By Wong, Alia . USA Today (Online) 28 Feb 2022.
NANAKULI, Hawaii –When Kalehua Krug became principal of Ka Waihona O Ka Na‘auao several years ago, he and his team cut down some age-old trees that towered over the charter school’s front lawn. The decision caused “a bit of a stir” in the rural, coastal West Oahu community of Nanakuli, Krug said. One elderly resident told Krug removing the trees was akin to erasing a neighborhood legacy. But Krug’s intention was, in fact, to reclaim that legacy.
A plurality of the area’s residents are Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and most of them are low-income. The monkeypod and ficus trees Krug had cut down are species that were, like the forced assimilation suffered by Hawaii’s Indigenous people, introduced to the islands by outsiders. In the old trees’ place, Krug and his team planted breadfruit, a staple in the traditional Hawaiian diet and a material used for everything from canoes to glue.
It's all part of the Native Hawaiian concept of aloha ‘aina –"love of land" –which has become crucial to both Hawaii's cultural awareness and its existence.
The Pacific island chain is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Its beaches are disappearing thanks to expedited sea-level rise, now estimated at an inch every four years. Three of Hawaii’s eight main islands have lost nearly a quarter of their shores. Last spring, Hawaii became the first state to declare a climate emergency.
Hawaii is also dangerously reliant on imported goods, with more than 80% of its food brought in from out-of-state.
So it's no surprise people in Hawaii are significantly more likely to discuss climate change than the average American, according to a 2021 Yale study. Close to half of Hawaii residents talk about climate change with their family at least once weekly, the study suggests, compared with a little more than a third of all Americans.
Hawaii's schools hope to lead climate education across the U.S., too.
At Ka Waihona, teaching aloha ‘aina is “about our familial relationship with land, our connection with each other, the ideas of sustenance,” Krug said. “But it’s also about unlocking the shackles and chains that have been put on food and sustenance.”
FEW US EDUCATORS TEACH ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
Students across the U.S. have already dealt with the consequences of climate change–wildfires, flooding, extreme heat. Such disasters will only become more common, experts predict, as the earth warms and sea levels rise. And they’ll continue to disrupt food supplies and other systems integral to humans’ survival. Polls show that most Americans, including teachers and parents, believe climate change should be taught in school. Yet one of those same polls, from 2019, also found most educators weren’t teaching about it at all. A 2016 study found that most science teachers were ill-informed or ill-equipped.
The politicization of climate change adds to the complexity. Virtually all scientists agree that climate change is occurring and caused by humans. But just 1 in 4 Americans realizes such consensus exists, a recent study suggests.
That discourages teachers, already under increased scrutiny, from addressing the issue.
In the fall of 2020, nearly two dozen education leaders –including superintendents, the presidents of the two largest teachers’ unions and former U.S. Education Secretary John B. King –got together with the mission of better equipping schools to respond to the climate crisis.
For starters, they say in their 80-page K12 Climate Action Plan, it's incumbent on the country’s schools to reduce their massive environmental footprint. Sitting on 2 million acres of land, schools are often their locale's largest real-estate owner and consume more energy than most other public sectors. Collectively, they also operate the largest mass transit fleet in the country and produce hundreds of thousands of tons of food waste annually.
But it's just as incumbent on schools, the report suggests, to match those efforts with education that engages students in environmental issues and enables them to be change-makers.
"We're going to have more of those climate change-induced crises," said King, referencing Hurricane Maria, which devastated his mother's homeland of Puerto Rico in 2017. "And schools are going to have a critical role to play in terms of community resilience."
‘OUR ‘AINA IN DYING’
Critical to that resilience are not just technical skills but social-emotional ones, too –how to work with others, for example, and manage one's time.
Scenes from Ka Waihona show how those skills are, if only implicitly, being developed in tandem. On a recent Monday, Hi‘ilani Shibata, an agriculture teacher at Ka Waihona, led a group of giddy fifth graders to a portable tucked toward the back of campus near the beach.
The portable is home to a rabbit and her newborn kittens, which explained part of the excitement. (The students use the rabbits’ feces as fertilizer on their plants.) But it’s also home to rakes and shovels and hedge shears, the main reason these preteens were so energetic. The gardening supplies meant agriculture class, and agriculture class meant a brain break and a chance to get outside.
For Shibata, that her students equate the class with relaxation is, in a way, the point. Just as students shouldn't have to go on a field trip to experience ‘aina, she said, students shouldn't see their work with ‘aina as a chore or just another required class.
