Kaho'olawe Bound

I'm soon to officially become a published photographer. One of my shots of Kaniakapupu Palace is going to be featured in the November/December 2011 issue of Innov8 Magazine! It's the inflight magazine for Go! Airlines. I've never flown with them before, but I've flown a lot of other airlines and I have NEVER seen an airplane magazine that's this snazzy. I get photo credit, a voucher for a one way ticket, and a copy of the magazine as payment. Bam! I'll take it. Check out the magazine, it's rather nifty (also, you can view the complete magazine when it comes out so you can see my picture there when it prints). Also, check out my Kaniakapupu Palace set on flickr, the image that will be posted is in there. They narrowed it down to 6 possibilities, but didn't tell me which. And speaking of flickr, my account is now over 75,000 views!

In other news, tomorrow I'm leaving Oahu to do something rare and take part in something special. I'm going to Kaho'olawe! Kaho'olawe is the smallest of the 8 main Hawaiian islands. It is a sacred place to Hawaiians, as it is considered to be the earthly form of the god Kanaloa, the god of the ocean. It was once used as a training site for Hawaiian seafaring navigators. There's very little groundwater on the island and it has been periodically populated and uninhabited through out history depending upon availability of water or lack there of.  In modern times, the island was pretty much destroyed. After the arrival of Europeans and Americans the island was used for a penal colony and then various ranching enterprises took over. The island was systematically deforested and stripped of much of its flora by feral goats. The deforestation lead to a further lack of precipitation which made the island more or less uninhabitable. During World War II the island was used for training and it was subject to constant bombings until 1990. The Navy did a cleanup of unexploded ordinance on the island, but the millions of pounds of scrap that they removed from the island was only a fraction of the unexploded ordinance left behind by decades of military target practice, and the clean up was only on the surface level. As a result, the island remains extremely hazardous. Local interest in Kaho'olawe was sparked in the 1970s as part of the Hawaiian cultural and spiritual renaissance. After a long fight to stop the bombings and military control of the island, Kaho'olawe is now held by a trust under the state government of Hawaii and it is to be used cultural and spiritual purposes only. The island is still extremely dangerous and only a few organizations staffed by a number of intrepid volunteers are allowed to travel to the island. I'll be going as a volunteer for the Kaho'olawe Island Reserve Commission from 3-6 October and we'll be working on things like erosion control and reforestation. I am extremely privileged to be taking part in this project. Now I'd better go pack. I have to go to bed early, my flight to Maui is dreadfully early in the morning.