Ehulepo

Great Conversation

2012-02-11T13:52:00.001-08:00

http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/transcript-charles-eisenstein

Generation X represent!

Family Traditions

2012-02-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky I only broke my ribs on the right side in 10 places, snapped my collarbone, and collapsed a lung. It could have been much worse. I hit the ground at very high speed and from a bit of an altitude after things went suddenly very wrong while riding a young horse this weekend. It hurt much worse than giving birth, I can tell you that. I count over the places where I might have decided differently and avoided the experience. And yet this too is what it is all about, my life. My parents and I compare notes on broken collarbone, broken rib experiences. My mother took a big spill chasing wild goats at South Point when I was about five. My father got bucked off his big red half-draft mare (the ranch's all-time top bone-breaker) and went back to work in two days, back to roping cattle two weeks later. He's unbelievably tough, but he didn't break as many bones as me.

Warhorse

2012-01-20T08:10:00.000-08:00

It is dusk and rains come across the Ka'u Desert. The horses stand at the gate, hoping I will open it onto the new pasture, but they must wait. This morning I went to see if the old gray mare, my father's "warhorse" in former days, had passed. I hoped so. She had fallen and could not get up. Her time had come, but she had lingered, lying there under the sky. I had put my hand on the gun to put her down, to put her out of her misery, there on the ground. But a voice inside me had said no, that she would find her own way to the other side. Strong-willed horse, you were never afraid.
When I told my mother, who had fed her daily for the last three or four years and who could not bear to see her dying, that she had indeed gone, she said: "So she made the leap."
"Yes," I said.

Multi-dimensional

2012-01-16T16:35:00.000-08:00

That is ranch life. The day before yesterday I spent the entire day saddling colts. Today, blessedly, it is raining. I celebrate by gathering electronic and paper documents for our annual workman's comp audit. Click, click, click, scan, convert, download, send. Resend. Usually I turn Pandora on to get through the robot dimension. "God Doesn't Take American Express."
My daughter and I have decided that there are a lot of similarities between Pomeranians and I Pads. They are both amusing, clever little pets.You buy them so that you can take them around and show all your friends. You buy them cute and expensive costumes and accessories. Marketing genius.
I have a lap-top. It's not so cute. It's more like a hound dog.

Saddling Colts

2012-01-15T09:39:00.000-08:00

This is as close as I get to a spiritual activity. It is also emotional, physical, and intellectual. It is something that you do with your whole body and mind. With your energy and your alpha waves. With your compassion, your creativity, and your strength.
You are offering them a culture. Your personal cultute. Your version of reality. Your way of life. It had better be a good way of life. So getting a saddle on a colt reaches deep into your life. The young horse will question you in their wordless way, and you must have something to say for yourself, for your species, for the order of the world.
They come to this willingly. They give you the benefit of the doubt. That is the miracle of horses.

Doing It

2012-01-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

Rode hard for four days last week. Blissful, punishing. On Wednesday we moved herds, on Thursday we sorted cows that had gotten mixed up and moved them back into their proper pastures, Friday we walked 400 mama cows and calves 3 miles to new pasture, Saturday we had a little branding -- 125 calves or so, lots of British Whites. On Sunday I cleaned tack and in the late afternoon rode some of my young horses that are not quite ready for the high pressure situations that come up routinely in ranch work.
Yesterday, Monday, did Honolulu, a farm-to-table demo with Chef Mark Noguchi and farmer Shin Ho for the American Farm Bureau annual convention. Met Andy Tranh and Amanda Corby. Mark broke down a short-plate on stage, which is a little bit like mud-wrestling only with tallow.

culture cont.

2012-01-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

I repeat myself, I realize. But perhaps the best kind of thought is the one that comes back. That circles the words that it is trying to herd into the light like a sheep-dog.
The so-called soft disciplines of culture go much deeper than we grasp at this point.
We have valorized the engineers and the economists, the financier and the venture capitalist, the scientist and the system analyst, the statician and the adminstrator for so many long years.
We defined what was serious by its dollar value. Then we systematically destroyed the values that gave the dollar its value. Now we don't know what to do.
More grieviously we don't even know why anymore.
The why never was something that you could just say and be done with, like the ubiquitous mission statement.
Why was where you came from, who you loved, the beloved horizon where your dreams and fears lived, the possibility of a world made by your own hands.

Boots, Culture

2012-01-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

Wore through another pair of my favorite cowboy boots - Olathe Muleskinners - yesterday. These lasted me about 4 years. I used to wear through a pair a year, I was cowgirl-ing so hard. Actually these could have lasted a couple more years if there was a shoe repair shop on the island. I send a pair like this to Drew's Boots in Oregon to be re-heeled. They told me they were beyond repair. The thing is they are still pretty much water-tight.

It occurred to me this morning that we don't have any kind of energy crisis, food crisis, water crisis. We just have a heck of a culture crisis. We adapted our culture to cheap energy. Now we are going to have to re-adapt. I'm sure we will bitch, moan, and fight every step of the way. But material reality does not change; we have to. And my god, it's not like the culture we have now is all that perfect. A less wantonly industrial culture will be quite a relief to most people and to the planet.

New Year, Ranch Life

2012-01-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

This year started very auspiciously with my father's annual New Year's Eve Party -- lots of family and friends in my parent's garage, lots of kids setting off fireworks, lots of huli-huli pig.  We played Texas Hold'um for brass rivets and laughed at each other. The New Year came, we were all a bit amazed to still be awake, hugged each other, helped to clean up, and went sleepily into the new year.
Yesterday we had a branding. We worked about 125 calves - vaccination, castration, and worming.  It is probably the worst minute of a cow's life, but it is all done for good reasons and as quickly as possible. Then they go straight back with their mothers. We had a skeleton crew so the ranch kids really had to pitch in, which is a satisfying thing to see, the next generation hard at work. My father roped calves on Kualii, my brother's black Apaloosa, and roared encouragement at the kids. It was so hot that no one had an appetite for lunch for a long while after we were done. In the afternoon a great bank of cloud rolled in from the east and mist raced across the mountain pastures. My puppies got lost, and then I found them. In the night it rained.
Today I replaced the tire that I shredded last week driving the flat-bed. That was a bit of a wreck. I still need to get the fuel line re-attached properly, that and the driver side mud flap. Everyone who saw the tire was impressed.  The guy at Lex Brodie's said, "Ho, you no fut aroun'!"

Food & Nature

2011-12-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

"One problem is that in Western nutritional science there is no effort to adjust the diet to the natural cycle. The diet that results serves to isolate human beings from nature. A fear of nature and a general sense of insecurity are often the unfortunate results.
Another problem is that spiritual and emotional values are entirely forgotten, even though foods are directly connected with human spirit and emotions. If the human being is viewed merely as a physiological object, it is impossible to produce a coherent understanding of diet. When bits and pieces of information are collected and brought together in confusion, the result is an imperfect diet which draws away from nature."

Masanobu Fukuoka

It rained

2011-12-15T00:54:00.000-08:00

Last Night. There is no more happy sound on this earth than that of a serious-minded rain on a metal roof. I hope for a wet, muddy, "miserable" Christmas, for green shoots, puddles, streams, mushrooms in the cowpies, clouds, mist, fog, dew. In the midst of the second year of drought, rain-water and all the phenomena associated with it, the very words themselves, have a sensual, almost erotic, fascination. In classical Chinese "clouds & rain" is a euphemism for sexuality. I no longer consider it an odd metaphor. When it rains I feel as if a darkness is washing away: dark worry, depression, fear. In its place is a new, small joy.

New Mexico

2011-10-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

This land has its beliefs and its thoughts. One can hear the land thinking and dreaming in leaf and mud, hills and waters. The strong, fierce, gentle soul of the land is in the grace of draping pine branch, in the tangle of the willow saplings at the edge of the ravine, in a spray of flowers blooming amid the grey-green wormwood.
It is easy enough to miss this, not to hear the thoughts of the land, to pass by hearing only one’s own thoughts, the speech of men echoing and clanging within one’s mind.
The black one in the sky speaks. All day the bee speaks in the brush-land, in the great nothingness on the other side of the gardens, the leaf unwinds its dreams in the shifting light of the woodlands.
Is it knowledge if we cannot name it: another human speak, whisper, write it down?

How awesome is the Quivira Coalition?

2011-09-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

http://quiviracoalition.org/images/pdfs/1954-Journal_34.pdf

Choices

2011-08-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation today with my friend, the remarkable chef Mark Noguchi, about ambition, talent, and choosing the place where you are. Our conversation was part text, part cell phone - frenetic and staccato, like most conversations in these days.
Mark is a passionate soul in the very best sense, he is all about sustainable food, local communities, native culture, restoring the 'aina and the people.
It started with Mark calling me to see if he could get a hold of 6 pounds of beef fat to render for next month's Kanu Hawaiii Eat Local Challenge. That's a real good, grounded place to start a conversation: availability of beef fat.
Then I opened my email and saw the Food Network had a casting call for chef talent. I thought of Mark with his big personality and unquestionable charisma. He would just kill it: imagine the Mark Noguchi TV show, cookbooks, signature restaurants, merchandise empire. I texted him asking if he was going to try out. He said that he was too busy and happy doing his thing in the 808.
Which I get, totally, completely. There's all that stuff and then there is what you love to do, madly, completely, all in. And sometimes ambition is just a temptation to sell your soul right down the river.
Choosing the place or places that you give your life to defines who you are. To choose a place or be chosen by a place and to give yourself entirely to that choice is a powerful act of love and creativity. You become bigger than yourself in that moment. You become part of a living place. There is no end and no beginning, as Su Dongpo said.

2011-08-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

I went out just before twilight, and turned to see two hawks circling above the hill behind my house. I thought of what my friend Palo said, watching an ‘io circling above the ‘ohia forest on the slopes of Mauna Kea: “And we think we are the most advanced species…”

It's true that we can hardly fathom that there might be intelligence anywhere outside of ourselves. We still look down on people who see intelligence in nature: the animist, the shaman, the primitives. Our culture - the Christian and scientific rational culture - says that we are the only ones that matter. The world is for us. It is a powerful idea. Also, it becomes clear, a dangerous idea.

Because we are the only ones that matter we isolate ourselves from life in concrete apartment blocks and office buildings where we go spiritually insane and that is somehow normal and desirable. Our intellectual concepts, our concept of intellegience, have become our straitjackets, instead of our tools. We have developed our capability to lay asphalt and to process information but forgotten how to be a part of a living world.

We are advanced alright, but it seems that there is a point where advanced turns into its opposite.

My “Imagine”

2011-07-12T11:18:00.001-07:00

Imagine this: that we loved energy more than we loved things.

That we could see the luminescent and invisible dance of energy through our lives,

And this was our great delight and reward.

Imagine that we treasured life above gold and silver, above possessions and security;

And that we treasured death as the transformation of life into energy.

Imagine that we renounced power, renounced control, renounced wealth,

And sought to make free and joyful lives for ourselves and all other beings.

Imagine that we left behind the manipulation of money as a pointless, circular game;

That we understood mindless success as a destroyer of life;

Imagine that, above all else, we sought to understand and to nurture the jeweled network of life:

The dance of people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, all the invisible ones;

That we valued machines as tools to a radiant planet, not as ends in themselves;

Saw ourselves as citizens of nature and stewards of life on earth, not as consumers.

Imagine that our greatest achievements as people would be a richer, more finely balanced planet;

That our greatest glory was to bring back life into our dead places;

That always before us was the vision of a beloved place, a beloved country, a beloved world.

Without Names

2011-07-03T09:33:00.001-07:00

I learned today that my grandfather, Eustaquio Ganda Galimba, may not have been born with that name, exactly. That name may have been borrowed from a cousin who was a year older, and who had signed on to immigrate to Hawaii, but when the time came to board the ship was too ill to travel, so my grandfather, then only thirteen and therefore too young to contract as a plantation worker in his own name, took his place and his name. Did his real name stay behind in the Phillipines I wonder? What was that name?