After they collected their supplies, the fifth graders proceeded toward an unkempt plot of land along a fence separating Ka Waihona from the beach. That’s where the school plans to grow a garden of Polynesian plants, including produce students will provide to community members and sell at a farmer’s market.
Shibata’s students immediately got to work, splitting up to do different tasks of their choosing. Some were in charge of transferring mountains of nutrient-rich soil procured from a local farm in wheelbarrows to the soon-to-be garden. Some took on the role of pulling out invasive plants and weeds, including bundles of prickly overgrowth. The remaining students chose to trim and prune a hala tree, whose long, spiny leaves are used to make products ranging from hats to mats.
The whole time, the students made observations and exchanged tips –"this is how high the soil needs to be"; "this is how you pull out the roots without getting poked" –while also engaging in casual chit-chat. This was, after all, a brain break.
Krug made agriculture a required course –along with dance (hula) and Hawaiian language –as part of his goal of better weaving Indigenous cultural practices into the fabric of the school.
The school is harnessing the Hawaiian ethic, he says–“the psychology of the Indigenous way of existing here in Hawaii.” His priority as a principal isn’t to prepare students for good jobs in corporate America. It’s to enable students to internalize what it meant–and what it should still mean–to be Hawaiian, including in their relationship with and use of natural resources.
“When you build your identity and become accountable to your culture ...the academics become stronger,” Krug said.
Asked why an education rooted in cultural and environmental sustainability is so important in Hawaii, one sixth-grader said: “Because our ‘aina is dying."
CLIMATE EDUCATION: EMOTION AND ACTION
In a Scientific American article last fall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, a climate change professor at Singapore's Yale-NUS College, coined the term "climagogy." It's essentially the teaching of students about different aspects of the climate crisis. Climate change “is no longer a niche topic," he wrote.
Yet two critical elements are often missing from such instruction, according to Schneider-Mayerson. One element is emotion; the other involves "pathways to collective action."
In Hawaii, both elements tend to take center stage in lessons about the environment and sustainability. "Our relationship with land and place is really grounded in a Hawaiian worldview, and we're surrounded by so much physical beauty," said Amber Strong Makaiau, who directs the Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center. The center has numerous teaching workshops related to the environment or climate change. In Hawaii, people are good at "overcoming differences and being able to listen to multiple perspectives. We do our best to relate to one another and solve problems as a community."
Twenty-six miles east of Ka Waihona, near downtown Honolulu, sits another charter school known as SEEQS–the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability. As with Ka Waihona, at SEEQS students spend much of their days learning in nature. Environmental lessons are infused throughout students’ coursework, too, rather than as, say, a standalone science unit. And while SEEQS isn’t explicitly focused on Hawaiian culture, Indigenous practices are central to much of the learning. That’s in part because sustainability and Hawaiian culture are so intertwined. On a recent Friday afternoon, about a dozen middle schoolers spread out in a little-known botanical garden that adjoins the school’s largely asphalt campus.
They were there, as they often are, to take kilo–a traditional Hawaiian method of observing one’s surroundings and focusing on the more subtle details–as part of a capstone project. This class’s research question: How do we malama (care for, preserve) our ‘aina?
Taking kilo is similar to meditating, said Ayu Sumayasa, a 14-year-old eighth grader at SEEQS.
“We kind of tune in with our senses, what we’re hearing, what we’re smelling, what we might be tasting, what we’re seeing–and we journal all of that,” Sumayasa said. “You can notice the patterns, which is kind of what kilo is for–to notice patterns. And when you notice these patterns, it's easier to fix a problem.”
One group of students was examining a bare spot of earth where they plan to plant some native ferns. What kinds of plants are already there? Are they invasive? What is the soil like? What about the lighting? Another group of students was surveying the stream in preparation for a cleanup they planned to do the following week. After the cleanup, they’ll take kilo yet again. What’s different about the stream? What’s the same? Trash, for example, consistently ends up on in an eddy on one side of the stream.
For Buffy Cushman-Patz, the school’s founder, the goal of SEEQS isn’t just to promote awareness about environmental issues. It’s to help students become active players in and contributors to their communities.
At SEEQS, students lead their own conferences with parents and develop campus policies through town halls. A few years ago, one group of students convinced a popular restaurant to stop automatically providing plastic straws; another helped successfully lobby the state Legislature to restrict the use of single-use plastics.
