Lafayette Celebrates Earth Day
By Genevieve Tarsa, Staff Writer
// As the world advances into a period of environmental unsustainability, local efforts are crucial to spreading awareness and preserving the state of the Earth.
Sustainable Lafayette hosted its annual Earth Day Festival in Plaza Park on April 21 to promote sustainability in the city.
Blueprint Photo/Cameron Powell
Since its founding in 2007, Sustainable Lafayette has been working to inspire the community to take action to better the environment. However, the city’s annual Earth Day celebrations predate Sustainable Lafayette itself. Lafayette’s Chamber of Commerce organized the first event before Sustainable Lafayette stepped in and took over.
“Sustainable Lafayette felt like it was fully within our mission to inspire people to take more sustainable actions, and that it made sense for us to take it over as the organizers with the help of the Chamber of Commerce,” Community Outreach Director for Sustainable Lafayette Pam King Palitz said.
Though the annual tradition of Earth Day has existed for years, the members of Sustainable Lafayette have worked to maintain consistency with each yearly celebration.
“It’s either our fifteenth or sixteenth Earth Day, so we’ve got kind of a template and we follow it because it’s been successful… It hasn’t changed very much,” Palitz said.
The event featured various displays, each promoting a different idea or solution to help create a more eco-friendly community. Many exhibits, like the Safe Route to Acalanes project, were locally centered.
Blueprint Photo/Cameron Powell
“Safe Route to Acalanes is a project within Sustainable Lafayette, and our mission is to build a pedestrian and bicycle path connecting Acalanes High School to the existing trail south of Highway 24,” co-founder of Safe Route to Acalanes and board member of Sustainable Lafayette Eric Law said.
Some organizations’ efforts affected areas beyond Lafayette, including those by Boy Scouts of America (BSA) Troop 200, which set its sights both in the city and around the world.
“Today, we’re trying to get shoe donations to send to a charity which sends shoes to third-world countries to recycle and reuse,” Troop 200 member and Campolindo frosh Clark Gregory said.
More than one exhibitor focused their conservational endeavors on apparel. In addition to Troop 200’s shoe donation, a local student-run countermeasure to the fast fashion industry called Project Slow Fashion, was also present during the event.
“I’m trying to combat the lack of information on fast fashion and provide people with simple solutions so that buying new clothes isn’t their first step,” creator of Project Slow Fashion and senior Elise Warren said. “I thought that [coming to the event] would be a great way to get out there and talk to people and present the information in a way that is palatable and easy to understand. It’s also just great to meet people and think of solutions with them”.
Blueprint Photo/Cameron Powell
The event’s diverse array of exhibitions and numerous potential solutions to ecological issues served as both entertainment and learning opportunities for all attendees.
“It really draws the community together. There’s something for everyone, there’s a lot of things for school children, for teenagers, and for residents of Lafayette to learn about sustainable and environmental resources in the area,” Palitz said.
Lafayette’s actions to bring awareness to the environment may have also sparked the interest of other cities that wish to follow in its footsteps.
“We’ve had a lot of questions from Orinda and Moraga about starting a “Sustainable Orinda” or “Sustainable Moraga,” so people are inspired and interested in our model,” Palitz said.
Though the efforts of the Earth Day celebration and its organizers’ are mainly centered around Lafayette, they can nevertheless set a precedent for other like-minded individuals, communities, and counties to draw inspiration from.
“The whole idea that everything is local, that environmentalism has to start at home in order to have a global impact, it’s an interesting theory,” Palitz said.
