Last Post

As next week is finals, I'm guessing this will be my last post of the course (but I think I may keep it going after the class is done).

As this course concludes, this post will be a summation of what I learned on top of the final projects.

During this course we delved into dozens of fields, which led me to understand that the three topics that provide the name of this course-- culture, religion, and the environment, make up the core of what our world is. This reminded me of the philosophy taught by the Polynesian Voyaging Society-- that the earth is a boat on which we are all traveling, and can only carry a limited amount of resources for us to share and understand. I was constantly reminded during this course of the image of "the blue marble"; the first time humans had a chance to look back at each other. This photo was the most selling photo of all time (a fact I recently found out from Cash Cab), and this tells me of the interesting we have in ourselves. If we can spur on this interest in this blue marble that we are all right now, we might find a way to try to protect it.

Culture, Religion, and the Environment are the veins that run through the human population. There is no one on the planet who is void of any of them or can try to remove them. They have a symbiotic relationship, and if any one of them is hurt, the other feels its pain. We can see this all over the world as the destruction of environments harms cultures, as changes in the human culture harms the environment, and as religious fervor harms all three. While there has probably never been a perfect relationship between the three, it is a perfect relationship we should strive for.

Panda Diplomacy and Other presentations

This week we had our first set of final presentations. I decided to do my presentation on "Panda Diplomacy" which is the gifting of the of Pandas by China for the purpose of heightening foreign relations. I thought that this would be a good topic for this course as it is an example of how a nationally and culturally important icon (the Panda) plays a role in conservation. Specifically the national conservation efforts through the creation of over 60 reserves meant just for Pandas. While I didn't include it in my presentation, I wanted to talk about how other animals, such as tigers, don't receive as much special attention by the Chinese government even though they are highly endangered. I also wanted to talk about the struggle between the environment and religion, as traditional medicines, which can involve the body parts of endangered animals leading to poaching, is still a multi-billion dollar industry.

Some of the other presentations I especially enjoyed were the presentation on solar panels and the presentation Nicole did on the oranges.

The solar panel presentation was interesting to me because he talked about how many people have had an aversion to solar panels not just because of their cost, but also for aesthetic reasons. To solve this problem, some companies have been cutting solar panels into solar panel art. The powerpoint included very interesting examples of this type of art.

Nicole did a short presentation of an experiment which she explained a few weeks ago. She cut an orange and passed it out to three different people with the instructions that one was to be yelled at and given negative energy, one was supposed to be told loving words and given positive energy, and one was supposed to be a control. I was really looking forward to seeing the results, but sadly, the person who took home the negative orange forgot to bring it to class, and only had a cell phone picture. While it seemed like the positive orange did a little better than the control, I would like to have seen the negative orange.

Thanksgiving and Food

I figured I would spend this post talking about the products of two previous events.  One was the field trip to Sweet Home Waimanalo, at which I was given an 'ulu (breadfruit), which I allowed to ripen on my kitchen counter for a few weeks.  At this point, which was a couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to cook the 'ulu so I did what I normally do when I have a random food product-- I look up recipes online and get a basic idea of what to do with it.  One of the first videos I started with was this one:



I thought this was really interesting, as it showed a traditional cooking method.  However, for obvious reasons, I couldn't do it quite this way in my home kitchen.  On the same website I found a method which involved peeling the 'ulu with a potato peeler, cutting it into quarters in order to remove the core, then chopping it into small chunks which I steamed in a pot.  I then strained the chunks and mixed them with olive oil, some vinaigrette, and some herbs in order to make a kind of breadfruit salad.

It was on the trip to Sweet Home Waimanalo that I was inspired to restart my garden.  The vegetables I was growing were ready for their first harvest right about Thanksgiving.  Here's a couple pictures of the patch on Thanksgiving day.  This majority of this small patch came from one bag of seeds which costs about $1.50.  The bag was a mesclun mix which consisted of a few types of cabbages and some other leafy greens like arugula.  I harvested enough for a large salad just and hour before our Thanksgiving meal, but it seemed like I hardly made a dent in the patch.  There was a sense of pride I experienced harvesting the greens, as I had spent the last month or so watering the small patch every morning.

