Seeing students gathered around big lights and staring hopefully at the night sky is enough to make anyone question the sanity of college kids, but on Monday September 9th, that is exactly what happened at Elm Quad to kick off Pollinator week. On Monday, students gathered at Elm Quad with the Sustainability Council to celebrate the pollinators of the night– moths. Using large lights to draw them in, the goal was to catch as many moths as possible.
Pollinator Week was thrown by the Sustainability Council, as a celebration of becoming a bee campus. No, this does not mean that the university is overrun with bees; it means that we have enough flowers, trees, and plants to support various pollinators. This includes butterflies, beetles, hummingbirds, bats and of course, bees.
“There [are] a lot of lights on campus, so we didn’t catch many moths […] but we made TikToks and played music, so it was fun,” said Ashley Carey, a studio art major and member of the Sustainability Council.
Two nights later, the celebration of Pollinator week continued with Watercolor Wednesday, a chance to talk about everyone’s favorite pollinators and make paintings of them that would later be voted on at the tailgate that weekend.
Later that week, Sustainability Council hosted “A Bug’s Life” movie night, the second to last event of the week.
To wrap up Pollinator Week, the sustainability council celebrated with a “Get Buzzed for the Beez” tailgate at the Stocker Stadium Parking Lot. Using bumblebee colors, they planned a black and gold theme.
President of Sustainability Council and watershed science and geographic information major Lauren Martin explained that being a bee campus is a big win.
“We are lucky to have lots of flowers, different trees and plants that are pollinators, and so being a bee campus is like an official designation of that,” Martin said.
Sustainability in all aspects, however, is often an uphill battle.
“Behind the scenes, we work with different departments across campus to try to fix some of the systems we currently have in place and make them more environmentally friendly.”
Right now, the Sustainability Council is trying to apply for a grant to get electrical charging stations on campus, as well as trying to improve recycling on campus. In the past, they advocated for the reusable to-go boxes in the cafeteria that students now use every day.
A large project they are working on right now is expanding the composting facility at CMU Tech, which has been around for almost 10 years. Sustainability Council has is to expand that and compost food waste from the cafeteria and Devil’s Kitchen.
“We did an event with Sodexo where we weighed all of the waste students made from lunch time and it was like, 50 pounds,” Martin said.
Sustainability Council is currently working with Devil’s Kitchen to audit their food waste as well.
For interested students, information on Sustainability Council can be found at @cmu_sustainability_council on Instagram.
