After a month’s travel through Fiji as the first leg of my nonprofit sabbatical, I planned to head to a place not only where I could surf more waves, but where I could afford to spend out the rest of my sabbatical time. Bali came highly recommended by someone in my network who had visited the island and loved it. Admittedly, I had also read the book Eat, Pray, Love and noted the way the author revered Bali as a magical place of healing and introspection as she struggled to make sense of her midlife crisis.

I was not in a midlife crisis, per se, but in search of some respite after the stress of running a nonprofit which often led to me being chronically ill and fatigued. I was also really wanting to improve as a surfer. And well, Bali was a mecca for waves. Surfers the world over flocked to it like pilgrims to a shrine. And so, I decided to join in on the “surf pilgrimage” and headed East towards this tiny island.

Upon arrival, I was picked up by a van from the surf camp I’d be staying at and transported to what looked like a small, Balinese-style, college surf scene. The camp had an abundance of palm trees and tropical greenery, two stories of rooms with dark wooden, outdoor corridors that overlooked a pool of shimmering blue water.

The weather was hot and humid as you’d expect in a tropical climate. The people of the scene were mostly a mix of bright blond-haired, young Germans and brown-skinned Balinese surf guides and workers. It was strange for me to see so many people from a mostly landlocked country so into surfing. But then again, Jamaica at one point did have its own Olympic bobsled team, so there’ve been stranger things.

Outside the coast, the Balinese landscape expanded into palm tree-lined roads bordered by spikes of green grass and thick patches of dark green trees. In some areas the land would drop off forming a bowl of tiered rice fields. It looked as if someone had carefully laid patches of golf course green turf in rhythmical patterns at each level. There were roadside stalls displaying fruits of varying colors methodically placed to form the shape of an inverted cone.
As you’d drive from the lush interior towards the small coastal towns, the landscape would shift drastically. Noisy motos carrying multiple people weaved in and out of standstill traffic amidst a lot of car honking.

Though I was appreciative of being able to take in Bali with the company of my new, barely out of college friends from the camp, I was most excited about the arrival of my best surf buddy, Blanket, who’d be joining me in the weeks to come.
Blanket and I had met three years prior at a Costa Rican surf camp. When this petite woman with a high-pitched voice, pale white skin and chestnut brown bob introduced herself, I immediately thought she was a secretary. She had a grounded, polite, organized vibe about her, carried a light spirit, and had an unexpected irreverence and humor that made everyone chuckle.

One evening while in Costa Rica, we ventured to the beach after camp. Blanket wanted to go for a swim and I wanted to hang on the beach to watch the surfers. As the sun set, I noticed Blanket had not yet come in from her swim. As I contemplated heading back to camp, hoping I’d find her there, she emerged from the distance, hair disheveled. She had been swept by a rip far beyond the lineup of surfers. Fortunately Cliff, a lad from our surf camp, saw her. He ended up paddling her to shore on his surfboard, with a view of Blanket’s ass in his face the whole way. Needless to say, she lived to celebrate her next birthday, which happened to fall on the very next day of her heroic rescue from sea. After that experience, Blanket and I would become best surf buddies. If I was headed to a place in the world to surf, she was the first I’d ask to go with me.

Once Blanket finally arrived, we’d spend the first part of our trip in the Southwest area of Bali at various camps with local guides helping us access waves. Then our plan was to head south to the Bukit Peninsula, a drier area of Bali where steep stone cliffs offered sweeping views of a clear blue sea.

In Bali, the primary mode of transport are motos. However, I refused to ride one the entire time I was there because of the number of accidents I not only heard about prior to my trip, but witnessed in my first few weeks on the island. Given the array of moto-gone-wrong tales, we decided to rent a car for our trip South. We’d be staying right in front of a place called Uluwatu, home to a world class surfing wave and to one of Bali’s sacred Hindu temples.
I was the designated driver on the ride down, but I had never driven on the other side of the road before. The further we got into the trip on the windy coastal road, the more I noticed Blanket’s face cringe. “Uhm, I think you’re getting too close to the shoulder,” she said with a bit of fear. How could that be? I thought. It felt like if I went any further to the middle of the road, I’d be in oncoming traffic. Whilst immersed in my own perspective, out of nowhere we heard a loud bang. I looked over at Blanket, who now had an additional layer of wrinkle to her facial cringe. “What was that?” I said.

“Uhm, I think you hit something,” Blanket replied, halfway to terrified.

I pulled the car over to the side of the narrow coastal road. We got out and looked behind us, trying to figure out if and what we might have hit. There was a construction site with 30 or so Balinese workers in blue jumpsuits on the side of the road just behind us. One of the workers, a frail, elder Balinese man, started walking towards us. He was holding something in his hands. As he approached with both hands out, he presented to us our passenger side mirror, as if bestowing on us a ceremonial fruit plate. He smiled with a nod. “Terima Kasih,” I said, the words for thank you in Bahasa. The rest of the workers looked on in wonderment at the bizarre situation. Utterly embarrassed, we got back in our car and continued on to our destination a bit shaken up, but relieved nothing living was hit.

