Nainoa Thompson & Planet Earth, 'Hawaiki Rising'

Review by Bill Doughty

When Pwo (Master) Navigator Nainoa Thompson brought the voyaging canoe Hōkūle`a into Pearl Harbor in February of this year, he spoke in part about harnessing fear, overcoming the dangers of complacency, embracing diversity as a strength, and passing knowledge and wisdom to the next generation.

Thompson addressed the Navy and local civilian audience during his visit – part of a statewide "Mahalo Hawaii" tour of thanks to everyone for their support of Hōkūle`a's Malama Honua (caring together for Island Earth) circumnavigation of the planet completed in 2017.

Sam Low's "Hawaiki Rising: Hōkūle`a, Nainoa Thompson, and the Hawaiian Renaissance" (Island Heritage Publishing, 2013) provides a fascinating history of the beloved canoe, the revival of Hawaiian culture beginning in the 1970s, and how dedicated individuals inspired others to become aware of the need to respect and care for our environment, including our oceans.

Renaissance man Herb Kane at work in his Chicago studio.

Low served in the United States Navy in the Pacific in the mid-1960s. He introduces us to iconic individuals who brought Hōkūle`a ("Star of Joy") to life, including Herb Kane, and artist, sailor and thinker who was inspired by a book, "Canoes of Oceania" and by Polynesian culture, in general. Kane worked in Chicago but dreamed of the Pacific, learning all he could of voyaging canoes.

Kane created14 paintings of Polynesian canoes in the 1960s. The Hawaii State Foundation of Culture and the Arts purchased the paintings in 1969, making it possible for Kane to move to Hawaii to continue his studies and setting the stage for the revival of Hawaiian culture in the 1970s. 

At the time the foundation that purchased Kane's art was headed by its first director, Alfred Preis, architect of the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.

The late Daniel Inouye, United States Senator from Hawaii, once said, “When you saw a Herb Kane painting, you were energized and motivated to learn about the past. …His artwork captured both ancient and modern-day Hawaii and help preserve Hawaii's unique culture for future generations.”

Nainoa Thompson called Kane, who was a Navy veteran, "father of the Hawaiian Renaissance.”



In 1973 Kane envisioned construction of a voyaging canoe that would inspire that renaissance. He met with University of Hawaiʻi anthropologist Ben Finney and Tommy Holmes, author of The Hawaiian Canoe. Together they founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society and began work on the Hōkūle‘a, capable of sailing between Hawaii and Tahiti. One day, their canoe would sail around the world on a mission to bring awareness about earth's ecology.

Kane lived in East Oahu, which is where he met a young man who was serious, quiet and young enough to be imprinted with a love of the stars, the sea and sailing.

Nainoa Thompson

That young man was Nainoa Thompson, whose father, Myron "Pinky" Thompson was a World War II Army veteran, a strong supporter of Hawaiian culture, and a foundation for Nainoa's philosophy of life. Pinky told his son "Ninety percent of success is preparing for it." He helped Nainoa overcome his fears and learn values shared by the U.S. Navy: the importance of discipline, training and having a vision.

Nainoa writes this in the book's foreword:

"Our canoe, Hōkūle`a, and our dreams have now carried us ... (following) in the wake of our ancestors who discovered and settled Polynesia. It has been a process of finding ourselves not only as Hawaiians, as native to these islands, but also as native to planet Earth. On all of our voyages, we have been guided by the wisdom of our elders, our kupuna. Among them is my father, Myron "Pinky" Thompson, who understood that voyaging is a process in which we are guided by values that are universal. 'Before our ancestors set out to find a new island,' my father told me, 'they had to have a vision of that island over the horizon. They made a plan for achieving that vision. They prepared themselves physically and mentally and were willing to experiment, to try new things. They took risks. And on the voyage they bound each other with aloha so they could together overcome those risks and 'seeking, planning, experimenting, taking risks, and caring for each other. The same principles that we used in the past, are the ones that we use today and that we will use into the future. No matter what race we are or what culture we carry, these are values that work for us all."

