Earth Day at Boston College
April is certainly a time of celebration at Boston College – students begin to prepare for graduation and make plans for the summer, the promise of some warmth (usually) offers a welcome reprieve from the bitter cold, and of course Spring holds three of our favorite holidays this year that start with “E.”
After searching for Easter eggs and/or reaffirming your faith in rebirths & reboots of all kinds, you might have a moment to pause, take in the spring air around you, and think about the upcoming Earth Day.
First celebrated in 1970 on April 22, Earth Day is a global holiday meant to celebrate the Earth and all its wonders particularly by demonstrating clear support for environmental activism in our current climate moment. Here at Boston College, the Greener Library Committee is thrilled to be participating at the EcoPledge Earth Day Fair on April 19th. This will be an opportunity for different community groups to come together around fighting for a more sustainable relationship with our environment.
While it can be easy to picture the vast expanses of national parks and sprawling unbothered rivers and mountains when we think of “nature,” there are opportunities to observe the small ecologies right around us – from rows of trees you might find between house blocks, a break in the sidewalk, or even a slit in a double-decker where a robin has made its home, studies continue to show that interacting with nature in any capacity has health benefits.
Here on Chestnut Hill, you can appreciate hundreds of trees with a student-developed tree map app with roots in the winning 2010 BC Geographical Information Systems (GIS) prize. Projects like these highlight the importance of considering the small plots of natural landscape that can bring us benefits like carbon dioxide sequestration and a reprieve from mental health triggers. How is your neighborhood’s access to nature? Find out with the mapping tool in this Washington Post article.
So, from the BC Greener Lib group at Boston College Libraries – Happy Earth Day! We hope you can visit the EcoPledge Earth Day fair and make a moment for the small bits of the natural world that inevitably creeps and grows its way into and around the tapestry of our busy city-dwelling lives.
