The Hawai’i Department of Health has led the way in framing the responsible use and sale of kava for public consumption. The GRAS determination has long-supported the freedom of the American consumer to gain access to foods that they find beneficial.

In contemporary discourse, islands are often viewed as marginal—small, remote, culturally picturesque but politically peripheral. This is a mistake.

Islands, and the people who inhabit them, offer a vital epistemology. One formed not in abstraction, but in constant negotiation with geography, climate, and social interdependence. As the world confronts escalating ecological constraints, forced migration, and cultural fracturing, the island becomes less a periphery and more a prototype…