Normally, Earth Day is only one day. This year, Quinnipiac University decided to make it a week.
Events are taking place from April 18 to April 24 on Quinnipiac’s three campuses and virtually through Zoom. Festivities kicked off on Sunday with a photo contest on Instagram and a clean-up at Sleeping Giant State Park. Students and faculty are encouraged to attend these events leading up to the annual Earth Day Fair on Thursday, April 22.
The week is being co-hosted by the Albert Schweitzer Institute (ASI) and Students for Environmental Action (SEA). There are also 21 other organizations from Quinnipiac which have partnered up in support of Earth Week.
Anna Ciacciarella, president of SEA, said she hopes for this week to be a time for unity, education and an opportunity to learn together.
“There’s been a lot of progress that we’ve made in terms of environmental sustainability at Quinnipiac,” Ciacciarella said. “We want to celebrate that and we want to do that in a space where we can have other organizations present.”
SEA is in its first year as an official chartered student organization, and the organization is at full speed. The students have been planning the week since September, Ciacciarella added.
“There’s been a lot of behind the scenes to making this week happen so I’d say it’s very important,” she said. “It’s definitely going to be the biggest event — or set of events — that we have.”
SEA has worked closely with the university on its sustainability plan, which is a part of President Judy Olian’s strategic plan. The sustainability plan sets measures for what Quinnipiac can — and should — do for environmental sustainability on campus and in the community.
“The key takeaway from earth week as a whole is the promotion of environmental activism and the encouragement of sustainability throughout all the student body, regardless of where they’re from,” said Parker Jack, a project analyst for SEA. “I think that’s what’s most important about earth week, especially the earth day fair, since we have clubs of all different backgrounds coming together in the name of environmental awareness.”
Aside from this week, SEA works throughout the year to implement sustainability efforts at Quinnipiac. This past year, the organization hosted environmental clean ups, virtual speaker events and an environmental justice awareness event in February.
SEA holds general board meetings biweekly on Tuesdays at 9:15 p.m. The meetings are open to the public and information can be found at its Instagram account @qu_sea_.
The Albert Schweitzer Institute also works to integrate green strategies into Quinnipiac’s portfolio. More recently, students volunteering for the Big Event helped out Sean Duffy, executive director for the ASI, install a rain garden and berm and swale outside the Institute.
“So these are green infrastructures to capture and hold water on the land, and to purify it there, rather than letting it run off into either the sewer system or into the Mill River,” Duffy said.
In addition, Duffy noted a Quinnipaic professor of Biology who studies native bee species will be working with students to do a census of which species exist in the Greater New Haven area. In accordance with the swale foundation — infrastructure to direct rainwater accumulate and let it infiltrate the soil inside the swale — to better understand what wildflowers would best accommodate those bee populations.
“We’ll plant it up and she’ll come back and see if it made a difference in terms of the variety and numbers of the species,” Duffy added.
A full list of events for Earth Week can be found here.
Additional reporting by Garret Reich, Matthew Bruin and Andrew Meyers