“What I learned really early on was you cannot decouple community and sustainability,” Cushman-Patz said. “Sustainability is basically understanding that our actions have impact on others. ...That’s what the school is trying to teach–ultimately, we’re just trying to make people move on to be a successful human.”
CLIMATE ANXIETY, ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE
An Indigenous ethic, as Krug says, is critical for any community interested in revitalizing its natural environment. Resource depletion, species extinction, inhabitable land–it’s all a sign that “something occurred,” Krug said. “We have to look at what (practices) the traditional folks in that place ... embraced to allow for everything to thrive.”
The people most affected by climate change tend to be the ones who, at least historically, played the littlest role in contributing to it. A federal Government Accountability Office study published in January shows students in U.S. districts affected by climate disasters are more likely to suffer from challenges such as housing instability and food insecurity.
The climate crisis has also taken a toll on people's–and, particularly, young people's–mental health.
In a recent global survey of thousands of adolescents and young adults, for example, 60% of respondents said they were "worried" or "extremely worried" about climate change. Separately, in a 2020 survey conducted in England, more than half of child psychiatrists said they were seeing patients distressed about environmental and ecological issues.
Education leaders in Hawaii say the key to enabling young people to thrive in the face of a changing climate is bringing them back to the islands' earliest days. How did ancient Hawaiians live and how can we apply those lessons today?
Many of those lessons come from Hawaiian fishponds, innovative aquaculture systems dating back centuries that used weir-like dams to bring in juvenile fish. Nearly 500 fishponds were built over the course of 800 years; today, just 50 or so remain.
One of the remaining fishponds–Waikalua Loko I‘a–lies on the northeastern coast of O‘ahu, at the end of a dirt road, abutting a golf course.
Herb Lee, a part Hawaiian entrepreneur who grew up in the area and cares for Waikalua pond, began the process of restoring it in 1995. Back then, it “was in really, really bad shape,” Lee said. The pond was covered in mangroves, and the surrounding land –featuring an abandoned car lot, a sewage treatment plant and a trash dump –was in disrepair. Real estate development in the surrounding area further restricted the freshwater stream that once fed into the pond.
In the years since, Lee and his nonprofit have begun the process of restoring it, restacking rocks to accommodate past floods and rising sea levels and removing invasive seaweed and mangroves. On a recent morning, a group of Pacific Baptist Academy high schoolers visited the fishpond as part of a lesson on altruism. They learned about Lee’s restoration efforts. But they also learned about the pond’s science and history, its relationship with the broader community in which it sits.
In ancient Hawaii, land was broken up into what are known as ahupua‘a–pie-shaped sections of land that run from the mountains to the sea. Hawaiians irrigated and cultivated taro in streams, bringing that nutrient-rich water into ponds that connected to the ocean and provided an ideal habitat for fish.
The ahupua‘a were self-sustaining ecosystems, leveraging natural food chains and supporting Hawaiians in a remarkably efficient subsistence economy, Lee said. The Waikalua fishpond was one of many serving the ahupua‘a of the Kaneohe Bay area, a lush region that today remains one of Oahu’s largest residential communities and commercial hubs.
“I believe that these ancient fishponds hold the key to helping to grow food in Hawaii,” Lee explained to the students. “We’ve basically fished ourselves out.” The ponds no longer function “because of what we’ve done to the water, to the environment. It makes it hard for us to grow cheap food in a safe manner.”
Toward the end of the visit, the students broke into smaller groups and were tasked with building miniature ahupua‘a using sand and any natural debris around them. The goal of the assignment was to create a mountain-to- sea system that successfully captured water in its fishpond. The students got to work and, through a 20-minute process of trial and error, designed their ahupua‘a. One group ended up lining the base of their stream with leaves in an effort to streamline the water’s flow. Another group erected sand walls on the side of their miniature fishpond to help contain the water. They all experimented with different stream and pond depths.
Ancient Hawaiians learned through trial and error how to harvest fish. Similarly, Lee suggested, today’s students must learn how to make use of Hawaii’s land to help the islands to reduce their reliance on imports. The fishponds may not be back up and running in his lifetime, Lee said, but he’s hopeful today's young people will return them to operation, as schools instill them with knowledge and appreciation needed to revitalize ancient Hawaiian aquaculture.
“I really believe that it's going to benefit us –maybe not in my generation, but maybe in your generation or for your kids,” Lee told the students, “and that we’ll be able to flip back to that situation where ancient Hawaiians, before Western contact, were totally self-sufficient.”
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As Hawaii declares climate crisis, schools hope Indigenous knowledge will save the islands
