Fighting the Lorax and planting some trees

This week has been a whirlwind. I guess you can expect that from a week containing leap day. I began the week fighting the Lorax. Yes, you read that correctly, this environmental lady had to go against the famous environmentalist Dr. Seuss book. My boss came in on Monday morning, shocked by the fact that IHOP was giving out Lorax bookmarks with seeds in them. Thus, my next steps involved finding out what type of seeds they were and if they were being released at the local IHOPs. Turns out they were Blue Spruce and Canadian pine, definitely not welcome trees in our great state. And that they were giving them out in Hawaii. This resulted in contacting our invasive weeds group and having them take the next steps of contacting IHOP and saying while we appreciate your attempt to have more trees planted and advertise this environmental movie, we do not want those seeds in Hawaii. Then the conversation spread to the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and pretty much any where not in the continental US that had an IHOP on how to shut this down. Turns out so far, all the IHOP restaurants agreed to not pass them out anymore.

But this isn't over, rather than making IHOP feel terrible about this, we wanted to create a teaching moment. We LOVE the Lorax in our office, so much so that its everyones first assignment upon arrival as a new employee to read the book (it sits in my cubicle bookshelf), so we wanted to use the movie's momentum to do some good. I think what will happen next is, we hope to create new lorax bookmarks and attach Ohia seeds (which have blossoms that do look like truffala trees) and carry this on till Earth Day next month. I predict some time in the next weeks I will find myself stapling ohia seed baggies to bookmarks...

So after that insanity, I needed to get out of the office and a fantastic opportunity to dart off for a day of out planting at Paohole Natural Area Reserve (NAR) appeared. After a long drive through the Hawaiian countryside (yes it exists) we got to the NAR and assembled our team. I was really excited because there were 4 other KUPU interns so it was fun to get to hang out with some of my friends. We gathered our tools and hiked 45 minutes in and got to the site. Fortunately they had already dug the holes, and all our plants and larger items were getting helicoptered in. Seeing that helicopter with a giant box hanging down full of plants was a new site and just crazy that thats the only option in a place like Hawaii with such steep cliff areas. We spent the day planting trees, building a catchment system and taking in the view which was awesome. Overall it was a great day to go out and enjoy some sunshine, do some manual labor, and basically avoid all the other things I had to do back at the office.

Once I had to return to reality, it was time for me to do my office presentation of my talk I'm doing at a GIS conference on Monday. I am presenting how I used ArcGIS online to map our Big Trees. Basically I am doing a tutorial in front of experts, for 20 minutes. To say that I am terrified would be an understatement. I will be spending my weekend memorizing my slides and trying to completely eliminate the words "um" "soooo" "ya" "like" and "things" from my vocabulary. Not likely. But I guess we will see how Monday goes. Thankfully after that, I will be able to relax a little, before I have to start on my next two assignments, sleuthing on the underground black market cost of Hawaii Sandalwood, and researching how to change the USDA Farm Bill, a process usually requiring far more time than I have. Guess I can only keep charging forward and attempting to do my best!