The Nature Conservancy - Penny Martin

Save our Vanishing Hawaiian Forest

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Forest Recovery Project

Learn more about the state of Hawaii's forested watershed. Find out what the Conservancy is doing to protect Hawaii's remaining native forest from invasive weeds and animals.

What's Being Said

Penny Martin and other Hawai'i residents speak out about the urgent need to protect the vanishing Hawaiian forest.

By Grady Timmons

It’s noon hour in the Conservancy’s Honolulu office, and in the downstairs conference room Moloka‘i-born Penny Martin is the guest speaker at a brown bag lunch. A staunch and longtime supporter of conservation, Martin has come to share her mana‘o (thoughts) about who she is and what she does.

And Martin does a lot.

In 1976, she was one of two female crewmembers aboard the Hōkūle‘a voyaging canoe’s epic first expedition from Tahiti. Today, in addition to volunteering for The Nature Conservancy and other charities, she works as an outreach counselor for the Maui AIDS Foundation, and as a cultural and environmental educator for the Moanalua Gardens Foundation.

“Someone once asked me how I could do HIV/AIDS outreach and education and then switch hats and do cultural and environmental education,” she says. “I told them I really didn’t switch hats. Health, culture and the environment are all related. You know, you need healthy land for healthy people, and healthy people for healthy land. To me it’s all the same: Chlamydia, Clidemia. It’s all not good for you!"

The room erupts with laughter. Chlamydia, after all, is a sexually transmitted disease, Clidemia a noxious, invasive weed. Martin confesses that while leading a hike in the Conservancy’s Kamakou Preserve, she once confused the two.

But there is no confusion about the point she is trying to make. “The same values that inspire me to take people into the forest at Kamakou are the same ones that drive me to educate people about HIV/AIDS,” she says. “It’s all about keeping our land and our people healthy. It takes the same values. If your work is values based, that's probably the most important thing you can do.”

Penny Rawlins Martin.

Making a Difference through Shared Values

When Martin speaks, it is with a sense of purpose. And whether she’s trying to change at risk behavior of adults and youth or sowing the seeds of forest stewardship among the young, she does it by appealing to people’s values.

Martin first realized the power of this approach while working at the Maui AIDS Foundation. Frustrated in her initial attempts to get through to her patients, she started showing a video made in Hawai‘i, which portrays a local woman living her life based on Hawaiian values.

The story had struck a deep chord with Martin, reminding her of her own childhood, and she quickly discovered it had the same effect on the people she was counseling. “Since then, whether it’s for Alternatives to Violence, Maui AIDS Foundation or The Nature Conservancy, all my work has been values based,” she says. “It's made the major difference in what I do.”

Martin’s approach is largely the result of a search for her own cultural values. Born on Moloka‘i – a tiny rural community of 7,000 – she was raised on a solid foundation of Hawaiian values and reveled in all the natural wonders Moloka‘i had to offer. She paddled a canoe, fished for crab and mullet – the island’s oceans and forests were her playground. Later she attended Kamehameha Schools, but says that it was her experience aboard the Hōkūle‘a voyaging canoe in 1976 that “reminded me of the values I had learned as a child and how important they are.”

Around that time, she had the opportunity to hear Molokai’s George Helm speak. Helm, the legendary Hawaiian activist, disappeared at sea in 1977 while fighting to stop the bombing of Kaho‘olawe Island. It was from Helm, Martin says, that she first heard the expression aloha ‘āina.

“Simply put, aloha ‘āina means love for the land,” she says. “But its meaning goes deeper than that. It's a practical yet much ignored notion that you take care of the land because it takes care of you…. I later learned it’s one of the oldest values in the Hawaiian culture. The whole culture is based on that value, but it had been lost. George was one who brought it back.”

Martin realized how those values tied into the ones she was brought up with. She explains that as a child she was taught to always respect the land, to never take more than you needed, and that everything has a season so the kapu (taboo, prohibition) had to be respected.

Ho'i Ho'i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm & Kimo Mitchell

Ho'i Ho'i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, © Bamboo Ridge Press.

Martin holds up a book about Helm, noting that he was also a talented Hawaiian musician who trained under kumu hula John Keolamaka‘āinana Lake. “One of the lessons George learned from John Lake, and which he then applied to his work with the land, was to always do your homework,” she says. “George couldn't emphasize enough how important it is to do your research because everything is not always as you think it is. He was famous for telling friends and acquaintances to find out as much as you can about what you’re doing so that you know what you’re talking about and can back up your work…He just pounded home that message.”

Connecting Science with Cultural Traditions

In 1991, Martin joined the staff of the Moanalua Gardens Foundation, a non-profit educational organization that works through the schools to preserve Hawaii’s native culture and environment. Even for someone born and raised on Moloka‘i, it proved to be an eye-opening experience.

