As part of an effort to reduce the University’s carbon footprint, student group Working for Intelligent Landscape Design at Wesleyan (WILDWes) plans to re-landscape the campus, beginning with a project to transform the once barren courtyard of West College (WestCo) into a fertile garden filled with native vegetation. The initial landscaping began during the summer and is currently underway in preparation for fruit tree planting in the spring.
“I feel like when I tell people about the [WestCo] project, that’s when they really get hooked,” said Manon Lefevre ’14, one of the WILDWes leaders. “When they realize that there’s going to be awesome fruit that everyone can enjoy together, it would change the way our campus works. It would be a whole new way to bring people together.”
Currently, the University’s campus contains more than 100 acres of lawn. According to the leaders of WILDWes, each acre of lawn emits 641 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. By landscaping the University with native species, WILDWes hopes to significantly reduce the University’s carbon footprint.
“As it is right now, there’s this paradigm of the University landscape being buildings surrounded by paths and filled in by lawn,” said Emma Leonard ’13, another WILDWes leader. “What we’re trying to work towards is changing that paradigm to include a landscape that mimics the surrounding ecology of whatever biogeography the University is placed within.”
The landscaping changes in the WestCo courtyard represent the first step of the overall proposed transformation. While other schools such as Hampshire College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Cape Cod Community College have undertaken similar projects, WILDWes is unique both in the scale of its endeavor and the fact that it is completely student organized.
“Other schools are doing it with a bunch of university funds coming from their [university budgets],” said one of the WILDWes leaders Andrew Pezzullo ’13. “They are bringing in professionals to either design a space or teach a course and design a space. The fact that this is completely student initiated is pretty radical.”
WILDWes has designed both a club and a student forum. Within the forum, students will learn together about ecological landscaping and design the landscaped area in front of WestCo. In the spring, another student forum will implement the design and plant the trees.
Although the effort is fully student initiated, the WILDWes leaders have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of support they have received from individuals within the University community, particularly by Physical Plant, which has responded enthusiastically to the endeavor.
“The fact that Physical Plant, the group that we are critiquing, has given us so much support, shows that there’s a change here,” said Pezzullo. “Professors also have been incredibly supportive. The University also generously funded the sheet mulching work in front of WestCo this summer and have vocally offered support into the future.”
The WILDWes leaders hope that with the success of their project in front of WestCo, they will be able to “green” all of Wesleyan’s landscaping practices.
“Our goal is to gain weight, credibility, and leverage,” Pezzullo said. “We want to be one of the people at the table in composing the contract that our landscape maintenance company has with the University. We want to try to alter their contract to fit a more ecological landscape-practice paradigm.”