The Portland State Environmental Club is organizing a week of celebration for Earth Day, dubbed Earth Week, to be held April 16–20, and is looking for organizations at PSU and in the community at large to participate in the event.
This will be the fifth year of Earth Day celebrations at PSU. “We are using Earth Week to highlight practices that support life and the community,” said Kirk Rea, logistics coordinator at the PSU Environmental Club. According to Rea, the club sees unsustainable practices on campus and in the community that do not support other forms of life. The Environmental Club is a student group that advocates for environmental issues and sustainability. They have campaigns on and off campus.
“This is a chance to celebrate the community and share skills to make it stronger, healthier and to contribute to a greater good,” Rea said. “This is one of the largest events at PSU; an opportunity to reach an enormous audience.”
According to Rea, however, the event will not only celebrate sustainable practices in regards to the environment, it will also look at social and economic issues. It will be a good way to share skills and information with the community regarding sustainability. “The themes are earth and community,” Rea said. “We do not want to give a singular perspective, but rather a broad view.”
The first four days of the celebration will consist of workshops, work parties and a lecture each day. Workshops will teach participants sustainable practices for their benefit while work parties will engage the audience physically in an activity that will have an immediate benefit in the community and campus.
The fifth day of the celebration will be a festival with musicians, food, vendors and technology demonstrations. It will also feature tables of organizations involved in the event. The festival will be fully driven and will be as sustainable and waste-free as possible—trash will be directed to recycling or compost.
“We want to make the concept of sustainability accessible to the average Portlander,” said Inna Levin, Earth Week intern liaison between the Sustainability Leadership Center and the Environmental Club. “We want to easily incorporate sustainability into life and highlight how we are already doing it.”
The events in the first four days of the celebration will be hosted by organizations both on and off campus. This will not only allow direct interaction with the student body and to attract potential volunteers, but will also offer the chance to showcase how the particular organization is socially and environmentally responsible.
Last year, the celebration had more than 2,000 visitors as well as eight art vendors, five energy demonstrations and 15 community partner booths.
Student organizations and community partners will be able to set up tables to distribute information and speak with the student community at the festival as well. Departments, faculty and other clubs at PSU are welcome to apply to help at Earth Week.
“We hope the larger PSU community can come together for the event,” Levin said. “We do not feel we have a monopoly on caring. Everyone cares and shares the earth. Knowledge is not to be held by the few but shared by all.”
PSU partner organizations include the Ecological Restoration Guild, the Ecological Economics Collective, the Sustainability Leadership Center, the Food Action Collective, the Anthropology StudentAssociation and Food For Thought Café.
“It is important, because once our connection with the earth is lost then so is the future of our species,” wrote Rob Duren, president of the ASA and co-founder and treasurer of the FAC, in an email. “Both [ASA and FAC] seek to raise awareness and intellect on social and environmental issues in hope that we as a society may eventually experience a paradigm shift and reconnect with our environment on a more intimate level.”
The ASA and the FAC will be hosting a container gardening workshop during Earth Week. According to Duren, this workshop would be particularly beneficial to those who have always wanted to do gardening but never had the space. “Container gardens afford the opportunity and ability for everyone to grow their own food,” he said.
The container gardens will also be a way to restore the relationship between society, the earth and the food it produces. “Container gardening is one small step we can make on a grassroots level to reestablish the lost connection,” Duren said.
The deadline to get involved in the first four days of Earth Week by hosting a workshop, work party or lecture is March 5. To set up a table at the festival on the final day of the event, the deadline is March 23. However, these are not the only ways to get involved if a commitment cannot be made. A group can also help the event by sponsoring it and donating money. The goal is to reach $8,000. The deadline for sponsorship is March 2.
To get involved, email psuearthweek@googlegroups.com with questions or to ask for a submission form. Alternatively, the Environmental Club can be visited in person in room 26 of the basement of Smith Memorial Student Union, aka the “green space.” It is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays.
“One important feature of Earth Week,” Duren said, “is that it is not only an informational platform to discuss environmental issues, but it also provides a plethora of methods and ideas of how students and their respective student groups can make a difference and become heroes for humanity; for today and our future generations.”