The Purpose of a Garden
By James Brooks
The Men of Pa’a work the soil of a local food garden as a form of rehabilitation. Through service to their community, the cooperative of formerly incarcerated Native Hawaiian men, finds purpose and worth, plus a path forward to recovery.
This purpose then becomes the foundation for these men to become rehabilitated and re-enter the community. As stated by the group, it is through the intention of serving others where individuals find purpose.
Working in a community garden — something as old as society itself — is making a comeback of sorts, as people are increasingly recognizing the potential of small-scale experiments in permaculture.[i]
For the Men of Pa’a, the word pono captures the essence of righteousness that depends on being in balance with others. The “we” as stated by this group, also restores the “me.” The men arrive at pono when their needs balance forces and reciprocate with communal needs.
Rehabilitation can start in that moment of worth that comes when serving others in a community.
The “me” working for the advantage of a common well-being is an intentional “me” that finds purpose in creating the common weal — a sort of material precondition for more abstract terms such as, “freedom”. Freedom is an old definition of wealth bounded by a feeling of independence through individual efforts serving others.
A sense of purpose is an individual sovereignty that becomes imposing and effective when it is “resident in, or bubbling forth from a set of men, a society, a people, a nation.”[ii] This sense of individual purposefulness is a point of departure for a democracy.
On the fertile slopes of North Kohala mountain on the Big Island of Hawai’i, an abundance of self-sustaining farm practices touches on the notion of community “currency”. The formerly incarcerated Men of Pa’a have a better chance to come back to pono through working in a community garden. A temporal, yet restorative balance of individual people and permaculture, can be put into motion.
An Environmental Common
Rehabilitation is happening through soil and plants in a sort of automatic socio-ecological circuitry. It comes by law of linkages. Humans in balance with humans, and with non-human nature, is pono. It is based on ancient canonical principles and restraints. The rehabilitating “self”, manifests in an environmental common — an ecological substructure essential to social and cultural existence[iii] — with the human condition functioning in a nature-culture continuum.[iv]
Ancient Hawaiian culture thought of an environmental common as a pragmatic, obligatory arrangement of individuals with an ecological environment that is considered a beloved family member.[v] A family is obligated to nature, in which we owe the possibility for restorative justice, and where it is understood to be an integral part of the metabolism of social life.[vi]
It is like an aboriginal palimpsest (traces of old writing) that remains for entire societies of individuals who can potentially be made whole by serving others.
It hinges upon an unremitting and immutable definition of environmental justice, where human life is already enmeshed in this socio-ecological circuitry and is already part of a feedback loop.[vii]
Ecological justice depends on the rights and interests of humans in nature, being in-line with the rights and interests of non-human nature. Its inverse is a form of auto-destruction[viii].
Kūpaʻa (Sustainability)
Pono for the Men in a community garden, is not airy utopianism, but essential, hands-on work. It is a working definition of an earned, good life contingent on the land that carries it. It is biochemistry as fundamental to being human,[ix] where the Men and a farmer, strive towards pono together by cultivating Native Hawaiian foods.
The farmer explains permaculture as growing “the things that love to grow where you live.” The farmer’s purpose to at least do his “part in perpetuating these crops” is prefigured by a biogeochemical cycle of carbon exchange with the biosphere. An appropriate mixture of sun, dirt, water, and temperature can help to accomplish a human flourishing[x].
This practical aim is ecologically embedded, entangled, and dependent in every temporal and spatial context, on non-human ecologies.[xi]
Wahi a’o (Instructions)
For Native Hawaiians, sustainability means that the land educates and informs. A community garden then, is where self-knowledge, consciousness, and subjective understanding can emerge — out of a perceptual engagement with a non-human yet thinking, feeling, people of the past, present, and future.[xii]
The farmer reaches pono in a familiar relationship with the food that grows and feeds the people here, in an experiment with permaculture. The basis for the Men of Pa’a and communities, getting to pono where they are, depends on a self-sufficient ecological justice.
Pono pulls us to recognize the family members that already undergird and produce this opportunity for human reinvention.
*Credit goes to Richard Bodien for devising the title for this piece.
============================ Footnotes ===============================
[i] Gerald Aiken, “Permaculture and the social design of nature.” GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER: SERIES B, HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2017.1315906
[ii] James Penney Boyd. “The Political history of the United States, or, popular sovereignty..” 1888
[iii] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[iv] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[v] Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Kekuhi et al., (2018). Ritual + science?
[vi] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[vii] Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Kekuhi et al., (2018). Ritual + science? A portal into the science of aloha. Sustainability, 10(3478), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10103478
[viii] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[ix] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[x] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[xi] Yaka, Özge. 2019. “Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice.”
[xii] Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Kekuhi et al., (2018). Ritual + science?
