“Going green isn’t buying reusable bags, it’s that we have to buy everything that’s part of the problem. Let’s have fun and learn some skills that will save us money and help us to build up our local communities instead of supporting non-localized corporations,” said Erica Mooney, a junior at Eastern Michigan University majoring in Urban and Regional Planning.
During GREEN Week (March 19-24), the goal is for people to realize that in order to be eco-friendly, this means learning how to work in smaller communities and not focus on large corporations.
The week starts off Monday, with an open house from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in the Student Center Room 352.
As the week continues, some of the events include “Seed-Starting” at the EMU greenhouse and documentaries such as “Urban Roots.”
The Eco-Justice conference will be held on Friday in the Porter Building, and according to Mooney, “There’s more traditional conference plainer-style academic discussion that’s on Saturday.”
Mooney is part of the group leading GREEN Week at EMU, along with the Education and Activism conference.
She said the major focus of the program will take place at 5 p.m. Friday during the conference in Porter, where there will be an EMU focus group of Climate Action planning.
The focus group will be asking questions such as, “How can we embed Eastern more fully within Ypsilanti schools for sustainability?” and, “How can we integrate students and curriculum with this need to create an energy dissent plan or to create a climate action plan.”
Part of this plan means educating the lower grade levels on what it means to truly ‘Go Green.’
Mooney said, “[At a montessori] I had this seven-year-old telling me, ‘We want to lead a workshop on how to get along with each other and reach democratic consensus’.”
It is this type of awareness Mooney and her peers hope to see in all schools in the future.
Mooney pushes the Climate Action Planning event as the most important to attend because, “It’s a good place to
see what people’s visions are and what the possibilities are.
Also, what’s going on already because there’s a lot going on in Ypsilanti as far as sustainability goes. There
are a lot of individuals and businesses and non-profits that are really focused on building community through lowering energy use and consumption in general.”
Part of the event is the potluck, which brings the idea of localization rather than corporation front and center for the participants.
Mooney said the potluck is, “Where they source as much food as they can locally. We’re integrating GREEN Week and the conference by having their potluck in the same building as the conference, and inviting everyone whose invited to the conference to bring food to share.”
Beyond sharing food, Mooney said there’s a lesson to be learned, “[In] big agricultural companies, there’s something like 80 percent less nutrients in conventional produce. It’s covered in pesticides that are cancer causing and it uses up huge amounts of water. So if you compare that to a small-scaled, diversified, localized food economy, not only would you be employing immensely more people, but you would be restoring your environment.”
Mooney said the whole day is focused around similarly centralize ideas of localizing businesses and incorporating environmental restoration.
“It’s free, it’s opened to everyone. And, really, we just want people to be there because we want to share our vision. Basically to create these hard changes, we just have to work with each other. We want to create this recognition that we’re all global citizens. We all share this planet and we all need to figure out how humans can live in an economically environmentally and socially restorative way.”
