Happy Earth Day: Lets Clean Up!
- Emory
- Apr 22, 2017
- 2 min read
Happy Earth Day! Today has been a whirlwind of business, organizing, and socializing. Over the past few weeks, I have been organizing a campus-wide Earth Day event with some of my peers. The intention of this day was to create a space where people could meet others on campus and talk about campus sustainability. The focus of our Earth Day event was to clean up the campus. A few different holidays and traditions have just passed including Easter Kegg Hunt (where the fourth-year students hid kegs in the woods and everyone else goes to find and drink them) and 4/20 (a day dedicated to smoking marijuana when most students travel and drink and smoke in the woods). The Hampshire College campus is also filled with cans, cigarette butts, and miscellaneous trash items. Our Earth Day event included a dumpster dive based brunch, a trash hike in the woods, trash art, and a movie about waste in the environment. For the brunch, I was very excited to do some of my first dumpster diving, but I was not expecting what everyone told me I would find. There are bags filled with perfect and relatively untouched pastries and foods at Panera and Dunkin’ Donuts. We feed over 30 people with bagels, loaves of bread, and donuts found from dumpsters. Food waste is such a tragedy in the United States. The person I was diving with, Frances, told me that he believes, “food production is not the issue. The issue is food waste.” I agree with him.
The other main part of our day was the trash hike. About seven of use walked around parts of campus and in the woods for an hour and a half. Not only was the walk lovely and refreshing in a time with so much to do and so little time, but the people were also lovely. We had great conversations about environmental action, waste production on campus, thoughts on how we could improve education the student body next year, and had generally loving conversations. It was really nice to hang out with people I do not spend most of my days with, and creating great social bonds. With the classic Hampshire culture of seclusion and clicks, festivities like this event can be critical to a healthy life at Hampshire. We also picked up a lot of trash! We filled two reusable grocery bags with trash and one with recyclables. Right after we turned around and created some beautiful artwork out of the waste we found. Earth Day has also made me very grateful for my project. There is so much waste and pollution on a campus that’s ethics are rooted in sustainable practices, but the student body and other people using the campus are still ruining the forest and living areas. I hope some of the photographs from today’s event show students how much on an impact they have, and that we can use this information next semester to campaign for a cleaner and more aware campus.
Also, a special thanks to Davis and I's good friend Emily O' Connell for the awesome Earth Day pictures.
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