Nainoa learned some values the hard way aboard Hōkūle`a: the importance of good seamanship, communication and the courage to assume command at sea.

Nainoa went to Bishop Museum's planetarium, studied at Willamette College in Oregon after attending Punahou School, and was inspired by a book called "The Stars: A New Way to See Them" by H. A. Rey, author of "Curious George." 

Low introduces us to another earlier influencer in Nainoa's life: Yoshio Kawano, who lived in traditional Japanese style and taught the young Nainoa how to fish and make connections with nature. Nainoa says, "Yoshi may have been my most important teacher of all. I didn't know it then, and certainly he didn't either, but he was preparing me for my life."

Pwo Navigator Mau Piailug

Through Low's insightful narrative we get to know others who worked with or inspired Nainoa and who have strong ties to Hōkūle`a: Mau Piailug, Eddie Aikau, Lacy Veach, Snake Ah Hee, Sam Ka'i, Chad Bayaban, Will Kyselka, Gordon Pi'ianapa'a, Shorty Bertelmann, Kimo Lyman, Dave Lyman, Wally Froiseth, Bruce Blankenfeld, Tava Taupa and Kawika Kapahulehua, among others.

We get an intimate view of life aboard Hōkūle`a, including on two roundtrip journeys to Tahiti in this book, published just before Malama Honua. We relive the heartbreaking loss of Eddie Aikau in 1978 and the rescue of the capsized Hōkūle`a, thanks to an observant Hawaiian Airlines pilot and a ready response from the U.S. Coast Guard.

Eddie ("Eddie Would Go") Aikau

Eddie's loss strengthened Nainoa's resolve. He pledged to fulfill Aikau's dream on his behalf, to see "Tahiti rising," coming up on the horizon as the voyaging canoe approached.

Using charts and simple explanations, Low shows some of the how-to of wayfinding. "The concept was straightforward – stars rise in the east, arc overhead, and set in the west, defining points on the horizon to steer by, or 'houses,' as Nainoa called them." Data becomes knowledge and, over time, knowledge becomes intuitive wisdom.

Author Sam Low blends science with art in his presentation, explaining some of the fundamentals of Nainoa's wayfinding using stars, constellations, ocean swells, birds, the moon and other means – using science and all the senses plus a spiritual dimension that defies explanation.

On one key night in the doldrums, confused about their direction, Nainoa "sensed" the moon before he saw it. He turned the canoe and when the clouds parted he saw the light shine through and knew he made the right decision.

"'I can't explain it,' Nainoa continues, 'there was a connection between something in my abilities and my senses that went beyond the analytical, beyond seeing with my eyes. It was something very deep inside. Before that happened, I relied on math and science because it was so much easier to understand things that way. I didn't know how to trust my instincts. My instincts were not trained enough to be trusted. That night, I learned there are levels of navigation that are realms of the spirit. Hawaiians call it na'au – knowing through your instincts, your feelings, rather than your mind or your intellect. It's like new doors of knowledge open and you learn something new But before the doors open you don't even know that such knowledge exists.'"

"Hawaiki Rising" is about discovering new knowledge, moving from anger and fear to love and courage, and rediscovering a culture of sustainable living on "Island Earth," showing how one person can make a profound difference. It's a good read for Earth Day 2018.

Midway to Midway: Navy Saves Nature

By Bill Doughty

At the turn of the last century the U.S Navy responded to end cruel and greedy destruction at a remote island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. 

Layson albatross eggs are harvested at Layson Island in early 1900s.

William T. Hornaday, an American zoologist, recounts the incident in his 1913 book "Our Vanishing Wild Life" about the devastation of hundreds of thousands of Laysan albatross birds.

An excerpt is published in "American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau" (Library of America, Penguin Putnam Inc., 2008), edited by Bill McKibben.