I know who my grandfather was. It doesn't matter so much whether he was born with the name or not, or what the story was. I knew who he was. I knew his flaring anger, and his great kindness, his restlessness, and his relentlessness. He had a violent temper, was arrested and jailed for abuse of my grandmother more than once, and was admired by the young men of the district for his spirited pursuit of the opposite sex well into his eighties. He was a chicken fighter and a marijuana grower. He gambled and he drank whiskey. He also raised five children, building his family up from the poverty of his childhood to the affluence of the American middle-class. He gave his children every opportunity. He was a scrambler and a person that enjoyed life. He constructed magnificent gardens in which my daughter, his great-granddaughter would wander, picking and eating delightedly. This was when he was in his nineties.

I don't know what his mother's name is. My grandfather died some years ago and now nobody remembers what her name is. I reproached my father, he said that they hardly spoke of her. It makes me think of a beautiful, powerful book of poems that I once had by a Filipino-American living on the California coast. The book was called "Without Names," I believe.

And that, as I like to say, is so Filipino. So Filipino, like eating every part of the animal, like living together as a multi-generational family, like having big dramatic domestic disagreements, like participating in illegal but fairly harmless activities, like living culture with a small c, like having a very fluid sense of identity.

It is entirely consistent with the Filipino esthetic, if there is such a thing, to take on the name of one's cousin for life, to resist or ignore the attempt to fix thing and people with names, to control, define, and perpetuate. After all, a name is the most gossamer of veils – a pattern of sound or dark marks, a point of light that might mean something, or something else. The ancient Chinese understood the double-edged power of names – the Confucian tradition was obsessed with fixing names, the Taoists with subverting them.

Filipino Women

2011-04-07T22:39:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about Filipino women. Filipino women are strong. They are presidents. They run businesses. There are a lot of cultures where women are like that. The men don't mind, are not shamed by being bossed around by women. They would rather go hunt, fight chickens, or whatever anyway. And make garden. That is what we say: make garden. "What are you doing these days, now that you are retired?" "Oh, you know, I am making garden." Filipino men are hardwired with the green thumb.

On the other hand Filipino women are known worldwide as sex workers and cleaning women. Is there a conflict in that? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only a certain perspective that sees sex and cleaning up as degrading. Both arts are, can be, an honest living. Both arts are very much a part of honest living.

Then I realized I'd read this a few days ago from UKL i.e. Ursala K. Le Guin (who I've been mad in love with since grade school) :

…like that woman we all know who's been pushed so far over by cultural bias that she can't stand up and crawls around the house scrubbing and waxing and spraying germ killer on the kids. But even on her kneebones, where you and I will never join her, even she has been practicing as best she knows how a great, ancient, complex, and necessary art. That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society.

As housekeeping is an art, so is cooking and all it involves – it involves, after all, agriculture, hunting, herding…So is the making of clothing and all it involves….And so on: you see how I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skilful and powerful way of being in the world.

From: Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 155.

There is another kind of culture and another way of being in the world, waiting there in the wings, already there but not easily visible. Already being practiced but without fanfare, without being on the cover of magazines. It is the same kind of thing that gives (Filipino) women their strength.

Art/daily life

2011-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

Why is it that the only Culture that seems to matter is the one that has broken free from biological responsibility, and exists in a shining, fragile, parasitic bubble. Why does Art have to be so dysfunctional?

So much of Art & Culture seems like the rage of caged animals at their confinement. Like gilding the bars of the cage. Or covering them with grafitti. The same cage that is closing in like a garbage crusher.

Beauty is free. That is one thing I know.

Things I like: the small acts of making by gentle but independent people, the cadences and melodies of daily life.

Everyday life, unfathomed yet. We don't even know how to eat in a way that is beautiful and respectful of the great world.

The Silence

2011-04-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

The long silences of herder are not empty, but represent their blending into the cyclical processes of this land, a oneness for which words seem superfluous even in the Eveny language which was fine-tuned for use here. From Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. This seems to capture a kind of silence that is not really silence but a listening to the music of the world, listening as it passes through you and is all around, and maybe with the one(s) that you are being silent with. It is not silence but no one is speaking.

Life & success (that’s all)

2011-03-24T17:34:00.001-07:00

First there is life. That is all, life. Life in the very broadest sense. Life and being, much the same. Rocks have life, as does plastic.

Then there is animate life. With all the attendant drama of moving, stopping, living, dying, reproduction, transformation.

We, with our fine minds, our powers of invention, like to make up stories about how things are supposed to be, but after all there is only life. It is the most important thing to remember. If we could keep that in our mind we would not chase dreams so much. Those dreams that have led us to spin stuff out of oil and metal like crazy fools.

What is it that we wanted with all of this stuff that we have made? A warm place, enough to eat, to be clean and healthy and happy in our families, however constituted. Everything else is just the means to those ends, or a detour. Everything.

Isn't it absurd that we cannot understand even our own needs? Do we define success by fulfilling our needs? No, success for us is about being better than everyone else, or trying to be. Much good that does. In fact, it does much evil. We hardly recognize the world we have made anymore, it is so over-built.

Our heroes of late have been engineers and physicists. We have all manner of machines. Now we live in order to keep the machines running. We work in order to pay for rent, food, water, for electricity, for the car and gas that goes into it, for the cell phone, cable-TV, internet connection, for the airplane, the airport, the shipping vessels, the delivery trucks, the factories, the tractors, the hospitals, the oil-rigs, the shopping centers, the cities! We have to keep all those machines running, each of us, otherwise we will be going backwards!

We can't imagine that, going backwards. We are terribly afraid of going backwards. Because going backwards means having less power, means being vulnerable, means, perhaps, failure. Failure to be better than everyone else. To do away with what is not really necessary, with what no longer works, is not failure.

Perhaps if we understood that seeing ourselves and our needs very clearly is a way forward. If we can see what we truly want and need, we will not expend energy, increasingly precious energy, on anything that does not get us there directly. What gets as much of the world as possible there, to what we truly need.

So one must challenge the idea of that false, invidious success, in the name of life, a good life, a good world. It is not so difficult, to get to the world we need.

Death in the Afternoon

2011-03-22T17:50:00.001-07:00

Chicken-fighting is one of the past-times of winter and early spring while the roosters have their tail-feathers. Some people think that cock-fighting is cruel and perhaps they are right, but if you have ever seen what roosters will do to hens, it makes you a lot less sympathetic. Chickens are some of the most vicious creatures on this earth. We can all just thank the Creator God that chickens are not 10-feet high, because us humans would have been extinct a long, long time ago. So there is quite a bit of practicality to fighting roosters. You only need so many.

I've only been to one cock-fight in my life and that was with my Filipino grandparents. My grandfather had an island-wide reputation as a breeder of fighting chickens and when he was in his prime his yard was filled with huts and cages for his chickens, with roosters tied out by a string around one leg, gazing down their beaks with imperious fierceness. The chicken-fight that I went to took place in the old Filipino camp in Pahala, under the shade of the giant, ancient mango trees. This was in the 80's when the sugar plantation and mill were still in full operation, but the Filipino camp was quite broken-down already. I don't remember much about the chicken-fight. There were crowds of people and my grandmother took me around to show me off to her friends. For some reason I ended up getting a hair cut there in someone's living room.

I watched one chicken-fight: first the round of betting with much yelling and money held high in the air, then the chickens were let go. Being a "let-go man" is a special skill -and dangerous, as the roosters have knives tied onto the spurs of their legs, and they waste no time going after each other. There is also a "knife-man" who specializes in tying on the knives. Then there is the owner, anxious. He has bred or bought the rooster, fed it a special diet, groomed and massaged it to build up its muscles, trained it with sparring matches. The two roosters circle each other with ruffs open like angry lizards, then fly at each other clashing in mid-air. They peck and bite at each other, and slash with their bladed legs. It's over in minutes. One combatant is dead or nearly, the other is triumphant and deadly. Each chicken is collected by its owner. Money is redistributed. Another pair of roosters are matched.

More often than not a fight erupts between the humans as well, or some kind of drama. Everyone is jacked up on money and surrogate battle. Someone is caught stealing or cheating or not behaving the way they are supposed to be. There are threats, yelling, posturing. Perhaps it comes to blows. Usually not. Just blowing off adrenaline. It is a Sunday afternoon. A past-time that takes place in clearings in the forest or fields - it is illegal - but that doesn't stop anybody: some things are older than laws.

Community Concerns About the Biofuel Project

2011-03-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

People I know stop me to talk about the biofuel project quite a lot these days. Some of the comments that they have voiced to me:

The honeybees in Ka'u are just starting to recover. Will the feedstock be grown using pesticides? If so this could have an effect on my honeybees and my livelihood producing honey. What assurances do we have that this will be taken seriously?

Do the project planners understand that they cannot just strip the fertility out of the soil again? It has taken this long to build anything back up after sugarcane. What are their plans for maintaining fertility in the soil?

If, as stated at the County Council meeting, this project will provide 200 permanent jobs and it takes 20 people to run the plant, what exactly are the other 180 jobs going to consist of?

I want to support biofuels but I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this project.

Balanced Cycle

2011-02-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

I'm a member of the current Agricultural Leadership Program of Hawaii (ALPH) class - which is an experience I highly recommend. We visited Kauai in January for four days of farm tours and intense discussion (always) between the class-members and the farmers we visit. One of the most intense was a talk by my fellow Board of Agriculture member Jerry Ornellas. Jerry talked about virtuous and vicious cycles and challenged us with the question: "what does a balanced cycle look like?" No one had an answer then, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

What seems pretty clear is that we need to balance extraction with regeneration. Unfortunately our present system provides very little incentive for regeneration of any kind. At least formally. We all know we have to regenerate our own private support systems, and that our" professional life" often conflicts with that need to regenerate our personal resources of energy, health, family.

Furthermore, the economics of almost any pursuit encourages, even demands, full-tilt resource stripping. If an enterprise understands the necessity of regeneration, it does so as an adjunct to the main task of transforming resources into wealth/power/survival as efficiently as possible. There is no margin for regeneration.

How do we balance efficiency and regeneration? How do we value an enterprises' return to its own ground, its regenerative power? How do we discourage irresponsible extraction? How do we articulate regenerative power as a source of pride and social prestige? How do we, at the very least, make some room for the regenerative cycles that Nature has developed over its billions of years of existence?

A lot of it comes down to social ethos - the way we think about ourselves, our way of making a living and consuming, thinking about the complexity of natural systems and our place in them, understanding the basics which we were all educated to forget. A lot of this will become much more clear as the Great Unwinding unwinds.

http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/254427-an-interview-with-michael-shuman-if

Avatar

2011-01-23T18:28:00.001-08:00

Kane talking about lying down in front of bulldozers.

Cliff-hanging off pali to find endangered plants.

Hippies living in remote valley of Kalalau

Green flanks, black teeth

Trail beside cliff that falls into ocean - Old Hawaiian man on horseback – seeing the hair in the water under the empty backpack

Story of Ko`olau & Pi`ilani – refuge- hanging valley – waterfall

Red dirt mud

Cycle of methane fuel production – anaerobic digester – methane –generator adapted to burn methane – electricity – heat byproduct –absorption chiller

Mud ditch and red dirt ribbon around the island

Ornellas – vicious/virtuous cycles – what is a balanced cycle?

Definition of agriculture enlarged to include all human activity? (Renewed) understanding of agriculture will only come through explaining connections, engagement, participation, holding stake. There is agriculture in astrophysics, agriculture in everything, can we remember in time? It's possible to be human without agriculture, but it's not possible to have a civilization without it, even just a village.

Mikinalo (carnivorous plant) and ohia makanoe

Smilax (hoe kuahiwi)

Can we remember in time?

