Greg Asner isn't your average scientist. His formal CV is fifty-six pages long, listing 850 peer-reviewed scientific publications and books, the names of more than five dozen doctoral and post-doc student advisees, several patents, numerous awards-including the Heinz Award for the Environment in 2017 (think the Heisman Trophy for environmental science)-as well as numerous conference speeches and movie and television appearances.
Following a 2019 stint on the television docuseries Judi Dench's Wild Borneo Adventure, Asner dismissed rumors he was dating the Dame (he's happily married to his colleague and research partner, Robin Martin). In August 2021, Pope Francis invited Asner to meet and discuss sustainability and climate change. Asner has developed and launched satellites. He casually calls the multimillion-dollar Global Airborne Observatory he invented "my plane." The GAO can map a forest down to an individual tree's branches or peer through water to identify individual coral heads from high in the sky. The aircraft is widely considered to have the most advanced mapping technology outside the government sector. Of the kitted-out boat parked on his property, Asner offhandedly remarks, "Jim Cameron bought me this boat." That would be, yes, director/explorer James Cameron.
To say Asner is at the top of his game as a respected sustainability scientist is an understatement. He's one of the most prolific conservation and climate scientists on the planet, renowned for developing new technologies to study biodiversity, carbon cycling and ecosystem resilience. His work has spanned 137 countries. Few scientists, especially one as young as Asner, achieve such notoriety or have access to such advanced technology. So why has this researcher of global import established himself on the remote South Kona coast, in the tiny Native Hawaiian fishing community of Milolii?
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Mapping ecosystems and tracking their response to climate change has earned Greg Asner (ABOVE LEFT) international renown. But it’s through his enduring and special relationship to HawaIi, in particular the remote fishing village of Milolii (SEEN AT TOP), that he feels big science can help make a difference at the local level.
(ABOVE) Greg Asner with Kaimi Kaupiko, Carol Kahele and Tahaa Kahele. (BELOW) Asner talking with Milolii community leader Kaupiko and Tahaa about how Western science can support and affirm indigenous knowledge.
At 54, Asner maintains a military-fit physique, a holdover from his time as a Navy diver, which first brought him to Hawaii from Maryland in 1986. Enamored with the Islands, he stayed to work for the University of Hawaii at Manoa and for the Nature Conservancy on Molokai, then headed to Hawaii Island in 1995; by 1997 he was measuring corals in Milolii. He pursued his doctorate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he focused on gathering data to help manage the Amazon, yet did so mostly remotely, spending the majority of his time in Hawaii. In 2001 he joined the Carnegie Institution but maintained his base in Hilo, where he created a slew of new technologies for data collection and mapping.
"I often tell people I was born on the Mainland and was awakened in Hawaii," Asner says. That awakening continues in his current position as director of Global Discovery and Conservation Science at Arizona State University; part of his job is to expand ASU's presence on Hawaii Island, and Milolii is the epicenter of that effort. In a 2021 TEDx Talk, Asner remarked that many of his important ideas were "born, raised and applied in Hawaii." He hopes to make Hawaii Island a sort of campus/proving ground-a new type of academic environment, where science can help address the immediate, real-world problems in the communities where it's being conducted.
All that makes Milolii, where Asner has based his research for the past fifteen years, an ideal campus/proving ground. While the village residents have sought to preserve their Native Hawaiian culture and traditions, Milolii is experiencing the myriad environmental problems that rapid development brings, some of which affect the reefs that the villagers depend upon. In 2017, using prize money from the Heinz Award, Asner founded a nonprofit and built a facility at the edge of Hawaii's "last fishing village"-a community bound to the land, to the sea and to each other by centuries of history. It might seem an unlikely place for a scientist of such renown to set up shop, but if you ask Asner, it's the most fitting.
A scientist of Asner’s stature has a few toys at his disposal. Asner, a former Navy diver, prepares to dive from Coral Guard, a retrofitted military vessel.
Coral Guard’s Graphic Information System generates a map showing the impact of wastewater effluent from land on Milolii’s reefs.
