Cal Poly’s Green Campus team and the sustainability community will put on an Earth Week Celebration this week, featuring a movie night, panel discussion, clothing swap and more. 

Earth Week events will run Thursday through Saturday, April 23.

Friday, April 22 marks the celebration of Earth Day.

The traditional single-day celebration has been extended to a week in order to allow students to engage more extensively in learning about the environment and sustainability according to the event page.

“Obviously, Earth Day is great, but conservation and sustainability should be a year long thing. So even a week isn’t enough,” Environmental management and protection senior and Green Campus member Hope Springer said.

Springer says that the beauty of having a week-long event is providing opportunities for a variety of events for students to really find interest in sustainability efforts.

“We want students there to learn about these things that are relevant to our community and relevant to the future of sustainability in San Luis Obispo,” Springer said.

Statistics professor and Change 4 Climate founder James Oksanish says that he wants to normalize individual change for sustainability, and that’s why he founded the Change for Climate campaign.

“Currently, there really isn’t any group or hashtag, in the United States at least, that encourages other people to change for climate by pronouncing what one does for climate,” Oksanish said. “And when one pronounces what one does for climate via Twitter or email signature, it reminds other people that this is something that we should be doing.”

Oksanish formed this idea during the pandemic and began putting #ichange4climate in his email signature along with the ways in which he practices sustainability with the hopes of creating a conversation around what we can do as individuals to preserve our futures and the future of the planet.

“If you receive an email from me at random, and you read my email signature, you read the things that I’m doing for the climate,” Oksanish said. “And if you’re a climate skeptic, if you continue to receive such emails, you may start to think, well, this is maybe something that I shouldn’t be doing.”

For more information on the Change 4 Climate campaign, you can visit ichang4climate.com or follow @iChange4Climate on Twitter.

Students, faculty and staff can register to receive free Earth week swag and RSVP for events on this form. For a list of all the events and dates, visit the Cal Poly events page