It helps to come to Islands & Cultures—a collection of essays focusing largely if not exclusively, as goes the subtitle, on “sustainability”—with at least some background on Polynesia, not because such background is necessary to follow the arguments in the various papers, but because otherwise one will be spending a great deal of time on the Internet chasing down one interesting reference after another.
The opening chapter, “Who Are the Polynesians and What Is Polynesia?”, provides succinct answers to the two questions, while the second, “Polynesian Islands as Model Social-Environmental Systems”, lays out the book’s principal raison d’être, to propose Polynesia and the individual island societies as models of sustainability. The rationale is in fact straightforward; individual Polynesian islands, or groups of islands (eg Hawai‘i), are resource-constrained and isolated:
island societies are less driven by interactions with neighboring societies than are continental societies, whose neighbors are right next door, so internal dynamics are relatively more important than external dynamics on islands versus continents.
More specifically, the authors discuss “how humans and human societies interact with land” and “the development and dynamics of social-ecological systems”.
Some potential preconceptions are easily disposed of: while the Polynesians could be said, to use the common phrase, “to live in harmony with nature”, the authors detail how this was not a harmony based on leaving nature to its own devices. Population densities could be quite high, farming could be and often was intensive, and societies, engineering and land-use strategies could be sophisticated.
The general outlines will perhaps not come as a great surprise, but some of the chapters detail subjects that are perhaps less well-known, such as the rock gardens of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), which appear to be attempts to make the best of rather poor soil. Exceptions, meanwhile, sometimes do indeed prove the rule and the discussion of what is known internationally as New Zealand highlights how the poorly the traditional Polynesian toolkit was suited to larger, more temperate, territories:
The climate of much of Aotearoa, for example, did not allow for the growth of any Polynesian food crops over most of the land during the winter season—and the summer season was too short south of the Banks Peninsula (near Christchurch) on Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island) for any transported Polynesian crops to grow to maturity at all. Given such constraints, the Polynesian discoverers had to adjust their production systems to work in their new environment.
But the most fascinating chapter is surely that on Tikopia, a tiny island of only 4.6 square kilometers, and “a Polynesian outlier in the southeastern Solomon Islands”:
Tikopia ranks among the smallest Polynesian tropical high islands, yet with a population density of about 242 persons per square kilometer, it has one of the highest demographic concentrations recorded under an Indigenous oceanic subsistence regime. The island’s agricultural system is highly intensive, yet it lacks both irrigation and extensive short-fallow dryland field cultivation. Rather, in Tikopia the high population density is supported by arboriculture, or what has more recently come to be called agroforestry, bolstered by the genetic manipulation of certain crops to adapt them to an intensive “orchard garden” regime.
There is no hidden hand here; everything seems deliberate. At some point a few centuries ago, the decision was made to get rid of all the pigs, despite their contribution to the diet, because their net effect on crops was negative. Even more decisively, the islanders also had an explicit “moral code of zero population growth”, which included
celibacy, prevention of conception, abortion, infanticide, sea voyaging (generally suicidal) by young males, and ultimately the expulsion of some segment of the population.
This broke down when Anglican missionaries interfered and
the Tikopia population overshot the island’s carrying capacity, resulting in famine and near disaster.
The council of chiefs now only allow 1115 people to live on the island.
Efforts to tie the various papers together are much in evidence but like most such collections, the essays only cover what they cover, while those sections dealing with the mental rather than physical space of Polynesia seem less immediately irrelevant to the nominal focus on sustainability. The contributors are largely, if not exclusively Polynesians themselves; their closeness to the subject makes much of the writing more immediate than it might otherwise be. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of the first person plural to refer to the subject people under study can be a bit disconcerting in an academic text.
There is some discussion, primarily in the context of Hawai‘i, of attempts to re-establish sustainable practices. The mind inevitably turns to the question as to how applicable these studies are to the rest of the world; the book doesn’t take on this question and it would probably be unfair to expect it to. What would be the modern, wider world’s equivalent to the “generally suicidal” sea-voyaging of Tikopia’s young males? Travel to Mars, perhaps. But even Elon Musk can’t put that many people in space.