They survived 1,000 years in the middle of the Pacific. And then we arrived.
It's a 1,000-year-old idea we may finally be ready to understand.
There's a place that's got more of everything there is on Earth.
Or there was until Westerners arrived.
It's called the Hawaiian Islands.
Just about any life-form on the planet could find its "sweet spot" there.
Dr. Sam Ohu Gon III, speaking as Senior Scientist and Cultural Advisor to The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, explains that there's something really important to learn about what happened when outsiders came in.
When Westerners arrived 300 years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians already having lived on these islands for a millennia, on their own, in the middle of the ocean.
The Hawaiians lived lightly off the islands whose resources they depended on. They used only about 15% of it, and, even so, they were still completely self-sufficient, with nothing they needed from the outside world.
The Hawaiians' belief system was the key.
They saw the islands as having different realms.
Wao kanaka are the lowlands along the shores where people lived. It's where they grew and caught the food they needed.
Wao akua was the uplands above wao kanaka. It was an intensely sacred place where humans had no role in the native forests or the waters that flowed out of it. It's where their ancestor gods, aumakua, lived.
Theirs was a system based on love, not fear.
The Hawaiians believed aumakua could take the form of individual plants and animals, or kinolau. So all the life in wao akua wasn't just plants and animals. It was literally family.
“When your gods are also your family and the elements of nature are their physical presence, your relationship with nature is transformed." — Sam Ohu Gon III
Hawaiians considered themselves actual kin to nature, a much richer way of thinking than viewing yourself of just a consumer.
They believed in aloha, which isn't just “hello" and “goodbye," as it often seems. It's actually the word for empathetic compassion, and it extends beyond the people you care about, to āina, the place you live. Together, aloha āina is a deep appreciation of and love for the features of your land. You're not whole without your place, and its fate is your fate.
To take from the land without thinking of what you're doing to it would be, as Gon says, “a direct and conscious prostitution of not only a family member, but an elder. And what right-thinking person would do that?"
And then Western civilization landed on Hawaii's shores.
A different idea came along with them. Nature to them was a set of resources to be exploited by property owners and purchased by human consumers. The human footprint on Hawaii expanded to 85%, and many of the islands' natural resources were destroyed or used-up. This shows how things changed.
And now the traditional Hawaiian self-reliance is gone.
Modern Hawaiians are now so dependent on imports that if they stopped, it's estimated there'd be famine in just three weeks.
This story should change our attitude.
In it may be the key to us stepping back from the environmental ledge.
Our global climate challenges come from losing sight of our relationship to the ground we stand on, the air we breathe, and seas we sail. By combining aloha āina with modern technology, there's a chance we can set things right. Maybe "aloha āina" isn't just a saying, but instead a practical formula for how we survive on our own little island out in the middle of the ocean of space.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.