Student organizations, research groups and local partners gathered on campus for Binghamton University’s annual Earth Day Festival and EcoBlitz over the weekend. Held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Peace Quad and Spine, the festival encouraged attendees to engage in environmentally friendly practices.

“We have over 30 different organizations here tabling,” said Martin Larocca, BU’s sustainability manager. “We have student groups, academic departments, offices on campus along with organizations from off campus as well. We’re all tabling, talking about sustainability, the impacts on the environment that we have — giving people the opportunity to learn about all these different things and, at the same time, potentially sign up to participate with those organizations.”

The Food Co-op, BU’s student-run vegan cafe, offered a sustainable alternative to traditional shopping with a clothing swap and repair. Organizations like the Binghamton Upcycle Project allowed guests to pot their own plants to take home. Other activities included a chemistry demonstration, bike challenges, trivia and a raffle.

BU Dining Services, one of the event’s co-sponsors, catered the festival and offered vegan and nonvegan options, and guests had the opportunity to taste the difference between Impossible meat and traditional hamburgers.

A new aspect of this year’s festival was a waste audit, stemming from Executive Order 22, which works toward making New York state more sustainable. The audit is required for each building on campus every five years to assess what materials are being thrown out and if they are being properly disposed of.

“Once we do those audits, we assess what’s going on,” Larocca said. “And then we can start targeting those different types of materials and say, ‘Hey, this could’ve been recycled, this could have been composted, why wasn’t it? Do we not have the infrastructure for it?’ And if we don’t, let’s go through the process of making sure we can capture all of that.”

The next day, student organizations tabled outside the Nature Preserve for the third-annual Ecoblitz festival. Local conservationists and researchers gathered on campus to raise awareness about environmental conservation and biodiversity.

Attendees were encouraged to download the iNaturalist app to document observations of plant and animal species in the area. Organizers hosted guided walks through the Nature Preserve focused on identifying plants, fungi and birds that live in the 190-acre space.

Christina Baer, a research assistant professor for the University’s First-year Research Immersion Program, said that data will be collected and logged into the app for the next two weeks as part of this campaign.

“Everything on iNaturalist is publicly available, and a lot of it also goes to a database called GBIF, which is like a global biodiversity database,” Baer said. “So a lot of it does wind up getting used by scientists in various ways, as well as people who just want to know what something is or know more about what’s in their area.”

At noon, a climate change quilt exhibit was unveiled in the Fine Arts Building’s Grand Corridor. Each of the 27 quilts on display was made with upcycled fabric and other materials to raise awareness for various environmental issues, like climate migration, impacts on medical care, droughts, hurricanes and other disasters. More quilts were displayed in Science 1, focusing on biodiversity, species at risk, future generations who will be impacted by climate change and solutions to the crisis.

Pamela Mischen, the University’s chief sustainability officer, said the project’s goal is to convince other colleges to join and eventually assemble 1,000 quilts to lay out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The project was inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which began in the 1980s to raise awareness for victims of the disease.

“Quilts traditionally have been made by scraps,” Mischen said in an interview. “So it’s a way of taking things that would have normally been considered waste and turning them into something practical and beautiful. So there’s that, and quilts were often made communally. Women, typically, would get together in what they would call quilting bees.”

“And so it was a social time as well as a productive time,” she continued. “And I think we need more of that. We need more getting together and doing things collectively.”

Mischen then introduced Meghan Fay Zahniser, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Zahniser announced that the University received a Campus Sustainability Achievement Award for its Binghamton 2 Degrees project, an initiative focusing how the local community must adapt to climate change.

After the unveiling, Mischen gave a keynote speech on the climate crisis and how people can live more sustainably. A Q&A session followed the talk.

On Sunday, climate justice organizations Zero Hour Binghamton, the University’s chapter of the New York Public Interest Research Group and Network for a Sustainable Tomorrow hosted EarthFest at Recreation Park, a celebration dedicated to combating climate anxiety.

“It’s really important to put a face with the idea of environmental importance and ecological importance,” Lee Hammond ‘24, who researches fungi in the Nature Preserve, said. “And just talking about it in more of a broad, sort of academic style, is useful but not always helpful in terms of the general public. So, to be able to get out and be talking with everyday people and communicating in ways that they can understand and interpret more easily without difficulty — it’s really a very important thing.”