Apri 15, 2008
EcoWeek a smashing success
Students tie-dye shirts on Friedheim Quad Thursday as part of EcoWeek. (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Spring picked an apropos week to finally bloom. Wednesday’s Campus Beautification Day began under a shroud of gray clouds and mist but ended soaked in sunshine that stuck around for the rest of the week. Thursday’s 70-degree temperatures were the perfect backdrop for tie-dyeing T-shirts on the quad, a part of EcoWeek, a five-day campaign sponsored by the student group Eco-Sense that was designed to raise awareness about sustainability on campus.
Green definitely was the color of the week.
“It was a huge success,” Mark Feist, assistant director of facilities management, said of Campus Beautification Day. “Our focus is not really the results of beautifying campus but rather we want this to be a community building day. We use gardening as the vehicle to bring everyone together. Over the last three or four years in particular I’ve noticed it’s an opportunity for people who normally don’t rub shoulders to interact. I see that happening to a greater extent. We really are starting to communicate with one another using this day.”
Feist estimated that about 400 faculty, staff, students, and people from the community participated. They applied three tractor loads of mulch, planted 75 trees, 150 shrubs, and about 1,800 perennials. Major projects included planting 35 trees near the Fletcher Gate off Rockwood Parkway, and resodding and planting shrubs and perennials on the McKinley hillside, where a gas line project had uprooted landscaping.
Meanwhile, the student-run Eco-Sense was staging panels, discussions, and screenings throughout the week, adding to the enviro-wise mood on campus.
“We have a bunch of different events,” said David Smedick, the group’s president. “We wanted to have one with RHA [Residence Hall Association] to raise awareness about how to live sustainably. We had an environmental film series with three or four films. One was about the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge and the oil drilling. We had an environmental justice panel about coal mining operations in the Appalachians. Instead of doing typical mining they just blow the mountains up. It’s harming the ecosystem there and the people there, it’s putting a lot of contaminents in their water.”
Other panels included “Profits Without Pollution,” how to go green without seeing red, and “Green to Green Purchasing Campaign Successes,” at which university librarian Bill Mayer discussed the library’s sustainability efforts.
“We wanted to show that being sustainable and being conscious of environmental issues is something that anyone can do,” said sophomore Anjali Bean, media director of Eco-Sense. “I am an environmental studies major, but that is not a requirement. It is something that any and every student should be aware of and interested in.”
