Days 6, 7, and 8 (today)

Hey there! Sorry I haven’t updated in a while. Here’s what’s been happening:

Day 6/January 9, 2011 

One of the many "sticks" on the beach. Dogs love these.

So, that was Sunday. Let’s see, what’d I do. Ok, so I went for a run on the beach, which was SUPER amazing! There were so many dogs playing with sticks and people and like, it was awesome!

One sad thing, though: I found a dead green sea turtle (endangered) in the corner of the beach next to Menehune Shores. Amber, one of my team members, works with rescue networks in the Virginia Beach area, and I told her about it and we got in contact with the Maui rescue network. They came out, looked at it last night, but Monday morning when they came out to pick it up, it was gone. I took a picture of it—by the time Amber saw it, it was a lot more torn apart. We think that the bulldozer that does erosion control on the beach early in the morning scooped up the turtle. Can you say ILLEGAL!! Anyway, so that happened.

A dead green sea turtle: endangered. Very sad. There is a thin strip of plastic wrapped through it's body...we're destroying the oceans.

We did our data collecting in the afternoon and I got a lot of sun! I also operated the theodolite for most of the time and got tons of data points! It was super exciting. After we came back, we ate dinner, read articles, analyzed our data, and went to class!

Me in the field!

Class was awesome. One of Dr. Green’s friends, Kalasara, is a native of Arizona but has lived in Hawaii now for 15 years and is an environmental activist. She gave a talk on speaking with the whales. Now, I know you’re probably thinking that’s crazy, but I totally related to her and understood and like, she’s awesome. So, here’s how it goes: our brain is divided into 2 sides—right and left. The left side is our empirical, sciency side. The right side is our intuition. Because of the way we’re raised in American, European, any “advanced” non-indigenous culture, the left side (empirical) is more developed than the right (intuition) and is able to override and essentially shut down any thoughts the right side has. So, it’s like when you have a “feeling” about something, but you don’t act on it because you rationalize—that’s the left side shutting down your intuition. Basically, what Kalasara talked about is trusting your intuition. We’re all a part of this earth—everything is harmonious. Evolutionarily, there’s a disconnect that has occurred between the heart and the mind—we’re trusting our mind rather than our heart and our intuition and it needs to be the other way around. Here’s an experiment for you to do—it’ll hopefully prove my point. And don’t read ahead, after this test: draw a picture of yourself. 

 Alright, so you’ve either drawn a picture of yourself or imagined what you would draw were you to draw a picture of yourself. Most people draw a picture of just their heads. If you drew a picture of another animal or of your head and body, kudos for being one with nature. If you only drew your head, this shows that psychologically, there is a predominance of the mind vs. the heart. We know we have a body and we know our head can’t live without our body, but the focus is so much on our mind, that we inadvertently disregard it. That makes sense, right? Think about it. To continue, she then talked about how she can actually talk to the whales. And I believe her. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like when Cooper (my dog) is hungry—aside from his barking at me, I get this “feeling” before he does anything that he’s hungry. Similarly, when I was younger I would always bring home stray dogs—somehow, they knew they could trust me. It’s that whole animal instinct thing—animals pay attention to their intuitions and their instincts. When the stray dogs would follow me home, I was probably somehow communicating that I wasn’t going to hurt them and that it was ok for them to come home with me. For lack of another word, it’s telepathy. And ducks! When I’d feed the ducks with grandpa—they’d come really close to me. There’s a similar interaction that occurs between mothers and babies—but, people are hesitant to call it telepathy because it’s considered a socially “weird” thing to do. Mothers “know” when the baby is hungry. Marine mammals do the same thing—actually, all animals in the animal kingdom do. We are no different from them, even though we think we are. Anyway, so she was talking about how she talked to the whales and she actually swam with them in the Dominican Republic at the whale sanctuary there ($1,100 for a weeklong boat excursion—something I’m TOTALLY doing someday).

It’s unknown why they sing (it’s not to attract mates)—but, she asked them why they sing and they answered, or rather she got a feeling in heart and she knew the answer, that they sing their lineage. But, of course, there’s no way to scientifically prove that—I think it’s brilliant, though! Oh, also: with dolphin chirps, they’ve actually figured out that their chirps correlate to 3D images—so, dolphins are, in fact, communicating telepathically with one another through their chirps. Which, in terms of survival, is very efficient because they’re not expending the extra physiological energy to use abstract words to describe what they’re saying—they’re just showing what they’re trying to say. And Kalasara also said the whales are desperate to let us know that humans are destroying the feminine energy of the earth (this ties in with other feminine repression around the world—sex trades, how women are still paid $0.75 to the man’s dollar, etc.) and that the whales are wise and that the whales know humans are capable of being more than what we’ve become. We’re meant to love each other and we, as humans and the mega-predators and parasites of the earth, are spiraling ourselves to doom with the destruction of the ocean environments.

 Don’t worry, I’m not turning crazy liberal or whatever. I’m actually becoming repulsed by our entire governmental system—so, I suppose I’m becoming more aware and independent in my opinions. It probably sounds a bit radical coming from me, though…maybe. I dunno. I’m just realizing that the world is being ruled by an oligarchy of a few powerful companies and their minions. It may sound silly to some, but all of this makes me just want to go off the grid, escape from the cage of modern living, and live off the land, away from everything where I’d be able to truly be in harmony with the earth. (I don’t know if I could do it forever, but at least for a little bit. Or, at least be in an extremely small community on an island in the middle of nowhere—that’s the more practical approach, I guess. The one the left side of my brain is telling me. I’m sick of using the left side of my brain, though. I’m just going to follow my intuition from now on.)

 Day 7/January 10, 2011 

A sailboat with sail: SBS code for our data collecting. 