We arrived in Uluwatu to our villa which overlooked the steep, rocky cliffs of the famed surf break Uluwatu, a series of fast, left-hand waves that broke over a shallow reef. Though the break was too advanced for us to surf at the time, our Balinese surf buddied Deny and Gede came up and together we ventured to more manageable spots (Blanket driving).

One day we went to a beach break to surf. Apparently, back in the day it was only accessible via foot and hatchet in order to cut away foliage to clear a path to the sea. By our generation’s time, it had large parking lots, a hotel, steps leading to a restaurant deck and bar and a brick laid path enabling easy access to a beach, now full of local and foreign beach goers.

Whilst in the parking lot of the hotel, a giant tourist bus full of Indonesian high school students pulled in. As they disembarked, the kids pointed their fingers at Blanket and walked towards her. Mesmerized by her pale skin, they lined themselves on either side of her, and asked me to take a photo. I had already turned several shades darker brown from surfing, so was of no aesthetic or novel interest to them. In fact, our Balinese friend Gede, who was with us at the time, once looked down at his arms in disgust after a surf session together, remarking how dark and ugly they had become in the sun. One time I asked my Balinese surf guides why there were hardly any Balinese girls surfing. I was told it was because their skin would become too dark and they would not be considered pretty. Colorism was rife in Bali. And I could relate. It triggered my own inferiority complex from childhood where I was made to feel ugly due to my brown skin.

With Blanket feeling like a circus animal wherever we went because of her pale skin (which she wished wasn’t so pale) and my inferiority complex flare up because of my brown skin, we were quite the motley duo. Still, we continued our exploration and took a break from the surf world.

We went to the local temple and interacted with the cheeky monkeys who did not hesitate to steal your possessions in return for paying a local Balinese person to get it back from them with a bribe of food. We also ventured a bit to the center of Bali to a place called Ubud. However, it made us feel as if we could be in California. There were smoothie bars, internet cafes and yoga studios abound. We did manage to see a Gamelan performance, the traditional music and dance of Bali. We’d sometimes see ceremonial processions in the midst of traffic mayhem.

Though glimpses of traditional Bali would shine through its curtains of industry, we were bummed at its over-commercialization. Compared to the wildness of Fiji, Bali somehow felt, well, taken over.

While I had planned to stay there through the remainder of my sabbatical, I decided that when Blanket left, I’d leave too and come back to Bali after a month’s time. It seemed I needed a break from the very place I came to for a break.

By the time I reunited back to the Island of the Gods, the rainy season had arrived. Temperatures were more pleasant and the water cooled as well. I managed to settle in a room in a shared house in a quiet rice farming area next to a lovely Balinese family away from the noise of camps.

Ibu Rai, the petite matriarch of the family who wore glasses and pulled her shiny black hair into a low ponytail, would come by from time to time to say hello. She’d watch with curiosity as I played my tablas, North Indian drums, and practiced classical North Indian dance on my porch. I’d show her some of the Hindu influenced elements of the dance, which she seemed to recognize due to the strong Hindu influence on the island. Though she did not speak a word of English and my Bahasa vocabulary was very limited, somehow we were able to connect.
My surfing improved a lot during this time. I got my first board shaped there, a 7’1” with a zebra pattern on the bottom, a supposed defense pattern to ward off Indo-Pacific sharks. One day, I went to surf a beach break on the Southwest side with my zebra board. As I paddled out to the spot and thrust my hand through the murky, blueish water, I noticed first a potato chip wrapper, then, an empty, white Dannon yogurt carton, then an upside down, broken flip flop, more wrappers, and more small plastic items.

With each paddle of my arm, I was moving not just through the water, but through a pile of plastic trash.

My Balinese friends explained to me that during the rainy season, all the trash from Java gets washed down polluting the ocean and beaches. It was, in short, gross. I’d spend out the remaining month surfing through plastic.

Though I found some tranquility tucked away in the rice farming neighborhood, I still struggled to find my footing in Bali. I felt sad how my Balinese friends internalized their darker skin as being ugly, a sentiment with which I could personally relate. I felt strange not seeing locally owned surf camps. I felt concerned at the amount of plastic pollution in the waters. These experiences would end up influencing a platform and concept in the years to follow I would come to name ‘brown girl surf’ that Blanket would help me launch.

Though Bali was not at all what I thought it would be, it certainly elevated my consciousness to larger issues, making me aware of the stark gaps that existed between tourism, environmentalism, and sustainable development.

It has now been over a decade since my trip to Bali. Since then, I started reading about how ocean plastics have disintegrated into microplastics, tiny plastic particles ≤ 5mm, and the swaths of trash gathering in gyres across the oceans. A few years ago, I started to read more articles on how plastics were entering our food systems. Just last month I read news on how researchers are discovering microplastics in our brain tissue and other organs. Is it safe to say that since my trip to Bali, we are, quite literally, becoming more plastic?