Waipao

For my second field trip I went to the poi pounding class in Waipao.  I wish I had brought a camera, or snapped some photos with my phone as it is a very beautiful area.  The location is in a warehouse like structure which is really in a small vale, or a groove cut through the valley floor by a stream that runs through the property.  I do have a picture of the valley from when I did a hike up Haiku stairs, and I edited in a red circle in the area that the vale is in.

I had the chance to buy cooked kalo corms for $4 a pound and take the class for free.  We went to the back of the building and cleaned the corms by scraping off the skins and any soft or rotten parts using a metal spoon.  The scraped material was saved and could be used in other types of cooking (such as my friends favorite: turkey taro burgers).  The cleaned corm was then taken inside where we grabbed a board and a poi pounder.  The pounding then involved several steps in which the corm was first mashed by rubbing the poi pounding against the kalo forwards and backwards.  I couldn't remember all the stages, but it ended with the stage in which water is slowly added by wetting the hand and rubbing the base of the pounder, and mashing the kalo in a rocking motion.  Before too much water is added the kalo is called pa'i 'ai, which is personally my favorite way to eat kalo.  If more water is added until the consistency is changed to become almost paste like, it is then called poi.

Overall the experience was excellent.  I had taken the class once before last semester and forgotten much of the process (and it seems I have again), but that's okay because I realize it is a learning process.  It is also a process which provides a great amount of satisfaction because once you engage in both the cooking and the preparing of your own food, it warrants a new meaning.  With my limited experience growing vegetables in my yard, I know that once this process is extended to planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, preparing, AND eating your own food, the eating part takes on a whole new meaning.

China and Hydrology

In the class we watched a video in which a system for urban development was describe in China.  What I found most intriguing about the video was the discussion of the very first step in the planning, which was to map out the hydrology of the landscape where the city was to be built and protect this vital resource.  The main way it seemed that the hydrology system was protected was to just leave it alone by doing things like making parks that surround them.

This made me think mostly about the mismanaged hydrology of Hawaii, especially on Oahu, where it seems that every stream has been channeled by concrete walls and forced to collide with itself into large culverts to dump into the ocean.  This seems to me completely contradictory to what water is.  Fresh water is necessary to our survival, as well as the existence of life EVERYWHERE, which is why water is the first thing we look for in our search for life elsewhere in the universe.  It seems like in the development of cities we treat water as an obstacle; as trash which must be emptied from the area (and in fact what we use to carry our waste away).  We turn perfectly good drinking water into waste when it should be conserved.  When its not treated as waste, its gathered up and used for aesthetic purposes, such as making sure the grass is green in all the "necessary" places, such as golf courses.  The talk of hydrology reminded me of the tragic story of Waikiki and its development, in which the wetland agriculture behind Waikiki was politically manipulated out of existence.

I'm glad that hydrology and the flooding of rivers and streams is being seen once again as something natural, beneficial, and necessary for our existence.

My Garden

After visiting the Sweet Home Waimanalo sister site, as well as viewing the drip irrigated planter boxes at the cafe which contained several varieties of fruits and veggies, I decided that it was about time to start rejuvenating my own home garden.  Ever since high school, I have at various times gone in and out of attempting to grow food in a few small patches in my backyard.  The history of my green thumb began with one of my many treks down to Pu'unui stream just a very short walk downhill from my home.  At the time I was only about nine or ten years old, and when I stumbled across a coconut which had begun to talk root and sprout on the bank of the stream shore, I was intrigued.  I uprooted the coconut and brought it back to my yard where I promptly took a shovel and dug up a small patch of ground, just enough for the coconut to sit halfway submerged in the soil, and plopped the nut in its new home for the next eight years.  It was then mistreated by me in a variety of ways, including feeding it chlorinated water from the pool on many occasions.  However, the resilient coconut kept growing and sparked my interest in growing plants.  I still think of what would have happened if I had decided to transplant something less hardy.

