This presentation
is brought to you
by Arizona State University's
Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability
and a generous investment
by Julie Ann Wrigley.
Wrigley Lecture
Series-- world-renowned
thinkers and
problem-solvers engage
the community in dialogues
to address sustainability
challenges.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SINGING TRADITIONAL SONG]
And welcome to all of you to
the Tempe Center for the Arts
and this very special evening.
The Wrigley Series is for
the very best thinkers
and doers who challenge and
inspire us in sustainability.
And it's been our pleasure in
the Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability and
the School of Sustainability
to host many, many
dozens of speakers
that not only have an impact
on the broader community
but really help to
inspire what's especially
important for me--
our students to think
about new ways of doing things
and, most importantly, to be
inspired to not deal just with
all the troubles of the world
but really to think
about what are
the solutions to the grand
challenges that we all face?
Now, not on all
occasions do we actually
have the person behind the name
present at these presentations.
We are very lucky and fortunate
to have here this evening
with us Julie Ann Wrigley, who
is going to introduce our very
special speaker.
So Julie, please
come up and do that.
[APPLAUSE]
Can you see me?
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, Dean Boone.
I'm delighted to welcome you all
to the Wrigley Lecture Series
on Sustainability.
This program brings
internationally-known thinkers
and problem-solvers to ASU
to interact with our students
and our community.
We've welcomed many
wonderful thought leaders
in the field of sustainability
through this series,
some of whom you
might not have put
into the field of
sustainability.
But recognizing the
breadth of the field,
people like Van Jones, Vandana
Shiva, and Tom Friedman,
Kate Brandt, and
Michael Pollan--
and that's only a very
small representation
of the great people
that have come.
Today is no exception.
Nainoa Thompson is celebrated
around the world for his vision
and courage.
He reunited Pacific Islanders
with the first voyage
of a traditional sailing
canoe in over 600 years.
The 1976 voyage-- and I never
think of him as that old,
so I had to question
the year, but it is--
1976 of Hokule'a reawakened
a cultural pride, identity,
and a connection to place.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society
has sailed the equivalent
of seven times around
the globe to unify
the world's oceanic nations.
And you'll hear about one
coming up in 2025 or--
2025?
2026.
Anyway-- not that far away.
Please enjoy this short
video about the importance
of exploration and
our common desire
to protect our most
cherished values and places.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[WATER SLOSHING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- 7,000 years ago, the
first really oceanic people
came out of China and
came out of Taiwan.
Then, you get to Polynesia,
this oceanic country bounded
by Hawaii in the
north and New Zealand
in the southwest and
Rapa Nui in the east--
10 million square miles
bigger than Russia.
And it was discovered by
these extraordinary people.
They were, really, the
astronauts of our ancestors.
They were the greatest explorers
on the face of the earth.
- Unaided by modern instruments,
these extraordinary explorers
discovered and settled
every livable landmass
in the Pacific, relying solely
on a complex understanding
of the stars, the winds,
the waves, and other cues
from nature.
- You know, our
ancestors not only
were just great navigators,
they were great stewards
of these islands.
The time that the
first Europeans came,
the journals of Captain Cook
talked about large populations,
maybe 800,000.
Now, that's a median.
It could be even higher.
It's approaching, maybe,
the numbers of people that
are living on Hawaii today.
They figured it out--
how to live well
on these islands.
And I think that
is the challenge
of the time for planet
Earth and all of humanity.
It's to figure that out.
How are you going to do that?
Hokule'a is pulling
us into a direction
of asking the question, are
you going to be responsible,
and are you going
to take action?
Are you going to do
something with what you have?
You've got a voyaging canoe.
- In a generation,
Hokule'a has sailed
over 140,000 nautical miles
to reunite the world's largest
oceanic nation.
Today, Hokule'a voyages
around the planet
with the message
of malama honua,
or caring for Island
Earth, with a firm belief
that blending traditional
and modern technologies
will help us find our way
to a healthier future.
- Hokule'a, to watch
it go around the world,
has this enormous
potential to go
to 40, 50 countries
on the planet,
to be with the great
navigators on earth.
And I'm not talking
about those in canoes.
I'm talking about those
who are doing things
to give kindness and compassion
to the earth and those
who live on it--
those navigators.
We're not going to
change the world.
But we're going to go and
build a network of people
around the earth who
are going to change it.
And our job is to help
them be successful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
Are we good?
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome one
of the world's greatest
explorers, Nainoa Thompson.
[APPLAUSE]
Aloha mai kakou.
Thank you so much for
coming, which allows me
the privilege to share a story
of thousands of people that--
I'm not much of
a public speaker.
I'm a much better sailor.
But I'm honored to be here on
behalf of the many people--
thousands of people--
that made voyaging
successful and safe
over the last 44 years.
And so I know we're
limited with time,
and the story's
gotten really long.
So I worked really hard
to cut the slides down,
and I actually added two more.
So I'm going to go
as fast as I can.
So I want to apologize
in the front end.
But before I even get
started, the reason
we're here with our team, staff
from the Polynesian Voyaging
Society and from Kamehameha
Schools, is to learn and do.
This word, "sustainability,"
we know how to spell it,
but we don't fully
understand what it is
and how are we going
to crack that code.
So we're searching for the best
and that have the best chance
at creating the sail plan,
navigating the course,
having the courage to
take on the challenge
that most won't, and having
the navigation skills
to be able to see
the destination
that we need to reach.
It's not an option not to,
on behalf of our children.
And so in our research
and our conversations,
the best place is here.
It's emotional.
It's meaningful.
We're here on behalf of
our children and children
that we don't know,
that aren't born.
And that the Julie
Ann Wrigley Global
Institute for Sustainability--
that we had this
eye-blink of time
in the last day
and a half, we can
see through the
eyes of those who
are dedicated on a daily basis.
It's a place of genius and
ingenuity and innovation.
But above all, it's a
place of courage that's
taking on the hard stuff.
And part of the problem
is, really, education.
We were not taught.
We were taught an old,
industrial-base education
that was designed
to make America
the most powerful
economy in the world
by teaching people to
be good in the workforce
in our industries.
And that's exactly what we did.
But now, we have to have a
university in which we're
going to be able to have a
new education, an education
of change.
And to be at Arizona
State University
was just a privilege
and a honor.
And Julie, we're
very, very grateful.
And through your whole
extraordinary leadership
and those of you
that supported us--
we need to go tomorrow.
We need to go home.
But we're coming back and
with a really amazing story
that I think is going
to start to shift
the purpose and the reasons
why we voyage into the future.
So before I even start
to go into this story,
I just want to try to--
maybe not possible-- to impress
upon you how privileged we
are to be here with all
of the great navigators
and great voyagers and
courageous people that
have inspired us, and
not just inspired us,
but you make it clearer about
what our work needs to be.
You help us define why we sail.
And this story that
I'm going to bring
is really an old one and
mostly about yesterday.
Because I will not speak
publicly if I don't attempt
to bring my teachers
into this room.
This is not about me.
This is about just
following them.
So permit me your time.
And I know I only
have so much time.
You kick me out any
time you're ready.
I am totally OK.
But I need to bring
them in the room.
Otherwise, I can't speak.
So let's just try to imagine.
Imagine 2,000 years ago.
Imagine there's these islands
in the middle of the Pacific,
where I'm born from--
the Hawaiian Islands.
Imagine that it's
like these miracle
islands in the sea that are the
most ecologically rich place.
Imagine that in the building
from the bottom of the sea
floor, through volcanism, these
extraordinary land masses.
And imagine it would take
200,000 years on average to get
one single species to transport
across the largest ocean
on the planet to the single-most
isolated-- so-called isolated,
if you say oceans are isolated--
high island archipelago
on the earth
and that this rich ecological
place starts to flourish.
So imagine that,
2,000 years ago, there
would be the first human
footprint that would come.
And you've got to
imagine because there
are no photographs.
There are no written histories.
And you need to imagine that--
we know that somebody came here.
But we don't know the
name of the canoe.
We don't know the
name of the captain.
We don't know the
name of the navigator.
That's kind like
forgetting Apollo.
And there's reasons
for the forgetting.
And that's the danger--
forgetting.
But they would cross, probably,
2,400 miles of open ocean.
They would be
considered, arguably,
the greatest feat of ocean
exploration and navigation
in its time.
But we forgot, and
there's reasons for that.
Next slide.
About 200 years ago,
the world is expanding.
People are voyaging everywhere.
The European expansion
came to Hawaii.
When Captain Cook came, he wrote
in his journal-- part of it
was in that video-- about
a very healthy people, very
productive people, very strong.
What Hawaiians believed was the
most important, most definition
of wealth, and that was fresh
water, protecting the water.
And so you can imagine
that these people that
were here for 2,000 years knew
the code to sustainability.
Because nothing was brought in.
It's very different today,
where 90% of what we eat
comes from outside.
And 95% of what we fuel,
we buy it from outside,
from people we don't know.
