Tom’s Blog Posts

Five days before Christmas 2020, at 10:36 on a Sunday night, our rainforest cottage trembled as a large earthquake struck the island of Hawaiʻi. My wife Catherine Robbins and I dashed to our computer to check the quake’s location and magnitude on the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s Kilauea website page. But it wasn’t the big red dot pinpointing the temblor on Kilauea’s southern flank or its 4.4.magnitude that took our breaths away. It was HVO’s webcam image of fiery illumination above the year-and-a-half-old water lake inside Halemaʻumaʻu crater. (All photos by ...
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By the time I came to maturity in the mid-1970s, the post-World War II Beat Generation literary movement had all but vanished in the public mind, supplanted by hippies, rock and roll, the New Left and a growing counterculture. But the movement’s quest to plant a “new consciousness” for peace, nonmaterialism and racial and economic justice—and its dedication to frank writing about all that—had been seeded throughout post-Sixties America. A key leader in that movement was San Francisco poet, painter, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died February 22, ...
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The Big Island of Hawaiʻi—with its Native Hawaiian traditions, exceptional ethnic diversity, dramatic coastal and volcanic landscapes, and unique ecology—is an extraordinary place, but never more so than when our volcanoes erupt and blizzards drape our highest peaks with snow. Both happened this winter! It started with a new summit eruption at Kilauea on December 20 followed by heavy January and February rains that deluged the island’s lower slopes and brought blizzards to its 14,000-foot volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. (Photos by Tom Peek) For my Native Hawaiian friends ...
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