For a few hours Saturday afternoon, live music and Frisbee-throwing students wrapped the campus in a web of feel-good activism. A beach ball designed as a globe bounced from one end of the crowd to the other.
More than 300 students celebrated Earth Day on the Parade Ground during the six-hour festival, which included free red beans and rice, live music from six different bands, pottery demonstrations, face painting and booths supporting peace and progressive issues.
The Student Environmental Action Coalition sponsored “Diggin’ the Earth Day” for students and Baton Rouge community members who felt the downtown Baton Rouge Earth Day did not reflect the true spirit of environmentalism, said Lee Guilbeau, SEAC treasurer.
“The downtown Baton Rouge Earth Day is one of the top five largest celebrations in the country, but it’s sponsored by Exxon and International Paper, those horrible polluters worldwide,” Guilbeau said. “It seems like a conflict of interest.”
Earth Day is officially April 22, but the downtown Baton Rouge festival was last Saturday. SEAC organizers held Earth Day on campus a week after the “corporate Earth Day,” Guilbeau said.
SEAC organizers, who have been planning the event since January, said two concerns drove them throughout the process — first, to make the festival free to the public, and second, to do it without corporate sponsorship.
Guilbeau said those concerns made their Earth Day different from the one downtown, where the food is not free, and the emphasis is on buying things.
The Residence Hall Association and the late-night activities branch of Student Government helped fund the event’s security and food, Guilbeau said.
Traditional Indian dancing and drum circles interspersed live music from local bands like Brother and Poor Harvey. Other students played didjeridoos or home-made trumpet-like aboriginal instruments made from clay or wood.
Security officers asked the College Republicans to leave when the organization’s members were unable to provide reasons for having a booth as part of Earth Day, Guilbeau said.
The organization was conditionally invited if they could prove they would advocate environmental causes, Guilbeau said. Once they did not, they were asked to leave.
“It’s a conflict of interest,” Guilbeau said. “It’s like having hamburgers at a vegetarian dinner.”
The organizers included trash composting methods into their celebration in an attempt to leave the Parade Ground free from any garbage the following day, Guilbeau said.
SEAC members asked students to put all the leftover food in separate containers from the recyclable materials. Organizers would wash all the dishes that had been used for food afterward, Guilbeau said.
April Tauzin, an English senior, said the composting and recycling awareness was one of the reasons she liked the celebration on the Parade Ground better than the one downtown.
“After Earth Day, they have to have cleanup crews go in and clean up all the trash, which is really ironic,” Tauzin said of the downtown celebration.
Greg Waldron, Vegetarian Society vice president, said he felt the celebration was more in the spirit with the original Earth Day.
“There’s more against-the-grain groups here as opposed to Exxon,” Waldron said.