And so Captain Cook
put Lieutenant Bligh,
the first-known European
onto Hawaiian soil,
on the southern point of the
island-- your island, at Kauai.
And his job was to do a census.
Imagine that.
They're guessing that there
was 800,000 native Hawaiians,
best guess.
And then, in 28
years, 75 percent
of those native
Hawaiians would die.
Stories of having to bury
them standing because there
wasn't enough sand.
And the story just
goes on and on and on.
So about 100 years ago--
it's a chronic,
painful story of loss.
And this is not what this
presentation is about.
But you need to understand the
loss to understand renewal.
But in that time, loss of
culture, language, your lands,
governance-- all that stuff.
Then you have to import people
from China and from Japan
and from Portugal and
from the Philippines
to be able to man
the plantations.
Rough time for native people.
So 100 years ago, the
population was about down to,
the best guess, 22,000.
So one out of 37 would survive.
Then my father was born in
1924, his parents nearly
pure Hawaiian, which makes
him nearly pure Hawaiian.
But he would be the first
generation that in my family,
that parents intentionally would
not teach language, culture,
or genealogy.
If you know where you come from,
it's dangerous in that society.
And then, the school
systems in 1926
would outlaw, by policy,
Hawaiian culture, language.
And my grandmother would
sit me down and tell me
stories about being
beaten by her teachers
with the authority to beat
the Hawaiian out of them.
And she went to the school--
it's called Kamehameha--
for the well-being
of native Hawaiians.
It's a very different world
view than it is today.
And that's because it changed.
And so what I want
to bring to you
is those navigators
and those change-makers
that allows me to believe that
we can solve the big issues
if we do the right thing.
Next slide.
It begins with him--
surfer, Santa
Barbara, not Hawaii.
He was an anthropologist.
He was studying the
Pacific and trying
to figure out the question
that Captain Cook would say--
how can you account for
this nation spread so large,
the biggest nation on
Earth, that has spread
so far across the giant oceans?
His name is Dr. Ben Finney.
And so he, by miracle,
came to Hawaii
in his post-doctorate
work, trying to figure out,
how did they do this?
How did they discover
all these islands
in the biggest nation on Earth?
And the genesis of
Hokule'a and the renewal
of culture and
traditions was because he
came to the University of
Hawaii and met a woman professor
at a time when you can
count all the women
professors on one hand.
And her name was
Katharine Luomala.
And she had these two books.
One was Kon-Tiki
by Thor Hyerdahl.
And this was 1958,
so it's 60 years ago
that the genesis started.
And the other book was the
Voyagers of the Pacific
by an anthropologist from
New Zealand, Andrew Sharp.
Thor Heyerdahl is saying, now,
they drifted on balsa rafts,
crashed into islands, and then
that's how this whole nation
got populated.
And Andrew Sharp said, no.
They had voyaging canoes.
I'm an anthropologist.
I know.
But they didn't have
the intelligence
to navigate more than 100 miles.
So Hawaii was there by chance,
by being lost in storm.
Mathematically impossible to do,
to drift in a storm to Hawaii
from Tahiti.
So this man, Katharine Luomala
gave him these two books
and said, these books are wrong.
Read it, and change it.
So she planted the seed
in the anthropologist.
It took a decade for him
to make the phone call.
The phone call
didn't go to Hawaii.
Because even if someone
answered the phone,
they wouldn't be able to
imagine the dream of rebuilding
a voyaging canoe,
rebuilding a culture.
He called this man-- next slide.
Hawaiian.
Arguably the top best artist
in Hawaii in modern times.
His name is Herb Kawainui Kane.
Ben called her and said, we
need to bring back the troops.
We need to be able to tell it.
We need to build
a voyaging canoe.
So these two men-- next slide--
would now reshape-- rethink--
everything, break everything
down, look at this triangle--
Hawaii in the north,
Aotearoa, or New Zealand,
in the southwest, and Rapa
Nui is down in the east.
10 million square miles.
It's larger than Russia.
It's three times the size of
the continental United States.
Exclude the landmass Aotearoa
for a moment, humbly,
and add up all the total
island mass in that triangle,
and it can fit into one
third the state of New York.
But now we know.
Australia has artifacts
from Polynesia.
And National
Geographic is trying
to put together a film about
the evidence-- both North
and South America, of
Polynesians going there.
And then we also know that there
are strong connections to South
America, and people are working
on the linguistic connections
and the genetic connections
to Cuba and in the Caribbean.
And then, to make
it more complicated,
go behind the screen to an
island called Madagascar.
And the names of mountains,
names of streams,
are all Austronesian-based.
It's the same root language
as those in Hawaii.
And that's 15 time
zones of the earth.
And we're still trying
to figure it out.
But Herb and Ben, what they
did in the equation of renewal,
they changed what we
know about the earth,
and they helped us be educated.
Next slide.
And then, they built this
voyaging canoe, the vessel,
the tool that we need.
This is on a sacred
beach of Kualoa the day
before she was launched.
Old slide.
I was there.
Just born and raised
in a Hawaiian family,
but it was a very
confusing time.
Because back then, Hawaiian
things weren't valued.
But we had this powerful
62-foot voyaging
canoe that was
elegant and beautiful
and was making a
promise even though it
didn't know how to do it.
And we drank alda that
day, the traditional drink,
and I didn't like it.
Nobody told me what it was for.
Everything's
changing because you
put the vehicle, the spaceship
of our ancestors, on the beach.
And I may just tell the story.
It was a pretty rough road.
We launched it the next day.
And when we launched
it the next day,
and we pushed it in the
water, and I was thinking--
I'm young, I don't know.
And I didn't say
nothing to anybody else.
I was just kind of hanging out.
But I was there on the port
side, that last crosspiece.
And we pushed the canoe.
And I thought it
wasn't going to go.
It was going to get stuck in
the sand, and it was so heavy.
And it just slid
right in the water,
and then I was so shocked that
I grabbed that crosspiece.
I pulled up, and
the whole canoe was
empty except for our
leaders in the deck.
So I got off the canoe.
And then, we sailed
the next day.
And rough day.
This is in Kane'ohe Bay.
And true story, had about
30 of us on board the canoe.
The canoe was low in the water,
and we broke the two steering
sweeps.
There are no cleats to tie
the rope, the sheet line.
We didn't know what
a sheet line was.
So we just made,
like 50 half hitches.
It'll hold-- until you go
aground in the sandbar,
break your two steer
sweeps, stuck in the sand.
Captain says, everybody get
off to lighten up the canoe.
Everybody jumps off.
But these sheets were
still sheeted in.
We saw it taking off.
And only the captain's
on board, and a few of us
got back on board.
And we're watching all
these people fall off
the [INAUDIBLE].
I was going, wow, this is
going to be a rough trip.
Because we didn't know anything.
All we had was the
promise until--
next slide, and I'm
going to go fast--
this man.
He created two miracles.
It was a time when we didn't
know how much we didn't know.
So the notion of navigating
by the stars to Tahiti--
just a notion.
Even though we weren't
honest, leadership
felt we could do it ourselves.
Extraordinarily dangerous.
So the leadership was saying,
let's just train ourselves
and go to Tahiti.
Yikes.
Just imagine if you're standing
in Waikiki Beach on the sand,
and you can see over the horizon
to the eastern end of Tahiti
against the western end--
the width of the island,
it's less than one degree.
It's a small target.
But a miracle.
There was a Peace Corps worker
by the name of Mike McCoy.
Came to a leadership
meeting in Honolulu,
came inside the debate
about navigating ourselves.
And he just said, hey,
you want a navigator,
all you got to do is drive five
miles down to Kewalo Basin,
and there's a navigator on
a ship called the Townsend
Cromwell-- which is a research
ship in the University
of Hawaii--
teaching scientists
at university
to learn how to make traditional
fish hooks to catch tuna.
His name is Pius 'Mau'
Piailug He's not Polynesian.
They're all gone.
We know the road of extinction.
And we're on the edge
of the cliff right now.
Mau comes from Micronesia,
a small, tiny island.
I wasn't there.
I'm telling you a story
of stories that I heard.
The group went to
see Mau, told him
about a project that is going
to sail a voyaging canoe that
wasn't fully constructed, a
crew that wasn't selected.
The voyage would be
eight times longer
than you've ever made on
a canoe six times bigger.
And they're going to
go across the equator.
You'll see new stars
you've never seen,
and you're going to lose your
most important star, the North
Star.
And they asked him
if he would navigate.
And the response was immediate.
He could barely speak English,
but he knew the word yes.
And many would argue
that it's obvious
that he's a courageous man.
He's a navigator.
He's an adventurer.
And he takes on challenges.
But I know Mau.
Mau is a genius in
many different things,
but he was watching cultural
corrosion and erosion taking
place on his own islands.
And if he doesn't participate
in this attempt for Hawaiians
to recapture and regain their
own identity and culture
and translate that to pride
and dignity in a humble way
and give it to your children,
we're going to lose it.