On a recent visit to his center in Milolii, constructed to blend in with the area's residential buildings, Asner gives me a tour of the gear room, a meticulously clean, hangar-like space smelling of epoxy and neoprene and filled with gadgetry. He gives me a simplified summary of the dizzying scope of his work: Asner and his Hawaii-based team conduct shoreline and forest mapping as well as monitor coral and fish populations throughout the main Hawaiian Islands. His other projects-the Allen Coral Atlas, an online map of the world's reefs, and the Global Airborne Observatory-are planetary in scope, but Milolii gets special attention.
Asner's work in Milolii isn't just about water sampling and reef surveys. He also runs the Hawaii Marine Education and Research Center (MERC), a nonprofit he cofounded with his wife, where residents can get support for their own marine-related initiatives. For example, the village's Makai Watch, which patrols the reef to stop aquarium fish poaching and shark finning, often monitors the coast from the building at night. MERC also connects the isolated village to the wider world: It's a place where youth can find mentorship, internships and jobs beyond the village and learn what it's like to conduct scientific research. Perhaps most important, the center gives residents a means to share their ancestral knowledge of the area's marine resources with government managers.
Both of Asner's roles-as the head of MERC and ASU's programs in Hawaii-are part of a larger, fairly radical plan: "to ensure that science is conducted in service of community," he says. Within a typical university system, "the science community is kind of in service to itself, and that's really bad. ... Why is the science so important if it doesn't help humans?" Conversely, in Milolii, he says, "It's about the people and this place-how important this place is in its own right, but also how it can be a model for how we take care of one another and the planet."
Asner’s Global Airborne Observatory, a research plane outfitted with technology that can pick out individual coral heads and tree branches from the sky.
The recent boom of residential home construction in Milolii makes it both a microcosm of what's happening to indigenous communities worldwide and an ideal place to explore how local knowledge can inform sustainability science-and how that science can be used, in turn, to support those communities. Asner hopes his "experiment," as he calls it, will inspire other scientists to do the same. But that's an uphill climb: There isn't much support within the scientific community for including local knowledge. When he gave his TEDx Talk in 2021 about tapping traditional knowledge to prepare for climate change, "Most of the pushback I received came from the science community," he says. "They were like, 'Nah, management has gotta be science- and technology-based.'"
But, he points out, Native Hawaiians have been employing hyper-local land-to-sea stewardship strategies for centuries. "They don't need 'help' from scientists," Asner says. "They need partnering." Modern resource management tends to be more general than local, with regional or statewide mandates created by managers often far removed from the systems they oversee. "Some days I get in the water and I go, 'Man! The fish biomass is low today!' And I'll mention it to somebody in the village and they'll tell me exactly why. They'll say, 'Well, it's because the tidal cycle is this, we had king tides three days ago and the moon is over here.' Hawaiian knowledge includes daily, lunar, solar and tidal cycles of the fishery. Science doesn't know that. And I go, 'Wow, you blew my mind, Uncle! You blew my mind, Auntie!' It's amazing. It gives you chicken skin. They really know the system because they are the system."
Milolii residents know their reefs down to individual crevices and coral heads, but government scientists tasked with managing the fisheries and the coastline often don't have access to such direct, intimate knowledge. The state Division of Aquatic Resources "has only one long-term research, long-term measurement site," Asner says. "And they've historically come twice a year, I believe, to that site. And it's like, but every day is different!" Asner is quick to point out that this isn't the fault of government scientists. "They are really understaffed. We have 1,200 kilometers of coastline in the eight main Hawaiian Islands, and DAR has fewer employees than I have in my ASU unit. They can't be expected to know about and manage fisheries on that fine a scale," he says. "But we've got to fix it by having community knowledge compensate for the sparsity of government capability to create a different future."
Asner talks with Pope Francis in 2021 about the Allen Coral Atlas, a massive project Asner directs to map the world’s reefs and monitor the impact of climate change.