Biofuels in Ka’u

2011-01-13T11:15:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I went to a public presentation of a biofuels project in Pahala. A company called Aina Koa Pono wants to come into Ka'u and harvest biomass from 13,000 acres for a biofuel processing plant that will involve microwaves. The presentation was held at the Pahala Clubhouse, a graceful meeting space built during the plantation era. There were approximately 100 people there and two video cameras. It was a warm afternoon, and there were plenty of mosquitoes taking advantage of the crowd. The chief engineer Sandy (Alexander) Causey stood in front of the group and gave a fairly detailed explanation of the process by which the organic matter would be vaporized, filtered, re-vaporized and distilled into synthetic crude (aka biodiesel)l, kerosene (aka jet fuel) and gasoline. The byproduct of this process – char- would be put into a boiler to create electricity to run the plant. Everyone was very polite, but the questioning that ensued was decidedly skeptical in tone. Sandy Causey is not PR guy, which is a good thing for the people of Ka'u because they get to see what the real deal is on this project. To be blunt, there are big gaping holes in their business model as far as their agricultural/harvesting expertise. They really don't know what they are doing, especially in respect to the actual physical costs of growing and re-growing biomass. It's not something I hold against them very much. Ignorance of biological reality is rampant. On the other hand, ignorance does not inspire confidence. Is it okay for them to blunder into our neighborhood armed with a HECO contract, federal funding, and an amorphous plan? I really don't know. On the one hand, no one knows what they are doing when it comes to facing the transition from away fossil fuels on the ground level. We absolutely need to have alternative energy processes being developed, even if it not particularly efficient or knowledgeable production, just so that we can learn to be efficient. On the other hand, there is a good chance that the project will fail because of the project designers ignorance of some very basic realities of Ka'u, the kind of experience that regular people have, the ranchers, the farmers, the loggers, the bulldozer operators. Unfortunately that kind of experience does not seem to be getting into the spreadsheets for this project.

Reading: A World Made by Hand

2011-01-05T14:48:00.001-08:00

Kunstler's novel is dystopian sci-fi of a different sort. Our more probable future, as is now apparent, will be one of devolution, rather than hyper-technology. If we come up with something along the lines of nuclear fusion, then we're on for R2D2 and the Death Star, but if not we're looking at a transition to the kind of neo-rural scenarios that Kunstler imagines. It's unclear whether he longs for or dreads it more. Me too.

Kunstler's novel is the story of the events of a few weeks in the town of Union Grove, in the vicinity of Albany, after the oil has run out, influenza epidemics have decimated the population, and bombs have destroyed Washington D.C and L.A. The electrical grid has gone down and central government has faded away. The town is on its own – for its food, fuel, shelter. Life reverts to the patterns of a 100 years ago, with the difference that people of the town are demoralized by the memory of how easy things were before.

At this point the odds are looking better for decentralization than world cities. We may lose some ground in the efficiency of production with decentralization but it is the lesser of two evils.

Eco-villages

2011-01-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling very optimistic about the new year and the new decade which I've decided starts now, rather than a year ago. 2010 was the end of what we will call the George W. Bush decade (pace Obama) and look upon with wonder and a twinge of embarassment for decades to come. We have a saying in the horse-training world (where there is a high and immediate cost in physical pain for bad decision-making): "Good judgement comes with experience. Where does experience come from??? Bad judgement." So let's get on with it now that we tried all that and saw how it worked out for us. :)

I began the new year with a websearch (aren't we humans great, we have websearches!) which led me eventually to the concept of the Eco-village and it occurred to me that I don't live in an economically depressed rural backwater - I live in an eco-village. Well, really, an eco-district. Sure we all drive around in trucks that gobble diesel, use LPG, and have high rates of unemployment and drug use. I didn't say we were angels. But we have a thriving community spirit, close-knit 'ohana, mad gathering, hunting, and fishing skills, and an intense connection to our beautiful, tough, magnificent Aina. Ka'u has soul.

end of 2010

2010-12-28T18:27:00.000-08:00

We have a choice: to be active or passive, to believe in something or just go along, to create or to consume.

It's really that simple. The choice part anyway. Putting that choice into action is anything but simple. And if we choose the active path, well, we have to act. To change the world for the better, to the best of our abilities, in little or in big ways.

We all change the world anyway, every day willy-nilly, by our choices or our ignorance.

We can make it better with our labor and our intelligence. We can create beauty, help others, build a community. We can look around and try to see what needs to get done. Look around and see the sky, the ocean, the land and let what we see, hear, smell, feel sink in deep.

Horns of a Dilemna

2010-12-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

Finally finished Nature - An Economic History, thanks to my mare who fell over backwards onto my right calf thereby creating some downtime. Nature is a unique book - densely argued but not impenetrable or academic, in the pejorative sense. You learn a LOT about marine molluscs along the way (Vermeij is a paleontologist specializing in fossil molluscs). More to the point, it has given me a much more powerful way to think about the interplay of natural systems and human social systems, including our economy. That we share an economy with nature is as at once obvious and forgotten. For farmers and especially for ranchers it is the stuff of everyday life: mediating the transformation of sunlight into dollars. Most of us would rather just stay in the sunlight part and forget about the dollars, but we have families, mortgages, and automobiles just like everyone else. But that's not the dilemna that I'm talking about.

It has become increasingly obvious that human civilization faces a troubling dilemna. Our success (or over-sucess) as a species, expressed by ou exponential population growth, has been largely due to certain social and cultural traits that encourage innovation. Among these traits have been competitive freedom at the individual level (free-market), and diffusion of power (democracy). Conditions of growth and prosperity breed innovation, which has led to further growth and prosperity. We have been able to innovate out of all previous limitations on growth by finding new resources to exploit or increasing the efficiency of our exploitation. Now we face global resource depletion and environmental degradation.

We will again need to innovate - socially, culturally, and mechanically -our way to a solution. Innovation requires freedom. Freedom requires growth/prosperity. Continued growth may well be fatal to our species and many, many others. Such is the dilemna.

Vermeij does not have A Solution. He does pose the question extremely well, and he does offer some interesting ideas to begin to address the dilemna . One such idea is to adapt the system of checks and balances that has, for the most part, been successful in diffusing power in Western democracies in order to limit corporate concentrations of power, and thereby increase the resilience of our economic ecosystem. Another idea is to require that corporate decision-making take into account true costs rather than simply profitability.

Performance & power

2010-10-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

As a caveat, I should say that I'm only a third of the way through Nature: An Economic History, (by the quote earlier, you can see that it's not a book that you just zip through), but I'm thinking quite a bit about the concept of power that is one of the central themes of the book. Nature selects for performance. Performance is measured by power. Power, for Vermeij, is energy, advantage, the ability to capitalize on opportunity. It's the core of what we mean to express by money. Performance is not about dominance but persistence.
It's a very stark but very clear way of looking at the world. And yet it makes more sense than our current valuation system, which is tilted way over towards the valuation of excess, not the means of persistence. Such as childcare and families. Or the health of the ecosystems that would allow us to persist. Or knowledge of the real world and the ability to create practical plans for our peristence.
An economy built around performance, rather than greed and fear, would bring us closer to persisting.

Currently Reading

2010-10-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

Nature: An Economic History
Geerat J. Vermeij

it rocks
It might be an idea slightly ahead of its time - I say this because to my surprise my biologist friend bristled slightly at the mere thought of the conjunction of nature and economics.
But what is real sustainability but bringing the two together?

Here's a little sample just totally at random:

In other words, actions and codes that look as if they are designed for the common good emerge because they confer on their bearers or creators not only long-term advantages, but the kind of short-term advantages which natural selection can enhance. The long-term benefits cannot be selected for directly; natural selection is very much about advantages here and now, not in the distant future. Traits conferring long-term advantages emerge because they also work well in the lives of individuals and produce positive feedbacks that enhance the economic well-being for a large number of other participants in the economy. By creating a shared common interest, selfish benefits become traits for the common good.

One could chew on that little bit for quite a while...

"Food" two ways

2010-10-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

I had dinner with my parents the other night. When I walked in the door, my dad said, "I was going to make pork with squash." That's his code for: "Michelle, why don't you make dinner with the above-named ingredients and try not to mess it up." The pork was leftover huli-huli pig(spit-roasted whole over kiawe with garlic, ginger, and lemongrass). The squash was that long green Asian squash that I don't even know the name for. My father and brother raise pigs, and grow the squash at the edge of the pig-pens where they are irrigated and fertilized by the piggery run-off. So I cooked some rice, peeled and chopped the squash, sauteed garlic, ginger and onions, threw in the the squash for a bit before the pork, covered, cooked, stirring a couple of times for, say, 20 minutes. Totally easy, nutritious, tasty, soul-satisfying, and it all cost less than $3 in bought ingredients (rice, onions, garlic).
The next day I was in Honolulu with a little extra time to spare, so I went to Whole Foods for some market research. Whole Foods is the ne plus ultra of value-added retail venues in Hawai'i, so I like to just look around and see what they're onto. I saw my friend Lorie Obra's Ka'u coffee "Rusty's Hawaiian" prominently displayed so that was worth the trip in itself. I also noticed that WF was carrying tiny goat loin-chops. I wanted to get some gifts for the friends that were putting me up for the night. I got a bottle of wine, artisan olive bread, two bars of super-premium chocolate (one spiked with chilies, the other with bacon(!)), and marinated olives. That cost me $75. The person in front of me spent $250. The place was a-buzz with beautiful people, there was excellent music on the sound system, and gorgeous prepared food everywhere you looked.

You could hardly have two more extreme experiences of food. Both were enjoyable, although so different. The big difference, to me, is that in our dinner at home the food just came right up out of our lives as a family, the work that we do, and the place where we live, mostly unpackaged and raw. In the other case, the food was also part of a lifestyle, but it was lifestyle as an assemblage of products for the purchasing. Of course there are all kinds of other ways of experiencing food, but the contrast struck me as near the two ends of the spectrum.

agriculture as art

2010-10-01T14:10:00.001-07:00

Really it's the first art. We've come to see agriculture in terms of production, simply because that's being the way of our civilization for the past few hundred years - to make everything more and more efficient, more and more standardized, more and more scientific, more and more technological. But agriculture was the first and most daring art, the art of taking up the materials of nature and making something out of it. Making gardens out of wild earth. Taming the beasts of the plains. And yes, turning the natural fecundity of living things to our purposes. Ranching is large-scale landscape art, among other things. And being part of the constant conversation between the soil, the grasses, the sky, the weeds, the animals, the very stones in the fields, and the people. It's just not an art that you can fit into a box and mount on your wall. It's not consumer art. It's much bigger than that.

reality based on reality

2010-09-30T22:51:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of time away from Ka'u in September. A week or more. It gave me a bit of distance on my favorite place. One thing that struck me was how little cognitive dissonance I experience here. I feel fairly OK about the terms of reality, even in this hellacious drought. Droughts happen, even the mother-of-all-droughts happen. It makes sense to me. Sharp contrast to last weekend at a conference at Ko'olina - the resort with a view of an industrial park. I found the presence of the industrial park comforting actually. Industrial parks are not pretty, but at least they're honest. Resorts - even the most tastefully done, culturally sensitive, native-specie adorned resort - make me slightly nauseous. They're just so fake. The fact that you can get a locally grown salad and creme brulee delivered to your room at any time of the night doesn't begin to make up for the alienation of being in an overly-constructed environment. For me, anyway. So, some people are anti-GMO, I'm even more fussy. I want the world to make sense.

Biophilia & The All Around Person

2010-09-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

I've been reading E.O. Wilson's Biophilia, in which he makes the argument for conservation of habitat in humanistic terms. In other words we need to save wilderness in order to save our souls, so to speak. A love for living things is written into our blood and bones, our instincts and emotions. This seems completely obvious to me, living the kind of life that I do, but I know that there are many people (supposedly 90% of people live in cities) who do not have much contact with the non-human living world on a daily basis (except that they eat biologically-derived substances everyday.) Wilson reminds us that sustainability is not just a technical problem. It is also an ethical challenge. We must alter our values system so that we can recognize systems that are in balance. We have trained ourselves to value and create systems that are not in balance. That is the essence of profitability. And, ultimately - let's be honest - profitable is the opposite of sustainable.
People often say we must invest in education. We must teach our children science and math, because we are being left behind by other countries. I agree that they should learn more science and math. The best investment that we can make, however, is to teach them to be all around citizens of a living world. Science and math will help us to create a less unsustainable civilization, but these analytical skills will need to be combined with a love of living beauty, a drive towards creating living environments, and instinct for balance that draws on our creatureliness as much as our analytical skills. Organizational and leadership skills are as important as technical skills if we are to create the flexible, decentralized and yet interconnected systems that will increase resilience. We need to be able to envision a world in which we are not burning through our resources at breakneak pace, and teach ourselves to be the inhabitants of that world. We must use science and math to get there but they must be yoked to common desire for a living world.

improbable?