But it turned out that it was a coconut, which provided me with MANY MANY more coconuts than I could have ever cared to have over its lifetime, until it was finally cut down while I was in high school.  It was during high school that I decided to actual try out gardening and over the years I have grown many different plants including eggplant, snap peas, bok choy, choy sum, corn, dill, basil, thyme, and many others with varying levels of success.  One of the crops I was most proud of was the kalo I used to grow.  I began with one pot of kalo from the native plant section at Home Depot which I planted, harvested, replanted the keiki and repeated multiple times until I was growing over thirty plants in a small plot.  Every nine months I invited my best friend Matt Maile over for a harvesting and would then proceed to make poi, laulau, squid lu'au, and once we even tried kulolo.  Since high school as I became more invested in college I slowly harvesting and not replanting until there was nothing.

In other words, I need to change this.  So I went down to Home Depot and picked up some seeds and planted them a few weeks ago, they're sprouting and doing nicely so far.

In other news, I got my LSAT scores back on Sunday! I scored a 166 which is in the 93rd percentile, and I've already begun getting soliciting e-mails from schools, haha!

World Population

Another of the speakers who came in and talked to the class was Henry Curtis, who is the executive director of Life of the Land.  He also was a contributing author of The Value of Hawaii: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future in which he wrote the chapter on energy.

His discussion began with a quick history of world population growth.  He then moved to talk about urban populations, mentioning that London was the first city on earth to reach a population of 1 million (in circa 1800), and that Seoul, South Korea now has the highest population of any city in the world.  He also talked about how the year 2008 marked the tipping point in which more than half of the world's population were urban (as opposed to rural)

He then talked quickly about the history of energy resources in the U.S. and Hawaii.  He began by mentioning the 1859 discovery of oil in Pennsylvania which began a massive drive for oil in the U.S. and simultaneously saved the Right Whale from extinction since it was being hunted on massive proportions for its oil (which was used as a fuel source for providing light).  Currently 80% of Hawaii's energy comes from oil (which is obviously not produced in Hawaii) and 20% from coal (again not produced in Hawaii).  He discussed how there is political manipulation of the term "green energy" which allows for massive amounts of the coal used to be counted as green energy.

Sweet Home Waimanalo

For one of our classes we had the chance to visit Sweet Home Waimanalo Cafe in Waimanalo.  The location is right next to a McDonalds which is often used as a landmark for directions in the area.  There is a sense of irony and imagery with this location.  It shows a sense of the battle for two competing notions of food production and business models.  Sweet Home Waimanalo is dedicated to sustainability oriented business which supports the local community, by keeping as many levels of production as possible within the "modern 'ahupua'a" or community (traditionally based along Hawaii's natural topography of valleys).

We had the opportunity to visit the cafe's sister site up the road in Waimanalo.  This site used to be an ornamental plant farm as well as an area for horse boarding, but there is a grand plan for the location.  The plan is to create a sustainable organic farm which will be complimentary to the cafe.  So far, there isn't much in the way of the farm realized on the plot, but the project is only a few months into its realization.  The main feature of the property currently is the house which Kevin Vacarello lives in.  The home was made at a relatively low cost, and is a model for what a green house could be.  Many of the materials came from Reuse Hawaii from deconstructed homes, and the building is designed to waste as little energy as possible.  However, one problem I had with this model was that it seemed like much of the building's low cost was possible due to the use of volunteer work and donated materials and services.

The tour of the property was very enjoyable and informative, and I was lucky enough to be able to take home a large 'ulu (breadfruit) as well as an avocado from the trees on the property.  Once we got back to the cafe we got to eat the food we pre-ordered (I ordered the fish tacos which I loved) and we had a chance to talk story with our classmates over some 'awa that was prepared by the staff.

Continuum of Communication

One concept that I feel could be talked more about was Kevin Vacarello's personal theory of a continuum of communication.  He made a simple chart on the board of a cone going from left to right (the conetinuum of comunication, and within this center of this cone, with an equal size from left to right, ran a bar which was labeled reality.  So in other words, at the short end of the cone reality encompassed almost the entire space of the cone, while at the large end, reality encompassed very little of the space of the cone.  Across the top of the cone was labeled different fields of thought starting from the most quantitative to the most qualitative (starting with math at one end and extending to metaphysics on the other).  The list of these he thought of when he was drawing the diagram went in this order: math, physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, economy, politics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy/metaphysics.  This meant that the more qualitative of the fields, such as math, portrayed mostly reality; the rules are set and there is not much variation in the real world.  While at the other end, fields like philosophy have interpretations of the world which go far beyond simply explaining reality.  Any space in the cone outside of the bar of reality represented the amount of interpretation of the world each field possessed.

