This week, Mount Holyoke celebrated the earth and its people with Earth Week 2022, featuring a series of talks, presentations and workshops from students, artists, staff and alumni. The week concluded with a keynote presentation by Lubicon-Cree climate and Indigenous-rights advocate Melina Laboucan-Massimo.
Graphic by Gabby Ganon ‘24.
By Anoushka Kuswaha ’24, Helen Gloege ’23, Lily Benn ’25 & Anh Pham ’25
Science & Environment Editor | Science and Environment Staff Writers
Content warning: This article discusses anti-Indigenous violence and gendered violence.
This week, Mount Holyoke celebrated the earth and its people with Earth Week 2022, featuring a series of talks, presentations and workshops from students, artists, staff and alumni. The week concluded with a keynote presentation by Lubicon-Cree climate and Indigenous-rights advocate Melina Laboucan-Massimo.
Mount Holyoke community members from across the world joined in the largely virtual festivities to celebrate the planet and learn how to better serve it from people actively engaging in fights against climate change.
Earth Week begins with student showcase
Mount Holyoke’s Earth Week began with an event held by the Miller Worley Center for the Environment which previewed the upcoming programming and highlighted student organizations who engage with climate-related work on campus. Attendees were given schedules detailing the Earth Week 2022 events, as well as bingo cards filled with climate-related challenges that students could complete for the opportunity to win a prize.
Various student organizations were represented at the kickoff event.
The Zowie Banteah Cultural Center “promotes visibility and empowerment for Native American and communities of Indigenous people,” according to the Center’s page on the Mount Holyoke website. Their representatives presented information on the role of Indigenous people in fighting against climate change and information about the cultural center.
The Animal Welfare Association, presented on the intersection between animal welfare and environmental rights, outlining their current Jorge information campaign, which aims to educate students on proper treatment of the campus goose. For example, they emphasized that Jorge should not be picked up or fed by students.
The event also detailed The Fridge Project — a new student project that aims to take electronic appliances from students at the end of the year and store them over the summer to give them to First-Generation and Low-Income Partnership students in the fall. This would prevent these items from going to a landfill by giving them to those who need them.
The Outing Club was also present, providing information on how to get involved with active nature engagement and appreciation.
Later during the first day of Earth Week, the Class of 1971 Climate Change Workgroup, co-sponsored by the Miller Worley Center for the Environment and Alumnae Association, held a climate film discussion. The event spotlit four climate change documentary films: “Kiss the Ground,” a documentary on regenerative soils; “2040,” a film about contemporary technologies that could reverse the effects of climate change; “Smart as Rock,” a “discussion on carbon sequestration strategies” and “Earth Emergency,” a “PBS documentary on climate tipping points and feedback loops,” according to the discussion event page. The discussion ended with a screening of the film “One Ocean,” which aims to capture the beauty of nature and the grief of the climate crisis.
Olivia Aguilar, Leslie and Director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Sarah Miller spoke about how the solution to climate change “has to do with cultural identities” and systematic change through political actions, including “voting for the right administration” to push through large-scale policies that “pressure corporations doing the most damage.”
V.S. Raghavan, director of sustainability and associate director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment, added that the climate crisis would not be solved by businesses coming up with profitable solutions.
Bowie Kung ’17 points to alternative economies
The idea that corporations and capitalism are harmful to the environment remained consistent among other events of Earth Week 2022. This included the discussion and presentation lead by Bowie Kung ’17 on creating alternative economies on the second day of the week.
In her presentation, Kung stated that the solution towards a sustainable future cannot be found through capitalistic means, as the measure of capitalism will always be profit. She emphasized this point, stating that “capitalism and sustainability are like oil and water — they do not mix.” Kung further stated that investment in alternative economies is a means of anti-colonial action, a mode of healing against the oppression of colonial, capitalist systems which have exploited populations around the world in the name of progress. She cited examples of alternative economies from around the world, including the Mexican Zapatista Movement and the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative in the United States.
Kung emphasized that there are many ways those living in capitalist societies can still engage in alternative economies, stating that advocates of alternative economies should aim to “poke holes in the capitalist system, not to start living in an eco-village.” She provided examples of everyday actions that people can take towards this end, such as conscious consumption, repairing and fixing items rather than replacing them and reducing waste wherever one can.
At the end of her presentation, Kung reminded those present to remain persistent and hopeful in making change — if not for one’s own sake, then to respect the work of those who came before in fighting against systems of oppression.
“Capitalism and sustainability are like oil and water — they do not mix.”
Jen Delos Reyes speaks on collaboration & creativity
A presentation given earlier in the same day struck a similar chord to Kung’s, emphasizing community, connection and collaboration with the systems around us, struck a similar chord.
“We are the institution,” