The recent spate of pictures and videos showing visitors harassing animals has touched a nerve, to say the least.

It started a few weeks ago with a TikTok video of a Louisiana woman touching a sleeping monk seal on Kauai that quickly went viral. Afterwards, a slew of similar pictures and videos flooded local social media pages. From there it snowballed into coverage from every local media outlet, prompting Gov. David Ige to release a statement that people who mess with local wildlife will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

That is unlikely to happen to recent offenders. There are essentially three avenues of prosecution: in federal court, state court, or civil court through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Disturbing wildlife is a misdemeanor under federal law, but it’s a felony under state law, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Even the most righteously outraged would probably agree that half a decade behind bars is a bit stringent for a thoughtless and idiotic moment that ultimately caused little actual harm.

Part of the issue here is the health and safety of the animals themselves. Human interaction is an ongoing threat to the roughly 1,400 remaining monk seals in existence. According to NOAA, as of 2018 at least 12 monk seals have been intentionally killed by people. But even in less extreme situations, people can unknowingly expose them to diseases and contaminants or disrupt their sleep patterns, either of which can have dire consequences.

Yet I get the sense that the outrage is about more than the animals themselves. As beloved as monk seals are, they do not have much direct or immediate impact on our daily lives…

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Only five full months have gone by this year, and already it feels like an eternity separates the reality we live in now from the one we knew at the end of 2019.

You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 2020 started off with the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian general. A few weeks later Kobe Bryant died in a tragic helicopter crash alongside his daughter Gianna and 7 others. COVID-19 arrived in the islands mid-February and has remained a daily presence ever since, despite interruptions from presidential primaries, murder hornets and, more recently, nationwide protests.

On top of everything else, as of yesterday we are in hurricane season for the next six months, because apparently not enough has gone wrong this year. But if it seems like things can’t get any worse, just ask a geologist…

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A push alert on my phone on Sunday notified me that Kobe Bryant died. It was morbidly appropriate: an impersonal message meant for countless people, sent directly to me on a personal device telling me that someone I had never met but felt like I knew was gone. I was in a glum funk for the rest of the day.

Basketball was my first athletic love, and it has been my longest. It shaped how I think about life and provided me with a perpetual sense of belonging. My earliest memories were of Michael Jordan, but by then, he was already established and nearing the end of his prime years. Kobe was the player of mygeneration. He wasn’t necessarily my favorite player, but he was one of them, and he defined the era that allowed me to feel like the game was also mine, not a loan or a hand-me-down.

I know that this is an MMA column and that Bryant was a basketball player. Though he was involved in some unique moments of the sport, his connection is larger and more essential…

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A bit from Dave Chappelle’s 2017 standup special “The Age of Spin” came to mind last week. A year before the standup special aired, Manny Pacquiao drew the ire of fans and sponsors alike by saying homosexuals were “worse than animals.” Chappelle called the comments outlandish, but then pointed out that a large part of the Filipino economy was composed of women working abroad and sending money back home. The men left behind, he said, were emasculated.

“And then, suddenly, a boxer rises from amongst them and reinstates their manhood with his motherf—–’ fists,” Chappelle said. “This is not the guy who you’re supposed to ask what he thinks about homosexuals. He’s not your champ.”

The punchline elides the fact that Pacquiao was running for a seat in the senate, so asking him about his stance on gay marriage was appropriate given the context; it’s not like someone randomly asked him in the gym what he thought about gay people after a few rounds of sparring. Yet there is still a resonant truth at the heart of the joke: Some people simply aren’t in a position to be a moral guide or clarifying voice on certain issues. Asking a religiously conservative professional fighter from a developing nation if he thinks gay people should be allowed to live a normal life is about as sensible as asking a mailman how to operate on a malignant tumor or asking a military contractor how to end a war. Nothing in their background allows them to find an answer worth hearing…

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Only three canoes dared to put in for the first Molokaʻi Hoe in 1952. The race was not yet the spectacle it would become more than 50 years later. It’s the Super Bowl of canoe paddling and a staple of the Hawaiian sports scene in which over 1,000 participants from across the planet compete in the more than 40-mile race from Molokai to Oahu. But the Molokaʻi Hoe — pronounced ho-eh, so that it almost rhymes with “boy” — has always been extremely dangerous. The treacherous Kaʻiwi Channel has been locally infamous for a lot longer than the Hoe has been internationally famous. Kaʻiwi translates to “the bone,” a reference to the collection of human remains strewn across its depths. Just a few miles down the coast from the Molokaʻi Hoe’s finish line, corpses of fishermen and sailors regularly washed ashore from Kaʻiwi’s torrents.

Completing the Molokaʻi Hoe is a man-versus-nature feat that has inspired risk-taking athletes for centuries; it also imbues the race with special local heroism, the bravery that inspired ancient Polynesians to explore their vast oceanic horizons thousands of years ago. The Hoe is no less daunting in 2019, but it has also become something else in recent seasons — a crucial example of how climate change is affecting our world…

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