Cameron Butler ’28 and Ian Wang ’28 played a match of Cornhole at the Earth Festival.
Students gathered on the steps of The Den’s Susies’ terrace last Friday to watch dancers, musicians, and talented athletes perform in the 54th annual Earth Festival. However, this was just one of the events the Phillips Academy Sustainability Organization (PASC) organized this week to celebrate the Earth. PASC’s number of events was a way to raise awareness on environmental issues in an engaging way.
Earth Festival was an event to kick off a busy weekend filled with climate summits, sustainability fairs, and a hackathon, inviting students to spend time thinking about the environment around them. Adelyne Liu ’28, a performer at Earth Festival, stated the goal of the event was to bring awareness of the Earth and bring the Andover community together.
“The Earth Festival was really the main event of this week. They had a lot of performances, they had a lot of games, and food to get more people to come and participate. [It was] just getting more members of the Andover community to be aware of this problem, and also just coming together to talk about this issue related to sustainability on campus,” said Liu.
Allison Guerette, the Campus Sustainability Coordinator and a faculty advisor for the PASC, expanded on the fact that this week offered a variety of events for students to attend. She stated they were able to add new events this year while keeping annual traditions alive.
“The goal when planning Earth Week is to have a mix of events in size, target audience, topic, and format. Some events grapple with heavy topics like the climate crisis and others are for celebration. We also try to mix annual events like Earth Fest and the Youth Climate Symposium, with new events like Sustainability Hacks and the Sanctuary Stroll,” wrote Guerette in an email to The Phillipian.
Claire Bancroft ’28, an Ecoleader in her dorm, attended the Sustainability Hacks event on Saturday, whose purpose was to brainstorm solutions to climate issues on campus. Bancroft noted how the members of the Sustainability Hacks used their expertise in coding to develop various apps.
“Typically, hackathons are related to coding and solving issues with coding, but Matt Robinson [’27] and Henry Zimmerman [’27] led the event where instead of coding to solve problems, we attempted to solve the climate issue in Andover related to energy usage, water consumption, recycling trash, and compost. I ended up specifically focusing on rewilding, so wanting to rewild areas of campus and other groups created a composting app or focused on fourth meal reforms,” said Bancroft.
Lisa de Boer ’26, Co-Leader of the PASC, reflected on the PASC Youth Earth Summit, which was held on Sunday, where multiple students from other schools in the region came to Andover to learn and collaborate on the environment. Despite the plethora of events, Boer also described how the PASC continues to change different events this year to have a larger impact on the student body.
“The summit was successful in a different way, obviously we had a lot of engaged PASC members, but it was really nice to see lots of students from other schools. We had almost 40 students from other schools such as Andover High, St. John’s Prep, Groundwork Lawrence. All these places come and meet with PASC students and learn what people are doing at different schools as well as attending workshops. We had a keynote speaker and a panel of speakers and there was a lot that we learned from that day,” said Boer.
Boer continued, “One of the challenges this year was even though we did try to focus on having fewer events, there was still a lot to juggle and a lot of different things to be thinking about and planning for. We definitely had more successful and less successful events. That’s another thing that we can continue to improve next year, to reflect on what made those less successful events less successful, and how we can improve that.”
Bruce Ru ’28, reflected on the importance of taking time to learn above surface-level knowledge about the Earth. He felt that this was necessary to make an impact rather than advocating for change without ample knowledge.
“Anybody would tell you that it is impossible to deny that this is an important issue, but at the same time, with things like the environment, it is such a vague and general concept that people talk about. It gets a little bit, like ‘it’s important to recycle, global warming exists’, and it’s very tempting just to look at that and understand issues on a surface level and just walk away. There’s actually so much more to just screaming for change. There’s some very special things that you have to know in order to really make an impact,” said Ru.
