Re-grounding "diversity".
Shifting towards relational storytelling
Our legs were knee-deep caked in mud as we waded through a loʻi (Hawaiian water taro patch) that has been stewarded by my friend’s family for five generations. With sickles and shovels in hand, we repeatedly gathered, chopped, and dug out bundles of a tall grass that was taking over one of the paddies. We later hand-pulled another aquatic plant in the field that was initially brought down the valley by one person in his aquarium — but that later spread everywhere after a flood.
As we tried to identify the other various plants now pervasive in the area like the poisonous Angel Trumpet, my friend shares that many of the plants now considered invasive in that specific biome were initially introduced by one particular neighbor who wanted to grow a diverse range of “exotic,” ornamental plants for their own botanical garden. Decades later, they now contribute to the never-ending, extremely laborious maintenance work that kalo farmers and families in the whole region must partake in.
Elsewhere around the island, large landowners who idealize the aesthetic of perfectly manicured, resort-style lawns translate their own conditioned “tastes” into what they consider as best practices for managing their estates — contributing little, and arguably detrimentally, to local watersheds, habitats, and food and community systems. Along the Hāmākua Coast in areas considered wet forest habitats, commercial interests have turned many former sugarcane plantations that long replaced native forests into large swaths of grasslands for livestock, as well as massive monocultural stands of eucalyptus that disrupt regional water cycles.
Cumulatively, these different approaches to tending ecosystems can all be viewed as a praxis and expression of diversity — which, in theory, ought to be celebrated... Because diversity is good, right?
But what happens when the diversity in thought guiding people’s decisions on how to care for their privatized parcels of land becomes completely ungrounded — not rooted in shared, place-based biocultural knowledges, values, and understandings of what the community (human and more-than-human) needs?
Marinating in these discomforting questions, I’ve landed on a challenging need to critique the types of ungrounded “diversity in thought” that permeate society today.