And so to me, the thing about
Mau, the great navigator,
was that decision was made
from kindness and compassion
for people that are
trying to find their way.
Then he would go.
And he did two amazing things.
Next slide.
This is his island, Satawal,
in the Western Carolines
and Micronesia.
It's a little over a mile
long, a half mile wide.
The highest soil is eight feet.
It's an atoll.
And the thing about this
island, it has no lagoon.
So the Spanish and the Germans
and the Japanese and Americans
had no reason to occupy
this island because it
had no military value.
And so they left the
school of navigation
alone until the United
States public school
system would come in
and say, well, this
is the wrong education
for your children.
And they would take the
children off of here
and put them on an island
called Woleai while they're
in the elementary years.
The key years to learn
nature is when you're young.
And so that was the key
educational disaster,
when the young were
taken from their elders.
And so in the end, Mau
would be of master rank.
And just let me make
it really clear.
This is not a
statement of humility.
It's the truth.
If I were to look at what grade
level I'm in as a navigator,
I'm in kindergarten
compared to him,
mainly because he was trained
so young, and I was not.
It's the kinship,
the nature, that
needs to be connected
when you're young.
But he was one of six
masters and the youngest.
When you look at Mau, you're
seeing the edge of extinction.
And you can see the
desperation of trying
to make voyaging succeed.
He would tell me, if there
are no navigators anymore,
we will be people no more.
And so he came.
And next slide.
And this would be his task.
Hawaii is up on the top, and
Tahiti's down on the bottom.
Next.
This is just the theoretical
line that you've got to sail
in across the world's two
consistent biggest wind
systems, where they
collide in the equator,
where there's high evaporation
rates-- it's hot over there--
into an area the Europeans
call the doldrums.
The scientists called it
Intertropical Convergence Zone.
Nevertheless, where
these collide,
you have the rainiest and
cloudiest place on Earth.
It is very hard to sail with
the stars through those clouds
and then to hit that tiny
little island down there.
Next slide.
This is an old slide.
It's three days
out, 17 on board.
That first voyage out of
Honolua Bay, Maui, May 1, 1976.
Amazing.
An amazing crew.
And Mau was the leader.
And this is three days out, when
they tacked all around the Big
Island to get east enough.
And then, make a really long
story-- amazing story-- short--
next slide-- 31 days later--
next slide-- arrival.
I was there.
I was somehow kind
of a banana guy
but was selected for the
crew to take the canoe home.
And I, in truth,
when I got there,
I had to climb the monkeypod
tree to see the canoe coming.
And we had to go and
ask the children that
loved this canoe-- they
all jumped on it-- they
were sinking the stern,
there were so many of them.
And in English, we politely
asked them to get off.
And they speak Asian.
And to protect our home--
But this is the moment
when everything changed.
Everything changed-- history,
stories, relationships, family,
ancestral family.
And it was Mau.
That was one miracle.
Next slide.
The other miracle would
be when we would ask him
to teach us to find the way.
I intentionally didn't
bring him in the room,
but I am going to do
it without the slide.
Hoo, man.
We know tragedy
because of ignorance.
Anybody in this room
know Eddie Aikau?
You need to google him.
We lose him.
We know that we don't know
how to do what we need to do.
We go back and ask
Mau to come back
to teach us, without
understanding that you're
breaking a kapu, without
understanding that navigation
is a power, it's sacred,
and it's not let out--
not only outside the
culture or the language,
it's not even out
of your island.
And even inside the
island, navigation
is secretly passed only
through the family lines.
Now these guys from Hawaii
say, will you come teach us?
And he struggled
with that for months.
And it's a long story
I'm not going to tell.
But eventually, I'd get a
phone call from his son.
He says, Mau's going to
be at your house tomorrow.
And yeah.
He would take us by
the hand like children
and drag us through the window
of time into the old world.
And nobody could do that.
Without the teacher, we
would end up in failure.
And the danger of
failure in the time--
failure was expected
because it was Hawaiian.
Hawaiians are-- many kinds
of issues of its identity.
But part of it is you're going
to fail more and succeed less.
This project was doomed, in the
minds of the largest society,
to fail because it was us.
And so Mau came,
essentially, to save us.
Then he would come and train
us for nearly 30 months.
We would sail 3,000 miles
in Hawaiian ocean water
before we would sail on our own.
Then he would come
back in three decades
and just keep staying with us.
That is the definition
of the teacher.
And I don't, cannot, speak about
what we do without bringing
them in the room.
Because what we do is only
because we were with them.
And there's hundreds
of them that I
didn't bring into the room
because we don't have time.
But he has to be here.
Next slide.
Yep.
He would put dream back
into this canoe and purpose
and inspiration.
And it had gravity.
It had built community, and
it needed to move this canoe.
We understand the
power of vision
and understand that we
navigate by common values--
the whole-- very important
steps for success.
Next slide.
We would sail.
And we would sail far.
Next slide.
And essentially, we
would sail to recapture
our culture and our traditions,
bring pride and dignity back
to this culture that deserves
it, especially to elders
and give it to
children so that they
are going to know a much
different world than the one
that we grew up in.
And I would argue
that that really had--
Mau had a huge, and Hokule'a,
had a huge part of what
we call renaissance in Hawaii.
It's a kind of peaceful way
to talk about revolution.
And it changed everything.
And the things that it changed
are the most important.
It changed our schools.
Hawaiian language
first language.
Hawaiian culture is
mandatory in the schools.
Coming in, you have
to be proficient
in language and in culture.
Otherwise, you don't graduate.
So we have Hawaiian
immersion schools.
And the list goes on and on.
It's about the
revolution in a kind way.
Next slide.
And then, this'll be the
last teacher I'll bring in.
Best friend-- Hawaii's
greatest explorer by far.
He'd be Hawaii's
second astronaut
after we lost Ellison Onizuka
in the tragedy of Challenger.
His name was Lieutenant
Colonel Lacy Veach--
best friend.
And he's, I don't know,
10 years older than me.
So when I would go and
take my little slides
to the elementary schools
and go talk to kids,
you walk in the
door, and there's
this six-foot, life-sized
cardboard picture of him
in his spacesuit
glued on the wall.
I never met him.
I would ask the children,
well, who's that?
And everybody knew his name.
Everybody loved him because
he's willing to go, and heroic.
So he became my virtual
hero because I never saw,
I never met, him.
But then he went to Punahou.
So Punahou had this event
at the Waikiki Shell.
It's that big amphitheater
with all the grass.
Everybody sits on the grass.
And they had all these alumni.
It was the 150-year anniversary
of the opening of the school.
And all these alumni got
up there one at a time
and kind of told
everybody how good
they were because they
were alumnis from Punahou.
It was a little
nauseating, but it was OK.
But Lacy was the keynote,
the last speaker.
So-- true story--
I didn't want to pay
to go to that event.
So behind the shell but
where the amphitheater is,
I climbed the fence--
jump over the fence--
no security.
And then, I wanted
to go see him close.
And so the back door to
the place, the shell thing
was open.
So I went in the back door.
And they had these
curtains where they
were lined up in the sides.
And I went into the curtains
and just stood there.
Nobody was at that back door.
Nobody knew who I was.
Nobody cared.
And then, he arrives in a
five-door white limousine.
The car should not
be on the road.
He has a white
tuxedo, black bow tie.
Fighter pilot.
He was the lead pilot
for the Thunderbirds--
best in the world.
He flew for his country, went
to the NASA space program.
That was his dream.
And he comes in.
He walks by-- type
A fighter pilot--
walks right by me, by the
wing, the side that I was on,
and he goes right to the podium.
He shows a video of the
earth from Columbia.
And standing ovation.
And he walks right by
me when he goes away.
And I said, wow,
that was awesome.
I got to see my hero in
real life and not cardboard.
And true story, the next
morning at 6:30, a staff member
from the governor's office--
I don't know how
they got my number,
nobody calls me from
the governor's office--
so calls me and says,
Lieutenant Colonel Lacy Veach
wants to go sailing
with you today.
How did he know?
We were training for a trip
to Rarotonga in Hawaii.
Our place that we trained
was at the old Dole
cannery, a dilapidated
building at Pier 39.
That was the only space
the state would give us.
And I was thinking, what?
You got the world's-- you got
Hawaii's greatest explorer want
to come on Hokule'a.
He says, yeah.
He wants to come sail
with you guys today.
And I was smart enough
to tell him, OK.
Why don't you tell the colonel
to come at 9:00 in the morning,
even though the crew
is coming at 8:00?
Good move, Nainoa.
Because I go down to the crew,
and our crew are just regular--
regular people.
And so I go down and
say, hey, you guys.
They had no idea Lacy's coming.
I said, hey, my
hero's coming today.
I want to ask you a favor--
because I was the
captain for the day.
I said, hey, can you put on
some slippers, and a T-shirt,
and can you speak the
best English you can?
My hero's coming.
And then, sure enough--
true story, true story.
