Earth Day is celebrated globally on April 22, but UW-Madison’s Office of Sustainability, along with other student groups, is dedicating an entire week to celebrating earth and learning about sustainability.
While UW-Madison has organized events around Earth Day in the past, this year’s focus has shifted to focus on sustainability in the life of the individual, as well as in the broader context of society.
Nathan Jandl, communications director for the Office of Sustainability at UW-Madison, said it is important to address sustainability on all levels because it impacts many different parts of society.
“[Sustainability] is something that everyone can do in certain ways, but we’re not only fixating on individual action,” Jandl said. “We’re trying to look at sustainability in the context of race and class. We’re trying to see it as part of the larger systems that operate in our lives.”
The Earth Week events range from painting pots to swapping clothes to discussion panels. Leah Johnson, ASM sustainability chair, said the events were created to accommodate a variety of interests and to make Earth Week useful to every student.
“[The events] are fun and they’re engaging and they’re interesting, and they extend across a wide variety of fields,” Johnson said. “We’re relating sustainability to so many other areas of life and society, and that’s really important.”
While some people talk about sustainability and environmentalism, many people don’t fully understand what those words mean, Jandl said. Earth Week will help students gain a better understanding of sustainability, so they can implement sustainability into their own life.
“We want to make sustainability feel like something that’s a shared value across campus, and if we can hold events that appeal to people in a number of different ways and show them all the different ways in which they can see sustainability in their own lives, then we hope that will have a positive impact.”
Earth Week events commence Monday evening with a compost workshop in the Red Gym, and will continue through Monday, April 23. The events can be found on the Office of Sustainability’s Facebook page.
