi.
And so, if you think about any real large-scale national disaster, whether it's a social disaster or a physical natural disaster -
Paula: Like a hurricane?
Noa: Like a hurricane or earthquake, Hawaiʻi's at major risk. We always talk about what if Hawaiʻi gets hit by a hurricane? What if California gets hit by an earthquake and they can't ship food out of there. What if there's another large scale world war and food gets diverted away from – you know, we're at the very end of the supply chain. And so Hawaiʻi's in a really tenuous position with our food. So, yeah, so there's both a big opportunity and a big threat, a big reason why we should be aiming to be more self-sufficient in that sense.
Paula: So by many accounts, this Aloha Plus Challenge has been sitting on the books, on a website with indicators and not a lot of progress has been made. So what are your thoughts on that? I don't mean to reduce it to that simple sentence, because I think there's an awful lot of folks working to make change in that direction.
But there's also a big question mark as to what changes are being made. What’s your thinking about what needs to happen to get to that goal by 2030, which is eight years from now?
Noa: I mean, I think the… one of the first things would just be a lot more conversation.
I still think there are a lot of different perspectives that are not well connected in terms of what the solutions look like. And you have on one end, people saying we have 7,500 farmers in Hawaiʻi, over 7,000 of which are small farmers. So we're a state of small farmers. We have to support the small farms.
And then the other end you have like, well, really it's just the top few percent of farms that's actually supplying most of the food in Hawaiʻi and we actually need more big farms. And there's. very little agreement, very little consensus and very little discussion about what the solutions need to look like.
So, step one would just be to start talking about it more, helping facilitate those conversations, putting more effort and energy and resources into, really asking those questions. What does need to happen? I do think some things are clear and common across the different perspectives.
One of which is that over the last more than a century, Hawaiʻi has been a plantation based agricultural system. And so that all our infrastructure was set up for that type of production and essentially for large scale export of just a handful of crops. And so regardless of if you want big producers or small producers, there is a serious lack of infrastructure in Hawaiʻi that can allow for a local food system to thrive.
Paula: Can you call out what kind’s you mean? Logistics, warehouse, storage, local food processing, meat processing, things like that.
Noa: All of it. Yeah. Cold storage, transportation, warehouses, food safety, facilities. processing.
Paula: That could be an investment.
Noa: Well, see, and that's where I think there’s a disconnect, even on the size of the farms, it starts to feed into that. Everyone recognizes we don't have the infrastructure. The government wants large producers because they're gonna bring the capital investment. Those who are supporting more small-scale production are calling on the government to make some of those investments because the small producers can't put forward the amount of capital it takes to build out some of those facilities.
Paula: So we need an “all of the above” kind of solution.
Noa: Well, I mean, I think it often just gets back to who's flipping the bill on this thing, right? We need it. Who's gonna cover those costs.
I mean, arguably it should have been the legacy of these plantation industries that profited off of agriculture for so long, or perhaps it should be the honorous of the tourism industry today, which has kind of taken the place as that extractive industry. But yes, in some ways these investments need to be made. A little bit of my opinion right now is everyone's just kicking the ball back and forth. Like, “you make the investment”. “No, you do it.”
Paula: So if I gave you a magic wand and you could have whatever happened, happen from waving your magic wand, including agreement on things, what would you have it be?
Noa: Well, I see a lot of value in there being more people on the land, you know, the legacy of the plantations removed, right?
A tremendous amount of people formed the land base in ancient times, and it was basically in agrarian society. You had a much, much closer interaction of, of people and land.
[Music: Kaaawa Ranch - Pacific Sounds]
And I think that's really important for a broad range of reasons, cultural reasons, environmental reasons, social reasons.
For all of those, I think returning individuals to the land is a core part of the solution, not just Hawaiʻi, but that the world needs. Whereas the plantations tended to remove everyone from the land and worked vast areas with a much smaller population.
Paula: The economies of scale?
Noa: Yes. That said, you know, now working in ag a bit and working, especially with small producers, there is a lot to be said for the economies of scale, going back to the infrastructure, right.
A small producer - not only can they not make the investment in a piece of infrastructure, they can't utilize it fully. If you build a big warehouse and you have a little five acre farm, you're just gonna use a little corner of it. So what I would like to see, if I really had a magic wand, would be some new hybrid models: collaborative, small to medium scale production.
I'm not a hundred percent sure what that model would look like, whether it is tenured tenant farmers, or cooperative community based. But something where you have a reasonably large land base that has some equitable distribution and collaboration that simultaneously allows for people on the land and more small-scale diversified production that is feeding into economies of scale.
Paula: A sort of already mid-scale, maybe.
Noa: Yeah.
Paula: Not necessarily global scale. I say that because I often talk about needing sort of a mid-scale food economy available. So we right now have this global super highway. We have the smaller markets, which I've sometimes analogized as being like a bicycle lane. But you need something in between. You need a grand boulevard that is tree-lined, and has walk paths on the side. But in other words, that mid-scale seems to be missing throughout the United States. Is that what you're talking about for Hawaiʻi?
