What can indigenous cultures, particularly Hawaiian culture, teach us about confronting modern problems?
Talk about Sulak and the subjects you want to discuss with him. Sulak extends the work of E.F. Schumaker’s Small if Beautiful. I read Schumaker’s work in the ’70s when I was a teenager and I fell in love with it. He was speaking about sustainable practices in the ’60s, but what rang true to me is that indigenous people have been practicing these ideas for thousands of years. Sulak also synergizes with Paul Hawken’s idea in Blessed Unrest: our native ways have not been abandoned, they’ve just been made impossible. I appreciate that clarity. Our ways aren’t abandoned, but they were made impossible by million-dollar lots, million-dollar this, million-dollar that. My job is to contextualize all these ideas in one of the most expensive places to live in the world, made more expensive by capitalistic epistemology. You said native ways were made impossible. Do you think they’re becoming possible again? Absolutely. The system of money is beginning to implode on itself. Systems like this cannot