2010-08-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

just exactly what is it that we need to see the way forward? why are we so tied to a life-world that is so spectacularly dysfunctional? it all operates pretty well now, as we burn through the oil supply at a rapid clip. the solution is simple, but improbable. it has nothing to do with smart this or that, thought leadership, international conferences, or non-governmental organizations of benevolent intent. all that stuff is well and good, but it involves a whole lot of time and energy spent in spinning our intellectual wheels. the solution requires everyone to get their hands literally dirty. to produce. to be both intellectual and worker. yes, it is socialistic, even communistic. they weren't wrong on everything. they were wrong in thinking you can force people to do what needs to be done. that doesn't work in the long run. there is a need for leadership, for articulating direction and organizing resources, for intellectual work. but then you have to just get out there. boots on the ground. our culture is frighteningly top-heavy and stratified. there are too many people that work out and not enough that work. people expect jobs to be created for them and not to have to figure out what needs to be done, then go do it. maybe I'm getting prematurely crotchety here, it's just that I know that we can do so much better for ourselves and for our kids. I think it's actually easier than we make it out to be. but it means taking some degree of physical responsibility for the means of one's own existence, without which everything tends to become a thought exercise. it means not following the money, but following the real things - the essentials of our sustained existence. perhaps we can re-link money to these essentials eventually. right now, our system of value/money has become severely distorted so that money is a pretty poor indicator of long-term value. but to restore real value will require a social consensus that will draw on the experience of each of us taking responsibility for our part in the making of our world.

Then and Now

2010-08-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

While foraging on the web for info on tech "guru" Esther Dyson (of all things), my wanderings led to this collection of color photographs from the Great Depression/1940s.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/07/rare-color-photos-from-the-great-depression_n_674344.html

It is fascinating to see the difference between then and now, what we have gained and what we have lost. Here's my list:

Obligatory hat-wearing

Paint on houses

Physical work and getting dirty

The mental and physical flexibility to lie down on a wooden porch floor and be comfortable

Horses as a part of everyday life

Separation by race

Extreme rural poverty

Lack of building codes

Back

2010-07-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

So I got through it. July was crunch month for me. Aside from generally keeping the wheels on the bus, I took Kuahiwi Ranch Natural Beef on the road to the Hospitality, Lodging, and Food Expo at the Blaisdell and the State Farm Fair at the Bishop Museum. We got lots of positive feedback on our product. Mufi Hanneman became a fan. But our biggest fans were the toddler set at the State Farm Fair. The 3-5 year olds were running away from mommy to get a second, third, fourth, and fifth sample of our beef all weekend. They licked their toothpicks off. They dragged their parents back and insisted that they buy. That has got to be the best kind of endorsement you can possibly have.

Future of Agriculture Panel

2010-06-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon at Xavier University
Quirky, lovely, very level-headed stuff.
http://www.postcarbon.org/audio/94710-the-future-of-agriculture/22069-culture-behavoir

Miloli'i

2010-05-22T13:54:00.001-07:00

I remember waiting for my father's fishing boat to come back in at the beach at Miloli'i (in South Kona). My younger brother and I would play by the boat ramp in the lava rock tide pools. Pahoehoe lava that was once flowing liquid stone, hardened into voluptuous folds at the water's edge, forming shallow basins lined with seaweed and coral, populated by tiny fish, crabs, sea cucumbers. The water, absolutely clear, washed in and out, carrying tiny flecks of seaweed, evanescent bubbles and swirls like fairy-tale hair. The ledge of tide pools dropped off into a small bay where a few boats were anchored on the pale sapphire.
In Miloli'i one felt yet the rhythm of an earlier world, that world that existed before, when we did not know there was anything else to do but simply live in it. Edge of land, edge of water. Sunlight and coconut trees. Mid-day silence.
Another way of saying it, Miloli'i has not lost its Being. It resists being real estate. It is a Being in which the lives of humans have been held for a thousand years, in the pulse of the sea on the shore, the ebb and flow of time and lives. Bones among the coral. Coral in the bones. Lava worn by sea and feet. Children laughing in the small waves on the other side of the bay.

Growth towards Equilibrium

2010-05-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

I've been reading "Holistic Management" which is basically about sustainable ranching and holistic decision-making. I came across a sentence in a section about ecological succession that began "Complexity, productivity, and stability..." And I've been chewing on those three words for the past couple of weeks. They seem to sum up, in my mind, the direction that we need to take as a society. The frustrating thing is that there is so much work to be done and yet no "jobs." I am thinking that the idea of a "job" has become obsolete, a relic concept of the old economy. Now there is work that may or may not provide a margin at any given moment. Everyone is going to have to accept that risk and the responsibility of their own means of existence to a far greater degree than just a few years ago. There is still huge potential for us to grow but it will not be in the exponential upward curve of the old economy. Now we have to grow towards equilibrium. There is room for growth in building a stable, complex, and productive economy - but to do that we are all going to have to take on the responsibility as co-entepreneurs and not just employees. And we'll need to support each other to make it possible, and yet we cannot take away the elements of risk and freedom that keeps us honest. There is and needs to be a process of succession going on - where we move away from a simplified global economy towards complex re-localized and scalable economies.

Mind-bending

2010-05-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

look into our possible futures...

biology is technology: the promise, peril, and new business of engineering life
Robert H. Carlson

Organic Pt. 3

2010-04-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to articulate, hopefully once and for all, the reasons for not jumping on the certified organic wagon. There are a lot of things that one just inherits from an agricultural upbringing - ways of perceiving, thinking, making decisions - that are ingrained into one's very consciousness and therefore hard to develop into words and arguments. I'd like to get it out and move on, really.
I don't want to go the organic route because the scale is all wrong for me. It seems like a micro-solution to a micro-problem. Part of the scale-thing is that we ranch on 10,000 acres, a good part of it infested with an invasive weed - the dreaded popoki - that sports poisoned talons on every milimeter of vine, twig, merest wisp of leaf. I reserve the right to retaliate in kind, even if it is bad karma. (Yes, I do have a Republican streak.)
But the other part of the question of scale has more to do with re-thinking our present paradigm. To go organic I would have to focus on technical questions, on figuring out how to do what I do with the products listed by the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute). And, honestly, we've got bigger problems coming at us like a freight train in a tunnel. Or worse coming at our kids. Organic is going to be a moot point a whole lot sooner than we'd all like. The big question for me is not whether my own deal is or is not organic, it's whether we can think through the post peak-oil, post-global structural questions with nimble wit and gutsy fortitude in time for our kids to have a good kind of world. So that's what I'm going after. And organic, heirloom tomatoes will be in there someplace, I dearly hope.

Organic Matter

2010-04-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

"More carbon is stored in soils than in all plants, all animals, and
the atmosphere combined. Soil organic matter contains
an estimated four times as much carbon as living plants.
In fact, carbon stored in all the world’s soils is over three
times the amount in the atmosphere. As soil organic
matter is depleted, it becomes a source of carbon dioxide
for the atmosphere. Also, when forests are cleared and
burned, a large amount of carbon dioxide is released. A
secondary, often larger, flush of carbon dioxide is emitted
from soil from the rapid depletion of soil organic matter
following conversion of forests to agricultural practices.
There is as much carbon in six inches of soil with 1%
organic matter as there is in the atmosphere above a field.
If organic matter decreases from 3% to 2%, the amount
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could double."

From Building Soils for Better Crops

Organic

2010-04-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

People ask me all the time why don't I get organic certification for our ranch. I could probably ask for more dollars for our beef. Then again I'd probably price myself out of my local (Ka'u) market. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is that the idea of organic doesn't appeal to me. I mean I support it in general but I just can't get excited about it. Mainly I just see the certification process as a whole bunch more words to manipulate and papers to fill out in a world with way too many words and papers going around already. Something like that. But what does get me excited is soil science. Stuff like this from "The Living Soil" chapter of the SARE publication: Building Soils for Better Crops www.sare.org/publications/bsbh/bsbc.pdf Bugs, fungi, bacteria, slugs, nematodes...and cows.

Nothing

2010-04-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

The best things about my life are not-things. I've chosen the life that I have -which is a pretty weird life compared to the average - because I can't live without those not-things. When I tell people that I live in Ka'u I often get this look of disbelief, because it is the no-where of no-where, the extreme boonies. But damn my life is so rich, I almost can't take it sometimes, and it is the stuff in Ka'u that makes it so rich. It's the community and when I say community it's just the closest English equivalent to something that tangles much deeper. It's the spirit of the land that is like endless music in the heart. It's the nothingness that lives.
Sometimes I think about trying to get other people to understand Ka'u and I feel like I have to create content to get people's attention - products, events, stories. But it's really missing the point. Ka'u is not about the content, it's about the anti-content. It's about that feeling that you'd be happy to spend the rest of your life, and several more lifetimes, if you had them, just trying to understand Ka'u. That it would take all your brains, heart, creativity and strength. That it would leave you weather-worn but complete. And that the best part of it would be way beyond words.

Crash Course

2010-04-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.postcarbon.org/video/89646-the-crash-course-exponential-growth

All food producers should be respected

2010-04-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

It really disturbs me that there is a tendency to bifurcate the agricultural world into bad farmers and good farmers. This mostly occurs amongst food commentators, not so much amongst actual farmers. The attention that is being placed on agriculture is a wonderful thing.
I hope that out of all of this attention a new generation of food producers will be born who will command the respect of their peers and who will help to shape a new culture that respects the land, each and every acre of it. I look forward to this new culture that is in love with the land and the ocean again. I hope that an innovative spirit will be brought to the practical questions of how we derive the most basic necessities from our natural environment sustainably and fairly. I dream of a day that we will see large numbers of highly productive and diverse farms on a human scale that can provide a good living for farmers.
I hope that farming becomes very, very cool. Even beyond that I hope that farmers become regular people again and not the slightly quaint folk that we are considered today. It is a deeply satisfying and incredibly challenging way of life. And however you manage to do it, if you can make it work, then it should be respected. Because whatever kind of farmer you are, at whatever scale, you will only make it work if you very accurately assess the place where you are farming, the resources that are available, the technology that is most appropriate, the presence and capacity of processing infrastructure and distribution channels, and not least, the audience for your product - your market, your consumers. Any farming operation has to be an accurate reflection of what is and what might be.

What's Really Going On

2010-04-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

The politics of food is really big right now, which is just great. There's much talk of a food crisis. Seven million people watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. There's an organic garden at the White House. It's an exciting time to be a food producer. We feel like Cinderella - maybe we'll actually get to dance with the Prince at last.

But you know, it isn't really a food crisis that we're having, no, not so much...America is having an identity crisis, a values crisis that we are projecting onto food. Everybody who's ever been a teenage girl knows that eating disorders are not actually about the food. It's about all the other stuff, the feelings we can't quite handle. We're scared out of wits because everything we see around us seems to depend on burning fossil fuel. Our cars, our clothes, our food, our houses. Our entire way of life. We get that out-of-control feeling.

We're a nation with an eating disorder. Because we were and are living a lie. You actually can't have an economy based on the service sector because, hello, that makes no sense! We can't all play the stock market because the stock market has to be based on something. Monopoly money is not real, and just because it looks like food doesn't mean that it actually is.

But you know food is a very basic thing and if we can get that right, if we can remember what food looks and tastes like, if we can find some integrity there, maybe it's a start.

So there's an opportunity here for food producers to push for a food system that makes sense, to help to heal our wayward culture, to seize the moment and offer something better, and at the same time demand that our own lives and lifework be better recognized and rewarded.

Careers in Agriculture

2010-04-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

A telling moment today. I ran into a dear friend and mentor at the airport, a brilliant educator and advocate for gardening skills as a means of hands-on learning. She mentioned that she had received an offer from the Hawaii Community Fund for three scholarships for students majoring in agriculture. She had to turn down the offer because there was no one wanting to major in agriculture. Yes, that’s how bad it is. As long as I have been alive we have been punishing those who chose a life in agriculture with low wages and long hours, uncertain livelihoods and social condescension. Yes, punishing and for decades.

A practical example

2010-04-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

of what I was trying to get at in my last post.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/28slaughter.html?ref=dining

In what could be a major setback for America’s local-food movement, championed by so-called locavores, independent farmers around the country say they are forced to make slaughter appointments before animals are born and to drive hundreds of miles to facilities, adding to their costs and causing stress to livestock.