The incident at Laysan Island occurred just six years after President Theodore Roosevelt sent United States Marines to Midway Atoll to stop the slaughter of seabirds for their feathers and eggs.

Hornaday writes:

"Ever since 1891 the bird life on Laysan has been regarded as one of the wonders of the bird world. One of the photographs taken prior to 1909 shows a vast plain, apparently a square mile in area, covered and crowded with Laysan albatrosses. They stand there on the level sand, serene, bulky and immaculate. Thousands of birds appear in one view – a very remarkable sight."

Laysan Island was known to the whalers who hunted and butchered the huge mammals of the sea for their oil. In the spring of 1909 businessman Max Schlemmer of Honolulu targeted the island for its birds and their byproducts: guano for fertilizer, eggs for food, and the birds themselves for their feathers. He surreptitiously sailed there with 23 Japanese laborers to kill thousands of birds, according to Hornaday.



"For several months they slaughtered diligently and without mercy," Hornaday writes. They clubbed and cut the wings off the large birds, with an apparent goal to ship the wings to Japan and France where the feathers could be used in the fashion industry.

But a college professor of zoology in Honolulu heard about Schlemmer's venture and "promptly wired the United States Government."

"Without the loss of a moment the Secretary of the Navy despatched the revenue cutter Thetis to the shambles of Laysan. When Captain Jacobs arrived he found that in round numbers about three hundred thousand birds had been destroyed, and all that remained of them were several acres of bones and dead bodies, and about three (railroad) carloads of wings, feathers and skins. It was evident that Schlemmer's intention was to kill all the birds on the island, and only the timely arrival of the Thetis frustrated that bloody plan."

It wasn't the only time the Navy came to help the island, repairing the damage to nature caused by the greedy Schlemmer.

Schlemmer not only slaughtered birds, but also destroyed the ecology by purposely introduced rabbits and guinea-pigs as a way to start a meat canning business. But the rodents reproduced rapidly and consumed most of the plant life on the island, changing the habitat for generations. Aboard minesweeper USS Tanager (AM-5) the Navy made five surveys of Laysan Island in 1923 and 1924 with the Bureau of Biological Survey and the Bishop Museum in eradicating the rodents and studying plant and animal life. 

The scientists who were part of the Tanager Expedition documented the extinction of the Laysan honeycreeper and witnessed, firsthand, the devastation of the island by nature itself, in the form of severe tropical storms.

Laysan Island is about two thirds of the way up the archipelago from Kauai to Midway.

When I visited Midway Atoll in 2007 for the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, Laysan albatrosses sat everywhere. At several points, while on a tour of the island by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rangers, we had to stop to gently move the huge birds out of the way of our electric carts. I had the great good luck of being allowed to carry one of the birds out of harm's way.

Laysan albatrosses are graceful flyers but clumsy landers. Their chicks are fuzzy and gray, while the adults are slick white and black with shades of gray and Amy Winehouse eyes.

In recent years the regal birds, some with a wingspan of six to seven feet, returned to the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, where they became a hazard to themselves and pilots at the Navy's sprawling testing and training range.

Working with the Pacific Rim Conservation group, the Navy translocated eggs to the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on Oahu, where chicks were hatched and raised. Laysan albatross adults are programmed by nature to return to their place of birth after spending the first few years of their adult life at sea. The return last month of the first PMRF-translocated bird, called V106, is a sign of success for the project.

Laysan albatross egg at Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai (Photo by MC2 Omar-Kareem Powell.

Last week the Chief of Naval Operations announced that PMRF is one of  the 2017 CNO Environmental Award winners for "Natural Resources Conservation, Small Installation."

A new children's book captures the beauty and majesty of the Albatross, "A Perfect Day for an Albatross" by Caren Lowebel-Fried (Cornell Lab Publishing Group, 2017).

Artist and author Lowebel-Fried illustrates her book with woodblock prints. She tells a story from the perspective of a bird born at Midway.