“When I was growing up, we never heard words like ‘native’ or ‘indigenous,’” she says. “I had been up to Kamakou many times and never even knew it was a native forest. Most of my education came after I joined the foundation. It was like a whole new world. I went up to Kamakou and it was like seeing it for the first time.”

The foundation provided great opportunities for Martin by offering workshops, staff training and the chance to learn from experts. Martin absorbed all that she could about the native forest – the names of the different native plants and their traditional cultural uses, its value as a source of water and a buffer against erosion, and its history of loss and destruction from the impacts of weeds, fire and introduced hooved animals such as pigs, goats, cattle and deer.

She then incorporated that knowledge with the core values she learned as a child and used it in the curriculum she taught in the schools, reinforcing it with field trips into the forest. She also began educating visitors, in 1995 becoming the Conservancy’s first Moloka‘i docent. Today, along with other respected community members, she serves on the Conservancy’s Moloka‘i Advisory Council, where she provides an important voice for conservation.

Pig damage at Kamakou Preserve.

It has not been easy, however. Conservation efforts on Moloka‘i have meant fencing lands and reducing feral animal populations – controversial measures in a community where almost every family hunts for recreation and subsistence. As she herself notes, “The value emphasis when I was growing up was on being able to gather from the land and provide for your family.”

She also explains that many Moloka‘i residents grew up on an island were everything was fenced off. In the 1970’s some residents demonstrated and fought hard to bring the fences down. “So, to see them going back up is hard,” she says.

Martin understands the community concerns, but she sees a bigger picture. Moloka‘i has already lost 85% of its native ecosystems – much of it due to the animals – and this progressive loss of forest is endangering the community’s long-term physical and cultural survival. Living on an island, she says, is like living on a canoe: You have to learn to live with limited resources and work together to manage them – and that includes the animals. It’s a value she would like the entire community to embrace, but adds, “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

The Future Caretakers

That's a major reason she works with Molokai’s youth, who she sees as the island’s future caretakers. Martin is a familiar figure in the Moloka‘i school system, where classroom visits and field trips with “Aunty Penny” are eagerly anticipated.

"Aunty Penny" and her students at Kualapu'u School, Moloka'i.

“The kids really get it,” she says, recalling the day she was invited to Kilohana School on the east end of Moloka‘i. The school had received funding to do an investigative learning project on the theme of erosion, with each grade studying a different aspect of the problem.

On the day Martin visited, she observed a class whose job was to show how animals contribute to erosion. “They had sectioned off a piece of property in the back of the school that was on this little hillside,” she says. “And they fenced off an area and put a goat in there and let it eat for a week. They measured all the grass at the beginning of the week and then saw what was left afterward – which was nothing.

“Next, they put a plastic tarp at the bottom of the slope and ran water down the side that the goat had eaten. They timed how long it took for the water to go down the slope – it just went zoom! – and then collected the water in a clear plastic cup and measured the sediment. When it finally settled, there was all this mud.”

The students then ran water down the grassy side of the slope and took corresponding measurements. According to Martin, “It took the water about 10 minutes to reach the bottom…and this time when they collected the water in a cup, it was almost clear.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “This is the kind of investigative, hands-on learning they were doing in looking at erosion on Moloka‘i. And these were 5 or 6 year olds!”

Penny Martin leading hike at Kamakou Preserve.

But the story does not end there. At the conclusion of the project, the school held a science fair where they presented their work to the community and invited Aunty Penny to be a keynote speaker.

“I had my speech all prepared,” she says. “But then I realized it was the 30th anniversary of George Helm's passing, and I really wanted to remind everyone about George, a real Moloka‘i hero, and how he brought back the value of aloha ‘āina.

“So on the way to the school, I rewrote my speech and included George. And I told the kids that what they were doing with their investigative learning was that they were doing their homework. And then I spoke about the importance of sharing what they had learned with the community. You learn the most, you know, when you teach. And so they were extending their learning by teaching the community.”

Through their simple experiment, the children learned how hooved animals not only threaten the island’s remaining native forest and the important water it provides, but how the erosion they cause is washing off the mountains and destroying the island’s reefs and fishing grounds.

The children saw the connection – just as Martin sees the connection among health, culture and the environment and the different Hawaiian values she teaches.

“I truly believe that what we are trying to do is pono (right),” she says, referring to the need to reign in animal populations in Molokai’s best remaining native forests and protect the ‘āina. “You take care of the land and the land will take care of you.”

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Grady Timmons/TNC (Penny Martin at TNC office); © Bamboo Ridge Press (Ho'i Ho'i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell); © Phil Spalding III (Pig wallow, Kamakou Preserve); © Randy Fujimori (boardwalk at Kamakou Preserve; Martin with students at Kualapu'u School; Martin at Kamakou Preserve).