This is a problem that I deal with everyday. It's a part of what I mean by saying that it's not enough to buy local. Is it the farmer's and rancher's responsibility to create the infrastructure necessary to get the food all the way onto the plate? Do farmers have the millions of dollars and more importantly, the time and stamina to get through the regulatory hurdles of putting this infrastructure into place? We are trying to get it done, but the obstacles are daunting. We could really use some help, and not just in the eating part.

Where to begin?

2010-03-30T01:54:00.000-07:00

There are some things that have been swirling around in my head for some time now, but difficult to articulate.
I spend most of my time these days trying to build a supply chain from my family's ranch to consumers via farmer's markets, restaurants, and stores. I'm literally a poster-child for our local "buy local" campaign and can rattle off the arguments for buying local passionately. And yet I feel slightly hypocritical when I do so. The local food movement, the organic food movement are admirable things and I support them. But all the while I know that just buying local is not near enough. I thnk about the statistic that every farmer in the US feeds 120 people. 120. That is a heavy load to bear. I think about the producers that I know of, and the worry and frustration in their eyes. The worry is not just for our individual lives and businesses. It is about the system. We are very capable people - strong, disciplined, creative. But we can see that we cannot bear the load. That the burden is too great. That we cannot do what needs to be done with the resources of time, money, and energy that we have to offer. We can see that most people do not begin to fathom the social and physical infrastructure that makes the basic necessities of life available to them. We were all brought up to take our the necessities more or less for granted. We were brought up to work within a highly hierarchical system with jobs specialized and ranked. To get to the top of the food chain. To pick a career with the highest possibility of the highest wages. Nobody told you to think about where those wages were coming from. If it paid a lot of money then it must be important and necessary. And the necessities would be taken care of by paying other people to take care of them. Of course. So we have built a culture around the faulty premise that value will be assigned rationally. That the most important and necessary things will be valued the most. But that hasn't happened, not exactly. And so when the logic falls apart what will happen? That is the worry.

The frustration comes from the same source. Farmers and ranchers know that the more basic and necessary the food stuff, the less viable the business. We are frustrated that we are preyed upon by our own society. That none of our businesses quite "pencil out." That we bear the burden of a system that has evolved into nonsense, ignorance, and frivolity. These are bitter words and it pains me to say them. But they are true, I think.

And so what is the answer then, if buying local is not enough. It is to take responsibility at a deeper level. To help to make our world make sense again. To fight for the right to contribute. Not just as a consumer, but as a producer, a builder, a maker. And there is all the poetry and beauty in the world in that.

Secrets of the Mountains & Oddities of the Farmer's Market

2010-03-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

This Dr. Seussish-looking plant is a rare native called opelu, like the fish. It was growing in the ravine that we hiked through in the forest (nearly a month ago now, it's scary that the months flash by like days). It is called opelu because the underside of the leaves have a silvery irridescence like the fish flashing in the water. It is the mauka incarnation of the makai fish body, in the Hawaiian poetry of names and things.

Last week I turned up at the Na'alehu farmer's market and there on my neighbors table (she sells jewelry) were four Buddha's hands, a variety of citron celebrated in Chinese culture for its fragrance. What are the odds of that? Supposedly there are only two trees on the island, and those four hands are the entire crop this year for one of those trees. I bought two. My friend Lorie Obra, the coffee grower, kept asking me "What do you do with it?" Lorie is Filipino and I'm half-Filipino, and that is the quintessential Filipino question. We are very pragmatic. My explanations about the Chinese aesthetic of qikuai or strangeness, was not satisfactory to her. So after appreciated the weirdness of my Buddha's hands for a few days, I chopped up the less weird one into little bits and candied it. Very yummy. I'll take it to the farmer's market today to reassure Lorie that I have not betrayed my Filipino values.

Tomorrow

2010-02-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

I'm going up into the mountains to beg the gods for water.

OK, I'm going to go up in a Toyota Tacoma with a bunch of guys to map out a waterline from a spring deep in the mountains, and the actual gods that I have to appease are a bunch of bureaucrats in Honolulu, but still it's going to be a primal day of slithering around in the mud and the ferns literally searching for the source of all goodness and life: fresh water.

I've been up to this spring perhaps a half a dozen times in the last 15 years. Although it's marked on any number of maps, it is still a little tricky actually finding the living, bubbling thing in all that forest. We want to bring a little of the water down to help the ranchers of the area survive this El Nino winter, but the spring is located in a conservation district and the layers of bureaucratic permitting that shield it from even the most innocent use are forbidding, to say the least.

Actually it's not really a spring either, as it was created in the twenties and thirties by the sugar plantations. Work crews dug a horizontal shaft into the mountains at the meeting point of a porous layer of lava stone and an impervious layer of volcanic ash. Where the water filtering through the rock met the thick ash, fresh water would flow sideways creating a potential water source.

One of the unforgettable moments of my life was the day we hiked up into the mountains, past the known spring in search of a half-remembered one, into a deeper wilderness of moss-thick ravines shaded by hapu'u ferns and came upon, in all that brown and green, a straggly red rose-bush with a single bloom struggling for light where some long-dead tunnel diggers had planted it near their camp as they searched the mountain's layers of rock and ash for the hidden streams of water.

Kuahiwis in the city

2010-02-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the link to the wonderful article that Wanda Adams of the Honolulu Advertiser did about a beef tasting that Alan Wong put together. Dan Nakasone likes to stay under the radar but he has been doing so much for local agriculture, and much of it out of absolute aloha, that he really deserves a medal of honor from all of us in farmers and ranchers for making it happen. And Alan Wong has brought along so many farmers, putting up with our beginner's mistakes and learning curves as we figure out product, processing, packaging, distribution - and how to act in the big city. He and his crew make everyone they come into contact with feel like they are the President of the United States. Big Mahalo, Alan, Dan, Wanda!

Beef, au naturel honoluluadvertiser.com The Honolulu Advertiser

Wild Read by a Wild Woman

2010-01-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Ex-vegan radical feminist anti-pornographer born-again farmer from the city etc. My boyfriend is getting sick of me referring to him as "the patriach" but that's just my geeky sense of humor. Lierre Keith has done a lot of very interesting research, which she turns to very provocative use. She calls veganism "part cult, part eating disorder." You go, girl!

Hard but Good

2010-01-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

One of the books that I have been dipping into is James Herriot's "All Things Wise and Wonderful." It's another 25 cent book. Definitely not the latest thing. Herriot relates his experiences as veterinarian - pre-penicillin! - in the English countryside in the 1930s. What is striking is the richness of the lives of the people and animals he writes about. There is bitter cold, rain, and war, dirty barns and deep snow, but there is also the deeply satisfying beauty of open countryside, and the unpredictable revelations that come from living with and among other species. There is also the unrelenting labor that comes with making a living in agriculture. "Them were hard days," says a retired farmer wistfully, "hard but good." Herriot also describes unflinchingly the characters who have been ground down to dour rancor by too many hard and hopeless days. That is one of the reasons that so few people today are in agriculture. You don't have weekends, holidays, or guaranteed sick days. You don't have much time or energy for philosophizing or art. And yet your life is art, but it's not the kind of art that is clean and shiny and for sale. It's unpredictable, often quite grubby, and just as often blazingly glorious. It is not something that you can buy at Neiman-Marcus, ever. You find your art in your hard but good days, in the poetry of making.

Ua on Big Pharma

2010-01-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

My daughter, Ua, who is 8, said something hilarious, and sad, last night as we were driving home. She said thoughtfully: "I don't know about these "doctors", they are making up all these drugs and nobody wants to buy them." I laughed. Undeterred, she continued with her business analysis: "Grandma and Grandpa use Tylenol and Advil, so I guess they are doing OK, but Symbacort and all these other ones that have ads on TV, nobody wants them. But they just keep making more and more ads."

The Power of Limits

2010-01-03T23:36:00.000-08:00

"To hard-core nationalists and neoconservatives, the acceptance of limits suggests retrenchment or irreversible decline. In fact, the reverse is true. Acknowledging the limits of American power is a precondition for stanching the losses of recent decades and for preserving the hard-won gains of earlier generations going back to the founding of the Republic. To persist in pretending that the United States is omnipotent is to exacerbate the problems that we face. The longer Americans ignore the implications of dependency and the longer policy makers nurture the pretense that this country can organize the world to its liking, the more precipitous will be its slide when the bills finally come due.
A realistic appreciation of limits, on the other hand, creates opportunities to adjust policies and replenish resources - perhaps even to renew institutions. Constraints subject old verities to reconsideration, promote fresh thinking, and unleash creativity.

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, 174.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T08:33:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone that has commented on my blog either here or to me in person! I really appreciate it.

As my daughter would say (and she wasn't even around when it started): "That was the best decade ever!"

Here's to the beautiful and tough world we live in, to grief and joy, and all the blessings that befall us everyday.

The Magic Mountain

2009-12-19T21:37:00.000-08:00

I picked up Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924) in a really good translation by the unimaginatively named John E. Woods amidst the bodice-rippers on the twenty-five cent table at the Na'alehu Farmer's Market the other day. I came across this line last night: All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, the the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. To track that sentence down took great skill in hypotactic sentence construction, of course, but even more courage. Going there, to the place where we all measure ourselves against what the world secretly whispers to us and what we expect of ourselves, is to visit a place of great incoherence and vulnerability. Just to speak of such things sheds a little light and courage in the darkness where we all go fumbling to make a life. Thomas Mann's novels are vertiginous, often almost frightening reading experiences. Well, and to live in Germany through the first world war and its aftermath would give you a front-row seat on the catastrophic melt-down of a civilization.

Post global

2009-12-07T23:31:00.000-08:00

We are, I'm thinking, moving into a post-global world.
It is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic world.
The great global system crashed, and now we know that turning every place into every other place just isn't very smart. Because you lose too much of the particulars that add up to a reality worth living in and being passionate about.
We lost track of the basics - of how life and lives are sustained - because we made money the measure of all things. But we didn't measure everything in money, not the things like sanity and safety, breast-milk and soil fertility, coral reefs and fresh eggs. So we were making flawed calculations and flawed decisions, becoming more and more alienated.
We are going to need to learn how to assign value to particulars, without making these places, people, or things globally interchangeable. We are going to have to learn how to value what is most valuable, in some kind of common language like money. I'm not sure how this is going to happen but it will, because there is no other way.
And we could lead the way.

War

2009-12-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

My daughter announced to me suddenly: "Today Samson (her aptly named classmate) and I agreed - the people in Afghanistan should stop fighting and we should just be friends." This startled me. It seemed so fresh and radical.
I said, "You and Samson are right, however...it's not quite so simple" So then I had to explain 9/11, the war on terror, Bush I & II, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and all kinds of human insanity and bad-ness. I felt like I was justifying it by making it comprehensible. It is all just so stupid and yet hasn't it always been like this?
Humans have this burning need to be important - to be on top of the food chain. It's a lot easier and faster to get important by being hard-hearted, selfish, and greedy than by being kind, humble, and generous. It all unrolls from that little kernel: all the wars, Wall Street, and most of history.
You'd think that being important would make people happy, since we desire it so ardently. Sure, being important does provide lots of adrenaline thrills and there is no greater drug than home-brewed adrenaline. It just never ever ever is enough.
Nope, it's the nurturing and generous people that are deeply happy, which is some kind of quiet justice.
But we've really got to get a handle on the adrenaline thing - if we're ever to have a sane world.

First and last

2009-11-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

My dog died about a month ago. I've been mourning. He was old and had lived a full, happy, but intensely arduous life chasing wild cattle in the mountains with me when he was young, and then herding cattle on the ranch later. He lived well and died well, free and in his element. Still, it hurts.
In some ways I saw, or felt, the world through him. He was a dog, he had fleas, and did gross dog things. Still he had a fine mind and spirit. In his last days, in the midst of many trips to the vet to try and keep him here, he showed me something very beautiful. He showed me how to sit and listen to the world. He did this with great intensity, almost as if he were hunting but different, and I could feel his mind out there in the wind and the grasses waving, the distant sounds of the ocean and the cattle bellowing, the light on the mountains and the hours of the night. It was different than a hunting mind though, it was letting it all in, in all its fathomlessness. He showed me the simplest possible happiness.

The Tao of Ka'u

2009-10-19T23:31:00.000-07:00

The rain has come back tonight, suddenly, though I felt it coming hours ago and made sure to put my saddles away.