Her description of life at sea takes the young reader along for the flight:

"Not far from here, when I grew old enough to fly for the first time, I looked at the ocean and spread my wings. I ran and felt the wind beneath my wings lifting me up and up. Suddenly I was no longer over the land! The rolling, splashing wet sea was beneath me! I learned to land on the ocean, catch squid and find flying fish eggs to eat, then run across the surface of the sea and take to the sky again. I explored for years, traveling across the ocean, the smells and signals from the sea telling me where to find food."

Lowebel-Fried's albatross returns to Midway, finds a mate, and does the artful dancing, preening and beak sparring that is a joy to see. Cornell Lab offers a behind-the-scenes video of Lowebel-Fried's visit to Midway Atoll.

The book ends with a glossary, geography lesson and tips on where to see a Laysan albatross, such as at the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on Kauai and at the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on Oahu. Also included: tips on how to protect the birds, such as "Reuse or recycle plastics to keep them out of the ocean," something the Navy does at sea every day.

One of the artist's amazing woodblock prints not included in this book features a cool mix of natural and Navy images from Midway Atoll, along with a voyaging canoe.

In "Our Vanishing Wild Life," Hornaday notes, "In February, 1909, President (Theodore) Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Hawaiian Islands Reservation for Birds."

Today, according to Papahanaumokuakea.gov, "Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is the largest contiguous fully protected conservation area under the U.S. flag, and one of the largest marine conservation areas in the world. It encompasses 582,578 square miles of the Pacific Ocean (1,508,870 square kilometers) – an area larger than all the country's national parks combined."

The eclectic "American Earth" compilation includes works by Lewis Thomas, Alice Walker, E. O. Wilson, John Muir, Joni Mitchell, Rachel Carson, R. Crumb, Walt Whitman, Al Gore, Marvin Gaye, Philip K. Dick, E. B. White, and Henry David Thoreau.

Science Evangelist: Climate Blasphemy?

Hope Jahren presents to a joint audience at NOAA, Pearl Harbor, April 10, 2017 (MC1 Troutman),

Review by Bill Doughty

Friend of Navy Reads, Hope Jahren, author of "Lab Girl," edits "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017" (Houghton Miflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2017).

Jahren reminds us that "science is essential and frivolous, jubilant and despairing, lovely and brutal, perfect and broken – all at the same time – just like the scientists who fashion it." 

She brings us essays on emerging fields of study, changing areas of our world, and the "real life" of scientists, warts and all, who wonder, discover, contemplate and explain.

In her introduction Jahren focuses on a theme that runs throughout this book and appeared in "Lab Girl": the effects of increasing carbon in our atmosphere and the resulting climate change and inevitable impacts: hotter summers, more severe storms and rising seas.

Hayhoe quotes from authors of the Bible such as Peter and John.

Sounds Old Testament, right? Which is fitting because one of the best works in this collection is by Sonia Smith, "Unfriendly Climate," from Texas Monthly, about a compelling scientist named Katharine Hayhoe who uses the Bible to explain why people should care about climate change, not just as a scientific issue, but also "a moral issue." Hayhoe consults for DOD and other agencies.

Called by others a "climate-change evangelist," Hayhoe says, "I feel more like a Cassandra, or an Old Testament prophet spreading bad news." 

But Hayhoe, we learn, is also optimistic about the opportunity to preach about renewable energy and the potential for solar and wind energy to eclipse our reliance on fossil fuels – especially in her home state of Texas.

The CoServ Solar Station in Krugerville, Texas. (Photo by Ken Oltmann)

Author Sonia Smith writes: "Over the past 15 years, climate change has emerged as one of the most polarizing issues in the country, ahead of guns, the death penalty and abortion." Yet, the basic science was worked out more than a century ago when scientists Joseph Fourier, Jon Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius came up with and proved the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Today there is robust scientific consensus that global warming is 'real, caused by humans and dangerous'; a study found that 97 percent of climate scientists agree with those conclusions. The Department of Defense calls climate change a 'threat multiplier,' because it exacerbates existing problems. And the year 2015 was the warmest on record, breaking the previous mark, which was set in 2014."

