Concord Celebrates Earth Day

Earth Day. A day meant for people to focus on the appreciation and preservation of our world and the environment that we live in and, if you’re a student here at Concord, a chance to try and make a small difference and give something back. The idea for a dedicated day nationwide to focus on the earth and the environment came about in 1969 after an oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson took that spill as an opportunity to force environmental protection onto the national agenda and, on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans participated in demonstrations for a healthy, sustainable environment, and Earth Day was born.

    This year, in the true spirit of the event, Concord celebrated the week of Earth Day with many different activities for students, starting with a campus-wide clean-up on Wednesday, April 20. The clean-up and other Earth Day activities were organized with much help from Concord student Michelle Laneave, who works with the Student Affairs and Academic Success offices at Concord as a part of her internship.

    “There are several organizations on campus, Bonner Scholars and the Tobacco Coalition, that are doing the [free] water bottles with the awareness facts,” Laneave explained. As a part of the clean-up and environmental awareness efforts, any person who signed up to help with the campus clean-up was given a free biodegradable flowerpot with a small package of potting soil and a packet of seeds. In total, around 60 students signed up to help clean up the Campus Beautiful, separated into about five groups.

    Wednesday night also saw a presentation about gardening given by two women from the WVU Extension. “Master Gardners [came] to talk about pollution and gardening. Basically, Master Gardners is a program where they try to get the younger kids interested in gardening, so they offered to do it for free,” Laneave said.

    Thursday, April 21 saw Laneave at the daycare here at Concord University to celebrate Earth Day with the children of Concord. “I have two books to read and then a craft to do with them, and then Friday is actual Earth Day,” she said. She explained that they decided to do the Earth Day events early in the week in order to avoid a potential conflict with Founders Day and the Towers Groundbreaking.

    “I think people, you know, when we talk about going green, people are ‘that’s a lot of work’ and ‘you’re making a big effort’, but it doesn’t take a lot of work. All you do is, you know, walk to CVS instead of taking your car, reuse a water bottle, or turn off the light when you leave the room. There’s simple things that you can do,” she said when asked about the importance of Earth Day, “we want to make the earth and the campus better for our kids, and it’s frustrating to me to walk out and see cigarette butts on the ground when people could just put them in the trash.”

    For more information about Earth Day and how you can start changing your habits to help make a difference, as well as other efforts to help save the environment, visit www.earthday.org.