Throughout the month of April, the Sustainability Office has coordinated and endorsed events happening on campus and around Middletown to celebrate Earth Month. The month’s variety of events that promote awareness and action of environmental issues is centered around Earth Day, which was celebrated globally on Saturday, April 22. 

Celebration of Earth Month at the University began as a way to expand the amount of programming students, faculty, and staff could execute around Earth Day, according to Sustainability Director Jen Kleindienst.

“Earth Month evolved over time,” Kleindienst said. “Everyone has heard of Earth Day, but it became too stressful to do a bunch of events in just one day. So [we decided to] do Earth Week, but then we had different student groups and academic departments with events all [that were] overlapping, but probably attracting the same audience. So we just called April ‘Earth Month’ and now we have some more time to do different events.”

Earth Month officially kicked off on Monday, April 3 with a screening of climate documentary “Kiss The Ground” (2020) in the Goldsmith Family Cinema. Highlights from the first week of programming included lectures and discussions of books and arts led by a range of University faculty and students, as well as guest speakers and artists.

Additionally, compost interns Emma Singleton ’23, Peter Fulweiler ’23, Dane Thompson ’24, and Devin Sturtevant ’25 hosted a Clean Plate Challenge in Usdan University Center on Friday, April 7. From 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., when lunch was served in Usdan Marketplace, the interns collected food waste from students in a clear bin and any student whose plate was clean was entered in a raffle to win a $25 gift card to Neil’s Donuts. By the end of the lunch period, they had collected about 60 pounds of food waste, Singleton explained.

She added that her team hoped that the clear bin of food waste—which was later composted—would draw students’ attention to the abundance of food that is wasted during a single meal period. 

“[The bin is] a real visual reminder of food waste, which is one of our biggest environmental problems,” Singleton said. “I think [about] fifty percent of our landfill mass is food waste. If that was all composted, that would be a huge win for the environment.”

Fulweiler added the food collected that afternoon was a relatively small representation of the amount of food wasted on an average day at the University.

“We talked to one of the kitchen staff, and they said, [that] three of [the bins] get filled up with food waste at the end of a busy night,” Fulweiler said. “We did it [during] a Friday lunch. It wasn’t the [busiest time], so we still didn’t fill up a whole bin ourselves on a Friday.” 

Singleton highlighted other goals of the challenge, hoping that it would remind students to be cognizant of the amount of food they are taking.

“[We wanted] to get people to really consider what they’re putting on their plate,” Singleton said. “We know it’s hard because [at] classics, kosher and [the Mongolian grill stations], you get a portion you can’t control, but if you see that you get a huge classics plate, don’t put a bunch of more chicken tenders on it if you don’t think you’ll finish all your food.”

The compost interns also sat in the dish room during the challenge, using the opportunity to engage students about how they can compost on campus.

“One goal was to make sure that everyone knows what they can do with their food waste on campus,” Singleton said. “By placing ourselves right there in the dish room, we had a big chance to interact with a bunch of people and spread that awareness.”

Ultimately, Singleton hopes to raise awareness of composting as a simple and effective solution to environmental issues that students can incorporate into their lives almost immediately.

“Composting is an underrepresented solution in the environmental movement, because not everyone has the opportunity to interact with it,” Singleton said. “Some cities don’t have compost programs, so if you live in a city, and you don’t have a backyard to do it, then you might not have the chance. Since we’re all here at Wesleyan, and we do have the chance to think about food waste and to compost the food waste we do make, we want to make sure everybody knows how to do that, where they can do it, and why they should do it.”

Earth Month has also seen a series of events and discussions centered around “Ocean Filibuster”—a play about environmental justice directed by Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl. Pearl gave some insight into the play and how it explores the complex relationship between humanity and the ocean.

“My company made ‘Ocean Filibuster’ to explore our relationship with the ocean—a relationship that is so vast it’s hard to comprehend,” Pearl wrote in an email to The Argus. “And yet it’s also incredibly intimate…. We wanted to make a play that brings the audience into awareness of all these different relationships we have the ocean, the different ways we’re connected, and then offer the possibility of another way to think about the ocean, to be with the ocean by letting the Ocean itself point out the traps our Western, capitalist, patriarchal mindset has laid for us.”

