Sustainability focused clubs teamed up to celebrate Campus Sustainability Day with educational activities and food. The Campus Sustainability Day Celebration was held on Britton Plaza on Friday, Oct. 25, as the Dickinson edition of the 11th Annual Campus Sustainability Day. This is a national event through The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
According to AASHE’s website, they strive “to empower higher education to lead the sustainability transformation [to create] a prosperous, equitable, and ecologically healthy world.”
The Center for Sustainability Education (CSE) sponsored the event at Dickinson and CSE Intern Cyrena Shiland ’14 was the coordinator.
“The event is meant to shed light on the innovations, successes, and challenges that contribute to creating sustainability on campus,” explained Shiland.
Many other campus organizations had their own booths to spread their messages about sustainability, including The Handlebar, The Peddler, the Idea Fund, Reinvest Dickinson, the Eco Reps, Earth Now, and the Dickinson Farm.
Food and drinks were provided by The Peddler, Dickinson’s sustainable coffee cart, and CSE. At their table, CSE had a variety of locally grown apples to sample, and their interns were making French fries with vegetable oil that would be turned into biodiesel after it was used.
The Handlebar had a bike fixing station for students to stop by. The Dickinson Farm stand, which sells produce in the HUB every Friday from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., moved out onto Britton Plaza to join in push for sustainability.
Reinvest Dickinson passed out orange pins to raise awareness for their cause. They are a student led movement that is working to have Dickinson’s Board of Trustees and administration divest endowment money from fossil fuels and reinvest it in companies and organizations that align with Dickinson’s commitment to social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
The Eco Reps were ‘upcycling’ water bottles that they had collected from recycling bins around campus by turning them into planters. They taught students how to make these planters, and gave them a wide variety of plants and flowers to put in them.
Earth Now was trying to get the Dickinson community “to think holistically about sustainability,” said Madison Beehler ’15.
They asked students to write down what they thought sustainability meant on leaves that were then added to a sustainability tree collage. The goal was to discover what the typical view of ‘being green’ was on campus. They were also promoting their Take Back the Tap petition – an initiative to phase out the selling of disposable water bottles on campus.