Environmental club organizes Earth Day
Frank Berta
April 22 marks the 29th anniversary of Earth Day.The Environmental Action Club at MCC is organizing an Earth Day event at the MCC campus.
From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the campus will come alive with live music, juggling, a rock-climbing wall, jousting competitions, volleyball games, Frisbee golf, tug-of-war and other exciting activities.
The band “Peppermint James” will perform, along with other musicians.
There will be two stages and a performance tent.
Several MCC clubs, as well as, “green” vendors will have booths to help raise environmental awareness.
About 30 displays will be set up around the campus.
Liberty Wildlife will be at the event, bringing with them live hawks, eagles and falcons.
The Environmental Action Club will have a live butterfly room, participants will be able to enter the room and be surrounded by live butterflies.
During the festival, the series “planet Earth” will be shown continuously in room 196 of the AS building.
There will also be tours of the new science building, which is a LEED certified building, currently the only one on MCC’s main campus.
The idea of an “Earth Day” was a creation of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who had struggled for many years to bring the state of the environment into the political arena.
Long before the age of instant communication, a true grassroots movement began, and on April 22, 1970, millions of people came together to make a statement about their concern for the environment.
Since that time, many organizations have been created in defense of the environment, and many battles have been fought in the political arena on its behalf.
For some time, the environmental movement seemed to be losing its momentum, but in recent years, with advancements in scientific research and the awareness of global warming, and even more recently with the relationship between environmental sustainability and economic realities, it has once again become a major issue.
The Environmental Action Club, which began in 1989, had gone dormant for a semester, but was restarted last September when its current president, Bec Veerman, heard about the club and decided to get involved.
“Our primary goal is to raise environmental awareness, but we have fun, too,” Veerman said.
“We go on service learning trips, like to Boyce Thompson Arboretum, where we worked on a service project, but then we took some time to go hiking,” Veerman added.
Recently, the club helped clean up the grounds of a women’s shelter in Phoenix and is planning to return to put in a vegetable garden.
Ron Dinchak, one of the clubs’ founders, and the faculty adviser for the past 20 years, said, “We’ve always been a small group of dedicated people who try to get a few things done each semester.
“From my perspective, I’d like to see the club as a learning experience for the students,” Dinchak added.
The club worked with second-graders on science day, held plant sales on campus and organized the earth day events.
The Environmental Action Club meets every Thursday at 3 p.m. in room LS 202.