According to the OECD Global Plastics Outlook Database, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled. Most is classified as mismanaged, landfilled or incinerated. (See graph below.) What’s worse, according to a recent article in Science, forecasting models predict the migration of microplastics into our environment could rise by 1.5 to 2.5 times by 2040 if we keep running things the same way. If greenhouse gases are considered the unseen existential threat in climate, microplastics are right behind.

It’s one thing to end up in places on our travels where we feel out of place. As a surfer from the Global North, I have the privilege of being able to cross borders to come and go. It’s quite another thing for plastics to end up out of place. They’re there to stay in our food, water and air, stealthily ricocheting themselves back to us as a reminder of the lack of forethought that went into their design.

The solutions since have been to refuse, recycle (not very effective as noted above), reduce, or reuse plastic, design alternative replacements to it, influence policy and change social practices around it. It’s a given climate solutions are most effective if driven by frontline communities, like the organization Bye Bye Plastic Bags, formed in 2018 by two pre-teen Balinese girls to clean up and ban plastics on their beloved island. But when microplastics cross borders, infiltrate our water, air and food systems, isn’t the frontline community, well, the whole world? Who then are those best positioned to influence the levers of culture change at such reach?

Selena Gomez, the famous singer, actor and influencer, launched a line of cosmetics, one of the main sources of microplastics, to her half a billion Instagram following. So did Hailey Bieber, wife of Justin Bieber (Selena’s first love) with her 50 million following. Though Selena is committed to using recycled plastics in her packaging, these mega influencers are still adding to the microplastics problem in the name of beauty. And the teens are following. My dear friend’s 15-year-old daughter has twice attended a local program designed to educate girls on environmental stewardship and conservation. Despite the good intentions of the programming, and her love for the ocean and scuba diving, what store can’t her mom keep her out of?

Sephora.

Perhaps a sleeping lever in the climate movement needed to accelerate the existing levers at play, is in who can make behavior change towards plastics sexy enough to follow. Perhaps it’s high time for climate to reign in “sexy” — to get those figures on board to way show the behavior changes needed within the context of their own lives (and products!) at mass scale. The organization, Sustain Movement, is already getting the ball rolling by calling attention to social media as an under-explored approach to environmental communications.

If Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart can champion a culture of appreciation for the Olympics, and Taylor Swift can inspire half a million people to check out vote.gov in 24 hours from a single post, what’s then possible for those with global sway to accelerate the behavior changes we need to sustain our planet when the frontline is, well, all of us? Perhaps the very mechanisms that are exacerbating the addictions to the problem are the very things we need to reverse it.

Inspired by travels to Bali, Indonesia in 2010.

Farhana Huq is a Social Entrepreneur, Executive Coach, Global Explorer, Terra.do Fellow and Founder of @browngirlsurf

After a month of traveling in Fiji, I headed to Bali for what I hoped would be the Eat, Pray, Love leg to my sabbatical, a much-needed break I was taking after 10 years of founding and running a nonprofit. Though Bali was a surfer’s paradise like no other, it wasn’t paradise in other respects. I quickly found myself amongst chaotic streets full of noisy motos, surfing in an ocean full of plastics and dodging loud Ozzies who moved through Kuta as if they owned it. Unsure of the energetic match between myself and this tiny surf haven, I flash backed to the advice my friend Tim, the fisherman, had given to me back in Fiji. I had shared with him my longing to visit Tahiti to pay homage to the roots of its dance and music, which I loved and had been studying for some years. But it was too expensive. Upon hearing this, Tim suggested I go to a place called Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Often referred to as Tahiti’s English-speaking cousin, Raro, as Tim called it, had a rich dance and music culture similar to Tahiti. After a few weeks in Bali feeling a bit like a sardine in a tin box moving from one packed surf camp to another, I’d take Tim’s advice and redirect my travels back to the Pacific Islands, destination Rarotonga.

I managed to get an accommodation in a one-room, wooden bungalow with a small loft directly in front of the beach. Built on a platform of beams, it had a sea green roof and light grey, wooden sides. It looked out over two short palms which were planted close to its railing. Beyond was a beach whose white sand blended with small chunks of corals and met brown rocks bulging from a gentle shoreline as the reef exposed itself in low tide.

My bungalow was part and parcel of a group of 3 other bungalows owned and maintained by an artist couple from Hawai’i who made their retirement income off rentals of the units. Paul was a musician in his 60s. He had a gentle presence and eyes only for Leilani. Leilani was a petite woman with long, brown hair who wore a small flower on her left ear to signify she was married. A visual artist, she drew large fish in iridescent blues and greens on canvas. She had a secret stash of Tahitian pearls of varying luminosity that she offered at groundbreaking prices from the foyer of her home. She was also very connected with the culture and traditional ways of life on Raro.

