2019 Campus Sustainability Month Schedule

We are excited to offer a full slate of programming for Campus Sustainability Month. All of these events are free and open to the public, no rsvp necessary. Please note this calendar is subject to change. These events are brought to you by the Sustainability Center at Oakton, the Environmental Studies Concentration, and special support from the Center for Campus Inclusion and Diversity for Indigenous People’s Day.

Indigenous People’s Day

Join us for a gathering and land acknowledgement, followed by a native plant walk with Oakton alumnus, Gina Roxas. This event is put on in coordination with the CCID.

Monday, October 14

• 12:00pm gathering, land acknowledgement, and blessing
• 1:00 pm native plant walk

Des Plaines Campus, meet at the Lee Center outdoor classroom (rain or shine)

Creating Justice: A Celebration of Art in People’s Movements, April 20

Saturday, April 20, 2019, 1 – 8 p.m., Oakton Community College, Des Plaines Campus

• Workshops, presentations, and art making from 1 – 6:30 p.m. (Ten Hoeve Center)
• Free dinner and live music show by ¡ÉSSO! from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. (Oakton Cafeteria)
• This event is free and open to all. Please register! Full schedule coming soon.

Presentations, workshops and performances:

Earth Week 2019, Session Descriptions

Visit here for a calendar of events.

Bird Walk: Paul Gulezian, assistant biology professor (Dress for the weather and wear comfortable shoes.) Walk the grounds of the Des Plaines campus and discover what birds are living near us or visiting for the season. Binoculars and field guides will be provided.

Wildling Kin: Chicago’s More-than-Human Worlds:Gavin Van Horn, Director, Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature Stories provide a bridge between the sciences and the humanities, offering a critical means of communicating and reflecting upon urban wildlife issues. Join Gavin Van Horn, the author of The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds (University of Chicago Press, 2018), in exploring the importance of story as a means to knowing the city and its nonhuman denizens. Van Horn will highlight his recently published book as well as the “City Creatures” project, which he leads for the Center for Humans and Nature. Comprised of an interdisciplinary collective of authors and artists, this project utilizes the power of art, poetry, and personal narrative to draw attention to urban animals and our shared urban habitats. Van Horn will draw examples from the City Creatures Blog; the edited volume City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press, 2015); and The Way of Coyote to illustrate the ways in which stories can deepen appreciation for the ways in which our lives are entangled with urban wildlife. Funding provided by a grant from the Oakton Educational Foundation to the Environmental Studies Concentration.

Earth Week 2018–Session Details

For a quick, shareable pdf of our Earth Week events, click earthweekpstr18LR. For details about each of the sessions, see below!

Earth Day 2018 Event Descriptions:

Events are open to the public, unless otherwise noted, no RSVP required*

Earth Week at Oakton, 2018 Events

We are so pleased to announce our 2018 Earth Week events here at Oakton Community College. Check out the calendar below and visit here for details on each session. All of these events are free and open to the public, though we do ask for pre-registration for a couple of them. Please share with your friends and colleagues!

earthweekpstr18LR

 

 

Digital Campaigner–Entry Level Position, Environment America

Work as if our planet depended on it

BECOME AN ENVIRONMENT AMERICA DIGITAL CAMPAIGNER

We need to build a greener, healthier world with clean air, clean water and clean energy. We approach this challenge one step at a time, putting the environment first at every step along the way.

Imagine using your sharp writing skills and strategic digital content to promote solar power. Or putting your talent for social media to use to keep local waters clean and ban fracking. Imagine running online campaigns to build the organizational power—the funds, the membership, the activist base and more— that it takes to keep all of this critical work going for the long haul.

Creating Justice 2017

Being sustainable is about more than protecting the natural environment–it also involves protecting and caring for people and the communities we live in. Join us on Earth Day, April 22 for our annual Creating Justice symposium. Please feel free to share this pdf widely. The event is open to the community, though registration is requested.

Earth Week 2017 Events at Oakton Announced!!

Join us for our annual Earth Week Events at Oakton Community College, April 17-22. Feel free to share this pdf version and post (with permission) wherever you see fit! Thank you for helping us to spread the word on these amazing events to learn, engage with others, and make a difference at Oakton and in your communities!

Banning the Bottle at Oakton

On November 1, 2016, Oakton Community College’s “ban the bottle” campaign became official. Bottled water will no longer be sold in our cafeterias, vending machines, or at catered events. This initiative, powered by students in an Honors course and carried on by Students for Social Justice, is a clear example of the broad impact our students can have on their surroundings when they work with dedication, passion, and research. To learn more about their role in making this initiative happen, please check out this Chicago Tribune article from April 2016.

The purpose of the initiative is to draw awareness to the social implications and environmental impacts of the bottling process. Among the many concerns:

• Privatizing water sources drains wells and aquifers, hurting farmers, communities, and ecosystems.
• Bottling companies are not subjected to the same regulatory and health testing as municipal water sources, so it is hard to determne the safety of the water.
• Often, bottling companies are bottling filtered tap water and selling it back to you for 240 to over 10,000 times the cost.
• Three liters of water are required to produce one liter of bottled water and only 27 percent of bottles are properly recycled, ending up in oceans and landfills instead.

To find out more, please visit www.banthebottle.net.

Refill your re-usable bottles with filtered water at our hydration stations in the cafeteria and other sites throughout campus. It is important to note that both Des Plaines and Skokie provide clean, safe drinking water which is subjected to intensive regulatory testing on an annual basis. Please check out their respective websites to download the most recent water quality reports.

Village of Skokie, Public Works Department, Water and Sewer Division

Des Plaines, Water System Division

As a proactive step in verifying health and safety of drinking water on campus, we worked with a contractor to sample our water fountains and fill stations. The results indicate high water quality on both campuses. Read the full water testing report.  Follow up water testing was conducted for points that showed slightly elevated levels of copper, which were eliminated/reduced by flushing the system. It is now part of our regular maintenance schedule to flush to our fountains in order to maintain high water quality.

During the month of October, we also held a water taste test on both campuses to raise awareness of the ban and see if individuals really did have a preference for bottled water. We were pleased to discover that water from our filtered hydration stations on campus came in at the top!

For questions and concerns, please contact greenteam@oakton.edu.

Farmworker Justice Teach-In, November 7

Join your peers and faculty in a unique opportunity to learn from the Coalition of  Immokalee Workers (CIW) and find out why there is a call to boycott Wendy’s. All details below!