In the fall of 2011 Collins and Goto went to go to Okinawa, Japan. They were invited to teach a sculpture class by Yutaka Kobayashi, an ecological and environmental artist at Ryukyu University. Goto and Collins were interested in what kinds of trees they would find in Okinawa, and how they related to people and the environment. They propoosed a bio diversity inquiry with his students as a way to explore the campus, working with Kobayashi and his students to mark all of the native trees with different colored cloth to reveal the plant diversity.
