“An enduring familial relationship with the lands and oceans.”

Think about what that means.

Scott Fisher uses the phrase a few times in “Hawaiian Culture and Its Foundation in Sustainability,” the first chapter in a Maui-centric collection of thoughtful, forward-looking essays called “Thinking Like an Island — Navigating A Sustainable Future in Hawaii.” Jennifer Chirico and Gregory S. Farley edited the book, published in April by UH Press.

The need for a “familial relationship with the land” serves as the essence of Fisher’s argument: That Hawaiian culture, both past and present, is shaped by a cosmogony wherein the first ancestors were siblings of the kalo, or taro plant; and that the islanders’ worldview, evolved over centuries, therefore places “an intrinsic value on the interdependence of all life, with a sense of the sacred permeating the entire natural world.”

Fisher names three closely related pillars of sustainability that supported the cultural and economic success of pre-contact Hawaiians: an island worldview, a religious connection to the natural world, and an interdependence between alii and makaainana, between the people and land.

Then, as of 1778, the rest of the world arrived. In 1821, the first company of New England missionaries sailed to the Kingdom of Hawaii, bringing with them western notions of individuality, a limitless appetite for limited resources, and, as Fisher notes, a Bible whose god who said man should subdue the earth and have dominion over all its creatures.

We all know what happened during the 100 years that followed — the catastrophes of cultural collapse, disease and displacement — yet Fisher, the acting director of the Maui-based Hawaii Islands Land Trust and a member of the Maui/Lanai Island Burial Council, is sanguine about the present and future.

“Reassertion of Hawaiian values can be seen in the context of retrieval, reevaluation, and transformation,” he writes. In fact, it’s already happening.

He quotes scholar Malcolm Nanea Chun, who wrote in 2009 that “cultural revival and identification have gone beyond academic and intellectual arguments to a reality in communities and families, and are now part of the political landscape of the islands.”

If you don’t believe Chun, ask Walter Ritte. The veteran bare-bones activist regularly mobilizes hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who demand, usually successfully, that Hawaiian protocols be followed, whether it’s on Kahoolawe or Molokai, at the 1978 State Constitutional Convention, atop Mauna Kea or at the University of Hawaii itself where, in 2006, Ritte and his legions convinced the school to relinquish its patents on certain strains of kalo.

“Cultural revival and identification … are now part of the political landscape of the islands.” — Malcolm Naea Chun

“If you understand the Hawaiian point of view, then maybe you understand why life forms can’t be owned,” Ritte said at the time.

The book’s title “Thinking Like an Island —Navigating a Sustainable Future in Hawaii” is catchy, even if the word “sustainable” is shopworn. Editors Chirico and Farley, both of them with Maui connections, insist on it.

In the book’s introductory remarks, they posit sustainability as “a fundamental change, a paradigm shift, in the way humans view the world.” They decry Hawaii’s resource depletion and its dangerous dependence on — and the ever-increasing costs of — imported energy and food supplies.

But they too are bullish, if not wishful: “Buoyed by opportunity, desire, practicality, and the remembrance of native Hawaiian culture and practices,” they write, “the fiftieth state is becoming a sustainability showcase: a model for sustainable living that is also applicable to other isolated communities worldwide.”

To illustrate their thesis, they include 11 essays on a wide range of subjects.

Among them: Hawaii’s shaky food security and the advent of the non-governmental Hawaii Food Policy Council; the visitor industry’s confusion about “sustainable tourism” and “ecotourism;” and a seriously wonky, pie-in-the-sky brief on planning and the viability of offshore, mechanical wave-energy converters.

Water issues get two chapters: One reviews ecological design and biomimicry in water systems, including recycling and watershed and wetlands restoration. The other details the saga of Maui County’s Wastewater Reclamation Division and its five wastewater recycling facilities operating on three islands.

In the essay “Green Building — Integrating the Past with the Future,” architect Matthew Goyke and John Bendon, an expert analyst in green building design, highlight the award-winning, 39-unit Kumuhau subdivision in Waimanalo, which won a gold certification by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Developed as entry-level family homes by the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and built by Armstrong Builders in 2011, the subdivision’s simple one- and two-story fhouses look like contemporary riffs on Hawaii’s vernacular plantation houses of the early 20th century, with open-sided carports/lanai attached.

The key decision by DHHL planners was to eliminate air conditioning in the units. “All subsequent decisions were based on creating comfortable living environments through natural ventilation,” Goyke and Bendon report.

“It should come as no surprise that award-winning ‘green’ buildings, such as those at Kumuhau, ultimately converge on some of the same underlying design principles that reflected centuries of experience with these islands.” — Matthew Goyke, architect, and John Bendon, green building design analyst.

This meant things like creating usable outdoor spaces, strategically placing windows for maximum natural light and ventilation, and installing reflective roofing, insulated roofs and walls, sunshades over south-facing windows, and mechanical ventilation: ceiling fans, whole-house fans, and automated exhaust fans in bathrooms to control moisture build-up.

Energy savings involved maximizing natural light and installing solar water heaters, photo-voltaic panels, Energy Star fans and appliances, and outdoor clothes lines located close to washing machines.

Drawing parallels between the breezy, modest, no-need style on display at Kumuhau and the waste-not-want-not ethic that island living once demanded, Goyka and Bendon conclude that “it should come as no surprise that award-winning ‘green’ buildings, such as those at Kumuhau, ultimately converge on some of the same underlying design principles that reflected centuries of experience with these islands.”

There is news from the kalo patch, where Penny Levin, a member of the Taro Security and Purity Task Force and a Maui kalo farmer, goes deep into the history and efficacy of Hawaiian agriculture and the later, extractive plantation model for agricultural industry. She exhaustively traces a litany of government studies and smaller, island-based reports — from Molokai, Kohala, Maui — that illustrate the evolution of thinking about sustainability.

A workable, Hawaiian-style plan for sustainability continues its evolution, but it’s not there yet, she says, arguing that “a sustainable agricultural industry (revenue generation) is not the same as sustainable agriculture (resource rejuvenation).”

While kalo acreage and poi production have remained relatively constant during the past three decades, the action is moving to smaller-scale farms, Levin reports.

“Those who do not grow food must create and protect the space in which food is grown for them.” — Penny Levin, Maui kalo farmer

“If one goal of sustainable agriculture is to feed ourselves first, we do not need to size ourselves out of our own markets,” she says.

Furthermore, she urges that “those who do not grow food must create and protect the space in which food is grown for them.”

In 2011, Hawaii’s Legislature legalized the direct sale of hand-pounded poi to the public. During the past five years, Levin reports, an estimated 8,400 people have learned how to pound nutritious kalo corms into paiai and poi; and more than 200 poi boards and 500 poi pounders a year since then have been distributed to schools, communities and families.

I have always believed that the most interesting thing going on in Hawaii is the righteous quest, led by Hawaiians themselves, to rebuild, rock by rock, their cultural and political primacy, their systemic aloha aina.

This book, firmly convinced of the durability of the Hawaiian way, is a bracing, hopeful look at some of what’s possible.