More than 40 Harker students lent helping hands to the Magic organization in mid-March, spending the day helping Mother Nature. Magic specializes in ecology-based volunteer work. Since their founding in 1979, Magic has planted tens of thousands of trees, written computer programs to forecast the economic and ecological effects of urban tree management and established the first ecological economics course at Stanford University.

“Together we tagged, surveyed and mulched more than a hundred trees; planted eight native oaks; abated coyote bush that was encroaching on recently planted oaks; installed protective shelters on more than a dozen trees to prevent deer browse; laughed and learned and enjoyed a beautiful day in a lovely natural (mostly) environment,” said Magic representative Robin Bayer, who also mentioned that she hoped to work with Harker students on future projects.

Students who embarked on the trip were:

Gr. 9: Dwight Payne, Jason Kuan, David Dominguez, David Fang, Stephen
Hughes, Nathan Hoffman, Daniel Mao, Ananth Subramaniam, Asia Howard,
Alex Mabanta, Saagar Sarin, Saurabh Sharan, Vikrum Jain, David Brunfeld,
Sebastian Herscher, Kirsten Herr, Devin Nguyen, Richard Lee, William
Chang, Robert Maxton, Aditya Sastry, Lauren Pinzás and Kushal Ranjan.

Gr. 10: Amir Mortazavi, Chris Ng, Daisy Mohrman, Katharine Forsberg, Justin
Shamlou, Rishi Bhatia, Riya Parikh, Alex Kablanian, Michael Prutton,
Ajit Punj, Baran Ozdemir, Jai Nagarajan, Howard Lio and Rishi Ravuri.

Gr. 11: Melanie Herscher, Jackie Ho and Jonathan Lau.