This Year, Resolve to Volunteer, Hawai`i
This marks my first-year anniversary of writing for Environment Hawai`i, so I thought I would do something special for this issue. As a columnist, I have written many times about my own experiences volunteering with my high school club, Jr. Greenpeace, weeding invasive plants, sifting through beaches for litter, and replanting forests. I have dwelled on how much fun, surprisingly, volunteering is, how it is instinctual to join together with a group and work on a project, the thrill of seeing results, such as a newly planted forest. I’ve even alluded to the “Zen approach” to picking up garbage. I hope I’ve given readers optimism for the future of the environment, but I would like to do more. That is why, with this issue, I’m unveiling a new feature on the Environment Hawai`i website that I design: an island-by-island map showing different locations where you can volunteer – work on the land by planting native species, eradicate alien species, pick up litter, and many, many other projects.
Yes, the amount and variety of volunteer opportunities in Hawai`i are endless. You can irrigate anchialine ponds or care for nene, run a petting zoo or destroy miconia. There are beaches where you can be in a keiki surf competition and then make environmental signs, or plant taro and educate children about Hawaiian culture. There are fun places to camp and get free tours of interesting areas as you restore them, or you can be a tour guide yourself at various National Parks. You can even kayak down rivers while picking up litter!
Environmental organizations on these islands are also plentiful and diverse, each with ways they need the public to help out. There should be no surprise at so many different efforts taking place. Practically anywhere you look in Hawai`i, you will see a threatened ecosystem, a landscape taken over by alien species, or the invasion of people themselves – thoughtlessly dumping their garbage or smuggling alien species to our islands in the first place.
But, despite the carelessness of some, environmental organizations, big and small alike, are a testament that there is a great deal of concern for our islands that well deserve and need human empathy. It is almost incomprehensible that some people do not care – where, in plain sight are idyllic beaches, towering valleys rising from the ocean, or the brilliant shock of red of the `i`iwi fluttering on an `ohi`a lehua that seems dyed to match.
Fortunately, there are those people who appreciate Hawai`i. As a reader of this newsletter, you must certainly be one of them. I urge all of you to go to [url=http://www.environment-hawaii.org/volunteer.htm,]www.environment-hawaii.org/volunteer.htm,[/url] find your island and a project that interests you, and experience the joy of having direct contact with the nature that we are all trying to save.
— Emma Yuen
Volume 11, Number 7 January 2001