He arrives on this old dock
in his mother's rusted DeSoto.
And he gets out of the car,
and he starts walking to us.
And he's barefoot, ripped
shorts, and no shirt.
[LAUGHTER]
And he was just so intimidating.
So I don't know what
happened, but I couldn't talk.
So he gets on the canoe.
I don't talk.
Everybody's looking
at each other.
They don't talk.
And Lacy's standing
there by himself.
And so he was the one
that first said, he goes--
he goes, thank you,
thank you, thank you
for letting me come
sail on Hokule'a today.
Because today, I'm going to
understand the definition
of what it is to explore.
And he rubbed the [INAUDIBLE]
wood on the canoe just gently,
with a lot of love,
on that canoe.
And he rubbed it.
And I stepped back,
and I said, whoa, man.
This is going to
be a good friend.
This is going to
be a good friend.
Next slide.
Yeah.
So by coincidence, that trip,
we were training for Rarotonga.
We're coming back from Rarotonga
to Hawaii in October of 1992.
By coincidence--
by coincidence--
next slide-- he'd be in
Columbia again, flying.
So we're going
four miles an hour.
It takes us two
months to get home.
He's doing six miles a second,
and going around the earth
in 90 minutes--
a very powerful perspective
of the island, our only home.
So he conjures up this
crazy plan about--
I know.
Come on.
Let's help children understand
the power of exploration
and have them create
their own voyages.
But they've got to explore.
And so, true story--
next slide-- so he
flies me to Houston
with the educational committee.
They don't get it.
He gets frustrated.
And so our antennas, they
come in two different signals.
We couldn't mix.
We couldn't connect
to the shuttle.
So I was told that he stole
his radio out of his fighter
in Ellington Field, got
some engineer to hook it up.
And then, I sailed, and he flew.
We had six minutes
of time when our two
antennas could see each
other that we could connect.
And our technology was so old,
the single sideband radios that
bounces the signal
over the atmosphere,
and it goes to a place
called [? Pisat ?]
in the University of Hawaii.
But if the bounce is wrong,
it'll miss the antenna.
And so we have six
minutes to connect.
We had it all set up.
All the children were waiting.
And true story--
so we did the test
to call [? Pisat, ?] Hawaii.
And we'd bounce a signal across
the atmosphere, and nobody
answers.
And Lacy's coming at six
miles per second, right?
And the antennas need
to see each other.
True story-- there's a real
good friend in Cook Islands--
his name is Stuart Kingman--
who had his own personal antenna
and radio--
that worked as a volunteer
for [? Pisat. ?] A hurricane
a decade before this
knocked the antenna.
And all the grass is
growing over the antenna
in his backyard.
But that was our backup--
antenna in the bushes.
And we can't get
hold of Honolulu.
We call Stuart Kingman
loud and clear.
So we call Stuart.
He sends it by phone
line to Pasadena.
Lacy's goes to Houston.
Another phone line mixes
it and sends it back
by phone line to about
35,000 schoolkids.
Next slide.
That's him talking to our kids
about the power of exploration.
Amazing man.
And he was a mentor.
He was best friend.
And he should be here.
That's why I bring him.
Next slide.
He goes, hey, Nainoa, I
got a present for you.
I'm going to bring
it back from space.
Cockpit window, top of the
edge of the earth on the top.
That's the island of
Hawaii on the bottom.
You can't really see it, but
there's kind of a red spot
on the slopes, at
12,500-foot elevation,
on that powerful mountain
called Mauna Kea.
And 35,000 years ago,
there was an eruption.
There was a very colder time,
and the glacier was thick,
and it supercooled that stone.
So it made-- that
stone is an adze
that his grandfather gave to
Lacy from that place called
Keanakako'i.
And Lacy-- you don't take
hard, heavy, sharp objects
into zero gravity.
So he stows it away
on the shuttle--
weight is a big
issue, by the way--
floats it in the window,
takes a photograph
about sustainability.
Because this man loved his home.
But his home was the Hawaiian
Islands and the Island Earth.
He said, there's an
equation we need to crack,
an equation we
need to figure out.
There's a code
we've got to crack.
And that is you need to
look at the ancestral
knowledge of people who
lived over 2,000 years.
The adze was that
kind of technology
that built voyaging canoes.
But you also need to couple that
with the best of our technology
that we have-- science
and technology.
But he said, the key
piece is not the power
of science and technology.
What navigates science
and technology?
And he's always meaning it needs
to be about the goodness of who
we are as people.
Kindness and compassion counts.
That's why Mau and Lacy
are essentially the same.
Kindness and compassion counts.
Next slide.
He was wild.
So Julie, we would
take our calendar books
and cross out one day.
And these books would
govern your life, man.
And that day was kapu.
Nobody could take it away.
And I'll meet you in Hilo.
So he'd come from where he was.
I'd fly to Hilo.
We'd rent a car and
illegally drive it
up the slopes of Mauna Loa.
And we'd drive on top of the
lava at 6,000-foot elevation
to go on the black rock
that absorbs all light--
bring the stars close.
And so we would
go once a year, be
on the black lava
with the commitment
that we're going to
connect the shuttle
program with the
voyaging program,
help young people to believe
that they can explore
and change the world.
And so we would go up there.
And inevitably, it would begin
with all optimism, excitement,
positive-- next slide--
until the conversation went to
the Island Earth, the only one
we've got.
He would begin and say, I know.
You have no idea how
beautiful the Island
Earth is when you can see
the whole thing from space.
You have no idea how
extraordinary and complex and
rare life is.
And the only place that
we know of that has life
is this planet and this island.
How come we don't
take care of it?
And then he would talk
about, we take the shuttle
to the nearest next solar
system, Alpha Centauri,
4.3 light years away.
It'd take you 200,000
years to get there.
Then you'd say,
hey, then you've got
to have the fuel to stop it
and turn around and fly home--
a round trip of 400,000 years.
But it was just
saying space is big.
This island is rare.
Protect it.
It is the genesis of the
starting to change from
cultural revival to
environmentalism,
to sustainability-- all these
kinds of issues and these words
that we don't understand,
that were starting to creep up
in a new language--
climate change,
sustainability, turning up
the thermostat that'll
melt polar caps
and raise our oceans.
It was happening.
But we didn't know enough
to know enough to care.
He was the one that
shifted voyaging.
He is the one that's
why we're here today.
We are finding our teachers.
Thank you, Julie.
When he started talking about
what we're doing to the earth,
I would physically--
he would get
so angry-- he was the most
optimistic human being,
the most optimistic human being.
We talk about staying positive.
That guy-- that's all he
was until he could not
figure out the code
or the solution
for the problems on the earth.
This is 1992.
And he would be enraged
on the lava rock.
And I would physically have
to hold him to calm him
down and settle him down.
Next slide.
Because he knew.
He knows what we're doing to
the earth, as a scientist,
as an astronaut.
Next.
And it's us.
Next slide.
This is a key slide.
Julie, this is for you
because your home is there.
On his last flight into space--
he didn't tell me the story.
Sometimes stories
are too emotional.
But it was his
partner, an astronaut
called Bill Shepherd, who became
the commander of International
Space Station, 2000.
He was the first commander when
it became fully operational.
So they were
mission specialists.
And they have very, very rigid
working time and sleeping time.
Lacy was stuck on the wall
with Velcro, with goggles on.
And Bill saw the inertial
navigation system,
and he knew--
he knew-- that
Lacy's home was going
to be coming up in the golden
dawn of the shuttle sunrise.
Breaks protocol, scrapes
Lacy off the wall,
floats him to the cockpit
window, takes the goggles off.
And Bill tells me this story.
He just said, it
was quiet and calm
and Lacy, the fighter
pilot, goes, that's it.
That's it.
This is the place.
This is the place.
And he told Bill,
this is the place
where we need to figure out
how to create the laboratory
to figure out all the challenges
and test them and then create
the school.
That was Lacy's vision.
And then, when he
got home, we sailed
on one of our voyaging
canoes together.
And he sat me down.
And then, that's when
Lacy started to talk.
He said, Hawaii
is the place that
has all what it needs to be
able to do the research into all
the issues that need to
be integrated to come up
with a sustainable plan.
And then, if Hawaii can become
the laboratory for success,
and also the school,
then, Lacy said,
then it's going to have
the greatest gift it can
give to earth, and it's peace--
verbatim.
Lacy would tell me, you want
to solve the energy problems
in Hawaii?
100%.
It's easy-- off the grid.
You want food sovereignty?
Hawaiians already
figured it out.
He goes through all
the issues that we
would need to do to figure out
the code for sustainability.
And he'd go through all of them.
But the one that was most
impressive was the last one.
He goes, with even all those
things, the most important gift
that Hawaii has to the world is
that its cultures are diverse.
And Hawaii is still kind.
So he plants the seed that
culture is not defined by race.
It's not defined by the bounds
of geography or nationalism.
It is really defined by values.
