Photos by PRIYA SHARMA/Daily Bruin Lynn Briance
instructs a fellow student on how to play one of the games Calpirg
designed for their Eco-Fair in Westwood Plaza Wednesday afternoon.
Senior Sunny Haskes joins Christopher
Hollis in painting over the graffiti on the walls which
line the Los Angeles River. First Lady of California Sharon
Davis thanks young volunteer Stefano
Velencia for his hard work at the river clean up Saturday.
The B Team performs for Calpirg’s Charity Night at the Westwood
Brewing Company on Tuesday night. Sandra Ikamuro
collects trash from the banks of the Los Angeles River
Saturday.
Plans made by the environmental organization CalPIRG and
UCLA’s Environmental Coalition helped make Earth Week at UCLA
quite eventful. The week began with an Arctic Slide Show, organized
by CalPIRG, on Monday, April 16. Journalist Lenny Kolm came to
speak and show slides of Arctic Wildlife. He urged students to join
the fight against oil drilling in the Arctic. “Drilling for
oil will destroy the wilderness of the last untouched stretch of
the United States Arctic coastal plain,” he said. A Charity
Night took place on Tuesday at the Westwood Brewing Company.
Several UCLA bands played and collected donations from the crowd to
benefit a number of organizations, including CalPIRG. CalPIRG held
an Eco-Fair in Bruin Plaza Wednesday. The fair provided games and
conservation information, as well as maps indicating the 24
recycling bins on campus. “We want people to know that there
are places on campus where they can, and should recycle,”
said CalPIRG member Merriah Fairchild. CalPIRG’s main event
took place on Saturday, Earth Day. Dozens of people from UCLA,
central Los Angeles, Hollywood, Pomona, Long Beach and Venice
converged in the City of Cudahy to clean the Los Angeles River. The
volunteers included children, college students and adults. As
official sponsors of the event in conjunction with CalPIRG, First
Lady of California Sharon Davis as well as State Assemblyman Marco
Firebaugh, D- Cudahy, also attended the event. For three hours, the
volunteers walked around the river banks with rubber gloves and
trash bags and picked up all the visible trash. Other volunteers
helped repaint the graffiti-covered wall that runs along the river.
Volunteers took a lunch break to listen to a number of speakers,
including First Lady Davis and UCLA CalPIRG Chapter Chair
second-year student Alyssa Scullion. Scullion thanked everyone for
the help and support, while Davis encouraged the crowd to make Los
Angeles, as well the rest of the Earth, a more livable place for
all of its people. In addition to CalPIRG’s events, the
Environmental Coalition held two events on Tuesday and Thursday.
Both events consisted of panels with speakers who dealt with such
topics as environmental challenges, fair trade and sweatshops.
Participants of Earth Week thus kept themselves busy, and from the
large turn out at all of the events, it seems that more and more
students are becoming environmentally conscious in the 21st
century.