The bungalows were built right next to one another and shared a courtyard made of sand interspersed with splotches of grass. The sanded area then met grassy turf where small palms and other native trees were planted, each tree surrounded by borders of circles of white sand. There was a square gazebo and picnic table with two reclining wood chairs to chill. There were ample papaya trees which I did not hesitate to pick from for breakfast, slicing them in half to reveal their salmon interior and blackish grey, tapioca-like seeds. There were avocado trees, medium-sized palms, taller green trees and shrubbery lining a quiet paved road which led down to the lagoon, the main location in town for much of the tourist activities. Taking in the slow, lax pulse of the island, it felt like a small piece of heaven and a welcomed respite from the chaos of Bali.

As beautiful as Rarotonga was though, it felt lonely. It was a place for couples or families more than single travelers. I realized early on I was going to have to put effort into making connections. I tried to make friends with my neighbors, a couple from England, but they only said hello and good morning, asked what I was up to in the day, and pretty much kept to themselves. No invites. No group socializing.

One day I was walking on the side of the road when a bald, stocky, muscular, young man on a motorcycle pulled over and asked me if I wanted a ride. Why not I thought? It was a bit of a walk. At the time, I did not understand accepting a ride from this particular guy on this island might be code for something else. In my naivete, I hopped on his bike and off we went. As we pulled up to the property, I thanked him for the ride and chatted for a bit. I learned he was from one of the outer islands, a place I’d later learn, known in particular for its lasciviousness and free spirit. He asked me if I wanted to go out for an island night. In Raro, island nights are traditional shows of dance and music which are hosted at a different hotel each night. Eager to experience Raro’s rich music and dance culture, I gladly accepted the offer. As said goodbye to him and headed back to my bungalow, I ran into Leilani, excited to tell her about my day. “I met a nice guy that gave me a ride on his motorcycle,” I said. “And we are going to go to an island night together.”

“Oh what’s his name?” she asked, delighted that I had made a new connection. Upon revealing his name, she nearly fell out of her pareau. Let’s just say he was known as quite the ladies’ man on the island. I still went to the island night when he showed up on his motorcycle and enjoyed the show. After, I wished him a polite goodnight and walked back to my bungalow. He looked perplexed, to say the least. Leilani, in her protective “auntieness”, had some words with her friends on the island as well, who had some words with the young man, and I was never approached again for the remainder of my time there.

From then on, I discovered a bike on the grounds and ventured out to nearby beaches. I did the famous lagoon tour where I learned to wrap a pareau in various ways and watched island men husk coconuts in an awe-inspiring display of masculinity. I even rode ATVs in the middle of the island through the rainforest. I took a trip to Aitutaki, the outer atoll, known also for its beautiful sand bars and absolutely pristine waters. I sea kayaked alone to the island where they filmed Survivor. Though there were waves in Raro, the surf was for highly advanced surfers only, comprised of thick waves breaking further out in the ocean over shallow reefs. So unlike Bali where there was a plethora of waves for any and every kind of surfer to choose, I was not able to surf in Raro. Instead, I immersed myself in honing the myriad of classical Indian dance compositions I never had time to work on and practiced my Tahitian Ori repertoire religiously. Though I deeply appreciated the solo time, I couldn’t help but wish I had some people to share in the adventure.

Luckily, Leilani helped a lot in this regard, chatting with me in the mornings, taking me with her to town on occasion as she ran errands, and ensuring I was looked after. She had the skinny on all the important events happening on the island, including the impending arrival of a fleet of Polynesian voyaging canoes guided by traditional celestial navigators. They were making their way from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Hawai’i via the South Pacific islands as part of a project to raise awareness about the impact of global warming on island nations. We got word of their arrival and joined the island community to welcome the valiant seafarers. We went to an area of the island shaded with many trees and looked out as seven double hulled, hand crafted, wooden voyaging canoes with red and white sails emerged in the distance. It looked like something out of an old picture book. Each canoe was comprised of crew from their respective lands: Cook Islands, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawai’i, Aotearoa, and Fiji. There was a Pan Polynesian crew as well. We welcomed their arrival with festivities of traditional music, dance, heartfelt speeches and lots of food. They brought with them a sense of community and connection, and an energy that dispelled any loneliness I may have been feeling there.

With about a week to go on Raro, I had finally settled in to a content rhythm and had just enough left in my budget to rent a car. Now I could actually get around at night. One night, alone in my bungalow after a solitary sunset, I hemmed and hawed about whether to go by myself to an island night at one of the bars downtown. I felt the same emotions one would feel before the first day of school. Would I meet anyone? What if I sat there alone and looked like a fool? I convinced myself to just go, reminding myself that if I felt uncomfortable, I now had a car and could just leave.

When I arrived to the bar, the dancing and drumming was in full effect. Gorgeous women in coconut shell bras, feathered hair ornaments and tiny pareaus tied in a dainty knot at the waist danced alongside muscular men with patterns of black Polynesian tataus (tattoos) adorned on their chest and thighs. I tried to find a place to sit as soon as possible. I noticed there was a woman sitting alone at a big round table in front of the bar stools. Like me, she had brown skin and long, curly brown hair. She looked like she could be my cousin. Perfect. I’d sit next to her. As intermission came, she turned to introduce herself. “Hi! I’m Nofo,” she said. “I’m a sailor. From Tonga!”