Is the earth still kind?
Is it still compassionate?
And he believed that Hawaii is.
And that was the most
important thing that he raised.
So Lacy planted the seed.
Next slide.
He says, and I know you
cannot protect what you
don't understand, and you
won't if you don't care.
And you can't do it by yourself.
You need to take Hokule'a
and go around the world.
Hokule'a will be your
vehicle to learn the earth.
And the earth will be the
vehicle to learn Hokule'a.
When you take Hokule'a,
you're taking all of Hawaii.
Go around the world.
And then he would say, you
need to go learn the earth.
And you need to go
find out one question.
Is humanity still
kind enough to change?
And then he said, you
can't do it by yourself.
Find relationships.
Find partners.
Find friends out of strangers.
That's why we came,
with that hope.
That's why we're here.
He planted the seed
of a powerful idea.
What he left in us was a belief
that we could change the world.
Next slide.
1995, in October.
I get a phone call.
Lacy was sick with cancer.
Wife calls me up and
says, you've got to come,
Nainoa, now.
Next day, I jump on a
plane, fly to Houston,
go into the astronaut's house.
There must have been
100 people in there.
The lights are dim.
Everybody was sad in the
living room and the kitchen
and everything else.
And I don't know anybody.
Very depressing.
And I asked his wife,
Alice, where's Lacy?
She goes, he's hiding
in the bedroom.
He's waiting for you.
And so I go in there, and
he's in his wheelchair
because he had a lot
of fluids-- very heavy.
And he goes, hey, Nainoa,
don't worry about this.
I'm going to get over it.
We've got too much to do.
That optimistic person.
He goes, but hey, can
you get me out of here?
And so I'm a small guy.
He's a big guy.
And so I wheel him
out, and everybody's
watching me take him outside.
And we get to the front door.
He goes, no, no, no.
I don't want to go
out in a wheelchair.
I want to walk.
Can you carry me?
Yikes.
And so I say, OK.
We'll go.
And so he puts his arm over
my shoulder, barely alive,
and take him down the steps
and go down the sidewalks.
You know where the sidewalk
has that grass before the road.
It's like, that's cement--
the sidewalk-- and there's
grass, there's a curb,
then there's a road.
So he's walking,
and I'm holding him,
and he slipped on the grass.
He falls.
He's falling.
So I tried my best to get
underneath him to protect him.
He lands right on me.
I lose my breath.
I can't talk.
And he's laughing.
It's the funniest thing ever.
And I was gasping for air.
And I couldn't get him off.
And then he was just--
it's where miracles are born.
He just-- he stops laughing
and looks into the sky,
and he tells me, you hear that?
I'm like, no.
No, no, no.
Do you hear the engine?
And I listen.
I say, oh, yeah-- this
faint engine of an aircraft.
And he starts telling me
the kind of the engine
that's up there and what
kind of aircraft this is.
And then he stopped and goes,
hey, Nainoa, show me Jupiter.
I want to see Jupiter.
So I'm in Houston.
I grab his hand and point it
up to the heavens, and I say,
it's over here.
Because I couldn't see it.
He goes, I see it.
I see it.
And he was so
joyous that he would
see another planet in the sky.
The problem was it was daytime.
Lacy's vision was so bad
that he couldn't see.
But it doesn't
mean you can't see.
And then, we lose him
the following week
from lympho melanoma when
the flight surgeon should
have picked it up.
And then, he left us the seed
and the promise for Hokule'a
to be active.
But that was 1995.
We plant the seed in 1992.
For 16 years, leadership in
Hawaii, we get together--
all the voyaging leaders--
and we have an agenda.
Worldwide Voyage is on
the agenda every year.
Every year, we start
the agenda with, wow,
this would be an
amazing thing to do.
What a voyage of all time.
But not clear of the
why you would go.
Not clear of the why.
Not enough clarity to go.
So when we start the debate
the other side of the voyage--
the hurricane or the
pirate or the mosquito
or the human violence or the
rogue wave of South Africa--
then we would all vote no.
It's too dangerous to go.
It's not worth the risk.
You don't have a reason that's
more compelling than the risk.
But the problem we had in
our debates over the next 16
years--
another vote was taken
on April 1, 2008--
when we all got together
was the language--
acidification, hypoxia, coral
bleaching, drowning islands--
famine to us-- having to move
from their homeland of 3,000
years to a country
they don't know.
Somebody else is going
to buy it for them.
Helpless.
And the list of dangers and
risks in this new language
is starting to grow.
We became more informed.
So there was a vote,
Julie, on April 1, 2008.
But the vote wasn't whether
we should go or not.
Because we had to already.
We knew it instinctually.
The vote was, what's
more dangerous,
the hurricane, the pirate, the
mosquito, disease, rogue waves?
Or what's more dangerous--
staying tied to the dock?
What's more dangerous?
Because if we
accepted to say no,
with the new language
and being informed,
then we would have to not
only tell ourselves but tell
our children that we sail for--
or that we believe we sail
for--
that we're going to be ignorant
and apathetic and inactive.
And so we voted four times.
And it had to be unanimous
because we took everybody
to do this.
We voted four times.
And we're going to go.
We didn't know how.
But we needed to go.
The why was answered because
of the dangers of the language.
Next slide.
Next slide.
Yep.
18 months, 32,000
recorded man hours,
volunteer time, to
redesign-- redesign--
and reshape and get Hokule'a
prepared for the earth.
Next slide.
Training.
Committed to succession
and young leadership.
These guys [INAUDIBLE] with it.
We raised the bar on training.
It was hard.
Criteria was hard.
We didn't know how to recruit.
We just said-- just
word of mouth-- anybody
want to go sail
around the world?
And 1,300 people signed up.
We don't know who
these people are.
We don't know if they can swim.
So we shut it down.
And we trained for six
years to get ready.
It's all in the training.
Next slide.
Built another voyaging
canoe called Hikianalia.
We made it in New Zealand--
Okeanos Foundation--
by the kindness
by a German businessman by
the name of Dieter Paulman.
It's 10 feet longer than
Hokule'a, about the same beam.
But we did this intentionally
because of the lessons of Lacy.
That photograph
would represent--
the adze would be on
Hokule'a, that we maintain
our traditions, we
sail it the old way,
we navigate it the old way.
But this canoe was a
platform as an escort.
It was a platform for
a medical platform.
It was a education platform.
It was a documentation platform.
And our goal was to
sail around the world
without any carbon footprint.
So we have 240 square
feet of solar panels
and then six big lithium
batteries and two
15-kilowatt electric engines.
So it was really
powered by the sun.
And we trained.
Actually, on the fifth
year, our crews are ready.
Our canoes are ready.
It was time to go.
Next slide.
April-- end of April 2013.
We're going to take off.
But it's those kinds of times
when you're so busy and crazy,
the truth is kind
of lost someplace.
And so you just kind of
ignore it in the business.
Except in the dream.
It was mid-March,
the kind of time--
3 o'clock in the morning-- where
you're in the dream, and then
the next moment, you're sitting
up, cold sweat, and saying,
something's wrong.
And what it was, the dream
that I had was a girl--
it was in black and white,
I couldn't see her face--
on the beach.
And all the trees were
killed behind her.
And you're standing on
the beach by yourself.
And so I thought and I
thought about it that morning.
And I said, you
know, we can't go.
We don't have permission.
We don't have permission
from our children in Hawaii.
How do we know?
Because we didn't go to them
to see whether they care,
see if it matters.
Do they even know Hokule'a?
So we set a benchmark
number saying, here's
our goal-- if 5,000.
So we canceled the voyage.
And we went that summer-- next
four months, five months--
to 32 ports, to
about 72 communities,
to see if the children cared.
If 5,000 kids would
sign our logbook,
that was permission to go.
But it would be 32,000 children
came in the summer months
when they're not in school.
So I was sensing that
we're getting permission.
But it was a single boy.
We go around all the Hawaiian
Islands to all these ports.
And one of the ports that
we go to is called Poka'i.
It's the port in the
largest concentration
of native Hawaiians on the
earth-- the west side of Oahu,
on the homestead lands.
It's arguably, statistically,
one of the roughest places,
also.
But we needed to be there
with these children that
need us the most that we
typically serve the least.
So we anchored in Poka'i.
Bay.
A swell came up.
We had to move Hokule'a
way outside the harbor,
outside the breakwater at night.
And it was a big swell.
It was rough.
And then we'd bring it back
in the daytime the next day.
It was safe enough.
And it was about 11 o'clock
at night in the black,
way outside.
This boy swims all the
way out by himself--
strong enough to grab a
catwalk four feet off the water
and climb up by himself.
He comes on the
deck, soaking wet.
And you could tell that he
didn't want to engage the crew,
so he just curled up in a
ball on the deck of Hokule'a
by himself, just shorts
on and soaking wet.
And I knew he didn't want that
engagement, so I told the crew,
leave him alone.
Just leave him alone.
And sunrise, he was gone.
