Day

Columbia’s celebrated Earth Day for a long time, and that proud tradition continues today. If you’re not spending the day getting closer to nature in Riverside Park (or just the lawns), why not check out some of the conferences and symposia the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences has planned for today?

If you want to keep your weekends devoted to entertainment instead of education, check out The Great Immensity, a piece of experimental theatre focusing on climate change. Excerpts of the play will be performed at the Elebash Recital Hall at CUNY tonight at 6:30 pm.

Did all that ecological edification and entertainment make you thirsty? Grab a reusable mug and head to Starbucks, where baristas will fill it up with free tea or coffee. And don’t just throw out that mug when you’re done! Even on non-Earth days, you can bring in a reusable mug and get it filled with coffee—it’s not free, but you do pay $0.10 than the normal customers who destroy the environment.

To really celebrate Earth Day, you should head to Roone at 5 pm tonight for ECOPALOOZA, an “Earth-minded Culture Show” full of free food, talks from professors, performances by CH Dhoom, Metrotones, and CU Swing, and even a raffle for a Kindle and other prizes! Free tickets are available from the TIC, but you need to pre-register by filling out this online environmental quiz before ordering tickets. Yeah, it’s confusing.

But if you absolutely insist on staying indoors, cooped up with your computer, we suggest procrastinating with PowerUp, the official video game of Earth Day.

Is there anything you shouldn’t do today? Yes, in fact. You should not go to Ferris, put a bunch of food on your plate, and then throw most of it out. That’s exactly what EcoReps found happened at John Jay on Tuesday. After scraping the plates, they found that in one night, Columbians wasted 236.5 pounds of food, specifically 120 meatballs, over 400 servings of pasta, and over 150 servings of vegetables, all of which could’ve fed at least 100 people.

Our home we must protect from Wikimedia Commons