STARKVILLE – Some say it’s just not easy being green.
But a Mississippi State University student organization aimed to teach Starkville residents about easy ways to be more environmentally conscious during its annual Earth Day Fair Saturday.
Students for a Sustainable Campus held its first off-campus Earth Day fair Saturday at Fire Station Park downtown to reach more people and spread the word on environmental sustainability methods that the average person can use in their day-to-day life.
Club president Emma Van Epps said the new fair was meant to show people how to be more aware of their surroundings and use the local environment to be more sustainable through educational workshops.
“This is a new thing that we’re doing,” Epps said. “We’re hoping to make it an annual festival because we wanted to have an outlet for the community to get together and celebrate Earth Day but also to spread some educational resources.”
Campaign manager for the club, Grant Peterson, said having the fair at Fire Station instead of on campus also helps more people become aware of the organization.
“We really wanted to expand it to the community because there is kind of that town and gown divide, and we want to help bridge that gap,” Peterson said.
To do this, Epps and Peterson invited six vendors to teach locals about efforts to preserve natural habitats, vegetation and even local projects to help preserve watersheds in Starkville.
Those workshops included sessions with sustainability landscapers, experts on foraging for certain foods, plants and edible fungi, conservation efforts and even ways to can and ferment vegetables and fruits.
One vendor, landscape designer Toby Gray, taught event goers about planting local vegetation that pollinators – such as honey bees, hummingbirds and butterflies – can use to maintain their populations and grow other plant life.
Those plants include native species such as red buckeye, a bush with red flowers, butterfly milkweed, an orange flower and even oak trees, which birds, squirrels and other animals can use as homes and also as a food source, eating the acorns that fall to the ground in the fall.
“There are a lot of native plants you can learn a lot about here,” he said. “You can plant more native plants, use less irrigation, shrink the size of your lawn and use plants in the garden that are beneficial to wildlife.”
Another vendor, Tim Schauwecker, an MSU professor of landscape architecture, taught about efforts to preserve the Catalpa Creek watershed and provided people tips on how to keep local waterways in Starkville healthy.
Schauwecker said there are plenty of ways to help keep local streams and creek environments clean. He suggests that people who live near streams avoid blocking the water with dirt or concrete, as well as picking up trash around streams that fish and other wildlife use
Even mowing the lawn less frequently could help to provide local wildlife and vegetation with more available resources to grow and have fewer pollutants in the water such as pesticides, which can harm plants and animals.
“That would allow some bigger vegetation to grow,” he said. “You would have some clumps of grasses and flowering species that would come in. You’d start to see more things like dragonflies and amphibians if you can establish that practice.”
One of the event goers, Peyton Bryant, said he liked the fair having the workshops because they taught people about ways to be more active with their environment.
“I think it’s absolutely important for people to learn more about sustainability,” Bryant said. “It’s just trying to find more local native plant species to use and I think that I can definitely learn a thing or two from this.”
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