SEES Fellows: Hoahu, to set aside for the future - understanding sustainability of community based natural resource management through a century of rapid land use change

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to expand understanding of how social-ecological systems adapt to change. The research fellow will investigate community-based natural resource management in a model island system, the Hawaiian ahupuaa (a traditional Hawaiian unit of land division which organized human communities along watershed boundaries) over a time of transition from communal land ownership, to plantation agriculture, to development of luxury homes on agricultural lands. The study will consider changing mechanisms of access, boundaries of both resources and the community, rights and responsibilities of users, resource health, and ecological knowledge. The researcher hopes to illuminate often unseen patterns of natural resource use - how resources are accessed for cultural purposes, how they are shared, and what cultural ecosystem services they provide, not just to individuals, but to entire communities. The study will use geographic analysis to map the cultural landscape of traditional knowledge and resource use alongside policy and land use change, using visual and narrative tools to display diverse sources of information together. This research will enhance future community-based resource management efforts by: 1) documenting fast disappearing traditional ecological knowledge, 2) creating visual tools to display past environmental changes, while providing baseline data against which to measure future changes, 3) educating future leaders on how to care for natural resources at the local level, and 4) building on the area's poetic and storytelling traditions to translate multiple diverse ways of seeing the same landscape, and often conflicting views of sustainability, to non-academic audiences. In utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates interviews, focus groups and mapping the project bridges the fields of natural resource management, cultural and physical geography, cultural anthropology, planning, environmental education and environmental studies. The research offers the potential to transform the conceptual framework within which natural resources are managed and to effect policy within this realm. This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.