The Meaning of Aloha: Sustainability the Hawaiian Way
Aloha! I recently moved to Hawaii. You may have noticed the lack of blog posts, YouTube videos, and content from anything other than my social media (and the occasional podcast episode for This Sustainable Life).
It’s been busy getting a new job and getting a whole new life set up for me and my wife and daughter with everything from cell phones to health insurance to a place to live. Worry not, I’ll be back to blogging, and hopefully YouTubing again soon! It’s always on my mind and I’m constantly thinking of how I want to come back better.
Living in Hawaii has forced me to change a lot of what I do, but the new perspective has also brought new insights, and there’s one in particular I’ve really been thinking a lot about when it comes to sustainability (and I’ve already mentioned it once in this post…): Aloha!
What is “aloha?”
You may know “aloha” has the Hawaiian way of saying hello, but do you happen to know what the word means? I always knew it had meaning deeper than just “hello” but I never actually looked into it until now. Now that I know, I’ve realized how much the meaning of “aloha” is connected to sustainability.
So what does aloha mean? Before we answer this question, there’s a little bit of Hawaiian history I want to cover.
I know, stay with me here. This is interesting stuff. Especially if you love sustainability. And if you’re here reading this blog, there’s a good chance you do.
Before westerners arrived, Hawaiians lived in isolation from the rest of the world for at least 500 years. Sustainably. That means, they were able to maintain food production, population, and live in harmony with nature: something we in America haven’t ever figured out how to do. Have you ever thought about that? Our entire culture is based on taking advantage of resources…Leading us to this world we live in now: a world where we use one year of Earth’s resources in about 7 months. Hawaiian people, using far less sophisticated technology than we have now (arguably BECAUSE they don’t have the technology we have now), were able to live in balance with the Hawaiian islands that provided them with food and resources.
Growth isn’t sustainable. Growth isn’t aloha.
We base our economy on growth, but if you live on a small island and expect your population and resource usage to grow continuously, you probably won’t live long. It wouldn’t take long before you overpopulate, use up all the resources, and die out. They lived sustainably because they had to.
We are still trying to figure out how to do that on a global scale.
If you still don’t think what the Hawaiians did is amazing, consider that in about 200 years, we’ve gone from 1 billion people to 8 billion people while causing climate change, reduced the amount of nature and wildlands to a tiny fraction of what they were, and caused the extinction of a very large (and growing) number of animal species. In other words, we have NOT lived in balance with the world and have NOT been sustainable. We’ve modeled our economies and rated our success by growth. And they survived for at least hundreds of years (thousands, by some estimates) IN BALANCE with nature. No overpopulation, no over-extraction, and without most of the kinds of the technology or knowledge we have today.
Full disclosure: I’m NOT Hawaiian
I am by no means an expert on Hawaiian language or culture, I just recently moved here. But the ancient Hawaiians fascinate and amaze me, so I did what most people do: used Google, and started with “aloha.” One of my favorite pages that came up wrote:
“Aloha is being a part of all, and all being a part of me. When there is pain–it is my pain. When there is joy–it is also mine. I respect all that is as part of the Creator and part of me. I will not willfully harm anyone or anything.
When food is needed, I will take only what I need and explain why it is being taken. The earth, the sky, the sea are mine to care for, to cherish and to protect. This is Hawaiian–this is Aloha.”
I’m not sure how correct this is, and I would love to hear from someone who knows better (comment below if you do!), but I found this meaning so moving.
Another said:
“Using Hawaiian language’s grammatical rules, we will translate this literally as “The joyful sharing of life energy in the present” or simply “joy fully sharing life.””
As I read these, it started to make sense why Hawaiians were able to live sustainably for so long: they took a very all-together view of their world. They viewed themselves as a part of a whole. Their way of thinking means: “What damage I do, I do to myself and my family. What I take, becomes less for everyone else. When I am joyful, I should share that joy with others because their joy will again become mine.”
We don’t live aloha. But we should.
Hawaiian culture is about so much more than just hula dancing and surfing. It’s a deep and rich culture based in treating the earth and others with respect.
I think today we have stopped imagining ourselves as part of a whole, and it has started to cause the problems we see in many aspects of our modern lives: societies that are fracturing over politics, ecosystems that are being destroyed by overfishing or overextraction, or tension between countries/ethnicities/wealth classes.
It’s up to us to learn from Hawaiians and other indigenous peoples: the world is not a thing for us to take advantage of or use. We are part of it’s whole. When we start living like we’re part of a living, breathing system, and we recognize that the better we do for the world, the better it will do for us, that’s when we will truly start to know the real meaning of sustainability.
The true meaning of living aloha, to me, is synonymous with living ECO. Living in a way that is Environmentally COnscious of who we are on this earth. And how to live in balance, as one with the planet. To give love and respect to everyone and everything around us, so that we can get love and respect in return.
Live Aloha. Live ECO.
Final note: If you’re interested in more, here’s a great YouTube video about how Hawaii survived sustainably and what we can learn from them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9fv_2XIJBk