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With maturity comes the understanding that inconsequential events have consequential effects. We’re told this starting at a young age, but it’s only by accumulating years that we feel this. Hawaii’s several-fold environmental and social ills can only be fully addressed if you and I and the rest of the people we know consciously engage those problems through our daily, seemingly inconsequential activities.

Take your childhood dentist, for example. Remember how she tried to scare you straight with pictures of wickedly bad teeth, something you so certainly knew only happened to other, less fortunate people?

Fast-forward to today and you’re talking to an insurance representative who confirms that the composite fillings in your back teeth will indeed cost you the several hundred bucks charged by your dentist. And, the representative informs you, because a group of dentists (the American Dental Association), who have long relied on mercury-infused metal fillings, refuse to recognize any adverse effects of those fillings. Your dental insurance covers a tiny fraction of the cost.

You think back to your childhood dentist and a familiar cliché pops into your head about prior and current knowledge. Those cavities were the avoidable consequence of each night you skipped flossing.

I’m two years into my legal career. Occasionally, to my initial surprise and subsequent pleasure, the profession requires me to be a scientist. Some weeks I’m relearning biology and how the body processes the things you put in it. Other weeks I’m relearning oceanography and the forces that keep our shoreline in constant flux.  The science is familiar but forgotten — subjects learned in high school and college, more immature days, when I failed to appreciate the beauty, sophistication and miraculous interconnection of the natural world.

From the ground up, nothing illustrates the elegant laws of nature better than trees. Drawing minerals from ancient soil with tiny hairs — and the assistance of friendly fungi and benevolent bacteria — roots obtain raw material for building the structures above. The trunk elevates the tree above the ground-cover, branches extend and leaves spring.

As chemical processing plants, leaves harness the universal power of light energy, inhale the foundational carbon, and, in a divine conversion, produce food for the tree and oxygen for us animals. Leaves, members of a just and well-functioning society, make enough energy to support their home branch, plus a little extra to send back to the trunk and roots. Leaves then die, fall to the ground, and return their borrowed nutrients.

We know the elementary components of trees: root, trunk, branch, leaf. We know the elementary components of tree growth: soil, sun, water. But it takes reminding, and years of manifesting consequences from little events with compounding interest, before we actually see the nuanced interaction of all the elementary components and the sophisticated simplicity of its hidden complexity.

We must deliberately direct our dollars to local producers at each visit to the supermarket. We must honk at the drivers flicking cigarettes out of their windows.

At least, that’s how it works for me. Years of varying soil compositions, sun windows, shade shadows, rain storms, wind gusts, growth-inducing hormones, growth-inhibiting hormones, trimming and decay have culminated in that avocado tree in your front yard with the deep trunk cavity and slight southern lean.

You always knew that tree didn’t pop-up overnight. It took a while, however, to realize just what went into the creation of those funky-tasting avocados and just how long it took. No force goes unnoticed by the tree.

Life and all its events and sub-events do not occur in vague, distant, or abstract terms. Life happens in concrete, close range and singularly small events, crushingly conspicuous in the aggregate. A fluidly complex chain of indifferent chance and certain consequence leads to your current state of health. It’s a mix of genetics, environmental exposures, three-meals-a-day of various nutritional content for 365 days a year, decades of movements – or lack thereof.

Perhaps the small events have resulted in that bad knee, bad teeth and bad gut. Or perhaps your teeth are fine, your wallet is full, but your relationships are sour.

It’s this complex and often hidden chain of consequence that puts lead in drinking water, people on the streets and a new development on prime agricultural land.  No man is an island, no woman is an island, and no event is an island, even if they occur on one.

Even the financial upswing of an inheritance, or financial disaster caused by a natural one, have deeper roots than the apparently sudden up-shoot. An inheritance represents years of someone else’s work, not some lottery sum. Financial vulnerability is the product of forces far-preceding the flood or layoff. Some forces are within our control, and others beyond.

Simply lamenting commercial development at the expense of our natural resources or posting our allegiances online is not enough. We must deliberately direct our dollars to local producers at each visit to the supermarket. We must honk at the drivers flicking cigarettes out of their windows. We must vote and stay engaged with the civil beat beyond election cycles and beyond the narrow realm of presently popular controversy.

We must inspect our own hypocrisies and shortcomings with honesty. We must feel and understand the delicate balance of our island lives and, most importantly, actÌý²¹³¦³¦´Ç°ù»å¾±²Ô²µ±ô²â.ÌýWe are, after all, suspended in a very fine web.