Noa: A little bit, but I think that collaborative nature has to be part of it. So it's not just independent mid-scale producers, but there is this coming together of producers to achieve some of those economies of scale and other outcomes.
Paula: So another question that comes to mind for me is land availability. So a lot of the land in Hawaiʻi - and I haven't taken a close look at some of the inventories that I know have been done - but had been owned by the plantations, which were largely descendants of some missionary families. Is there enough land available to achieve this mid-scale vision? However, it's arrived at. And should there be some intervention there now to help make that more possible? If it's not available already.
Noa: Yeah. I would say yes, as a whole, the land is available with the exception of Oahu, by far the most urbanized island. The trajectory is that we're all moving in that direction. So I do think more stringent steps need to be taken to ensure we don't continue with the loss of our ag lands.
Paula: Perhaps like conservation easements, agricultural conservation easements, things like that.
Noa: Yeah. And we are seeing that and we put together this Build Back Better grant. One of the local resources we looked at was how much ag land was in conservation easements now. And I was unaware that HILT, The Hawaiʻi Island Land Trust, and TPL the Trust for Public Lands, how much ag land that they did have under their easements now.
So I think that's a strong model, but stricter state and county laws in terms of rezoning and the usage of agricultural land I think would go a long way. We did a survey of south Kona as part of my PhD work quite a while ago now. And of the 160 ag parcels that we interviewed and talked to, less than a third of them were actual farms. A tremendous amount of them were retirees who kind of did gardening and ran a B&B, had like true gentleman farms where they just have a horse and that's ag and, you know so, yeah.
There's a lot of very underutilized ag land that's either completely misappropriated in terms of its usage or is used in very, very marginal ways. So there's a lot of lands that could be brought back in the production.
Paula: So this feeds into my wonky policy brain and makes me think about a suite of government related incentives or disincentives. And restrictions or conditions. Maybe it's implemented through Hawaiʻi Land Trust and the Trust for Public Land, because they can put conditions on the conservation easements that they own. But maybe also there could be other incentives and disincentives that are imposed by government.
Noa: Yeah, I think absolutely. I mean, I think that would be some of the low hanging fruits that aren't gonna cost the government a tremendous amount. In some cases, could be used to generate more revenue. So right now, if you have ag land and you build a mansion and keep a horse, the only penalty is you don't get the ag rate discounts.
So they're misappropriating ag land, but there's no penalty for it, they're just paying normal residential rates. You know, to me, if you're doing that on ag land, you should be paying double, triple because you're using lands for how they're not supposed to be used. And that could go into funding, like you say, incentives for people who really want to do ag.
Paula: To support the smaller farmers. Yeah. It would be a public declaration and a recognition that growing food in Hawaiʻi is important. So it would recognize that food is a public good that we're offering to the people of Hawaiʻi that we know we want to get to this goal. So in order to do that, we have to really look seriously at how ag lands are used.
Noa: Yeah. and I mean, it starts to feed into the culture; this culture of wanting to have food production and good food available. And so it's just one more mechanism that helps funding flow and, and stuff like that.
Paula: So there's a lot of concern I hear from, especially larger institutional buyers is that buying local is more expensive because you have to ship inter island. That's one aspect of cost that we don't have in California, there's trucks that'll take food from, if we wanted to have a more local supply chain.
And again, in California, it's the same only five to 15% of food in California, which is where most of the fruit is grown for the United States iff not the world ,only five to 15% of that actually remains local; but we could set up trucks if we wanted to. So it doesn't increase the cost too much to bring things from the farms to the urban areas. In Hawaiʻi, you have this issue of inter island shipping, but there may be some other costs associated with local food too.
Noa: Yeah. Well, I mean the big one is land and labor costs. Land costs, I think could be addressed through, through policy and should be. I just got back from Scotland where they have these crofting declarations, which are a response to the …I'm blanking on the term now. But anyway, they, when they were kicking all the Scots off the lands for the English estate eventually the government stepped in and, and kind of created these crofting designations.
But one of the aspects of that is the value of the land is legally mandated at the undeveloped cost of the land. So here in Hawaiʻi, our ag lands are being valued at the developed cost of the land. So if you want to buy 20 acres of ag land on the north shore, the cost of that land is gonna be like, well, what would someone pay to buy that land and put a mansion up? And then suddenly 20 acres of ag land costs several million dollars because you're competing against,, this urbanization standard. And being as living in Hawaiʻi is in high demand, it really bolsters the land value. So, valuing ag land as ag land, as land that should only be used for farming, would drop that land value tremendously.
Paula: And also as a high priority use.