I was talking with my friend Dan yesterday, who was visiting Ka'u. He was asking about the connection that the people of Ka'u have with the land. It is hard to talk about the deep stuff, the feelings that run like a river throughout our lives.

It struck me tonight that living in Ka'u is a kind of religion or belief system - a stubborn belief in intangibles. Like the feeling of living in a landscape that shimmers in the sunlight, so full of primordial power it is, or the richness of recognition in the eyes one meets everyday. Like happiness - fleeting, capricious but unmistakable - a spiritual coconut that falls on one's head. Like the freedom to live and work with and among animals.

It is a way, a compass bearing through life, that Ka'u offers to those who choose it. But you have to decipher it slowly in the little things.

Stories

2009-09-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

Ka’u is a dream, a memory, an intuition, an emptiness, a home. Ka’u is that rarest of things: a living place, a place where each person is part of the story, in which there is no movement which is not significant, no action that is not felt. Ka’u is a cradle of stories, a web of memories.

Ka’u is a failure, a loss, a place where people are poor, conditions have always been difficult. Ka’u is backwards, behind the times. Ka’u is intransigent. This is both a blessing and a weakness.

Ka’u is a geography of meaning. The names of places have dignity and are spoken of with fondness and reverence, as if they were people, very old and embattled by the winds of time.

Ka’u is a pebble of old memories stubbornly living on amidst the plastic glamour of the First World. Ka’u has roots in the forest.

Ka’u is the cradle of stories.

Once upon a time at the beach at Waikapuna lived a young girl. She lived in a rock-walled, thatched house with pebbles for a floor. Each pebble had been sought, picked up, and carried into the house. She ate fish and seaweed. She slept on woven mats on the floor. One night a man came to her as she slept and made love to her in the night, and left before light. He came to her for many nights. And very soon she was with child. The child she bore had green skin, and when in the sea he turned into a shark. The shark protected her and all her family. He was immortal and did not die even after she had died and all of her family had died or moved away. Under the waves of Waikapuna, a shark. As surely as men make love to women and as the sea is dark and seductive, stories are born here along with the children.

Congruous & Modular

2009-08-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

I've been asking myself the question: does it make any sense to have a local economy as a goal? Can local economies still work? Or is the whole "buy local" trend just a nostalgic or even irresponsible fantasy? Has our population even here in Ka'u over-grown to the point where we must have global economies of scale for all of us to survive?

In the big picture, there's no doubt that we need industrial agriculture, with its complex set of technologies and skills, to continue to make enough calories available to all or famine will happen. At the same time our global system of production and distribution has become rigid and therefore inefficient. It also supports and is supported by a certain world-view which is overly simplified and therefore, basically, stupid. A lot of people growl about corporations, but there's nothing wrong with corporations in and of themselves. Corporations, big and small, are just one way to organize people and materials. It is the world view - the culture - that undergirds global corporations (and hedge funds and credit-derivative swaps) that is so ridiculous. Ridiculous because blindered and short-sighted. Ridiculous because sterile, obsessive, neurotic. Does anyone like to live in a McDonalds, an office tower, or a strip-mall? The stripped down environments that this world view generates just plain suck. They really are like malignant tissue.

Bryan Fagan's book draws strong connections between rigid, top-heavy, and overly centralized civilization and the inability to adapt to the challenges which extreme weather such as El Nino inflicts. Our business culture certainly has become overly rigid (banks "too big to fail") and top-heavy (bonuses), and definitely over-centralized (just try to start a small business).

Here's the weird thing from a food producer's point of view: the more involved you become with our modern system of processing and distribution, the less -pound for pound - the stuff you produce is worth. Why? Because your carrots, corn, cucumbers, or in my case, beef have to carry the weight of the entire structure, the top-heavy and elaborate structure of distributors and government regulators, bankers and insurance salespeople, truckers, grocery-store clerks, food writers, chefs, graphic designers, window-washers, janitors, etc, etc, etc. To support all that there is a relentless pressure to drive down the costs of the actual stuff that the system exists to distribute. It's the opposite of adding value. The structure overwhelms the content. And so we have CAFOs and GMOs, giant slaughterhouses and illegal alien farm-workers. It's not somebody else's problem. We are all implicit and complicit. And it is all much more fragile than most people realize.

Which gets me back to the title of this piece: congruous & modular. Which is how I am breaking down that the all-too-ubiquitous concept of "sustainability" in my mind. I think we should aim to build systems that are congruous with the scale and character of communities and regions, that are congruous with local values, the local environment, and the particular carrying capacities of local natural resources. We also need to build flexibility into our systems by making them more modular (rather than centralized, consolidated, or global) in character. As well as being flexible, modular systems are also more human-scale, and therefore have the ability to tap into the creativity of individuals more completely, which really is a profoundly under-utilized natural resource at present. These are both time-tested grass-roots survival strategies, of course, nothing new. But I think congruous and modular - which local systems generally are- is the way to go.

Books

2009-08-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

I just read Flat-Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People by Jon Jeter. He argues that globalization and especially the "neo-liberal" free-trade regimens imposed on developing economies by the IMF and World Bank have destroyed local, regional, and national economies by flooding them with cheap foreign goods. Sound familiar? Jeter's antidote: government investment in infrastructure, worker education, and research, regulated trade, higher taxes, and...Hugo Chavez (!?)

Then I read The New Mediterranian Diet Cookbook, which has really yummy sounding recipes, but I still found it annoying because of that tone which people adopt when they live in farmhouses in Cortona, Italy and they like to rub your face in it. And then they want you to have all these different cheeses and olives on hand to sprinkle everything with, as if everybody has time for hunting down ricotta salata.

Ka'u has amazing things to eat and they just kind of show up, if you've lived here long enough and been reasonable civil to everyone. Like pink and red mempachi (squirrelfish) with their big black eyes, to salt & fry crispy or make into soup with ginger, onions, and tomatoes. Just as ravishing.

Now I'm reading Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian Fagan (so far, amazing.)

Free Enterprise

2009-08-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

There are certain things that just feel good to do. One of those things, for me, are farmer's markets. I like being a vendor even more than being a customer. It is gratifying in that way that very basic human technologies feel right - you sense the echoes of thousands of years of doing this. There is nothing self-alienating about it; on the contrary, one of the big by-products of a farmer's market is a very rich sense of healthy human connections. It is community development in the very best sense. Casual, voluntary, not a government program.

Too often "community development"programs are just so seriously boring.

My daughter loves farmer's markets as well. She is working on getting the skills to do a transaction by herself. It's a fantastic learning environment. She will have a better intuitive sense of how a healthy economy actually works at 9 than I probably had at 19, maybe even 29.

There is a lot to be said for decentralized local food production, but for certain essential items of modern existence a "global" system is the way to go. There is no question that large-scale commodity production and distribution is much more efficient for a lot of things, if not everything.For instance you just can't grow wheat efficiently in Hawaii. Too humid, too much slope, acid soils etc. But everybody like bread - and automobiles and cell phones.

But our global system teaches us all to be stuck-in-self-gratification-mode consumers or beast-of-burden producers. It turns money into a math game untied from the human societiesthat money is meant to serve as a tool. We become opaque to ourselves, we don't even know how what we consume relates to what we produce, or what exactly it is that we produce. We lose the ability to make mental connections - to see our society or even our communities as a whole, and to believe in ourselves.

The kind of free enterprise that a farmer's market encourages is a beautiful antidote to the global system and the mindset that comes with it. It's a lot of fun and full of yummy things, too.

Berry's Husbandry

2009-08-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

From Wendell Berry's "Renewing Husbandry:"

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge.....The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote a general awareness of everybody's agricultural responsibilities, thus becomes urgent.

Part of the problem is that so far the movement towards a new agriculture - locally adapted, deeply rooted in place, small, resilient, human-scale - has been consumer-driven. It's been a foodie/Yuppie phenomenon. The farmers, and I'm talking the kind of farmers who have farming in their blood, farmers from farming families, have been terribly marginalized in all this.

Farmers don't talk a lot, and they really don't blog a lot. If you're talking, you're not farming.

It takes tremendous focus and self-discipline to farm sucessfully. I'm talking about farming as a profession here, not as farming as a hobby. Straight-up commercial farming, not experimental farming that is supported by the government, not farming as a setting for agri-tourism or eco-tourism. Not that I have anything against any of that. I'm talking about the farmer-farmers who grit their teeth and get the food out into the world. They are the backbone of any civilizational achievement, always. They produce. We need to make the effort to listen to them and rebuild our economy starting from the ground up. We need to support farmers with the same intensity (or more) as any endangered natural resource. When we get to the bottom of all this maybe that will become clear.

Being Part of It

2009-08-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

There are important things that are really hard to put into words.

Tracy and I were playmates in kindergarten and first grade. After second grade my family moved away from Ka'u. Eventually, when I was in my twenties we moved back and started a ranch. Tracy also helps run her family's cattle ranch in Ka'u. We share fencelines and see each other almost daily on the backroads of Ka'u.

There are a lot of differences. I have one small child; she has a large family and a small grandchild. She's being here; I've been away for roughly half my life. She knows this community inside and out in a way that I never will. She knows who dated who in high school, what their parents thought about it, how many children they have and with whom. She knows all the high school kids by name. I barely know that they exist. She has that deep, multi-generational knowledge of the community that I don't have. I don't have a knack for it, and I made different choices with my life - I know what early morning looks like in Paris and Taipei. Now I like to stay here in Ka'u and learn the intricacies of this big country and little community bit by bit, although I'm still not any good at keeping track of all the strands of family history.

I wish I could be somewhere distant and exotic sometimes but I know that you can't have it both ways. There's a story that we are all making together. You're either part of it or not.

But this story, which is the internal story of a real community, and the value of it can't be counted, measured, "monetized." It's the opposite of money. It is more like literature, but it isn't written down, published, made into somebody else's experience. It's in the little things. You can destroy it just by looking at it with greedy eyes, just like any other intimacy. This is the intimacy of people, land, and sea. It is unbearably important and incredibly evasive.

Picking

2009-08-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the farmer's market, my friend who survived the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia showed me a picture of her sister, who survived imprisonment, torture, and near execution by firing squad. She said, "That's my sister. She only came here once. We had her picking raspberries. My sister said 'worse than Pol Pot.'"

Approach

2009-08-06T10:33:00.000-07:00

The thing is that farmers and ranchers are not very happy with modern agriculture and the current world order either. We aren't too happy with having to make a living on razor-thin margins, with having to produce food for 120 of our fellow citizens on average.

The problem is that we know how fragile our agricultural system is. We know how tough it is to provide our families with the trappings of a modern life-style from an agricultural livelihood. We know how few people are willing to live the life. We know that our agricultural system depends on people like us - depends on us getting up at often un-godly hours of the morning to do things that are not as pleasant as drinking coffee and typing on a keyboard. We know the tough choices that we have all had to make to keep on doing what we do. We respect each other.

Living agriculture is a lot like living on a active volcano, as we do here in Ka'u. When you live on an active volcano you know that it could all explode tomorrow. When you live agriculture you stare down the basics of human life every day. You don't think about Armani Exchange or Airbooks very much. You witness and work on the difference between eating and not-eating every day. This is where you come from. It makes a lot of the criticism of the modern food system seem pretty trivial. As in, "So, don't buy the Doritos!"

Counterbalance

2009-08-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

This is a great article.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals

I love Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, and crew as much as the next person, but we have to temper idealism with the complex and often unpleasant realities of what it takes to have a minute percentage of the population providing the basic life support systems for the entire civilization. Unavoidably, "what it takes" isn't always all bucolic and heart-warming. I do welcome the critical attention being paid to agriculture and the heightened awareness that comes with it, but criticism has to be tempered with a big dose of respect for the system, however imperfect it may seem. If we crash the financial system, we all lose money - big deal. If we crash the agricultural system, it will be really, really bad.

No can help…

2009-07-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve not been feeling quite right lately. I forget what I am doing, lose track of my car-keys, wallet, credit cards all the time - it’s comical. There is constant unease to everyday life, different than I’ve experienced before. I don’t know how to deal with it.

I am theorizing that this is not just a personal failure, that many others are feeling something similar, but perhaps expressing it differently - in the variegated forms and degrees of depression, anger, or numbness. We are all worried, distracted, drained, unclear how to proceed, how to get through this.