Pearl also explained how the play uses a personified version of the Ocean to fight for its own preservation in a future global society that thinks the human race will be better off without it. Jenn Kidwell will portray both the Ocean and the other lead character, supported by an “ocean ensemble” of University students. PearlDamour, Pearl’s production company, worked alongside ocean scientists to combine several forms of performance to immerse audiences in the show’s central debate. Each performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

Earth Month has also sparked the return of a student sustainability group, the Environmental Sustainability Network (ESN). Eco-Facilitators Co-Coordinator B Frankenstein ’25 explained why some team members of the Sustainability Office have worked to revive the group.

“This semester, I’ve had the unique experience of being able to talk to sustainability-oriented people from all over campus,” Frankenstein wrote in an email to The Argus. “Over these conversations, the same frustrations came up over and over again…. Our vision is to create a platform for collaboration, communication, and organizing on sustainability/environmental issues on campus and in the greater community. We want to connect individuals, clubs, and any other stakeholders to bridge overlapping work and organize behind common issues.”

The group’s organizers held an interest meeting on Sunday, April 23 to determine the sustainability issues on campus that students are the most concerned about and decide what the structure of the ESN might look like going forward. Frankenstein encourages students across campus to reach out to them and their co-organizers to get involved with the renewed efforts.

“It’s important for us, as Wesleyan students, to recognize that we are privileged to be in a place with so many sustainable resources at our fingertips.” Frankenstein wrote. “My inbox is always open, and I actively want to hear people’s thoughts and opinions about what they’d like to see changed, what supports they’d like to see introduced, or what makes them angry about Wesleyan. To anyone who reads this article and feels passionately about sustainability, please reach out to me (bfrankenstei@wesleyan.edu) and we can set up a time to talk, chat virtually, or I can just keep you in the loop.”

To wrap up Earth Month, Eco-Facilitators Natalie Sweet ’25 and Eden Ho ’24 will lead the first event of The Climate Resource Pact. Sweet explained how through the Climate Pact, students will work together with local businesses to strengthen sustainability efforts across Middletown.

“In short, we communicate with organizations and local businesses in Middletown such as Amazing Grace, Reboot Eco, and St. Vincent’s Soup Kitchen, and determine a list of items (e.g. warm socks, thermos, waterproof bags) that they have expressed needs for to organize into relief kits,” Sweet wrote. “A large part of the pact is to also democratize access to disaster relief education and what to do in the event of an emergency, which includes research on climate change and local resources (helplines, emergency shelters, etc) that are put in the kits as guides. We give these kits to local [organizations], who then are able to distribute them to members of the community.”

The Pact will begin with a workshop at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 4 in the Downey House lounge, where students will learn to assemble the kits for distribution. The organizers hope students will attend to learn more about the impacts of climate change in Middletown and the surrounding area.

“We will be having a workshop hosted by the Sustainability Office, Wesleyan CERT Emergency Response Team, and Sunrise Movement to facilitate discussions around climate resilience, community building, and what Wesleyan can do better, which will be followed by assembling the kits going to Middletown,” Ho wrote. “We’re hoping that lots of people come and become more aware of emergency preparedness and the effects of climate change in Middletown! I remember a lot of the community was left stranded and confused during specific instances when hurricanes would blow through campus over the late summer and wreak havoc on power supplies, and when the Butts experienced severe flooding and caused everyone to evacuate and sleep at the Freeman Athletic Center overnight.”

Kleindienst hopes that the programming hosted throughout Earth Month will encourage attendees to learn more about environmental issues and to use newfound knowledge to take personal action to reduce environmental issues.

“The goal is to get people to internalize what they’ve learned and then it might encourage a change, whether it’s something individually, something more collective, something more systemic, ideally, at all of those levels,” Kleindienst said. “That’s pretty much [the goal] everything we do in the office. We’re trying to get people to think [beyond] ‘Oh, I just learned something is interesting.’ We have a lot of global problems, social problems, environmental problems, and we all really need to be part of the solution. We’d like people to be inspired to take action in whatever way that looks for them.”

Emma Singleton is a distribution manager for The Argus.

Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu.