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GREENMarch strives to stimulate sustainability

Greenmarch-strives-to-stimulate-sustainability

Blaine O'Neill | for The Phoenix

Bringing GREENMarch to a close, Earthlust hosted a Make-A-Dorm-Plant Parlor Party last Thursday.

In print | April 2, 2009

At the end of Tuesday, March 31, Swarthmore’s first ever GREENMarch campaign came to a close. A project of Earthlust, the campaign aimed to increase campus awareness of environmental sustainability issues. The effort involved a variety of other activist and green groups on campus as well. Dividing GREENMarch into themed weeks, organizers addressed issues of energy-saving, transportation, food and consumption.

“Really so much of GREENMarch was about making people more aware of our lifestyles and how the choices we make while we’re going about our daily lives do have consequences,” said Elizabeth Crampton ’09, a member of Earthlust and one of the organizers behind the campaign.

“I think the most important thing is getting people to think about it. Having someone actively engaging with something that was previously just implicit, I think, is the most important part of this battle,” she said. “If they’re going to make [an environmentally unfriendly] choice then they’re going to make that choice … but the important thing is that you’re making an active choice.”

According to Zein Nakhoda ’12, a member of Earthlust and one of the campaign’s organizers, GREENMarch was also a way to give many students a platform from which to communicate their support for a stronger academic approach to environmental issues. “Tons of other campuses are really taking up this sustainability approach and environmental studies approach not as something marginal like a subset of [other departments] … but as its own interdisciplinary area of focus that is really integral to the future of all our societies,” Nakhoda said. “Swarthmore seems to be behind in that we don’t have the curriculum or the administrative support to make changes on campus.”

“All the green groups have been working with the administration to try to get the larger sustainability ethos, but it seems like they’re not going to budge, nor should they, until they feel like it’s what the student body wants,” he added.

Earthlust member and GREENMarch organizer Hannah Jones ’12 agreed with Nakhoda about the importance of the campaign in rallying support. “Our school is right now in a transition — with new administration, with a new president coming in. That was another reason why we were really pushing [GREENMarch] — to get across the fact that students really care about this issue,” Jones said.

Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61, who is a member of the Swarthmore Sustainability Committee and was involved in the publicizing of GREENMarch, agreed that the time was ripe for the campaign. “I think the existence of the sustainability committee has given a new level of visibility to this kind of effort and helped get an even more sort of prominent, institutional role in what goes on here,” Eldridge said.

This was the first GREENMarch effort, though there have been campus-wide energy-reduction campaigns in the past. According to organizers, none were of the magnitude of GREENMarch. For example, last year Green Advisors headed an inter-dorm energy reduction competition. However, Crampton said, “We wanted to make GREENMarch a month of awareness and action that spread beyond just energy reduction.”

Jones also explained that encouraging long-term changes in living habits was a large part of GREENMarch, but was something that was less prominent in the energy reduction competition. “People can make lifestyle changes here at Swat which is wonderful, but what’s much more important than that is making lifestyle changes that you will then carry with you after Swat and then hopefully expand,” she said.

Jamie Hansen-Lewis ’10, a member of the Good Food Project who was involved in GREENMarch, elaborated on the differences between the competition last year and the campaign this year. She said, “I thought this definitely brought out a lot more collaboration among a lot of different student groups … GREENMarch was a good way to get everyone, at least for this period of time, stepping together.”

“It was amazing how many groups got involved, and that was wonderful and really a big part of what we were trying to accomplish in terms of getting the entire student body excited and into it,” Jones agreed. According to Crampton, this collaboration reflects the larger spirit of the environmental movement at large. “Reminding everyone of how inclusive of a movement the environmental movement is and how everyone has a place in it is just really exciting for me personally and I think for everyone else, too,” she said.

Commenting on Good Food’s involvement, Hansen-Lewis said, “I think we really established a relationship this year that we can continue to work with in its framework for a while.”

Organizers expressed the hope that GREENMarch will become an annual tradition at Swarthmore and continue to improve and expand. And although some organizers expressed the desire to increase publicity for future GREENMarches, Eldridge said what struck him about the campaign this year was “the extent to which it has really been a message that [he] think[s] has been heard throughout the community.”