Out of one eye I see our magnificent (it is!) American civilization continuing with its usual business: people drive their cars to work, buy their groceries, watch television, go on trips. There is noticeably less activity, but in general everything seems sort of normal.

In my other eye is a vision - an intuition that our civilization grew beyond its own structural support and, what is worse, began preying on itself. We've taught ourselves to take advantage of each other whenever possible. With that ingrained in our values, it will be a long time until we figure out how to build something larger than net worth again.

Right now no one feels very good. Even if you still have a job, there is anxiety and uncertainty. Will the situation improve soon, or will things get much, much worse? What will much, much worse look like, be like? No one knows. It makes everyone a little crazy...not themselves.

Work

2009-07-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

I went to dinner last night with a beautiful (inside and out) lady originally from Cambodia. She was pregnant with 4 children when the Khmer Rouge took over and sent them all to work in the rice paddies. She gave birth without medical assistance and survived on starvation rations - one bowl of rice per a day - "I lived on coconuts." After the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge, she lived for six months in a Red Cross refugee camp. She made it to Oregon but there her Cambodian husband left her. But she survived it all. She remarried and she and her husband produce some of the most beautiful vegetables and herbs you will ever see. She works very hard even though she is in her sixties. She is as tough as my own mother, maybe tougher, and that is saying something. And she does it all so gracefully. The walls of her home are adorned with gorgeous Hawaiian quilts that she makes at night.

When we were driving to dinner she said, "They should only make one kind of car, one color." I think she's right.

We don't need shiny cars to make us feel good. We need more people like she and her husband - they are practical people who work fiercely hard and smart but they are also extremely creative. They have very high standards in what they do. They are willing to do new things, test the boundaries, take chances. They are, above all, tenacious.

beauty

2009-07-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone (I hope) has been graced by one of those moments when the most everyday sight is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. If you have children it's almost common - those moments that take your breath away. It is one of the rewards for the unremitting labor of being a parent. It is love that makes such moments possible; the vulnerability of love. The revelation of beauty that love provides is graced by gratitude. You realize how much you have, what a gift it is to be there witnessing whatever it might be.

It is such a different kind of beauty than which is constructed to stimulate our desire to consume. That beauty is all about surface gloss, ownership, power or the wish for power or status or some kind of momentary feeling of success. It is not about love at all. It is a chimera, and the pursuit of it, even if momentarily successful, is never satisfying.

Honolulu Green

2009-07-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

I spent the last couple of days in the upscale urban heart of Honolulu, an environment so relentlessly artificial it might as well be on the moon, and I began to understand some things. I began to undertand where city-dwellers come from a little better.

With every view-plan dominated by right angles and every foot-step paved no wonder the denizens of this world crave "green." I imagine that most everyone that lives in such a world is haunted by a sense of loss - a vague desire for more life in their life, for a reconnection with "nature." The easiest way to assuage this sense of loss, as well as all other discomforts, is by... shopping. That is where green products come in.

The white-collar urban life is so physically un-demanding that being a vegetarian makes a whole lot of sense. Instead of physical work, city people have "work-outs." Honestly, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an actual creature to lay down its life to provide calories for work-outs.
Someone needs to figure out a way to capture all of the "work-out" energy and transform exercize into a renewable energy source.

One of the reasons that Honolulu seems so artificial is that it is a resort city. It is an apex organism, a money-making machine that serves a semi-parasitic role in the world. In exchange for providing a fantasy environment the city reaps the disposable income of the tourists that flock from East and West to escape from their overly-mechanized lives in other money-making machines.

sustainability

2009-07-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

As futurist Lowell Catlett wisely pointed out, there is still a LOT of disposable income out there in the US. We still are ridiculously rich. Most of us have multiple vehicles per household. We may be in a low but only relative to the crazy highs of recent years.

The danger in this situation is we will damage the foundations of our economy in the downdraft. The re-assessment of our economy and society that is going on at every level is a good and necessary thing. We all knew we were in a bubble. We also all know that the stimulus funds are just a temporary cover for the real work that needs to be done. The danger is that much of the stimulus funds will go towards one-time projects, however worthy, that don't strengthen a critical capability or seed new businesses.

We have worshipped growth, out of fear that if you are not growing, you're dying. Brute growth, growth for its own sake, leads to bubbles, but we do need to make progress, keep getting better, grow in quality and not necessarily quantity. We do need to make progress and fast at finding a sustainable source of energy for our civilization. Without energy we will all need to start studying the Amish.

The concept of sustainability has its own problems. First of all, one meaning of the term seems to be about finding a stasis between available resources and our economic appetite. The dark side of statis is rigidity. Sustainability itself should not be the goal of our civilization. It is the means of the long-term survival and well-being of our communities, cultures, and natural environment.

Second, what we take for granted in the term sustainability is the assumption of a first world, middle-class lifestyle. What is coded into the term is the birthright to interact with the world at the level of products and brand names, of services and trends.

It isn't really about sustainability, but sustaining the lifestyle to which we've all become accustomed

LAX

2009-07-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

LAX is the polar opposite of Ka'u and that's why I like passing through there.

It's an antidote to my own little not-even-rural anomaly of a world. It's like getting a slap in the face.

Any other large, completely artificial, utilitarian, and business-like installation would create the same effect. I admire the vision, will, ruthlessness that created LAX, the Burbank cargo airfield, LA in general. Maybe admire is too strong a word. Awe-struck?

This is our world, too big and complex for any one person (not even the sage of Omaha, I suspect) to comprehend. It's too big to fail. It's not working too well lately but even the smartest of us can only nibble around the edges hoping for some kind of miracle.

People can say this stuff about "this is your world" but it's only very slightly true. The world makes us. We try to find someplace where we can do our thing, pursue our dream of acclaim, prosperity, security, or whatever and hopefully won't get smashed in some turn of the gears.

I wish we could do better for ourselves.

Perhaps we need to learn to make the distinction between necessities, improvements, and entertainment, prioritize our choices, and build our economy based on these distinctions. We have to "see" all parts of our civilization, not just the finished consumer goods - the steel that goes into engines, the naptha crackers that make the plastics, the machine that plants the carrots, and the water-system that irrigates them. We need to see where the raw material comes out of the ground and the people and machines that mine, grow, transport, transform them. We need to see the value-chain of materials and labor that make up our world. We need to see these things but not in hysterical, sensationalistic, guilt and recrimination-driven "exposes" but in a serious and respectful way, so that we can see the connections between our lives and the resources that go into making them.

It is too easy to slip into a lame finger-pointing pseudo-radicalism that forgets that we are all just people doing the best we can in a world that any one of us, honestly, only partially grasp.

Rural

2009-07-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book called "Rural by Design" by Randall Arendt. If you're interested in land or community planning it's a valuable resource, providing fairly specific antidotes to the suburban sprawl and commerial strip patterns that are so obnoxious a part of modern life. This is all good stuff.

The funny thing for me is that the word "rural" means quite a different thing than it does to the author. To me "rural" means a community that still is fundamentally connected to the land. To the author, and there's nothing wrong or right about this, "rural" means rural residential lots and subdivisions, basically pre-suburbia. Farmland and open space amount to the same thing. It's something you set aside and preserve not something that is has anything to do with the residences that will go onto the landscape. At the most you might have some "community gardens" in the plan.

I find this really odd. It's an indication of how marginal my point of view is, because I know the author has the numbers on his side.

Truly rural people need a spokesperson. Lots of them, actually. What we've got out there talking for us are a bunch of omnivorous foodies.

It's a brave and beautiful thing to live with the land, to find a spot to work with and then create some piece of a working paradise. In a world that has lost its way chasing dreams of "wealth," facades of "power," and the glamour of "high" technology, it is something rare and beautiful to be strong and wise enough to be able to feed other people.

You don't make a lot of money at it, but you get rich.

Connected

2009-07-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I meet people and they'll ask "where are you from?" and I'll say "Ka'u." Then I get this look that says "why would you do that?"

I like living in Ka'u. Most other places seem a little dead to me. Which may seem like a very strange thing to say, but I'm not talking about night-life here. (Night-life is fine, I like getting really drunk in dark places with strobe lights as much as the next person.) No I'm talking about another kind of dead, dead as in disconnected. I feel very alive and connected here in Ka'u. You could say this aliveness is spiritual, cultural, and social, but mostly it is an environmental connection, and here I'm defining "environmental" my way, since I'm no kind of environmental activist.

Imagine living in a place where the winds have names. Imagine living in a place where you get most of your food by growing or catching it for yourself or as a gift from friends and neighbors. Imagine a place that makes your heart sing like a tuning fork.

When (first world!) people start going off on needed to save the planet and save this and save that, I think that this is what they are looking for: a life that is connected to the land.

But they've long ago lost the path to here. Choices were made long ago about what the world is like. Most people are prisoners to a job, a mortgage, car payments, tuition, but most of all, prisoners of what is perceived as success, what is expected of them, what is normal. They inherited a world, an operating system that floats above, disconnected from the strength of simple things.

And yet feeds off of these "natural resources" without acknowledging them. And so there is this movement to set things right, and yet it comes mostly from inside this disconnected "dream space", this operating system that is so comfortable, clean, and shiny. There is a "demand" for "green products" and "green packaging." There is this frenzy of recrimination, environmental self-righteousness, green life-style tips. It's all just noise inside a bubble, because it doesn't take into account the realities that make all that frenzy possible. Food, house, paycheck - where does it come from? If you don't start from that, if you don't have quite a bit of humility and integrity about that, you are being deeply dishonest. The wilderness is not just something to be enjoyed and preserved, it is also where we came from.

Here's the heart of it: find out where you live and live there. That is the basis of everything. You cannot have a whole and healthy society, economy, culture, environment without knowing, loving, and contributing to the place where you live. What is the wildness of it? How would you make a living here, if this place is all you had? Go out and do something if possible - build a rockwall, catch a fish, dig in the earth. Strip away all the layers of civilization and find the kernel of life that connects to a place. Then you will begin to come from someplace real.

Ka'u culture

2009-07-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Ka'u is a kind of island within an island. Hawaii is, so I've read, the most isolated islands in the world, and Ka'u is one of the most remote spots in these islands. We have our own world here, our own culture, and much of that culture is entirely invisible initially. We don't have colorful traditions or costumes. We don't speak a different language.

What there is - a feeling for each other that comes from shared lineages. Sometimes these are lineages of blood or marriage. Sometimes they are lineages of memory - stories and adventures that were shared however long ago. Most of all there are lineages of service to each other - kindnesses (kokua) that are never forgotten and pass on to the next generation as legacies of goodwill. That is why family names are so important.

We go on and on, weaving these stories together against the magnificence of our landscape, the sweep of the land from Mauna Kea to the brilliant dark ocean. This is the art form that we love, where the landscape, the winds, the shining grasses, the ocean, and the people are all mixed up together, so we hardly know what is what. We keep on making it and loving it, despite everything.

Daily Budget

2009-06-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this concept of "green" a lot lately. I'm starting to get it. For a rural agricultural producer the "green trend" is a little puzzling. Especially the part where people who would starve to death in a month if the oil got shut off recommend earnestly that you go "organic."

The green trend seems to be a consciousness-raising campaign for consumers - all the people who work in offices and who sip lattes and have no idea where the coffee, milk and paper-cup came from.

At it's best "green" seems to be shorthand for "lessen mindless waste of resources and yet not give up any of the comforts of being a privileged citizen of the first world."

Here's the part where it gets dicey. I saw a clip of "Food Inc." where someone says "consumers have to demand healthy food!" That word "demand" bothers me. We've created a "consumer society" in the US. So demanding something as a consumer can be very effective in the short run. And healthier food is certainly a valid issue as 90% of the stuff in the average store (even health food store) is rubbish. Convenient rubbish. But demand only works if : 1. there is a solvent company/business model/ food system to make your demand upon, and 2. you support your demand by buying the healthier products and keeping the company/supply-chain that is trying to cater to your demand afloat. That word "demand" assumes a whole lot of work, organization, and management. Demanding is not enough. Everyone needs to look at their own lives and see what they are producing.

