I didn't expect it to work out this way. Mitch Charnley, my journalism professor at the University of Minnesota, who got me a job at The Advertiser, warned me: "Beware of mental stagnation in Hawai'i."

The day after I arrived, I was befriended by proofreader Tsuneko Oguri, "Scoops Casey," who took pity on struggling writers. At the University of Hawai'i during World War II, she took pity on an awkward, lonely GI from Schofield Barracks. He turned out to be James Jones, who wrote "From Here to Eternity."

Growing up in the Dust Bowl, I had never met an Asian. My next friend was Yoshiaki Ishii, the pidgin-speaking photographer who introduced the 35mm camera to newspapering in Hawai'i. He took me squidding.

Next came Chan Kwok, editor of the New China Daily Press, who believed in magic. My first date was Sarah Park, a Korean, star reporter for the competition.

Talk about cultural complexity. Hawaiians are the most complex of all. Where can you find more fascinating humans to write about? Or a place where they mix so freely?

And all of this takes place on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. From the beginning, I knew that not only can people change islands, islands can change people. But how? And why?

The more I learned about islands, the more I realized that I had tapped into a universal wisdom. Global Village, Spaceship Earth, Global Society — we're in the middle of it.

In the 1950s, renowned botanist Raymond Fosberg defined the elements that shape biological evolution on islands. One element is vulnerability. Another is limitation.

I've reported from about 40 islands and atolls in the Pacific. My gut tells me that social evolution on islands works much the same way because islands are where vulnerability and limitation hit you in the gut.

It's taken Sept. 11 to teach many Americans how vulnerable they are to everybody else on Earth Island. It will probably take more than global warming to teach us how limited we are by our environment.

Yet Pacific Islanders survived for thousands of years under these conditions. Some of them made it look easy. Others made a mess of it. How? Why?

Trying to answer those questions has been a continuing creative adventure. The great American novel doesn't hold a candle to what I'm working on now.