COSAS celebrates Earth week with eco hunt, birdhouse building, bike-to-breakfast, more
The Utah State University Christensen Office of Social Action and Sustainability held a series of events for Earth Week, where students could join in celebrating the planet.
Starting on April 8, COSAS kicked off the week with an eco hunt and clothing swap. Events ran until April 22, including a bike-to-breakfast event, an art exhibition and award ceremony and a community garden service project.
Ella Leonelli, the COSAS student engagement lead, was in charge of planning Earth Week this year. She is a junior in the environmental engineering program.
“A lot of the events are crossover events this year,” Leonelli said. “I love encouraging people from diverse backgrounds to attend events. It’s not about education; it’s about creating experiences around sustainability, so that’s what I am trying to do.”
These crossover events with other departments, such as the art and engineering programs, were to include other aspects of the school to further its mission.
“There’s little ways you can be sustainable in every facility and every facet — there’s so many ways to practice sustainability that we just overlook,” Leonelli said. “You don’t have to be perfect. It’s just making little changes towards the right cause, and I think that having crossover events allows for that experience along with education.”
Mercy Smith, a sophomore studying management and restoration of aquatic ecosystems, worked alongside Leonelli to put on the events. Smith is on the Earth Week council and helped run the birdhouse-making activity.
“We made birdhouses out of recycled stuff from the Idea Factory, which is the College of Engineering maker space area,” Smith said. “The idea was to create an event that’s a crossover between sustainability and engineering. We got to build things using sustainable materials, and I think getting the College of Engineering involved with sustainability is really important.”
COSAS’s commitment to get everyone involved expands past other educational programs into other groups around USU.
“On the 12th, we have Creation Care,” Leonelli said. “That is with a religious group on campus. They asked if they could do an event about stewardship and how the Bible talks about taking care of the earth.”
The events had a variety of vegan food options, and COSAS wants to push for sustainability in every aspect of its activities.
“Most of the food that we served was actually donated to us by the community, which is cool, and we’re very grateful that we have such a supporting community for events like these to celebrate Earth Week,” Leonelli said. “We support having at least one meatless day a week here.”
On April 15, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art hosted an Impact Art Exhibition and Annual Sustainability awards ceremony. The exhibition featured art students submitted that demonstrated sustainability. This year’s first-place winners were Elsa Cole, Kaden Francis, Samantha Greene, Jacob Clawson and Lele Bonizzi for their sculpture representing plastic use titled, “Ripple Effect.”
Karis Pace works for NEHMA and said the museum was happy to have the Earth Week art on display.
“The impressionism was sort of founded on the basis of capturing the little flighting moments in nature,” Pace said. “That in and of itself is important because nothing is ever the same in nature. One of my professors always said that we exist in a series of nows, so whatever is in the past is just an abstraction. It’s important to have visual records, especially artistic visual records of what the world and nature looked like. It reminds everybody that the world has existed before, and it’s up to us to keep it somewhat decent.”