I've been reading a brain-candy-ish book on the oil industry "Oil on the Brain." The writer takes us on an oil-themed tour of the world: LA gas station, Long Beach refinery, East Texas oil rig, US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, NYMEX oil exchange, Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, China, and back to the gas-station. None of it is very pretty. And yet this is what we are. It's how our lives work. We've all been eating oil for decades. What are we creating with it? I hope that it is more than a consumer lifestyle, which we will somewhat mitigate by being green. What is the point of all of our busy lives? How will we balance the budget of our own daily lives, so that we all produce or create a little more than we consume?

2009-06-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

So I took my annual trip out of Hawai'i to the "mainland. I went to Albuquerque. I like Albuquerque quite a bit. First of all there was a lot of empty land all around the city. Desert for miles, punctuated by occasional geometries of green - irrigated alfalfa fields I'm assuming. Flying into the city there were more fields of green, this time with buildings and house interspersed. From the direction we took flying in, there were none of those tracts of pretentious houses built in the great Housing Bubble of the last 2o years. There were some pretentious country manor-type houses fronted by 5 acres of horse pasture, mixed in with fields of row crops and more alfalfa. This was a city with it's toes still in the country, which for me is a very good sign. I was visiting Albuquerque for the trienniel meeting of the National Association of Resource Conservation & Development Councils - a kind of NGO sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture.

I got to the conference late but just in time to hear the keynote speaker, Dr. Lowell Catlett, a agricultural economist, futurist, and Dean of the Department of Agriculture at the University of New Mexico. I fell in love instantly. Dr. Catlett took us on a roller-coaster ride of ideas and stories. Here's the refrain: "You cannot have healthy humans if they are separated from plants and animals!!!

He was preaching to the choir, of course. If there was one thing that binds the group of 800 representatives from councils across the country, it was that all of us, despite all societal clues and suggestions to go for the easy money, have chosen to live in the most intimate and strenuous relationhip to plants and animals possible - that of farmers and ranchers.

But Dr. Catlett made this point: science and the public are catching up to us. His speech was titled "The Greening of America." The largely instinctive choice we all made decades ago to attend to the plants and animals is now being played out as a national "green" trend.
This trend rides an inarticulate longing and a massive accumulation of wealth - "I want a farm - I don't know why." This presents, in Dr. Catlett's view, a huge opportunity for those in agriculture and conservation to provide these born-again farmers and ranchers with the services they need to fulfill their dreams. Interesting...

Harry Whitney's coming to Ka'u

2008-12-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Harry Whitney is a fantastic teacher of horses and humans. I've had a lot of teachers of all sorts of methodologies and temperaments and Harry is quite possibly the best, and definitely in the top two. He is a very subtle and sweet person.

I just saw the movie "I Heart Huckabees" last night. Harry is a little bit of an existential detective. The horses help with the existential part. The thing about horses is that they don't care much about all of the stuff whirling around in a human's head. And yet you have to create a relationship with a horse if you are going to be a competant horse person. So you have to build a relationship that is non-verbal, non-symbolic. It is not structured by the cultural apparatus that usually structures relationships between humans. This can be quite challenging, especially with a creature that is 6-10 times one's size and their own hard-wired view on what is important in the world.

Horses understand the world on gut level, in a very simple but also very honest way. For instance horses do not care one iota about money. This is very important to most humans, structures our relationships with each other a great deal of the time. Horses don't care about money but they care about the relationships which money sometimes represents, and that is leadership. Horses always want to know who is in charge, who is going to be responsible for the situation. If they feel that their rider is not on top of things, then they are going to fill in. Which is the reasonable thing to do. The heart of some of the more traditional approaches to horsemanship (and leadership) is to break that idea of taking over right out of a horse (or human). In very blunt and sometime brutal ways a horse is shown that it has no power any more, even over it's own life. This simplifies the relationship between human and horses quite a bit. But it certainly is not very pretty. But it works. And sometimes it's a better deal for all involved to have things real clear like that. But of course it pretty much kills all the joy out of all involved.

There are other options, but their a lot more difficult. That's where Harry and people like him come in.

2008-11-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

So I'm back. The winter months are more conducive to "civilized," indoor activities, what with the encroaching darkness and all. So here's the grass in our pasture. It's been a good year, as far as grass goes, despite the vog. Some plants really don't seem to be affected. Others just up and die. The eucalyptus plantings seem to be fairly sensitive. One particular species that was planted on the edge of a coffee farm in Moa'ula succumbed instantly. Also the extremely noxious (but quite pretty) Madagascar fireweed seems to be sensitive. It's been a year of living with vog. The last time I wrote for this blog, the problem didn't even exist yet. It kind of crept up on us. Officially it started in March, but it wasn't until late April that it became clear that it was going to be a Problem. There was a week in late April when we all walked around with ash falling on us all day long. Some of the children had respiratory problems and they all had blood-shot eyes. I couldn't wear my contacts for a couple of weeks. We wondered if it would get worse, and what life would be like if Ka'u became uninhabitable. It's one thing to choose to leave your home, another to be forced to leave.

It's a strange thought to have to entertain seriously- the thought of being forced to leave your home behind. One is usually so caught up in the mechanics of maintaining, creating, or fixing the world that you live in, that you don't hardly realize how absurdly beautiful it is, how it is a great work of art; like a piece of music that one just keeps working on, whether it is symphonic or a simple melody. Just the thought of being an exile puts a completely different perspective on what it that we live and do, and the totality that we make out of the living in doing. Most of the time we're far too immersed in it all, in keeping the music playing, to enjoy what we've made.

But so far the vog is really just a nuisance rather than an apocalypse.

Pickle mango

2008-02-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

Pickle mango is so popular you can use it like money.

In late summer everyone with access to a mango tree goes into business. There are pickle mango sellers along the roads, going from door to door, from the back of trucks, at the beach, the rodeo, the baseball game, outside the supermarkets.

Pickle mango is made from green mangoes. crunchy and tart. The little, prolific "common" mango variety is preferred for this, not the elite varieties such as Haden and Pirrie. Common mangos have fine textured flesh and are extra-lemony, like Granny Smith apples. The green mangoes are peeled and the flesh cut off of the seeds. The mango-slices are then soaked for a day or two in a mixture of vinegar, sugar, water, and li-hing mui spice.

Pickle mango is versatile, you can eat it anytime, as a snack, as an appetizer, as a fruit, as a vegetable, as a condiment, as dessert. Locals eat ripe mangoes occasionally, reservedly, almost with disdain, but pickle mango is craved, coveted, eaten by the pound.

For years, between the age of 3 and 6, pickle mango was the only vegetable substance, aside from white rice, that my nephew would willingly eat.

Pickle mango has a great deal of nostalgia appeal. It reminds everyone who has grown up in Hawaii of childhood, in which at some point or another one climbed into the hospitable arms of a mango tree with their turpentine-scented sap, and crackly red-veined leaves and picked a mango, green or ripe. That is, one was initiated into the tribe of mango-lovers.

Waikapuna

2008-02-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

Almost all cultures have stories of places that exist in a different realm: Shangri-la, Peach Blossom Spring, the land behind the waterfall's veil. Waikapuna is such a place.

Most of the landfall of Ka'u meets the ocean with black lava cliffs against which the waves pound mightily, sending up white explosions of sea-spray. Waikapuna is one of the rare spots where the sea and the land meet on the same level, in a bay of the ocean and a cradle of the land. Directly behind the beach is a ring of hills that block off almost all indication of the rest of the world. All that matters when you are at Waikapuna is the sound of the ocean, the feel of the sun and the wind on one's skin, the warmth of the sand, the cool of the water. It is a place both elemental and unusually gentle for this rocky coast.

It is a quiet place, but rich. There are rock tidepools and inlets full of creatures, and there is a sheltered, sandy pool which fills and empties as the tide changes. There is a beautiful miniature bay into which perfectly formed waves break continually. On the sea-cliffs there are little pools full of fluer-de-sel salt crystals which glitter in the sunlight and taste like the essence of ocean. One of my favorite things about Waikapuna are the heliotrope trees. There are heliotrope trees elsewhere, but these trees seem to have personalities that shelter and welcome one to the place. In the night their beautiful branches seem like a net woven with stars, and in the daytime the sunlight glances through their leaves and bees drone amongst their flowers.

Waikapuna (lit. water (of) the springs) was much loved in ancient times for its three pools of spring water. The topmost pool was pure fresh water and was used for drinking. The middle pool was somwhat brackish and used for bathing, and the third pool even more mixed with salt water and used for washing. In the late 1800's an earthquake destroyed the spring and the pools and there is only one of the pools left in a cleft of rock deep in underbrush, and it is very brackish. The ruins and remains of many house-sites surround the beach.

And it is much loved today, though no one lives there anymore. Returning from a visit there, one feels that one has been somewhere far away.

Nice pig, dat (2)

2008-01-30T18:53:00.000-08:00

I was with a 91-year old man, who has lived in Ka'u his whole life. He still farms coffee on his homestead surrounded by macadamia orchards. He astounded everyone when he ran off to get us a jabong to try. Someone asked him, "What do you eat everyday, that you are so fit at your age?" He said, "I drink five, six cups of coffee every day. I have toast for breakfast and fruit. I eat bento for lunch. I used to go up in the mountains every weekend hunt pig. I would still go but I too deaf already. No can hear the dog bark. I used to make kalua pig, lau-lau, smoke meat, sausage. Those pigs, they only eat natural stuffs, no chemicals! All the food you buy these days, all full of chemicals. No good."

His son was gored by a pig just this last year.

Wild pig meat is an interesting substance to work with as a cook. It tastes like forests, is resilient to the tooth, and it's impossible to get it to brown. It just goes from raw to rubbery. In other words you can't just fry up some pork chops. Oh no! You have to be clever and resourceful. You have to overcome the pig yet another time, as it were, in order to get something good to eat.

The most popular strategy is to cut the wild pork into thin strips, soak the strips in a strong marinade, and then smoke them in your handy smoke-house, constructed just to deal with the problem of having wild pig meat to eat. Fried up, wild pig smoke meat is dense with flavors - redolent of ginger, soy sauce, sugar, garlic with just a hint of wild fern shoot in the background. It is the star of any pupu table, the visible proof of a man's he-man-ness, and the gift of the forest to this all-too-civilized world.

Glossary

jabong - pomelo (Filipino)

bento - packed lunch, for eating in the field (Japanese)

kalua - pit oven-cooked (Hawaiian)

lau-lau - literally "leaf-leaf", seasoned meats & fish wrapped in two kinds of leaves & kalua-d (Hawaiian)

pupu - tapas (Hawaiian)

Nice pig, dat!

2008-01-28T22:22:00.001-08:00

Pig hunting is very big here.

Actually it's the true, living religion of Ka'u. That's where you'll find most of the men on a Sunday morning. They'll be up before dawn, heading into the hills with a pack full of exuberant dogs in the bed of their pickup. And they'll go at it fervently as long as there are pigs to be found.

To say that Ka'u is rural is somewhat wishful. The local culture, despite decades of plantation agriculture, never has given up its allegiance to the wild ways of the hunter's life. "Bucolic" is not something you think of when you think of Ka'u. It's entirely too disorderly and precarious a place.

Pig hunting is very important. It keeps the men in the forest, out of the house, and out of trouble. It's a wonderful reason to keep a lot of dogs and what is life without dogs? It gives the men and the dogs something to do together, so that there will be mutual admiration amongst them. And it keeps the pigs, who are wonderful creature and just as smart as men and dogs, from taking over the world.

It's a dangerous sport, mostly for the dogs. A boar's tusks can rip a dog's throat open in an instant. This happened a lot before the hunters started using cut-collars, thick nylon collars that cover a dog's entire neck. But the dogs still get very serious injuries. The men take an ill-concealed pride in the scars of their dogs. Each scar on a beloved hunting dog is a story much recounted and embellished, with the dogs as stars, the pig as co-star, and the hunter as arbiter of good and evil, and always, eventually, the victor.

Only in Ka'u are there pig hunting tournaments, with teams given 24 hours to pound the forests in search of prize pigs - the biggest pig wins the overall prize but there are prizes for sub-categories such as: the biggest boar, the biggest sow, and the boar with the longest tusks. The winners are instant celebrities of the pig-hunting world, especially the winner of the highly esteemed "Jungle Express" hunting tournament. Hunters come from all over the island on the day of the big tounament, and after staying up all night searching the forests, the contestants meet early in the morning at a beach park for the weighing and measuring. The winners are photographed with their prize, their team-mates, and their kids. It's a proud moment.