Today's Earth Day celebration marks the high point of a term's work by the Environmental Studies Department of the Dartmouth Outing Club to plan events promoting environmental awareness.
ESD Members have worked to preserve forests in Northern New Hampshire, organized plans for an organic garden and lobbied to make the Collis Cafe more environmentally conscious.
Last Monday, several members traveled to a Concord, N.H. town meeting to voice their opinions on the future of the Northern Forest, which is home to Dartmouth's Second College Grant and is the largest contiguous forest north of the Mississippi. It encompasses parts of Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York.
At Monday's town meeting, 33 Northern Forests Land Council recommendations regarding the preservation of the forest lands were addressed and debated. The recommendations met with some criticism.
ESD Co-chair Todd Steiner '94 said the Council's recommendations were vague in proposing policy implementation and ignored specific mention of harmful forest practices.
Steiner said the recommendations "didn't go far enough in advocating the current use of taxing, which would encourage long term control and stewardship of the land."
Another major project for the ESD this term is planting an organic garden they will eventually be able to harvest.
The idea for the organic garden was first proposed in 1991 as an Environmental Studies 50 class project. The ESD has recently taken control of the project and created an organic gardening club to oversee it.
Jessica Murray '96 is in charge of the garden, which encompasses a half acre of college-owned land at Fullington Farm off Route 10. If the garden proves successful, Murray said she believes it will eventually be expanded to two acres and will sell its products to the Collis Center.
If all goes as planned, by late summer Collis will be serving the vegetables grown and harvested by ESD students, according to a DOC bulletin.
The ESD has already spent time "environmentalizing Collis," which included convincing Collis to sell "Enviro-silverware" and mugs, putting up signs asking students to use only as many napkins as necessary and distributing recycling bins throughout the building.
Collis Cafe has been criticized for being un-environmentally conscious because it continues to use plastic utensils instead of silverware. But Collis Cafe Manager Cynthia Crutchfield said Collis has been doing its best within its limited resources and has always been open to suggestions.
Crutchfield said an experiment by the Collis Cafe in Spring of 1991 of providing silverware on a 26-day trial basis produced disastrous results, including losing 965 pieces of silverware. She said that kind of loss would amount to more than $8,000 annually.
She said Collis has cooperated with the environmental movement by recycling tin, aluminum, newspapers and cardboard and placing dozens of green recycling bins around the building.
One of the ESD's more recent aims has been to reverse the negative backlash that has emerged against the environmentalist movement. In keeping with this aim, the ESD will be holding a concert today to celebrate Earth Day.
On Tuesday the ESD will sponsor a speech by Gilbert Pilot, a native Innu activist, who is active in the continuing fight against Hydro Quebec.
Pilot's speech signifies continued ESD actions against Hydro-Quebec, which brought so much controversy to the Dartmouth campus just one year ago. The speech will take place at 8 p.m. in 2 Rockefeller.