And that’s how I would meet the (eventual) first female licensed captain from the Kingdom of Tonga who at the time, arrived as part of the fleet of voyaging canoes we had just welcomed a few days prior. It felt like I had hit the connection jackpot and that I was in the presence of a Polynesian celebrity. In the days that followed, not only did Nofo invite me on the canoes to meet all the other voyagers, but she’d sail with her fleet to San Francisco the next year, traveling over 11,000 nm in total without reliance on fossil fuel energy. I’d partake in their welcoming ceremony with First Nations as they arrived to Ohlone territory (San Francisco). Then I’d join Hinemoana, the Pan Polynesian canoe on which Nofo sailed, on a small leg of their journey down the California Coast. Who knew the only thing that stood between loneliness and a once in a lifetime journey was a car rental and a self-pep talk through first day of school jitters?

14 years ago when I met Nofo, she and her crew were sailing their canoes across the Pacific Ocean to raise awareness on ocean acidification, global warming, and the importance of solar energy sources. She was also keeping her ancestral traditions of celestial navigation alive, attempting to revive and pass on the traditions to future generations. At the time of our meeting, average ocean surface level temperatures were .5 degrees higher than average. Today, they are around 1.2 degrees higher than average, a record high in surface level ocean temperatures. The graph below shows average surface level temperatures of the ocean from 1880–2000 and just beyond.

While my tale ended in a personal victory over solo travel loneliness, and an unexpected connection with a unique and incredible indigenous seafaring community, I wish the voyagers could claim equal victory for the ocean and their ancestral islands. The voyagers were using art and tradition to put climate change front and center in their own voice through their beautiful journey. All. Without. Fossil. Fuels. And yet today, our ocean is at a record level of warming. Who’s responsible? According to a 2023 report from EDGAR (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research), China, the U.S. and India are the top three emitters of CO2 (carbon) and CH4 (methane), the main greenhouse gasses responsible for warming our oceans and atmosphere.

The actions we take in the next five years will be critical for our goal of reaching a zero emissions future. The key path to attaining this vision involves stabilizing concentrations of CO2, a gas that concentrates for a long time in our atmosphere and reducing CO2 emissions to zero. Doing this requires reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and using alternative energy in how we make our countries run. If Nofo and her fleet of seven wooden, voyaging canoes could travel 11,000 nm across the Pacific Ocean using only solar, wind and traditional navigation techniques in our modern era, what is possible for us in the global north to reach our destinations and goals in gentler ways? Perhaps it’s time to embrace the idea of seafarers as wayshowers, here to remind us of the original ways humans designed and lived in harmony with nature, and not in exploit of her

After 10 years of leading the nonprofit I founded, I was granted a sabbatical to take some time off and rest a bit from what felt like a decade-long sprint in nonprofit leadership. I craved being in a place where I could be anonymous, live simply and be in the natural world. I was deeply drawn to the South Pacific and her family of tiny islands or motus, as they are called in many Polynesian languages. My love of surfing and years of Polynesian dance study made me ever curious to visit.  Plus I had heard from a surfer I once met that Fiji was a place where you could take a boat out to the middle of the ocean and find bejeweled crested waves peeling over shadows of dark coral reef. For me the choice was easy - Fiji is where I’d start.
 
After spending my first week on a tiny outer island in the North small enough to walk across in 10 minutes, I decided to make my way South to a motu called Nagigia, just off the Western coast of an island called Kadavu, home to the largest producer of kava in all of Fiji. Stepping off the plane in Kadavu on the tarmac, I was surrounded by a deep bed of navy blue water that met a backdrop of brown mountain terrain covered in lush green rainforest. From there, I headed with a boatman to the island, a journey which exposed miles upon miles of coastal rock and deep beds of reef, with not a single stretch of white sand in sight.
 
Upon arrival to the island I noticed it was completely surrounded by reef and bordered by thick, dark green trees and plants giving it a mysterious feel. I was met by Leena, a bubbly, smiling, warm Fijian woman in her early 20’s and her team of various relatives from the nearby village. Leena showed me my bure and true to Fijian hospitality, made me feel right at home on this lush island as a guest of one.
 
From the island, I could see the King Kong surf break, named so because the 1976 remake of the original movie was filmed on Kadavu.  It presents as a mirage from afar as being fun!  But upon closer inspection, let’s just say you start to understand why they named it after King Kong. One day, I took a boat ride out to see it.  It looked like a sea monster rising from below, wanting to envelope you in a thick hug over a sharp, shallow reef. So I opted for the smaller surf break around the corner.
 
