Introduction: Doug Schmid

First I would like to express gratitude to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the State of Hawaii and the entire PAA team who have worked to provide this year’s team with this opportunity to experience Midway Atoll.

I also am looking forward to this program, at this place so isolated from human settlement, to see such an extraordinary and abundant part of our world. I have read about the huge colonies of nesting albatross and other seabirds and the remarkable life in the atoll’s reefs. I come from a heavily developed place, outside New York City, where the works of people are everywhere.

Here on Long Island we have a dense population and considerable pressure on our environment and natural resources. In my lifetime I have seem a great diminishment of the natural world. As a boy my local bays were full of game fish and clams and the spring skies were vividly colored with migrating warblers and noisy waterfowl. More recently I have seen our bays unnaturally full of algae, with eelgrass meadows gone and fishermen failing to find once numerous fish. I’ve led many post-mortem necropsies with high school students on marine animals. We’ve found plastic balloons that have compacted in the stomachs of loggerhead turtles causing death.

There has been much discussion lately about how our children are becoming more divorced from the natural world that sustains us (with every breath we take!). Most people here live a busy, suburban life, divorced from meaningful experiences with the natural world. We find ourselves less connected to and less understanding of nature around us. Our technology and standard of living insulates us. I think this “disconnect” from our life support system is a real problem for our future and must be addressed. Baba Dioum said “For in the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. And we will understand only what we are taught.” If he is right we have a responsibility to be the guides and teachers for the generations to follow. I hope to be better equipped to be one of those guides after working and learning as part of our PAA team.

Lastly, as our lives become ever busier and our time for reflection less, I hope to have the gift of time at this magnificent place- time for perspective and the time to absorb and understand some measure of the natural world at the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.