He didn't sign the logbook.
But that was the moment I knew.
It's time to go for those
children that need it the most.
What are we going to
tell them if we don't?
I don't know the boy.
We don't know his name,
probably never will.
But he was the one that
gave us permission.
Next slide.
Next slide.
Yep-- 42,000 miles,
18 countries.
It'd be about 32
ports we would stop.
We had a crew of 226 that would
sail 1,000 miles and more,
all volunteers.
37 months-- long.
Designed to stay
out of the storm.
Sometimes works,
sometimes doesn't.
Next.
We had crews from
11 Pacific nations.
We had, actually, more than that
from around the Pacific Rim.
Next.
That boy helped us understand,
what's the real promise?
It was a promise to children.
So we drafted a single page that
superintendents and presidents
of universities and the
head masters of top schools
and the leadership from
the public school system
would sign on an agreement to
values that children matter.
It's about them.
And so we're all
focused on them.
That was permission.
So the 47 leaders in education
all signed this document.
Next.
And then, we left--
headed west and kept
going till we came home.
Around the Island.
Next slide.
Navigated the old way.
Next slide.
Committed to younger leadership.
Next slide.
Went to ancestral homelands
first for permission--
to Kahikinui, to Tahiti.
Next slide.
We continued through Polynesia.
The secretary general of the
United Nations sailed with us,
and he signed a logbook.
Next.
But he gave us a bottle.
And in the bottle was a
handwritten note saying
that you need to do the voyage.
You do your part.
I'll do mine.
I'll bring the 127
nations together
and focus on the protection.
The greatest environmental
issue of this century
is to protect the oceans.
It defines everything--
chemistry, biology, wildlife,
the rain that we take.
70% of what you breathe-- the
next four breaths you take,
three came from plankton.
Kill the ocean, kill ourselves.
And so this bottle
was that promise.
And so we took it to
build relationships
with those around the world to
commit to the doctrine of ocean
protection by coming together.
Next.
Aotearoa-- "Land of
the Long White Cloud."
Nga Toki Matawhaorua-- twice
the length of Hokule'a.
88 paddlers came to greet us.
We could hear them chanting
before we could see them
in the swells.
Next.
Manaiakalani is one of the star
lines of the six major star
lines that we use
to navigate by.
Manaiakalani is Hawaiian.
It's how we organize these 7,000
dots of light into some order
so you can teach it
and navigate by it.
This cluster of 11 schools is
in the roughest, most so-called
depressed community
in all of New Zealand.
There are 2,400 students came.
You know how we
greet, with a hug?
Every child hugged Hokule'a.
And their whole premise
is that they teach them
to be grounded in who they are.
They teach them technology
so they can travel the world
and be competitive
with anybody else.
But we teach them navigation
so they know how to come home.
Next slide.
Australia.
Next slide.
Sometimes I look at
schools that I'm not
so sure people are clear--
what's the purpose of schools
in a changing world?
Are we committed to
the speed of change?
There are 320 schools
in Northeast Australia
that the single purpose
of all of these schools
is to protect the largest
and oldest and most
powerful single
ecological system
called the Great Barrier Reef.
And their whole job from
kindergarten to the sixth grade
is to do that.
So a kindergartner
grabs one finger,
drags me around
into a place where
they are replanting
corals and algaes,
and they're restocking
fish stocks.
And they take us
into the aviary place
where they're helping wounded
seabirds and sick turtles.
These are elementary
school kids.
When the school is clear
about what they're for,
then it makes everything
starts to makes sense.
And there are-- I don't know how
many thousands of school kids
there are-- that are
designed for one purpose--
protect the largest and oldest
ecological system on the earth.
Next slide.
Ashmore Reef.
Amazing, marine-protected areas.
Next slide.
Bad day.
Yeah, me and my
kind of ex-friend--
he's a photographer,
a videographer.
He goes, hey, Nainoa.
We look down and with
60 feet of water--
we had scuba diving stuff, so--
He goes, hey.
We got all these--
we call them uluas--
they're called jacks.
They're big predators, but
they're not going to bite you.
And they're in this sandpit.
And so he goes,
take one of these
bottles, kind of like this.
We fill it with water,
so it won't compress.
We go down the 60 feet.
We take it out.
We fill it with
air from the tank.
And then he goes, yeah, just
rub it, and make a noise
that the fish never heard.
So I rub the--
and these jacks
are coming around,
and the big black one would
knock you over in the back.
But they don't
like your eyesight.
They get behind you.
They push you over.
So I'm dealing with
all these fish.
He comes over the top,
grabs the bottle in my hand,
and points up.
And all these sharks
that weren't there--
but they got good hearing--
and they all start to come.
And we're just like--
so we're crawling
on the bottom just trying
to get to the anchor chain.
This is going up
the anchor chain.
And we take this photograph of
what life is supposed to be--
the apex of the food chain.
Hawaii, you'll never find this--
never find this
in the main eight.
You'll find it in the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
But you'll never find
this in the main eight.
I cannot take my children
to sea life in the oceans
in their home anymore.
That's got to change.
Bali.
Yeah.
We worked a lot
with our governments
to come together with waste
and power programs in Hawaii.
[INAUDIBLE] and they're
adopting their--
Some of the places,
so bad, you can walk
on the rubbish in the ocean.
Next slide.
Africa.
Problem.
It has no Panama Canal.
We had to go around it.
So you can go north
through the Suez Canal.
But you've got to pass Somalia
and Yemen, and at the time
when you had the refugees
in the Mediterranean.
It was the wrong time.
And you had all the
violence in the Middle East.
But the other
problem-- you go south,
you go into the most notorious
rogue wave center on the earth.
Rogue waves are dangerous.
Anyway.
We chose south
because I'd rather
deal with a storm than deal with
violence I don't understand.
Next slide.
Yeah.
Strong winds against
strong currents.
The strongest western
boundary current in the world.
It's a dangerous place.
Next slide.
But in Bali there were
a group of board members
that said they
weren't comfortable
anymore about the safety
issues about Africa.
So they talked to
me and said, we
want you to ship Hokule'a
from Bali to Brazil.
And then take away the risk.
And to make a long
story short, I said, OK,
but if we do that, you're
asking me to put it
on a ship I don't know captained
by someone I don't know
with a crew I don't know from a
country I probably don't know.
I will do it because you're
the board, but I quit.
Because essentially,
what you're saying
is that Hokule'a
is not good enough,
and we're not good enough.
And you're essentially saying
that Hawaii is not good enough.
That's essentially
what you're saying.
And so I get it on
the safety issues.
And so we debated
it for a while.
And ultimately, in the end,
we chose to go with the belief
that we're good enough
in a humble way.
We trained hard.
Next slide.
Next slide.
So we're in Mauritius.
We go to Madagascar, right on
the southern tip of Madagascar.
And we know it's
a dangerous place.
We get to there, right
at the southern tip.
There's only one
port that you can
go in in the whole southeast,
southwest safety ports.
So we've made all
these safety ports.
There's only one.
But the harbor's
open to the north.
Winds are east 5 knots.
It was flat at 5:00
in the morning.
7:00 the morning, it
was north 50 knots
and seas 10 to 12 feet.
I call the harbor master.
We tell him, hey, we're
not going to come in.
He goes, I'm not
going to let you in.
'Cause the swells
come in the harbor.
So we had to get
around Madagascar.
But before we did,
right after sunrise--
we call them stacking waves.
Big waves go faster
than small, and they
get on top of each other.
The hydraulic cycle was so
big that the wave broke down
on us on our starboard
side, tore out
15 feet of our security canvas.
And then, we had
to turn downwind
and get the nose of the
canoe away from the wave
and get around Madagascar.
So it was like, we're not
even at South Africa yet,
and we were getting pummeled.
And it took-- it starts to test
you, whether you can do this.
And so we get around Madagascar.
We get into the
lee and the calm.
The storm goes by.
We continue to sail.
And I'll just say
that we do navigate
without instruments on this
voyage maybe 50% of the time.
On deep, cold,
tropical weather, where
we're not going to hit
something, we train.
But in this circumstance,
where safety's way out,
we were 100% instruments.
So we had meteorologists
from South Africa,
from India and Hawaii,
as consultants.
We were going to go to South
Africa, but when we came on,
they said there's
a big storm coming
through the south Atlantic.
You need to hide.
And Richards Bay is a place
that we were targeting.
You can probably
make Richards Bay.
And so I said, by
how much margin--
hours?
So I said, well, what if
the next forecast says
we can't make it?
So we turned to Mozambique.
We had no connection with
them, no diplomatic ties.
And when we get to Mozambique
to a place called Maputo,
and we go into the Maputo area,
and they don't know us from--
what is this craft in Maputo?
So they wouldn't let us in.
So I declare mayday.
It's the international
distress signal.
And by law, by
Maritime International,
they have to take you.
So there were entire settlements
that were just broken piers
where the Dutch left,
and they blew up
all these ships and
metal all over the place
and horrible anchorages.
