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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, September 16, 2007

What I'm reading: Lea Hong

By Christine Thomas

Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

Lea Hong, Hawaiian Island Program director, Trust for Public Land.

Hawaiian Islands Program photo

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What are you reading?

I just finished reading "An Assembly Such As This" by Pamela Aidan, a fictional what-if premise of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." ... Right now I'm reading "Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place," an anthology of conservation writing with excerpts from conservationists like Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold.

What do you like about it?

The thing that struck me the most was this one sentence our (Trust for Public Land) president (William B. Rogers) wrote in the introduction — "The conservation of land is one of the most powerful tools for shaping positive change, because it gives communities hope through self-determination." In the past year I've been here, and with the projects that I've been working on, I've found that is definitely true. It often is a healing process. It brings all sorts of people together — community folks, landowners, state government, county government, legislators, staff people within the agencies. ...

Does this inspire you to deepen public commitment to the cultural value of land, and to collaborating on its conservation?

I think that's the purpose of the book — to remind folks who work for Trust for Public Land or anyone who works in conservation to help inspire us to define our mission, to encourage us to foster better relationships with the natural world. It definitely confirmed for me that everything that I'm doing is already consistent with the mission values of the founders, which is really good. That's a great feeling. Our president's quote is very, very true, especially in Hawai'i where land and people are so connected. When we talk about land conservation or return of land to people, it is an empowering process.