Green Week 2014 began with its Kick Off event on Monday on the Keyser Quad. Environmental groups, including Real Food Hopkins; Students of Environmental Action (SEA); the Environment, Energy, Sustainability & Health Institute (E2SHI); Homewood Recycling and Refuel Our Future collaborated to increase environmental awareness among the student body.
“Green Week is a Hopkins event to celebrate sustainability on campus. It’s meant to be the fall semester’s equivalent of Earth Week. The idea came from Refuel Our Future, the fossil fuel divestment campaign group, and the entire week was planned jointly by Refuel Our Future and Students for Environmental Action (SEA),” junior Nikita Singh, president of SEA, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Each affiliated group organized Green Week events that speak to its individual purpose. Refuel Our Future asked various students to photo petition for an environmental cause, Real Food Hopkins prepared a presentation on humane food with a dish of hummus, Homewood Recycling prepared corn hole for awareness and SEA gave out free plants.
“This is the first ever Green Week at Hopkins, with hopefully more to come in following fall semesters! Huge events like these are a great way to bring together all of the environmental groups on campus and showcase their great work. It also combines our effort in involving the greater student body,” Singh wrote.
Sophomore Maggie Weese, a member of SEA and Refuel our Future, explained why the environmental groups organized Green Week.
“It’s more of an awareness event,” Weese said. “It’s cool to have a lot of the environmental groups on campus come together. I feel that there aren’t a lot of opportunities to get together and advocate for all environmental issues — not just fossil fuel divestment, not just food, not just advocacy, but all of them.”
She stated that Green Week was also designed to advertise the groups’ work to a wide variety of students.
“[All the events] all kind of meet different niches. If you’re more into advocacy, or if you’re more into issues related to policy, I might recommend going to the Disruption screening. If you’re more interested in the infrastructure-based stuff, I would recommend going to the event on Thursday — the Sustainable Action Speaker Series,” Weese said. “It really depends on what you like.”
On Wednesday, Refuel Our Future hosted a screening of Disruption, a film that emphasizes the effects of ignoring climate change.
“[It is] a film about the lead-up of the climate rally that happened in March,” Weese said.
Junior Nava Rastegar explained the difference between SEA and Refuel our Future.
“The climate march happened around the beginning of the school year. We have SEA here, but our group, [Refuel our Future], is a little bit more political and based on infrastructural change, which is what the climate march is about: encouraging world leaders. Obviously we’re just in the Hopkins community. We thought it was a cool way to tie back to students as well,” Rastegar said.
The week-long event will include various proceedings hosted by the different environmental groups. On Thursday, Green Week will feature a seminar titled “Roadmap for Successful Urban Agriculture,” hosted by E2SHI, along with the Sustainable Action Speaker Series, which is hosted through a partnership among SHIP, Take Back The Tap and SEA.
“This event is meant for Hopkins, organized by Hopkins students,” Singh wrote. “Hopefully, students can learn about all of the environmental groups involved with this week, the importance of the issues the groups are targeting and how they could possibly get involved. Green Week is not just a reminder to act sustainably — recycle, conserve water, eat responsibly — and also why it’s important. If we can inspire just one student to think more about what they’re incinerating, recycling and composting, then Green Week has served its purpose.”
