Scott
Rowland
From: Scott Rowland
Date: October 12, 2010
Subject: some words
about Lorin
This is based on some words I said when I had the honor of presenting
Lorin with a lifetime achievement award at the Hawai'i Chapter's 40th
anniversary:
A few years prior to that, for unknown reasons, I was sitting in my
office at UH and it came to me
that I pretty much owed my entire professional career and all the
things that go with it
(friends, travel, etc.) to Lorin. How? I'm a geologist, and
the first geology course I took at
UH pretty much got me hooked. Why did I take a geology
course? Because my friend Mark Enomoto
was taking it. How did I meet Mark? On a HSTP to
Haleakala. And who founded HSTP? Was
Lorin. How did I learn about HSTP? Because in my
senior year at Roosevelt we had a High School Hiker
group. And who founded High School Hikers? Was
Lorin too. So I might have
stumbled into geology without all these events, but I might
not have. Importantly, there are lots of folks
out there who are far more accomplished than I am (Sam Gon,
Suzanne Harada, Art Medeiros, Dana
Peterson, to name a few), and I'll bet that they too owe at least some
of where they are today to
Lorin's guidance. Probably, as with me, Lorin never said, "Go
out and be a _____."
Instead, he put in place the mechanisms for us to see the natural world
in a way that we would come to care
about it; finding the particular path was left to us. The
other important legacy that Lorin
has left us is the importance of teaching. What good is
knowledge if it isn't
shared? Something I didn't mention that evening (because I
only thought about it recently) is what about all those
people who maybe only joined High School Hikers for one
year? Or only went on one
HSTP trip? Think of how many hundreds of such people there
are and how whatever little or large love
for the natural world they have, can be traced to Lorin.
I won't be at Lorin's memorial in November, but hopefully he would
approve of my excuse - leading a class field trip to Kilauea.
So on that day I'll be
out on the active lava flows where the world is alive and the
rocks live and breathe. And
I expect that I'll see him in the trees and clouds and rain showers and
maybe even the pahoehoe
toes. Aloha Lorin.