The smaller break was closer to land and broke in front of tree-covered land serving as a natural sea wall that dropped off into the ocean. Hopping off the boat, I noticed the tiny gathering of brown boulders in front of me, the dark shadows of corals below crystal clear waters and the view of the green mountain in the distance. The only one out, I noticed when a wave came, the water would suck off the reef, exposing an entire ecosystem of brilliant underwater life, from purple corals, royal blue starfish, to black, spiky sea urchins. Whereas the waves up North I had surfed were bigger and broke under a deeper bed of ocean, the waves over this reef were tiny and thinner in comparison, requiring a type of precision, care and lightness in order not to touch the reef.
 
After a rough first day trying to catch waves on a stiff longboard that only seemed to be resulting in me nose-diving on each take off, the next day I decided to change my strategy.  I’d try a smaller board. It can be a struggle to find a sweet spot of balance when surfing on an unfamiliar board. Despite the shakiness I felt with this board change, I was determined. This time, a bigger wave came, sucking up and leaving only a thin layer of water between the reef and myself. As I hopped to my feet, my eyes went straight to the fish on the reef rather than down the line of the wave where I should have been looking. I thought ‘wow look at that how clearly I can see that fish’ and ‘crap, if I wipe out there’s no water between me and the reef to land on’. (This thought happened in a millisecond but I’m giving you the slow-mo version that went on inside my head.) In my slight panic, I kicked off the wave, and tumbled below as I felt a bang on my leg. When I surfaced from the water and looked down to inspect, I had a line of blood oozing from my shin from my fin. And that’s pretty much how the start of Nagigia went – bleeding over baby waves on a reef.
 
Bummed at the injury, but grateful it wasn’t my head that was bleeding, I hopped back in the boat and Mareva, a woman who brought me out to the reef on the boat, steered us back to the island. Leena brought me some leaves of a local plant and suggested I put it on the cut but I opted instead for the triple antibiotic cream I brought with me, afraid it might get infected and that we were too far from any town or hospital to deal. Because I had an open wound, it was not a great idea to get back in the water. I wasn’t sure what else I’d do. After a quick e-mail of concern to the Australian tour operator, within days, Tim, a Fijian surfer and fisherman arrived as a guide.
 
Tim was a tall, solid man and introverted in his slow, thoughtful communications.  He gave a new meaning to the temperament chill. He went out one day to surf King Kong and came back with small, bloody gashes and scrapes on his back from hitting the reef. It didn’t phase him though. To Tim, it was just part of surfing. And yes, he did put the leaf stuff on his cuts. At the time, Tim also was the son-in-law of the King of Fiji, and seemed a perfect bridge in connecting guests to the local traditions and ways of the area.
 
Surfing was only one of Tim’s many talents. He was an experienced fisherman too. With Tim now on the island, we starting trolling in a boat searching for birds, catching yellow fin tuna, building fires from scratch to roast our fish on a remote motu, and going on hikes in the mountains to search for crabs as bait. It was a simple delight to be able to feel the pace of life and to have someone give me a peek into the incredible harmony of how the community of this region lived with the natural world.  And, I learned some interesting things about reef rights in this part of Fiji.  In Kadavu, local villages owned the rights of the reefs surrounding their villages.  So if you were wanting to fish on the reef, you’d have to dock your boat, pay a visit to the chief, do a kava ceremony together and then ask for permission to fish.  If you just go and cast a long line on the reef, there were men from the village who served as watchdogs who’d swim out and cut the line. So there was still a very old world etiquette around the ocean and reef rights in this region.
 
Tim and I were eventually joined by a few more visitors on the island and so I was no longer a guest of one, which was great. I did manage to catch a few waves. I paid a visit to the local village and their tailor who sized me up without taking one single measurement and sewed me a perfectly fitted skirt and top. To this day I am still in awe at her seamstress skills. Towards the end of my stay I managed to also get stung by a Portuguese Man of War jellyfish.  Then, a cyclone ended up ripping through the region, stranding us on the island and cancelling all flights out of Fiji. What I thought would be a surf adventure with food, surf, music and people ended up being a surprising immersion into a stunningly beautiful, traditional and remote part of the world, with humble people so welcoming to share. I was not a guest in some resort in remote Fiji; I was a guest in someone’s home.
 
As I share with you this trip from 14 years ago, I’m present to our record high ocean surface temperatures we’ve had this year resulting from the ocean absorbing 26% of the world’s carbon emissions. These emissions come mostly via fossil fuel use in energy and transportation. When I think about such a tiny place in the world as Nagigia, where people’s entire subsistence depends on their natural ecosystems, delicate reefs and minimal tourism, and where there were zero cars, climate change is an injustice to say the least.  Despite contributing the least in global emissions, it is these small island nations of the world that are the most vulnerable to climate change. Fiji has been the first of island nations to relocate an entire community due to rising sea levels and climate change, forcing communities to leave behind their ancestral lands. (Article)  Today, there is no tactic they can take like cutting fishing lines to protect their reefs when the threat is existential; the warming gasses are already spread in the air and throughout the sea.  How do they stop that?
 
