Earth Week celebrates sustainability

The Earth Week Celebration Fair showcased student and Baltimore environmental advocacy groups Wednesday on  the Keyser Quad. The Office of Sustainability organized the fair as part of its Earth Week program, a series of environmentally-focused events which will culminate this Friday on Earth Day.

Senior Nikita Singh, Co-Director of Sustainable Hopkins Infrastructure Program (SHIP) described how the fair showcases the work of environmental advocacy groups and brings together different organizations on campus.

“It’s a good culmination for all of the [sustainability] student groups to show off what they’ve done this year…to the campus community and hopefully get others involved as well,” she said. “This is such a great community, and it’s cool seeing what people have done this year and how we can work together.”

Looking to the future of her club, Singh detailed SHIP’s upcoming project.

“The most exciting thing that is going on with SHIP is that there is a new patio going up by AMR I that’s going to be like a barbeque pit, and part of it is going have permeable pavement on it, which is basically bricks that have a little more spacing between them so that water can get through, rather than run off and take pollutants out to our water bodies,” she said.

As part of its annual VegFest, Real Food Hopkins held a cooking competition between pairs of student chefs who used locally-sourced ingredients and compostable cooking utensils.

Sophomore Ashley Xie, treasurer of Real Food Hopkins, spoke about the message their student group sought to display to the Hopkins community.

“We’re here to let people know to eat locally and source their food from ecologically-sound sources,” she said. “We collaborated with the Food Systems Working Group, and basically we try to do product shifts, so that means getting our food from local farms that promote fair trade, instead of a big industrial agriculture.”

Aiming to eliminate the University endowment’s investment in fossil fuel companies, Refuel Our Future held a photo petition that featured signs explaining why they say students should support fossil fuel divestment. The group also handed out orange pins, the color of the nationwide fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Senior Nava Rastegar, marketing chair of Refuel Our Future, explained that student involvement is needed now more than ever.

“We think it’s a great way for student voices to directly make an impact,” she said, “and we currently have a proposal to cut the school’s investment in fossil fuels being discussed in the Public Interest Investment Advisory Committee, which is the first time a divestment case has been opened since the ‘90s and the ‘80s before that, the previous cases being about tobacco companies and South African apartheid.”

Rastegar believes that to help the planet, students need to put a focus on sustainability beyond just the week-long celebration.

“[Earth Week] is a good way to get people aware of sustainability efforts on campus,” she said. “But I do think sustainability is larger than just a week, and it’s important to be paying attention to these issues year round.”

Student members at Take Back the Tap’s booth promoted affordable, sustainable and convenient sources of drinking water on campus with an interactive game for students, according to President Karina Wohlhieter.

“We promote the use of reusable water bottles over single-use plastic water bottles, so today we’re playing water pong as a way to get people to interact with water and drink some tap water and have a fun time,” Wohlhieter said.

Wohlhieter praised the event for acknowledging the efforts of the student environmental activist organizations.

“Earth Week is really important for students at Hopkins to take some time out of the year and just have a celebration of the Earth and have some visibility for these organizations on campus that do really great things throughout the year and sometimes go a little bit unrecognized,” she said.

Other student groups present included Students for Environmental Action (SEA), who gave out plants in reusable containers and the Johns Hopkins Outdoors Club (JHOC) who held a Hug-A-Tree photo contest. Some of the off-campus organizations included Healthy Harbor, Baltimore Business Energy Challenge and Relay Foods.

President of SEA and junior Hannah Farkas hoped that the fair and Earth Week as a whole would convey to students the importance of taking sustainable action in their everyday lives.

“Sustainability is definitely something that all students should be integrating into their lives, because being sustainable isn’t just something that you should do, it’s something that we need to do to make our campus more sustainable,” Farkas said. “Sustainability isn’t just for fun or for hippies — it’s a social justice issue. It’s a climate justice issue, so we’re trying to raise awareness because with Earth Day it’s a perfect opportunity to bring together students on campus.”