By Nainoa Thompson / Source: HuffPost

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Over the past 40 years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the wooden deck of a sailing canoe. The experience, which has brought our crew around the world to diverse and beautiful places, has been a wake up call like no other.

Forty years ago, the ability to navigate the world’s oceans without instruments was nearly extinct in my home of Hawaiʻi. The rest of Hawaiian knowledge, culture and tradition was very close to being lost forever, too.

Together with a diverse group of individuals, we formed the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and found one of earth’s last traditional navigators, Mau Piailug, living in Micronesia. Through him, the voyaging traditions that helped our ancestors find Hawaiʻi helped our generation discover our place in the world again.

Through these ancient wayfinding traditions, the ocean became our way to reconnect with and build a global family.

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Over the decades, our voyaging canoe, the Hōkūleʻa, has sailed more than 150,000 nautical miles. As everything around us changed, and the life of the ocean and health of our planet began to diminish, we sought to reconnect with the elements and with each other.

The Hōkūleʻa’s small crew is at sea for weeks at a time, completely open to the elements and navigating without any modern instruments. At sea, all we have is each other; water and food are limited and our lives depend on respecting each other and understanding the natural world.

The lessons learned at sea are invaluable to us as we try to navigate through Island Earth’s many environmental crises.

The limits of our land and oceans are now clearer than ever before, and our generation has to steward our gifts very carefully. Taking our cues from nature is more relevant now than we could have ever imagined, and our current Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage is taking the Hōkūleʻa around the world in order to find and share stories of hope for our oceans, earth, and communities.

We are exploring not just the ocean, but the edges of human grace, compassion, and courage.

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Part of our own story of hope is using this voyage to train a new generation of young leaders and navigators.

Technology has drowned them in an abundance of GPS-based directional cues; but do they know how to work together, how to protect the things they love, and how to include the natural world in every decision they make? That is at the heart of mālama honua, Hawaiian for caring for our Island Earth and each other. The idea of mālama honua includes pairing indigenous knowledge and values with new technologies to build the leaders our earth needs.

What we’ve discovered so far, after visiting 26 countries in the Pacific in 11 months, is that though the warming climate, ocean pollution, and declining resources is a depressing story, Pacific people have not responded with depression — they have responded with courage, leadership, vision, and strength.

Every single community we have visited has responded with a strong sense of unity as Pacific Islanders. Everyone wants to talk about what we can do to protect our ocean.

Read more @ HuffPost