This cone showed the varying levels of interpretation which can sometimes restrict communication, and can be overcome through understanding their relationship to each other.

Routh Bolomet

Routh Bolomet was an... interesting speaker.  She gave an anecdote of how she came to Hawaii from California, where she did enough drugs to turn her brain into mush (as she explained a CAT scan showed).  She told a story of the organic farm she lived near on the north shore, and how that farm was actually spraying pesticides which was having an adverse affect on her health through its seeping into the water supply.

The rest of her presentation was a bit of a blur to me, as it involved a lot of philosophy I didn't really agree with.  For example, one of her quotes was that "you don't grow plants, you're growing the soil".  She made multiple mentions of how current science is essentially wrong in a lot of regards, and to this I had to tune my mind away from the presentation.  It's one thing for me to be open-minded, which I usually am, but in this case the argumentation had such a small base, I felt that she wasn't arguing for a side which I don't agree with, but rather something completely different (in some cases from common sense).  The presentation began to ramble on different philosophies and alternate religions (which included an alternative sect of Hinduism), to which I couldn't really follow.

Another concept she spoke of, which I can't remember the technical name, had to do with mass consensus.  She explained that if just 10,000 people learned how to do something, the entire human race would automatically know how to do it too, regardless of contact with any of those people.  She used the example of a case where she says a population of monkeys were taught how to peel bananas before eating them, and suddenly monkeys all over the world began to do that too.  This is a concept I don't agree with at all as I think there are many contradictory examples.  For one, it is a fact that more than 10,000 people currently know how to swim, but there are still many people who do not possess that ability.

Kevin Vacarello

One of the most important speakers who came and talked to the class was Kevin Vacarello.  He has an extraordinary background in the field of astrophysics and thermodynamics, and has decided to use this knowledge for one of the most humbling causes in today's world: the sustainability effort.

He began his presentation with a fairly simple explanation of sustainability including three factors: ecology, social, and economy.  His ultimate point was that there should be an equitable relationship between these factors, and that lies at the root of sustainability.  He made a very unique connection with this to the process of thermodynamics, which he explains is a field all about equitable relationships.  He then went into a discussion of thermodynamics, which delved into the realm of science far beyond my capacity, but interesting nonetheless.  One thing I did understand (I think) was his discussion of the equitable relationship between the economy and ecology.  If there was a truly fair relationship, the value of energy resources would be equal to the unit of energy it contains.  In other words, energy rich resources, such as oil, would cost much more than other resources with less energy contained in the material.

Another point of discussion I found interesting was his explanation of Social Network Theory, which is ultimately the method of social change.  It begins with leaders (early adopters), who adopt something new, and is followed by the first half majority.  Somewhere during the adoption of the first half majority there is a tipping point which is reached, where it becomes so accepted that the second half majority joins the bandwagon and adopts the new thing too.  The last stage of people is the laggers.  Ultimately this gives hope to the people who are beginning something new which is not adopted yet.  Their goal is to convert as many people as possible until they reach the tipping point and ultimate success is assured.

Beginning of the End

This is the beginning of my blog for my Anthropology course: Culture, Religion and the Environment, as well as the beginning of my last semester at HPU (thus the title).  This is actually quite a recent development, as I found out I could take one more course than I thought I could this semester, allowing me to graduate early (and not waste next semester with mostly fluff courses, as appealing as that may sound.  It is because of this that I was actually not able to go to the first session of this course.  The first week of courses actually ended up being a swirling maelstrom of changes in my schedule before finally settling on graduating early.

With missing the first week in mind, I figured I'd just talk about what I think Culture, Religion, and the Environment are/is.  For instance, why are these three concepts included in the title of a course?  For my part, I think that religion is located within culture, and culture is mostly our response to the environment.  I say "mostly" because I feel that culture is also creative.  It isn't simply our response to the environment in order to survive, but involves the creative capacity of humanity; a simple example being art which goes beyond the utility of the artistic object.  It is with this viewpoint that I came into the class.