As May brings all kinds of blooms and sunshine to campus, there’s no better time to look back on everything environmental that happened on campus during April, aka Earth Month!
At the beginning of the month, students, faculty, and staff participated in Worldwide Climate Justice and Education Week. With teach-ins and events happening every day of the first week of April, it was great to see so many members of our campus community engaging in climate action efforts!
A big theme of Earth Month was community – how can we build and celebrate community around the central ideas of sustainability and environmental activism? One way was by having an open Climate Action Plan meeting, where all of campus was invited to come hear about our progress on its goals, ask questions, and give ideas for direction in upcoming terms! Another community event was Rot Your Troubles (cathartic composting in the Grove), an awesome collaboration between the composting program and SPEAK.
We also joined together with the greater Kalamazoo community to celebrate Earth month! K students, faculty, and staff teamed up with their counterparts from Western Michigan University for a climate rally – they marched from their respective campuses, joined up on Academy Street, and headed towards Bronson Park for an afternoon of demonstration, speeches, and action. Additionally, interns from the Hoop House attended the Food Ways Symposium at KVCC! They shared good food and knowledge about the African diaspora garden that thrived in the Hoop House last growing season.
As the month drew to a close, it was time for the annual Sustainability SIP Symposium, a showcase of senior projects from all disciplines across campus that dealt with themes of environmental studies, sustainability, and the human-nature relationship. This year, we had a diverse range of projects including grazing sheep in the Arboretum, tackling the ins and outs of ecotourism in Costa Rica, and analyzing German environmental political propoganda.
Thank you to everyone in our campus community who helped make this Earth Month so special. We’ve loved seeing the passion and dedication of environmentally-minded folks, and it’s been truly uplifting to spend time making meaningful climate action together. We hope that these efforts can continue on long past the end of Earth Month, and that our journey towards sustainability can stretch far into the future!
