Photos, Recycling, and the Blues —
Paul Buklarewicz’s Sustainable Combination By Catherine Tarleton
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hat do a professional photographer, blues harmonica player, and recycling educator have in common? In the case of Paul J. Buklarewicz of Volcano, they’re all the same guy. A modern-day Renaissance man, Paul is a career educator, lifetime learner, and US Army veteran who has worked his passions for photography and travel into a successful stock photo business. Along the way, he taught himself to play harmonica—because it was easy to carry around—and started gigging with a blues band on a regular basis. Paul was executive director of Recycle Hawai‘i, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in Hilo, which provides education, recycling, and sustainability programs and resources islandwide. After 15 years, he retired in 2018, and is still a lifetime member. “Actually, I’ve probably been in sustainability since I was a college student in 1970–71 when they had the first Earth Day. I’ve considered myself an ecologist/environmentalist since then,” Paul says. The New Jersey native earned his bachelor’s degree in business education from Pace College in New York and, after living in Turkey courtesy of the US Army, started teaching high school at Bayonne High School in Bayonne, New Jersey. “It
was my alma mater, where I found myself teaching in some of the same classrooms where I formerly sat as a pupil,” says Paul. “I then picked up a one-year teaching assistantship at Utah State University to pursue a master’s degree in business education,” he continues. “It was 1976. My wife, Arlene, and I took our Volkswagen Super Beetle across country for the bicentennial. We went from the East Coast to Utah to San Francisco, including winter camping through a number of National Park lands.” Of course, he took landscape photos along the way, nurturing a hobby-turned-profession that started when he was a boy. “My first camera was my mom’s Brownie box camera. I remember taking it apart trying to figure out how it works,” Paul says. (Did he get it back together? Paul says, “Probably not!”) He worked in film photography at the time, and gradually developed a stock photo business, selling images to newspapers, textbooks, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times travel sections, Elle, Scientific American, Travel Holiday, Hawaii Magazine, and more. Paul’s Hawai‘i adventure began in 1981 when he and Arlene Multi-talented Paul Buklarewicz plays harmonica in a blues band and is owner-operator of the Eleventh Pearl Photo Gallery in Volcano, in addition to many other accomplishments. During Paul’s 15 years with Recycle Hawaii, one of his team’s proudest accomplishments was creating Re-use centers at island transfer stations, like this one in Pähoa.
