What can the ancient Hawaiians teach us about preserving todays resources for tomorrow?
Paintings by Herb Kawainui Kane Photography by the Maui Historical Society “The land rises for several miles through scattered households among groves of banana and many small fields of sweet potatoes and taro of the dryland varieties. Each field is bordered by rock, and along the walls are tall, feathery fringes of sugar cane. Pigs are kept in rock-walled pens, and chickens forage freely. Climbing higher, you come to breadfruit trees of such size, standing in groves so vast. . . . Above the breadfruit forests are more rock-walled fields of sweet potato and taro, wetted by afternoon showers.” —Herb Kane, Ancient Hawai‘i Kane’s landscape gives a picture of how the Hawaiians lived for at least a millennium before Western contact. Theirs was an island society—established in the most isolated place on earth—founded entirely on what they brought by voyaging canoe, migrating from the South Pacific, and what they found upon arrival in Hawai‘i. “Nowhere in Polynesia was the cultivation of plan
