A week-long series of events is underway at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry to celebrate and protect our natural environment. The Earth Week event will feature a series of activities to help people better engage with the world around them and understand how to preserve it.
Earth Week coordinator, ESF student Julia Frank, said the goal is to emphasize the human impact—but also reliance— on the natural world.
“It's themed around how we affect the environment around us, and then how the environment around us affects us,” Frank said.
This year’s Earth Week will bring back traditional celebrations, such as the music event known as QuadStock, but this year that will be enhanced with community and student vendors and food trucks to create a festival experience. There will also be a garden making workshop, a daily sustainability scavenger hunt and T-shirt tie dye events for students who show their school IDs.
They are also engaging online students—the Earth Week committee is sending remote students seed balls that they can put in their yards and hopefully see erupt in spring.
But Frank said the weeklong event is also meant to inspire people outside the college community.
“If you want to plant some pollinator-friendly plants during the week, that would be really awesome, and just get involved with cleaning up the community and making it nice for all of the community and making it nice for all of the animals, plants and the environment,” Frank said.
Earth Week Committee Advisor Chris Card, who recommended people focus on planting non-invasive species, said the annual series aims to help people understand how small decisions can have a big impact on the planet we call home.
“We see all of the impacts of all of our regular day activities that it has on the environment, and we see how the environment’s health is impacting us back,” Card said. “The more that we pollute beyond our capacity, there’s only so much that the environment can kind of clean and cycle through.”
SUNY ESF Earth Week will be celebrated from April 17 to April 21. A list of scheduled events are available online.