Noa: Yeah. And I don't know if this really fits, but I mean, a thought I had on this recent trip on the plane, was that a tremendous amount of our global economy and food in particular is completely based on inequality. The reason why we import ripe avocados from Mexico into Hawaiʻi in large part is because of these differences in labor wages. That is just the result of inequitable sharing of resources and capital. But as the world moves towards this homogenization and standardization, a lot of the vision of global politics is that there's gonna be a more even playing field, at which point a lot of these economic transactions globally won't make sense anymore. If laborers in Mexico were getting paid 18 bucks an hour, that we have to pay in Hawaiʻi, this whole thing suddenly wouldn't make sense anymore because we do need to transport them 3000 miles on trucks and boats and all this, and –
Paula: And adding the carbon footprint.
Noa: Yeah, of course. And so, looking further into the future…now it's cheaper to import food from central and south America. But I don't think that's always gonna be the case. Before the European colonization of the world people grew food in very diverse and different systems that were very much adapted to the local ecology. You had systems of forestry and systems of flooded pond fields and systems of varying degrees of intensity. But all of them really considered:what is the environment we're in. What can this land, not only what can this land do, but what does this land want to do? And so instead of really imposing, a system onto the ecology, it really works with the natural ecology of the system.
Paula: Some people would say that we can't feed the world with systems like that. What is your response to that?
Noa: Well, I mean, I would say several things. One is that most of the world is still fed with those diversified systems. Although we credit the green revolution and European agriculture as being the dominant world food supply, still over half the world is fed through smallholder agriculture.
And I think that kind of is testimony to that. We could probably feed the rest of it that way as well. The other is that the science is starting to catch up with this now. And even the simplest act of like, instead of growing a mono crop, let's grow two crops together, produces an effect they called over yielding which literally means, rather than growing a hundred acres of corn and a hundred acres of beans separately and getting 10 tons of corn and eight tons of beans. If you grow them together, you get less of each, but you get more in total. And so it literally demonstrates that growing two things together is better than growing one, and that, if you follow that logic it's likely that, even more diverse systems are more productive on a per area basis.
We talked about values and what we're valuing earlier; we don't value per area basis. Actually we value, per unit cost basis. So the thing with diversified systems is they are harder to mechanize, and therefore you need more labor and therefore they're more expensive, but that again is following a line of thought that less people on the land and more mechanization is always the good thing.
Paula: Well, plus the outcomes of those mechanized systems are profit and calories. But not necessarily nutrition and not necessarily soil health. Or biodiversity or any of these other things that we recognize now as a society, we need to value. Hawaiʻians seemed to recognize that awhile ago.
I understand your work builds on the concept of Biocomplexity. Can you talk about that?
Noa: Sure. So, I mean, the concept of biocomplexity is really, you know, humans are in a co-evolutionary process with our environment. Hawaiʻi's an amazing place to study that because, well, for a lot of reasons, but you know, we have a very short human history here and we have an extremely diverse local ecology.
And so you can literally see how people from a common ancestor, the same cultural group of people came and settled our islands. And as they started, you know, whether you lived in a river valley or whether you lived on the Leeward Plains, like you can literally see diversification of, of the culture in society based on the environment: different emphasis of the gods in your religion; different reliance on staples that resulted in different ceremonial practices and different protocols; different educational needs. Our people were literally diversifying socially and culturally before our eyes really, I mean, a blink of human history, which is all very theoretical, but to me has great lessons in the sense that what we do and what we build feeds back upon ourselves, right? When our ancestors took the time and invested in a big fish pond, that starts to influence what the next generation did. Because now they have this wonderful fish pond. So, okay, we're gonna farm a little bit less and we're gonna put a little bit more energy into doing this.
And those lessons hold true today. So what we build and what we install on the landscape and in our politics, it feeds back on who we are and who our future generations will evolve to be. And I just think it's a really important lesson, right?
The seven generations concept, every decision you make, you need to consider seven generations. And that's really what the biocomplexity, that's the lesson to me in studying biocomplexity that, the decisions, what we're doing today are not just gonna affect us but they're gonna have very longstanding effects on our future generations and the trajectory of our society into the future.
And consequently, the flip side of that is we are also a product of our histories and recognizing that understanding is also important in terms of understanding where we're at and where we're heading.
[Music: Waialua By Night - Pacific Sounds]
Paula: I know you have children.
Noa: I do, two.
Paula: What would you want for your grandchild? What kind of Hawaiʻi would you want?
Noa: This is a tough question. You know, you do wander into a utopia, but… really just wanna see them have communities that have relationships that value each other and value the relationships we have with each other.
I feel like Hawaiʻi's really drifted away from that even in my lifetime and considerably more from talking to my elders; and I would like to see us return to valuing people and valuing the people around us more.
Paula: Thank you so much.
[Music: Theme song]
Many thanks to our sound engineer, Keola Iseri and to Sue Woodard for project support.
And to the students at Waipahu high school: thank you, Carissa, Landon and Sid for your sound creation. Thank you. Ashley, Erica and Reiko for graphic design and to their teachers, Noelle-Lilli Ediger and Sky Bruno.
And Mahalo nui loa - much gratitude - to our sponsor, the Hawaiʻi Institute for Sustainable Community Food Systems at the University of Hawaiʻi West Oahu.