Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall , remembers his childhood home of Hawaii and the first time he met the man fighting to save the “Garden Island.”
Will Chancellor
Will Chancellor
I lived on Kaua'i, Hawaii, in the early eighties, before Walmart and traffic jams, when the biggest store was Big Save. Kaua'i is the Garden Island, and on the north shore it rains hard at least once a day. When the skies cleared, my mom and I would follow a rusted-out railing to the beach. Here I'd dig around the looping cursive of tree roots imagining the swamps of Dagobah from Star Wars, hunt for crabs on the rocks, or dive for creatures in the tidepools.
The Kaua'i my family moved to was wary of development. Locals seemed to realize that the arrow of "growth" only points one way, that no one ever undoes a big-box-store economy, no one de-develops. After a high-rise hotel went up in the sixties, residents passed an island-wide ordinance that "No building should be made taller than a mature palm tree." Kaua'i adopted a precautionary principle with respect to external development, saying in effect that there needs to be a clear benefit to local culture before anyone messes with paradise.
As such, Kaua'i was a remote place to live, and, like most other transplants back then, my family moved back to the mainland before I started elementary school. Even though it was only five years, living on Kaua'i shaped us. The first lesson I was ever taught was aloha 'aina, a reverence for the land that gets inside you — the same connection to the natural world stressed in ecofeminist literature, the same love for wildness found in deep ecology. That lesson stuck, and led me to major in environmental policy and work for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. A love for the island stuck with my family as well and we went back whenever we could.
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