And we went in there.
We had no choice.
And next slide.
It was rough.
It was like-- next slide.
In Maputo, there was lightning
every five to 10 seconds right
to the ground.
We couldn't get our crew off.
But there was a question that
a student asked me today.
When do you know
that you're really
ready to take on
the hard things?
It's when things are hard.
So anchored in Maputo.
The current was 9 knots.
Rain is at this
delta coming down.
The winds are 50 knots
coming the other way.
The current was so strong,
it turned the canoe around.
We hydroplaned on
our anchors and all
this metal down below us.
We hit another boat.
We busted right through
the hull of Hokule'a.
The rain is not vertical,
it's horizontal.
The anchors held.
We lose the anchorage and
run on rocks in 20 seconds.
And we got no place to go.
And our crew started to cry.
They didn't cry because they
were afraid of the storm.
They cried because
we hurt the canoe.
So we sat down.
And this is the moment
that I was angry--
my mistake, my fault.
I'm the captain.
And I just sat
everybody down and said,
do not ever let anybody
define your identity
by hurting Hokule'a.
Your identity is going to
be because you healed her.
You got two days.
Our crew was so amazing--
lying on surfboards,
working upside down,
grinding with just sandpaper,
having to borrow epoxy.
And then the deal was, in
that rainy night, was--
and the way that you're going
to know that you are the best
is to know that when
this voyage is over,
you'll bring your best
friend down to the canoe,
and you challenge
him, go find the hole.
And I bet they can't
because you're that good.
And then, that was the
moment that we were focused--
because of the crisis.
A crisis is a place
to grow or crush you.
Next slide.
It would take us 61 days to
go 900 miles, the slowest
voyage ever, the
longest voyage ever,
because we hid from cold
fronts every three months.
We just hopped.
Lehua did every single
square inch of that research
on that place to hide the canoe.
We sailed around.
16 people died in
other vessels when
we were there because when
we went in, they did not.
And we had the most
amazing, amazing voyage--
the people, culture, place.
And I'll just raise one
thing, that Agulhas Point,
NASA actually has a photograph
of the circulation cyclonic--
it was clockwise--
of this enormous, enormous,
hundreds and hundreds
of miles across--
and some were saying
it was 1,000 miles--
of this plankton bloom.
So much biology
was in the ocean.
It was like a
giant, living storm.
We didn't know, but we
went right through it.
And it would be lightning in
the water, light everything up.
Every agitation in the water--
you see a single fish going
through the oceans--
and that's when we knew,
wow, the earth is so amazing.
You can't protect what
you don't understand.
That's why you've
got to be there.
And then we went
to Cape-- around--
Agulhas, and there were
the pods, that were
feeding on this, of whales.
They call them superpods--
200 whales per pod or more.
And they were just one pod after
another, just life at its best
amongst the places
that we've hurt.
So next.
Cape Town.
Yeah.
Next slide.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
in 2013 came to Hawaii
to pray for Hokule'a
and to bless it.
He was sick.
And he said, I will be there
when you arrive if you make it.
And so I told him we would try.
And November 15--
whatever it was--
2015, we would
arrive in Cape Town.
And his daughter and others
are saying, he's really sick,
and he hasn't made a single
public appearance all year.
But he's going to come tomorrow
to the arrival ceremony.
He comes, and he was bundled
up in the heat of South Africa
with all these coats
layered and a woolen cap on.
And they put a couch down, tent.
They lay him down
because he couldn't walk.
And then, they said,
he's not going to speak.
I said, we're just
honored that he's here.
And then, he just laid
there until we brought--
Randie Fong of
Kamehameha Schools
brought charter school students.
He brought students
from Kamehameha
and from the public schools
to be with the arrival,
to be with the archbishop.
And they had their
Hawaiian Pahu, the drum.
And some had their drums,
but some had cracker cans.
The miles and miles
of barbed wires
that keep kids
out of communities
and lock them into schools--
the miles and miles of it.
These poor children were there.
And one African girl went up
to one of the Hawaiian girls
and said, can I
borrow your Pahu?
So the girl, of course,
gave her the Pahu.
And she started to beat this
drum and keep beating the drum.
And one African child jumped up,
starts dancing in the streets.
And another comes, and
there's all the children
dancing in the streets.
And then, they grab
the Hawaiian children
and drag them into the streets,
and they were all dancing.
And then someone said, hey,
Nainoa, you better turn around.
I turn around, and there's
Archbishop, standing up strong,
proud, and dancing with
the children in the street.
Then I knew the
voyage was worth it.
It's worth it for a man who's
protected 20 million children,
all on his shoulders, by
himself, for all those years,
dancing in the streets.
Next slide.
Yeah.
Next slide.
I know I'm way over time.
America.
We came in.
We chose east or west Florida.
We chose west to be
with the alligator
and to be with nature, to
make the first photograph.
Next.
NASA-- next-- to see my
friend where he dreamed
and where he worked.
Next.
New York.
Next.
Took back the bottle
with 18 commitments
from 18 countries back to
the secretary general, said,
we did our job.
We kept our promise
to protect the oceans.
Next.
Panama.
Next.
Navigate to these new
islands, the first islands
we would see in the
Pacific for over two years.
Next.
The Galapagos.
Next.
Galapagos, by law,
restricts humanity
to 1% of the land
and the oceans.
99% is for nature.
It's a part of the
equation, by the way.
Next.
Navigate to the next
single-most isolated land,
which is found by a navigator
1,400 years ago, Rapa Nui.
Next.
Homecoming.
Next.
Some of you were there.
It would be the single
most viewed event
in Hawaii's history.
That's one thing that
we're humble but proud of,
the fact that the
majority of the viewership
wasn't from Hawaii and was
watching it live on television.
Next.
And then, we come home.
Did it do anything?
What it did was help us to learn
to explore and to reconnect
with young people, what our
teachers and our principals
did in Hawaii in
terms of creating
new revolutions of
education and made
clear what schools are for.
Next slide.
Yeah.
Next.
Yep.
It's all we've got.
Next.
A few more slides.
Well, my voyage wasn't finished.
California has 100,000
native Hawaiians.
That's the second-largest
population in the world.
They asked Hokule'a to come
on the Worldwide Voyage.
We couldn't physically
do it because we
had to go to Panama Canal.
They wanted the
Hokule'a to come up
as part of this thing we're
calling Mahalo Hawaii.
We're sailing around
the state right now
and going to all our communities
and thanking teachers
and thanking community
and thanking students.
They wanted Hokule'a to go.
We said, no, Hokule'a is tired.
And leave her home.
But we took Hikianalia.
So we designed the
voyage to go up there.
And that's when I
found out how much I
don't know about this canoe.
Because it wasn't ready to go.
I committed before.
I didn't know it wasn't ready.
The crew was a fantastic
crew, just kept training.
But ultimately, in the
end, we were 21 days late
from departure.
And we were invited to
a global climate summit
by Governor Brown that
triggered Ocean Elders
and triggered Amazon Collective.
It triggered all
these other events.
They wanted Hikianalia
to participate.
And by mathematics,
we were too late.
So the crew sat down
and said, I know.
We may be too late.
But it doesn't matter if
we make their arrival time.
What matters is that we're
bringing a gift from Hawaii.
It's the best we can
bring you, and we're
going to come anyway
because we don't want
you to think that we stopped.
So even if we don't
make the arrival,
you need to know that the
gift is coming, anyway.
So they took off.
Next slide.
Record time-- two days early.
Next slide.
It's the one I wanted
to show you-- this.
So diversity matters, right?
Protection of new values.
There's two stories.
This crew of 13, we
intentionally selected them.
We brought on four of
our senior sailors,
not as command but to teach.
The captain was 32 years
old and would be a woman.
And it would be 2,900 miles,
the longest nonstop voyage
of the Worldwide Voyage.
It would take you halfway
to the North Pole,
and you'll be in two weeks
of very cold weather.
Very difficult to navigate.
We're training in succession,
shoving people forward.
Here's the four navigators.
There was one who is
incubator/accelerator/educator
with Emerson, but she's
born and raised in Korea.
And then, there's a sailor,
another woman that is a sailor,
and she is born from
Japan, from Okinawa.
Because this month,
right here, they're
going to be launching their
first voyaging canoe--
Hawaiian-designed voyaging
canoe-- first time
ever in Japan.
And she wants to learn
enough about navigation
to be a teacher.
Bingo.
That's part of scale.
The other navigator
is a 23-year-old.
He's from Tahiti, an
island called Rongiroa.
Tahitians, over 700 years,
don't have a navigator.
We're training this person
to take Hokule'a, maybe
next spring, back
to Tahiti so Tahiti
will have a navigator again.
And then, the fourth
is a 19-year-old boy
from Hawaii, a college student.
So Korea, Japan,
Tahiti, Hawaii--
intentional.
It's the way we scale,
not just the numbers,
but we scale our values.
People understand who we are,
that race doesn't matter.