For generations the residents of Milolii managed their coastal resources sustainably. But over the past few decades, they've butted heads with outside managers and enforcement agents, who visit a few times a year to collect data and establish rules. For decades the community has been fighting for the right to steward their ancestral waters. Thanks to their tireless work, the state designated eighteen miles of Milolii coastal waters as a Community-Based Subsistence Fishery Management Area (CBSFA), a fairly new type of public/private partnership regime, in 2005. There is currently only one other CBSFA in the state: at Haena on Kauai, established in 2015, where local and indigenous people collaborate with the state to manage that beautiful and sensitive coastline. But it took years to hash out the specifics for Milolii CBSFA, and it wasn't until this past August-thanks to continued activism by the community and, in part, to Asner's MERC-that the state formally passed the baton to Milolii so that its residents could care for the coastline the way their ancestors did.
Kaimi Kaupiko, a traditional fisher, teacher and community representative, was initially skeptical of Asner when he arrived fifteen years ago. "When I first met you, I wasn't really sure," he tells Asner as we talk just before sunset outside Kaupiko's home. Kaimi's father, Willy Kaupiko, a community leader who's nicknamed "the Mayor of Milolii," "was very hesitant with a lot of the science," says Kaimi, a sentiment shared by much of the community. "Most of us are subsistence fishermen who love to work from our own observations of the reef. That's how we've survived off of it. Our way is our science." After getting to know Asner's work, though, "I was thankful," Kaupiko says, "because it was really important for what we were trying to do: to create this management plan for Milolii. It's been our dream for a long time-since I was little.
"Greg helped us understand why what we're observing is happening, and that's been a huge awakening-to really invest in using the data you guys have shared." Asner chimes in: "We are just putting numbers to what you already know." The community had been voicing concerns about issues like declining fish populations for years, "But you put numbers on it and suddenly the Department of Land and Natural Resources goes, 'Oh! We do have a decline!'" Asner says.
"Our science is backing that up-that the community always knew what they were doing."
Asner measures the chemistry of corals off Milolii undergoing a marine heat wave, with a device he created that uses spectroscopy so he can avoid contact with the vulnerable, heat-stressed corals.
From Kaupiko's point of view, these efforts are all in service righting a larger historical wrong. Before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, he says, "We had our own identity, our sovereignty. We could feed each other and take care of this place for that. When the overthrow took place, it flipped the whole place upside down, because now we are going to a Western system that is not very pono [right, proper] to how our kupuna [ancestors] would manage the entire ahupuaa," the Hawaiian term for traditional land divisions typically stretching from the mountain peaks to the ocean. "We were so disconnected because we didn't have our place, we didn't have our language. Today we are doing the work. We're getting information from Greg and his team-and others who have been here for longer-which helps us understand the Western, biological view of what's going on in the ocean. We feel comfortable that they are not here just to tell us what to do; they're here to support us. Our narrative is important because we are the people who will steward this place."
When Gov. David Ige signed the CBSFA designation into law during a ceremony at Milolii on August 2, 2022, it was "the biggest thing for us as a people trying to figure out our identity," says Kaupiko, "because our whole life is around fishing. It's critical at this time in our journey as a community to make sure that what our kupuna did will continue. Our next generation will be able to carry on this work. Seeing this happen makes us feel that we can take ownership, that there's hope for the future."
Above, a spectrographic map of the reefs at Honaunau, Hawaii Island, the world's first map of coral biodiversity, from data collected using Asner's Global Airborne Observatory.
Later, zipping around on Asner's boat, a speedy, modified Coast Guard vessel, he relaxes. He pops the top on another can of UCC brand canned coffee ("my biggest vice," he says) and half-jokingly discusses plans to mount Super Soaker water guns on the former (real) gun mounts before reflecting on his team's work, both in Milolii and in the wider world.
For many scientists, research directed toward a specific legal outcome, like a CBSFA designation, would be a big no-no. There's a view that scientists should present good data, not interpret it or promote policy solutions. But Asner, having reached the peak of his career, has the freedom and credibility to buck that view. "The best management comes from the communities, because outside managers don't have the intergenerational knowledge," he says. "Why does science think it can figure out some other way that's more universal, when the system evolved with people? If you focus on communities-who you're really doing the science for-you'll actually look at the data not differently, but with the knowledge that your science will have an even greater impact."