Yesterday was a bit rough—I fell asleep on Sunday night with a pretty bad ache in my head and I woke up at 3 am with a raging headache—much like a migraine. So, I was pretty out of this morning. So out of it, in fact, that I was nauseous and I was trying to stay in the field but my head hurt so bad and I was so pale, clammy, etc., that Laura made me sit in the car and Janice came and picked me up in the field after I’d only been out there for a couple of hours. I felt really bad for leaving my team, but I was taken back to the condo, slept for a while in a dark room, given excederin and it made me feel a lot better. I drank tons of water and was able to keep down some food, too, which was nice. The people here are amazing. And my team is the best! In the past, teams or research groups I’ve been in have been like, all about self-preservation and not helping team members, but my research team here is fantastic!!! They rose to the occasion and even though I wasn’t feeling good took charge and I’m just really proud to call them my team members. I like them :) Anyway, so I spent the afternoon studying for the exam, which is tonight! I still had a dull ache in my head after taking the first excederin, but I took the second one before I went to sleep and woke up feeling a lot better. I’ve been drinking tons of water.

 OH! And there was a wicked crazy, windy, hurricane-esque (ok, that’s an exaggeration) storm before we left for class!! They had to drive us because the lightning and thunder was so bad. Yup, my first Hawaiian storm! Hawaiian rain smells weird. And you know the smell of after rain? Hawaiian after rain smells weird, too. In the states it smells like worms, here it just smells…weird and gross. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just Kihei…? I know Kihei can smell good—when I went running it smelled amazing (…like the ocean…even though salt doesn’t have an actual smell…whatever).

 Lecture last night was AMAZING. First off, Laura is a biomusicologist (in addition to being a Sea Shepherd). So, she presented her Master’s thesis research to us about the humpback whale song. Super fascinating. And then, David Rothenberger (sp?), who is a Professor of Philosophy and Music in New Jersey and a jazz musician talked about his research with the humpback whale song and bird song! He basically has jam sessions with birds (with his clarinet). He played some of the jam sessions with birds (the laughing thrush was my favorite!) for us and it’s amazing. He’s on YouTube, I’ll try to find a link for you to listen/watch. He’s my favorite lecturer so far. He also had a jam session with a humpback whale! He put a hydrophone in the water and played his clarinet while the whale was singing and the whale “dueted” back. Like, SO COOL.

 Our team stayed after “official” lecture and talked to Dr. Green at length about the random mass killings of animals that have been washing up on European beaches. Google: “HAARP” and “DARPA”. Basically, what is causing the mass killings of birds and fish across the globe is our Navy and the Air Force working with a high-powered sonar system that penetrates the ionosphere, heating it up and making it gelatinous and full of electric currents/hot. When this happens, they’re able to somehow direct that hot energy to a specific coordinates and cause earthquakes, mass killings (the birds’ hearts exploded, making it look like a heart attack…but, the birds were also then fried while flying, too, and then they crash to the ground in flocks), messing with plane systems (high profiled politicians that have died recently, anyone?), and other extreme things (like messing with the magnetic field in the oceans). There’s a HAARP mechanism in Alaska. It’s very secret, apparently, but now you know. If you’re interested in talking about it in person, I’d be more than happy to—it’s kind of hard to describe in this blog. But, HAARP and DARPA are the newest weapons of mass destruction. Yay humanity: finding new ways to destroy each other daily.

 And then I studied for the rest of the night and got to bed around 11 pm.

Plan: wake up at 6:30 am to study. Team study session: 9:30-11:30 am. Lunch: 11:30-12:15. Field research: 1-4 pm. Study 4:30-5:30 pm. Dinner (and study): 5:30-6:30 pm. Exam 7-9 pm. Wish me luck! :)

Also, a debate in class the other day was: Do humans have the right to develop a plot of land if it will cause the extinction of a species? Here are some arguments we came up with in class; what do YOU think?

 Pro/humans have the right: • Make safe houses for the endangered species. • How do you determine the net value of a species? Kind of like insurance values on body parts. • People need jobs and people need to survive. • Going to be destroying species no matter where you go. • They’re already vulnerable if they’re endangered, so what’s to say another environmental change won’t kill them? They’re going to die eventually. • Selfish gene theory: we have the right to let our species flourish over others; we’re using the tools of nature...nature is allowing us to do this. • Bible says, “man can have dominion over the environment.” • It’s the owner’s land, they can do what they want.

 Con/humans do not have the right: • Throw off balance of the environment; irreversible changes; scientific evidence that this happens. Take mosquitoes away and bats die and then owls die. Take bees away and flowers die. Symbiotic relationships are essential to the survival of everything because everything is interconnected. • Business people always find a way around stuff, they can find a way around killing a species • Playing god isn’t ok. We can’t decide which species live and die. • We can’t abuse our human power. • Keeping species around could be the cure for a new disease and if that species is gone, we can’t bring it back. • Bad impacts or good impacts—we don’t know, but if they’re bad, we can’t reverse it. • Everything has a right to life. • Domino effect of damage with trophic cascade and other stuff in the ecosystem. Not worth the risk to develop land. Better to play it safe than destroy the entire balance of the biosphere.

 Another question that follows this one is whether or not all creatures have an inherent right to life. Whatcha think?

Sunset :)

 Day 8/January 11, 2011 
Hey! It’s 1/11/11! Make a wish (with your eyes closed) at 11:11 am/pm and if it changes to 11:12 when you open your eyes your wish will come true! So, studying this morning and then field research in the afternoon, dinner, then the exam. Then we’re going to analyze our data from today because then tomorrow morning we’ve got the morning field research shift! We were supposed to go on a whale watch tomorrow, but the weather has been super stormy so they’ve rescheduled for next week. Anyway! Ciao!