New perspectives for old problems

By Haley Randell

I’ve been back for about a week but it still feels like a dream. If I still didn’t have WhatsApp beeping at me with messages of new and old friends reminiscing about Hong Kong memories, I would believe that I never went.

I was asked about how that trip to Hong Kong relates back to Hawaii and I had to think about it. How to make sense of that massively dense city in my ‘small city’ lifestyle? I’ve been thinking long and hard about it and although Honolulu and Hong Kong are intensely different, there are things to be learned from both sides of the Pacific. For one, both cities are hot spots for biodiversity conservation but are going about this task at different speeds. Honolulu, on one hand, has already developed so much that there is no more sea turtle nesting on the island. Hong Kong’s White Dolphin has become dangerously close to leaving for good. But the difference is that Hong Kong is truly running out of developable land and Honolulu still has plenty of non-protected land to create new resorts or power plants. Should we cap development by preserving almost half of our land? Can we learn from Hong Kong’s problem of having to reclaim land from the ocean floor and strategically develop a smarter and more sustainable city? It seems crazy to believe that preserving so much land might be more harm than good in the long run, but these are just a few dilemmas that I learned in Hong Kong. I will absolutely use my new perspective when working in a career in the future.