NOAA's Parks

Through my family's love of surfing, which was also taught to my sister and me at a young age, and through free diving, my awareness of the subtle changes and moods of the marine environment grew throughout my childhood.

In my senior year of high school, I cajoled Earthwatch (then a largely start-up effort) to allow me to join their humpback-whale behavioral observation team off the Big Island in Hawaii. I was 17 at the time, the youngest volunteer they had ever agreed to let join a research expedition. It really put the hook in me (no pun intended).

A few months after, the University of Miami gave me a merit scholarship to pursue my marine-science interests. After my undergraduate degree, I was given a fellowship to do my graduate work at Miami's Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science. My graduate research allowed me to explore my dual interests in traditional management and marine protection in the Solomon Islands as a research assistant for the Fiji-based World Wide Fund for Nature South Pacific Program. Living there in a small, rural coastal village for the better part of a year, I found the path that has led me to where I am today.

That path has taken me through 10 years of service in the nonprofit world, working for three U.S.-based international conservation organizations: World Wildlife Fund, the World Resources Institute, and the Community Conservation Network. I joined NOAA two months ago. I am truly blessed in that I am able to simultaneously look back on my nonprofit service with great appreciation and pride, while also looking ahead into my federal life with much excitement and opportunity.

Currently: the town of Vienna, Va.

During my second week with this community, I learned something that would forever change both the way I viewed such interactions, and the way I viewed myself. In a nutshell, I learned that at least one resident in the remote, traditional village had recently died of AIDS. Upon further inquiry, I learned that the person likely had become HIV-positive when down in the nearest town, about two days hike out of the bush. After some investigation, I was able to fit together a theory for what was happening: butterfly farmers, supported through the conservation effort I was representing, were visiting brothels while in town after collecting the earnings they made from selling their farmed birdwing butterflies. Upon returning to the mountains, an infected member would then act as a vector within these isolated forest communities.

Questions whirled through my mind: Was this conservation project a vector for HIV into this indigenous community, which up until a few decades ago had no Western contact? Were our efforts to promote conservation actually undermining the ability of the local people to survive as a culture? How much human suffering might result as a direct consequence of my presence during those few weeks of monitoring training?

It was by far the worst day of my professional life. Words cannot begin to describe the range of emotions I felt during those first few minutes of realization. And because I was a two-day hike out of the bush to the nearest telephone, there was no escaping or vetting the thought process that I had to endure the next several days in finishing up my work. The fear, the doubt, and the loathing permeated my psyche those few days in the bush in a way that forever changed me.

Needless to say, I alerted project partners as to the potential predicament when I had returned. I came back to do follow-up work a few months later and brought with me an award-winning investigative journalist whose job it was to learn about any potential links between the income being generated from the butterfly-farming project and the incidence of HIV. As it turns out, the links between the two were not as overt as I had originally feared. But learning this did not bring me much comfort. I knew that the presence of an additional income source in the community undeniably contributed to the overall change in the social realities and risks that come with an indigenous community's conversion from a traditional to a Western cash culture.

Truthfully, I'm reading Beatrix Potter's The Tales of Peter Rabbit and Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon quite a bit. While he has a wide variety of books to choose from, my son John prefers these two bedtime stories. The protagonists in both books are curious, juvenile male rabbits. I am not quite sure if this is supposed to tell me something insightful about my son ...

A copy of Mac Chapin's recent article "A Challenge to Conservationists" from the Nov/Dec issue of World Watch magazine. This should be required reading for anyone working in international conservation -- or for that matter, anyone reading Grist.

A hard copy of "2005-2010 Strategic Plan of the National Ocean Service," covered in red ink with my suggested edits and comments, due to my boss's boss by the end of the month.

Also, up until recently, I had long hair -- down below my shoulders. I was often told, "Oh, you're one of those long-haired hippie environmentalists" by people who'd ask me what I do for a living. I'd get this stereotype not just from folks here at home in the states, but also from peers abroad, in places like Indonesia and even Fiji.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, marine conservation issues consistently take a back seat to other global priorities. How bad do things have to get before we decide to act at an appropriate scale?