I know our global target is to keep warming below 2°C, a target that would put many island nations under water. So the small island and developing nations led us to focus our target to 1.5°C instead, a global goal formalized in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Though the goal has been stated, it is of increasing concern by the world’s leading scientists that that is even realistic at all.
 
It makes me think how important it is to acknowledge our global impact on one another when it comes to climate.  Only when we expand our consciousness and are able to connect how actions of the global north impact the global south and ensure the communities most impacted have an equal voice at the decision tables will we be able to truly tackle climate change though a justice lens. And only when there is some level of accountability in impact of emissions on vulnerable nations will we have true justice.
 
We are now in an era where Mother Nature is requiring of us to not only clean up our pollution, but to realize how the choices we make, from transportation to materials design to the food we cultivate, impacts entire communities in the most remote parts of the world.  Perhaps what’s needed at the moment is a collective reframe of our presence on earth.  Maybe we need to consider ourselves all as just travelers here - temporary guests on this beautiful, big blue planet. If we have the ability to create such impacts in far off places of the world, what is our ability and role in reversing them?

After founding and running a nonprofit for 12 years, I found myself wanting to do anything but nonprofits. In fact, the farther I could get away from nonprofit work, the better. I had a list of highly viable potential career choices I would explore instead: storytelling surfer, shoe designer, organic farmer to name a few. I had just launched brown girl surf and farming seemed like an additional good idea at the time. Tilling the land and harvesting food was a far cry from sitting behind a computer writing grants or schmoozing donors. I thought I should start small. Perhaps just with a garden. Yes! That’s what I’d do!  When I thought of where or how to begin, I immediately thought of my friend Jenny.
 
Jenny is one of those generous souls with the flexibility of a gymnast but with a moral compass of an arrow. I met Jenny while we were studying classical Indian dance together in San Francisco in our 20s. Aside from sharing a love of dance arts, we also ended up sharing a common tendonitis injury (due to the eight pounds of bells we wore on our ankles stomping various rhythmic patterns of the dance with the bottom of our feet). Who knew when I introduced Jenny to Uli, my towering, burly, kinesiologist body worker with Ukrainian roots, that she would not only heal her tendonitis, but she’d also fall passionately in love with him.  They’d birth two babies and transport their life to Maui living on a land trust off the famous Hana coast. I told Jenny about my idea of coming over to visit and help design a garden and she was totally down for it. As I’m a person that learns best by doing, I considered this training as I navigated through my first major professional transition.  
 
Within weeks I had arrived at Jenny’s to acres of lush green land tucked away off a winding and increasingly elevated coastal highway. There was a modest single room structured house with jalopies out front. Yellow and greenish fruit were scattered all along the ground as if it had rained lilikoi and Surinam cherries the night before. There were apple bananas, chili peppers, rosemary, coconut, papaya, and jackfruit trees as well. The sun was blindingly bright and the backdrop of trees ranged in color from palm green to cedar pine. The black volcanic soil was so fertile that if you spit a seed in the ground, the earth would send back up a plant in a few days. The land had a power I had not felt ever before.
 
I was to camp out back in a tent Uli had pitched for me atop a wooden framed platform in front of hundreds of acres of wild forest. You could see remnants of a former civilization of sorts through the opening of the forest, as if once upon a time there had been roads paved through the grasses. Uli told me that if you traveled further into it, you would reach Maui’s deepest fishing seaport. I never went that deep into the forest, but kept to my tent platform and the open areas of grass and fruit trees behind the house.
 
During the day, we’d try to break up a small patch of earth with hoes. We tired quickly from the sun making progress at a snail’s pace. I don’t think we realized how difficult it would be to get a garden going with Jenny’s other competing priorities of tending to a family and earning income, not to mention having unreliable transportation and being so far up from town. At night, after helping Jenny prepare dinner and clean the kitchen, I’d walk down to the platform to my tent. I noticed the winds seemed to get more aggressive at night, rattling the platform and bristling the leaves of the trees. Sometimes it would rain. On one particular night, the winds got really wild and the platform shook. Only this time, it felt different. It started to periodically vibrate, as if a surge of electrical current was running through it. This was not a sensation I can say I had experienced ever before. I brushed it off as just part of the already odd weather patterns. I felt afraid to fall asleep. What is this energy? Where is it coming from?  Is there something here? I kept myself awake as long as I could before I eventually fell asleep.
 
The next morning, in my sleep hangover, I walked up the grassy hill to Jenny’s one-roomed house. In our morning conversation I told Jenny and Uli about my night and that it felt like there was something supernatural going on down there. They both looked at one another in a knowing way. Uli said I was not the first guest to have noted disturbances in the night down on that platform. He suggested wrapping an offering in a tealeaf to whatever energies were at unrest and to state my intention for being there, which was to help my friend make a garden. I ended up doing this hoping a ceremony of intention setting would settle the space a bit.   
 
