Native Ecologies

The innovative contribution that native ecologies can make is to imagine and plan our planet's future starting from a paradigm of the living that conceives the ecosystem as a community composed of humans and non-humans, crossed by a dense network of relationships based on interdependence.

We are all on board the same canoe and the only effective way to steer the boat, especially during the inevitable storms, is a close and conscious cooperation. For native Hawaiian ecologies, every expression of nature – the other-than-human collective consisting of the atmosphere and its agents, water and land, plants, animals and spirits– is animated and aware, therefore capable of interacting with the other collectives including the human collective. This web of connections and interdependencies is one of the reasons why in Olelo Hawaii there is no term equivalent to "nature" in Western languages: the human and the other-than-human are not separated and opposed as in the Western conception, they combine to form a single family, the living. Within this cultural paradigm, Dr. Borgnino explores, in a perspective that is both ethnographic and historical, the forms of ecological responsibilities expressed by Kanaka Maoli culture, with its vocation to insular reciprocity. And it is precisely this vision of the world that is conveyed to us by native ecologies: an island-planet surrounded by a cosmic sea in which individual and collective well-being depends on the propensity for cooperation not only between humans but also between human and other-than-human.

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