Students Reflect on Sustainability, Community, and Connection After Caltech Y Trip

The grass stood waist high around Caltech second-year undergraduate Sophie Polidoro as she raised a metal pipe above her head and drove it a foot into the soil.

Another student dropped a seedling tree into the hole, then patted the damp soil around it. When the volunteers finished for the day, the vast meadow on Maunakea looked little changed. But hundreds of native trees were newly nestled amid the grasses.

Polidoro, who is studying mechanical engineering, was one of 11 students who participated in this year's Alternative Spring Break. The annual week of learning, service, and travel is offered by the Caltech Y, an organization that enriches students' lives and challenges them to grow into responsible citizens of the world.

The group traveled to O‘ahu and Hawaiʻi Island (the Big Island), to explore relationships between people and nature while helping with two land-restoration projects, a wide-ranging visit recapped by Caltech student Sascha Goldsmith in the California Tech. While in Hawai'i, students met with experts in responsible ecological stewardship, astrophysics, telescope operation, Hawaiian cultural traditions and origins, and Polynesian navigation.

Polidoro and physics graduate student Elsie Loukiantchenko reflected on the stories they heard from leaders of a group revitalizing a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) farm, as well as members of the Mauna Kea Forest Restoration Project.

The students learned that in the 1800s, agricultural companies cleared the native farmland to plant monocrops of sugarcane and, later, eucalyptus trees that were never harvested. Over time, Loukiantchenko recounts, the forest got a reputation as a place to dump trash and do drugs, and Hawaiians felt unsafe going there.

In 2015, locals formed a nonprofit to clear the eucalyptus and replant native species and food crops. Although detractors insisted the efforts would fail, crops are flourishing and dormant native plants and long-gone birds are returning.

"People have all these reasons you shouldn't try things, but you just have to try," Loukiantchenko says. "Maybe you'll end up succeeding; they did. It is a beautiful place now. I'm not a very religious or spiritual person, but part of me felt there was something so special there, with the birds circling where they never used to go because it was not an area that they had an interest in seeing."

Polidoro says the people she met have a big sense of community and family and work hard to take care of the place that takes care of them. "They are planting trees that will provide shade in 30 years," she adds. "When we look to the future, environmentally it can be really scary. But seeing small groups of people doing their best to try to make a positive step forward is inspiring."

The students recalled the Hawaiian word "piko," which means navel but also refers to points of origin or connection such as a summit where lava emerges or a plant whose stem springs out of its leaf.

"To me, it was meaningful to see how they connect the dots between things," Loukiantchenko says. "No one thing is so different from another. We divide everything. As scientists and as physicists, we have one way of seeing the world, and if things can't be explained within that sphere, then they're not real. We need to absorb a little of what Hawaiian culture sees into our own scientific worldview.

She is saddened by the Western world's history of saying, in effect, if it's not the way we do it, then it's backwards and bad. "That does create a monocrop," she says. "It creates one point of view that we say is correct. That doesn't hold up to scrutiny."

Graduate student Jan Gregrowicz noted how the Caltech visitors and local Hawaiian community each reflected struggles with mobility and identity. "People move to seek better prospects, and they change their motherland," he says, mentioning a speaker whose great grandparents moved to Hawai‘i to work on a sugarcane plantation. Gregrowicz himself left Poland, Loukiantchenko left Israel and then Canada, Polidoro left Brazil, and most others on the trip had also uprooted their lives.

However, across their differences in origins, the people Gregrowicz met spoke of themselves as local, worked in community, and listened carefully to each other's stories. "It was above any racial divide. It's more about our stories."

Gregrowicz, who studies biochemistry and molecular biophysics, says thinking and acting locally resonates with human nature because we need close connections and interactions with people. He notes that in biomedicine, while researchers develop important drugs, the multistage process is handled by different researchers. This means that a given scientist may never have a conversation with a cancer patient and see how their life is changed. Likewise, he says, someone trying to save rainforests by modeling them on computers would benefit from going to one and learning about its dynamics in person.

"The experience in Hawaiʻi," Gregrowicz says, "confirmed for me that instead of wanting to change the world, I would rather do something with people I care about, and we care about something together. Maybe it's too hard to sweep the entire world. Or I could argue that if a lot of people focus their energy on changing things locally in different places, those small local spots eventually add up to larger effects."

Polidoro says the trip changed how she wants to approach her academic work and career. "I have always been interested in how the things that I might engineer will interact with the environment around them. But now I want my work to be more sustainability focused."

Loukiantchenko says climate change is an uphill battle in part because people have lost connection with the earth. "We need more of this connection that Hawaiians have, because we are lacking in it," she says. "I want my future kids to be able to experience what I experienced. I want my grandkids to be able to see what I saw, and I want to be part of the movement that helps make that happen even in one small part."