Tom’s Blog Posts

This winter has been a dramatic one on the Island of Hawaiʻi, with repeated snowfalls—including blizzards—on the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa and one of the most spectacular lava lakes at Kilauea in memory. To Native Hawaiians these are the handiwork of two potent deities, Poliʻahu, the goddess of snow and ice and Pele, the goddess of volcanoes. Here are some photos that document those recent wonders while we wait for the next round of Big Island marvels to unfold. (Photos by Tom Peek unless otherwise credited.) While ...
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When people think of Hawaiʻi they usually conjure up images of sundrenched beaches on Oʻahu, Maui, or Kauaʻi. But the real heart and soul of the archipelago are the massive volcanoes that created it, something affirmed yet again by the recent eruption of Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest active volcano. The twelve-day event that started at 11:30 p.m. on November 27, Mauna Loa’s first eruption since 1984, generated an explosion of media coverage across the globe. Millions watched the spectacle via television, social media, and the internet, transfixed by the handiwork ...
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For decades now we’ve been bombarded daily—in the news, on social media, and in our own communities—with chronic, anxiety-producing strife: economic instability and poverty; racial, religious, class, and gender prejudice; constant war and empire building; gun violence and crime; the direct impacts of climate change; and ever-rising, often hateful cultural and political conflict. This leaves many of us confused, dispirited, anxious, even rageful. We seem stuck in a societal malaise that all our efforts to muster hope cannot seem to quell. And as my Alaskan poet friend Gene Ervine said ...
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Pele has returned to her legendary crater home on Kilauea. Once again the summit lava lake is rising and our night skies are adorned with the auburn glow of her fiery spectacle. After six months of quiet, on the afternoon of September 29, lava fountains broke through the frozen lava lake inside Halemaʻumaʻu. Scientists at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) declared this a “new eruption”—with new vents and initial eruption rates rivalling those of the devastating 2018 eruption—not a resumption of the recent December-March eruption that had created the ...
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In 1993, the caretakers of a Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Big Island’s Wood Valley risked their lives to smuggle an eight-year-old boy out of occupied Tibet. He was the reincarnation of Nechung Rinpoche, a high-ranking lama who had been imprisoned by the communists after their 1950 takeover of Tibet and who later became the couple’s beloved teacher at Wood Valley Temple in the 1970s and ‘80s after the Tibetan diaspora. Collaborating with a cadre of brave Tibetans and Tibetan monks, and with blessings from the Dalai Lama, the couple ...
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The protest roadblocks that kept telescope construction equipment off the summit of Mauna Kea from 2015 to 2019 are on hold, but the cultural clash over the future of Hawaiʻi’s most sacred mountain is far from over. Despite the protests’ clear message of community opposition, proponents of California’s Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) continue to push their Hawaiʻi plans, even as they pursue permits for an alternative site in the Canary Islands. They’ve tapped old allies in the state legislature and recruited a potential new ally in the federal government, the ...
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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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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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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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