But if you look to the
farthest to the right,
that is the captain.
The story is, behind
her-- and I sailed them
out the first 35 miles to help
them trim off the North Shore
Oahu.
But I had a little boat that
was going to take me back home.
And they're kind
of like, don't go.
We got clothes for you,
and we got plenty of food.
Because if I go, we'll keep it
safe, we'll make it successful,
but I will take it all away.
I will take it all away.
They won't navigate.
They'll wait for me to navigate.
They won't command.
They'll wait for me to command.
And that was a really difficult
moment to jump off the canoe.
Because I could see it in
their faces, but I knew.
It is your time.
This is a very
dangerous thing to do.
But I knew if they
were successful,
it's going to change everything
because of another story.
We were given a graduation,
a few of us, by Mau
and his island to take
this thing called Pwo.
It's never happened before.
It's sacred stuff.
But Mau was very sick.
He was losing his eyesight.
And we were sailing
Hokule'a to his island
to pay respect to
him, and another canoe
called Alingano Maisu
that was built for him.
We receive a radio
call from Pohnpei.
They say, Mau wants
to give you a Pwo.
I get to Satawa.
We go into the men's house.
I tell him, I don't
want to take it.
I can't assume
responsibility for something
I'm not going to be at
and I don't understand.
He goes, I'm not asking you.
So Julie, I asked the
question, OK, what is Pwo?
What is this graduation means?
So he took two days
with an interpreter,
and they actually typed
up with solar panels--
a little tiny
computer-- printed it.
It was 13 pages of what
the definition of Pwo is.
Everything is about skill.
And it's like Mao said--
your graduating from college
doesn't mean you know anything,
but it's time for you
to go by yourself.
So it was permission
to sail by yourself,
except for the last paragraph.
The last paragraph, it
said, to be Pwo is to be,
when you go to sea, you bring
gifts back to your people.
When there is
conflict, you resolve.
If a bird is injured, you heal.
And Pwo is the light,
and the light is love.
Bingo.
That is the true navigator.
You don't have to do it
on the deck of canoes.
My house burned down,
and I lost the document,
but maybe that's OK.
But I'll never
forget the paragraph.
Pwo is to be the light,
and light is love.
And you sail for that.
So that's why I
didn't want to go.
Because the next year, I went
back to Satawa to say goodbye.
It's such a remote place.
I'm never going to see
my navigator again.
He knew it.
I knew it.
We don't talk about goodbyes.
We talk about, Mau, if
we sail, are you with us?
He said yes.
Mau, if we do navigation,
are you going to be there?
He said, of course.
I'm your teacher.
And I said, OK.
So we're going to sail.
He goes, good.
As long as we sail,
you will be with us.
He said, yes.
So the day before
departure of this island--
his house is on the
other side of the island,
it's kind of far away--
we didn't say
goodbye, but I went
back to where the ship was.
The next day, everybody
was on the ship.
Everybody's ready
to go except for me.
And I'm wandering on
the beach, kind of lost.
I just couldn't think
straight and just completely
uncomfortable about
things I don't understand.
And everybody's calling me,
and I know we've got to go.
Pulling the anchor.
And I just ran.
I just ran.
And the more I ran,
the stronger I got.
And I ran, and I
ran, and I ran back
to his house, the last
house on the island.
His house is wooden, no
screens, just open, tin roof.
And his bed is plywood.
And he was sitting on his
plywood bed waiting for me.
So I come in there because
I knew what the problem was.
The day before, when
I was with him--
we train those who
deserve it the most.
Those are the ones that work the
most, irregardless of gender.
But there are no women
navigators in Micronesia.
So I had a problem.
I needed permission to give
Pwo to the ones that deserve
it the most.
And let me just say this--
women are better
students than men.
They just are.
I don't know what it's about.
But anyway, we had some very
powerful women in Hawaii
that were just--
they deserved the
right of command.
So I asked Mau the day
before we left, Mau,
can I give Pwo to a woman?
And he's the guy that
breaks all the rules, right?
And that's why he's at
the end of the island.
But this time, he
immediately, he said no.
No.
I didn't even debate.
I didn't want to question him.
I just stepped back.
He said no.
So I left that
day knowing that I
have a huge problem of equality,
of equity, about being fair,
being honest.
Because I don't have permission.
So that's why I
ran the next day.
I ran back to go see him.
I didn't bring it up.
I came in.
I looked through that
window with no screen.
It's a hot, hot day.
And I could-- this
black silhouette
of him sitting on the plywood.
I come inside, and
he was just waiting.
And the first thing he
said, he goes, hey, Nainoa,
you like give Pwo to the wahine?
And I said, yes.
Then, to break the kapu,
to allow the right thing
to happen, to give
permission, he goes, OK.
It's up to you.
So what he did was--
he couldn't do it.
He couldn't step over that line.
But I can.
So the captain of this
canoe is 32 years old--
was five years old--
born and raised
in New York, parents
both Hawaiian,
wanted her and her five sisters
to learn Hawaiian culture
and language-- went
back to Hawaii.
They don't have enough
financial support
to put them in private
schools, so they
put them into the public
schools but happen
to put them into
the first opening
of the first Hawaiian
immersion language school ever.
And would graduate with
the first class ever.
The right thing to do
as part of renaissance,
as part of Hokule'a's journey
to change this education.
Graduates from
Kamehameha Schools,
graduates from the
University of Hawaii
in mechanical
engineering, speaks
four and a half languages,
plays classical violin.
You want me to go
on on her resume?
Did all six years of research on
this assessment for the voyage
to keep us safe and
really was the one
that was most prepared to
take that canoe, Hikianalia.
2,900 miles, 23 days-- record.
And the reason why, amongst
all the fear and all the doubt,
that I kept shoving
this crew up there
to go-- because
I knew the risks.
But I knew that we had to
do this because the success
of this voyage was not Lehua's.
It's everything that
Lehua stands for,
that every single
child in Hawaii
should grow up knowing that
they have access, that equality
matters, that they're
going to be protected,
they're going to be cared for.
And that's part
of what I believe
is sustainability, of
your values, your beliefs,
the things that are right.
So yes, we break the kapu.
But we break it for
every child to grow up
thinking that this
world is equal,
and it's good enough for them.
Next slide.
Yep.
I know it's up to you--
permission.
Next slide.
I'm not going to go
into detail, but we're
planning a new voyage.
Protect the oceans,
put the Hawaiian star
compass on the map.
We pulled up on Google
Earth to find out
when can you see the
boundaries of Antarctica
and Alaska and Chile and China.
You've got to go up--
really interesting--
you've got to go up
40,000-- not feet, miles--
to see the edges of the land
of this magnificent ocean--
half the saltwater in
the world, one third
the surface of the earth.
And it is the engine
of our climate.
it's the engine of our
chemistry of the earth.
This amazing living system
is protected by the oceans.
It deals with carbon.
I mean, the list
could go on and on.
So the Worldwide Voyage
is about exploration.
This Worldwide Voyage
is trying to connect
people to touch the oceans and
come up with some kind of way
that we're going to be
responsible for the future
of this planet by
protecting the oceans.
And so it's longer than
the Worldwide Voyage
in distance and time.
It's 47 countries
and archipelagos.
We're going to need a
lot of crew members.
And we're planning to
take off in May of 2021
and come back home on 2025,
for Hokule'a's 50th birthday--
half a century sailing.
Next slide.
This slide's for you, Julie.
There's a parallel voyage.
Wanted us to go
around the Pacific,
but you're going to take an
enormous amount of resources
away and disconnect.
We're looking at taking children
around our special home called
Hawaii and having them
answer the question why
it should be protected.
And this is the island of the
laboratory that Lacy knew.
This is the island.
You want to pick a single
place on the earth?
My humble opinion,
it's right here.
All the geography's there.
All the rich ecological
system is there.
Hawaiian culture is
best understood here.
And it's still wild.
And that parallel
voyage is the one
that I want to go on
with young people,
take them around every square
inch of all of our islands
while we're doing
the other voyage.
Because we need to
make these canoes
be connected between our home
here and the home of the earth.
Next.
Last slide.
I don't know what to say to
thank you for your brilliance,
your genius, your
commitment, We're
looking for the world's
great navigators,
and they're sitting
in the front row.
We need you to help
show us the way.
Our children need you.
It's been an honor
for the last 36 hours
of being here to
be with all of you.
I will never be able
to thank you enough.
But if we have permission, we'll
sail for you, what you believe
and what you stand for.
And the thing about--
I saw the most-- about the
Wrigley Global Institute
of Sustainability
is your courage--
courage to be honest and
courage to do the right thing,
even though you don't
know how to do it.
So on behalf of our team--
I know I talked too much--
we'll never thank you,
and we're just very, very
deeply grateful.
And just a privilege
to know you.
Mahalo.
[APPLAUSE]
This presentation
is brought to you
by Arizona State University's
Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability.
For educational and
non-commercial use only.