Katharine Hayhoe hopes. (Photo by M. Voelker)

Hayhoe, we read, uses passages from the Bible in her slide presentations to make her point, including this New Testament quote from John 13:34-35" "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples – when they see the love you have for each other."

Agnodike (or Agnodice), Greek scientist.

In another essay we learn about ancient women scientists who contributed to their societies in Greece, Egypt and Babylon: Agnodike, Aglaonike, Hypatia, Aspasia, Merit Ptah, Tapputi, Artemisia and En Hedu-Anna.

The writers who contributed to this volume take us from the mountains and jungle of Virunga to the icy edge of the Arctic, from Assateague Island on the East Coast to Houston and Los Angeles, from the Marshall Islands south to the Chukchi Sea north, from our own DNA to the Milky Way and beyond.

We explore a wide spectrum of topics: effects of overuse of antibiotics, study of rats in Vancouver, hot Santa Ana winds, evolution of altruism, wave piloting, use of public wilderness lands, darkness studies, gravity and quantum theory, space exploration, and down-to-earth investigations of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Elizabeth Kolbert and Eric Rignot in Greenland, where Kolbert reports on the shrinking ice sheet.

But the stifling threats to the world's climate resurface time and again throughout this book. Elizabeth Kolbert's remarkable "A Song of Ice," published in the New Yorker, explains calving and melting ice in Greenland, at the U.S. Army outpost Camp Century and beyond. "I keep finding myself drawn back to the ice – to its beauty, to its otherworldliness, to its sheer, ungodly significance," Kolbert writes.

"I first visited the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2001. At that time vivid illustrations of climate change were hard to come by. Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in the too warm waters of the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the mounds of dead mussels that washed up this summer on the coast of Long Island and the piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River."

In a New York Times Magazine piece by Nathaniel Rich, "The Invisible Catastrophe," we read that "the World Health Organization has called climate change the greatest health threat of the 21st century." Rich writes about the godawful health effects to people and pets from methane gas pollution in Aliso Canyon, Orange County, California.

"The most dangerous threats to our species are precisely those that are most difficult to visualize: long-term, slow-to-emerge, amorphous. These threats include not only warming temperatures but also mutating viruses and political corruption and tend to be invisible, dimensionless and pervasive, like death. Like natural gas."

CJCS General J. Dunford tours Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum May 9, 2017.

Tim Folger is the series editor for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," and he writes a passionate plea for freedom of research, respect for the truth, and the need to heed reality. He compares attacks on science to events in Germany in the 1930s, when mobs of young men burned the works of scientists and Jewish writers considered blasphemous to the Nazis. Authoritarianism thrives when the free press, justice system and electoral process are threatened.

"One measure of the health of any modern society must be the degree to which it supports its scientists. A few days before I started to write this foreword, hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities across the country participated in the March for Science. It was an event at once inspiring and worrisome: inspiring because so many took a stand for rationalism ... worrisome because who would have thought that in the 21st century scientists and citizens would feel the need to gather in support of something so self-evidently valuable as unfettered scientific research?"

Hope Jahren joins a roster of other great science writers who have helmed the series since it began in 2000, among them: Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and another friend of Navy Reads, Mary Roach.

In Jahren's introduction to this volume, she jumps into a charge of "allegorizing human endeavors by way of plant biology," something that makes "Lab Girl" so personal and relatable. Jahren studies how extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps some plants thrive, and she tests how much may be too much.

"Right here, right now, I'll suggest that the Internet is like carbon dioxide for science writers, who are themselves like plants, and that we are living in an unprecedented era of diverse and thriving journalism in the service of science – albeit one that could be cut off and mowed down if we don't actively value and defend it."