The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Johnston and Palmyra Atolls

An ARCS Honolulu Chapter hybrid pau hana talk
Thursday, Oct. 16, 5:30 p.m. HST (8:30 p.m. PDT)
In person at AgriSci Building Room 214, 1955 East-West Road on the UH Manoa Campus
Registrants will receive the Zoom link to participate live and YouTube link for viewing later

Some of the least visited sites on Earth, these islands, reefs, and pelagic waters aren’t suitable for sustained human habitation, which has insulated wildlife there but also invited people to propose them as sites for activities that would be inappropriate closer to human population centers. Seabird ecologist Beth Flint and marine journalist Susan Scott, who both have extensive experience at these remote outposts, describe some of the exploitative, destructive, wacky, and scientifically important uses suggested, and sometimes executed, there… and how wildlife has held on and thrived.
Photo by Jordan Akiyama/USFWS, Pacific Islands

Flint retired in May as a supervisory wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Islands Refuges and Monuments Office, where she assisted the managers of twelve National Wildlife Refuges and four Marine National Monuments in the tropical Central Pacific. She has more than three decades of experience monitoring and managing wildlife populations and protecting them from invasive species, climate change effects, fisheries bycatch, and other threats. She completed PhD studies on seabird physiology and behavior at UCLA and postdoctoral research on seabird trophic ecology in the Bering Sea before returning to tropics to stay.

Scott is president of the Hawaii Audubon Society and author ot 10 books about nature in Hawai'i and the long-running OceanWatch newspaper column. A registered nurse and graduate of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa's Marine Option Program, she is a decades-long volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and has lived and worked on Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, and French Frigate Shoals.

For more information, email arcshonolulu@gmail.com or download the flyer