In retrospect, three hours doesn’t seem like a particularly impressive amount of time to volunteer to help Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park and the 'āina (land). But as I tackled invasive Himalayan ginger with a lobber one February morning while other visitors made a beeline to the current eruption at Kīlauea volcano or hiked to lava tubes, the repetitive manual labor quickly became addictive and I was sorry when Paul Field insisted it was time to stop.

Stepping into Primeval Forest National Park is like entering a time capsule and being transported back to when the Bahamas was covered with tropical forests. Agriculture, the lumber industry and shipbuilding wiped out great tracts of trees, but not these 7.5 acres on New Providence island. “Sprouting from razor-sharp rock and dotted with sinkholes, the forest proved too difficult to traverse and impossible to farm,” interpretive signage explains. “Thus it escaped the ravages of agriculture and development.”

Have you ever stopped to think about the number of National Park System units created around volcanoes and volcanic features?

The first thing I see when I land on Grand Bahama Island is Caribbean pine trees decimated by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. The impossibly tall evergreens line the highway, but all that’s left is their slender, erect trunks. They look naked without their branches and needles. Naked, yet also defiantly still alive.