The following night, the winds returned as usual and I lay on my sleeping bag wide-eyed and weary of the night, keeping myself awake for as long as possible. This time, when I peered out of my tent into the darkness of the night, I saw a strange floating light up by the house. My heart started beating harder and I could feel myself start to break into a mild sweat. My immediate thought was someone was on the property with a flashlight. Then I thought, I’m in the middle of nowhere, so maybe they are just gigantic fireflies like the ones that used to come out on summer nights in Jersey when I was young. My third and most logical explanation was that they were just an outside light fixture. To test my theory, I closed one eye and, looking over at the light, used my thumb to block the light. If the light doesn’t move beyond my thumb, then it’s likely a static house light. If it moves from behind my thumb, then it is definitely something else. As I covered the light with my thumb, it didn’t seem to move.  Phew! But when I opened both eyes and moved my thumb away, a second floating light appeared. My heart raced further. And then, just like that, they disappeared.   
 
The next morning, I walked up the grassy hill to the main house eager to share with Uli and Jenny my sightings. Jenny seemed to know exactly what I was talking about. “Yes!” she exclaimed! “And it looks like someone is walking around with a flashlight and then it just disappears,” she said. She went on to explain she had seen the lights as well on a different occasion, and freaked out thinking someone had come on the property. When she attempted to go out the sliding glass door of her house to investigate further, the lights would just disappear. Upon hearing this, I decided I’d sleep on the couch in the main house for the rest of the time beneath the loft where the family slept.    
 
In the days following the orb sighting, I learned a bit more about the story of the land behind where I had slept. According to neighborhood lore, the forest area was site of a farming village, the people of which were massacred by Kamehameha I as he attempted to unify Hawai’i. Clearly, energies were not at rest. Land was not at rest. Heck, I was not at rest! The land felt unsettled. And, it didn’t feel right for me to stay until the land received whatever it needed to be settled. So I cut my trip short, and headed over to the Big Island to stay with my friends Bryn and Danny, who lived a less off the beaten path lifestyle and whose land bore an array of flowers, fruits and trees, and seemed to welcome my stay with open arms.  
 
Jenny did eventually get the garden up and running after several years and amidst a few more orb sightings, which did eventually subside. She took her time to develop a reciprocal relationship with the land, listening to it and receiving visions over time on how the garden should take shape. She grew this interest into a career centered on gardening, permaculture and education with a dream still in tow to live reciprocally with the land. I never did manage to become a farmer. But I did become a storytelling surfer ;) and did manage to journey to far off places centering my work and life around the ocean.

Now, 12 years later, I find myself in a career evolution, feeling a calling again to the earth. This pull recently led me to attend San Francisco Climate Week, a week long event featuring everything from practical, hands on gardening and ecology education gatherings to panel discussions on the silver bullet solutions of carbon capture. The plethora of ideas and efforts around climate were wildly inspiring. Though the rush to find solutions to mitigate climate change and move us towards a zero emissions future has spurred a slew of innovations, technology and designs across various sectors, I can’t help but remember what Maui showed me so many years ago – that the land holds messages, life and powers that need to be felt to be understood. Perhaps it’s this lack of feeling that has gotten us to where we are in our relationship and reverence for the earth. Learning to take our time with the earth, nurture the earth and feel the earth is an equal, if not more important part of the solution to this crisis. To me, this is the most urgent relationship we need to move towards in order to create and preserve the planet we wish to see for ourselves and for future generations to come.

Inspired by travels to Maui, Hawai'i in 2012.

The roosters aren’t silent,
Cock a doodle doo-ing in the village grass,
On an island in the outskirts of Southern Fiji,
The lady that sized me up and sewed the blue dress with the hibiscus flower print to my exact size,
Without. Taking. One. Measurement.
 
The sun hitting the green grassy pastures,
The wooden shacks for the chickens,
The church that was bright and sunny,
Where I met the woman there from Kandavu,
And she had on the same type of skirt the lady had sewn me.
 
Across to Samoa where the homes have no walls,
A bright pink sheet hung with clothing pegs dividing my room from the rest of the platform,
The fried reef fish Fanny’s relatives cooked, wondering if I should avoid eating it,
Lonely Planet said avoid all fresh reef fish because of the toxins.
 
This is what it looks like,
Driving to the kids’ school,
Their white shirts and red short uniforms,
I can only remember the last time I remembered,
Was it red shirts and white shorts?
Needing to be accompanied at all times in those parts,
Because a single woman cannot not be attached to a family unit.
 
This is what it looks like,
Back to Fiji,
Royal blue starfish off the reef,
Juxtaposed against our fuchsia kayak,
The island nights Tim provided,
The fishing we did in between,
Freshly caught Yellowfin tuna,
The Fijians calling dibs on the head and tail, the most coveted parts of the fish
Just like my dad,
Like true Bengalis they just know what’s good.
 
This is what it looks like,
A spire of green grass,
The cackle of a chicken,
Village huts,
Homes with no walls,
Seamstresses that can sew a perfectly fitted dress at the bat of an eye,
This is what it looks like,
To be in Old Polynesia.


Inspired from travels in 2010 & 2011 to Kandavu, Fiji and Savai'i, Samoa