Tufts groups are busy planning for Earthfest 2006 in celebration of Earth Day. The annual festival will take place the week of Apr. 18 and include film screenings, faculty discussions, panels and a carnival in the campus center.
"The main goal of Earthfest is to raise environmental awareness on campus," said Earthfest coordinator Amanda Fencl, a junior. "We want to keep environmental issues in everyone's consciousness... to make people realize the impact of their choices on a daily basis."
The theme of this year's festival is the children's cartoon program "Captain Planet." The week-long event will focus on the environmental aspects of earth, fire, wind, water and heart featured in the program.
These themes will be represented, respectively, by activities involving food and fair trade, energy use, climate change, water and "loving sustainability." Each day will feature activities involving one of these themes.
Last year "it didn't really have a theme," Fencl said. "This year we ... thought Captain Planet would be a very fun way to do it."
The week will kick off Apr. 18 with an Earthfest dinner at the Dewick-MacPhie dining hall. The dinner will highlight locally grown, organic and fair trade foods, as well as food waste reduction and composting.
"I'm really looking forward to the opening night with the kickoff dinner," said Earthfest coordinator Carrie Jones. "We have a great menu coming up with a lot of food we normally don't see."
Last year, Waterwatch, the Tufts chapter of an organization that monitors local water quality, sponsored a clean-up day on the Mystic river during the Earthwatch week.
Approximately 100 people volunteered, pulling trash that ranged from shopping carts to spare tires from the river and its banks.
This year's clean-up day, planned long before Earthfest, will be held Apr. 1. The group will work with the Friends of the Upper Mystic Lake, a citizen-run neighborhood group working to preserve the upper Mystic.
"We definitely have about twenty [volunteers]," Senior and Vice President of Waterwatch Maura Allaire said, adding that ECO, Pangea, Engineers Without Borders, the Tufts Football Team, Sigma Epsilon and UMass Boston WaterWatch will also be involved with the cleanup.
On the Friday of Earthfest week, Waterwatch will "set up a...display on the quad about invasive plants and the Mystic [river] watershed," Allaire said.
Among the other scheduled events are an island summer themed party and a film screening to raise awareness about Massachusetts' poor water quality.
On Earthfest Wednesday, Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Paul Kirshen and Climate-Entrepreneurship Specialist Ramsay Huntley will deliver lectures.
According to Fencl, Kirshen will speak on the "regional impact of climate change," while Huntley's talk will focus on "what Tufts is doing and what students can do [about climate change]."
Organizers are currently working on securing additional speakers.
Another highlight of the festival will be a recycled art competition and a performance by a Tufts band on the academic quad. These events will take place on Apr. 22 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fencl said that the organizers still need to finalize which band will perform.
ECO is collaborating with other student groups, including Waterwatch, Pangea, and Tufts Mountain Club, to plan events. Planning has been underway since winter break.
"Earthfest is always one of our biggest events because it's in the spring and it's fun," said Fencl. "We try to come up with creative ways to get environmental ideas across."
Marc Raifman contributed reporting to this article.
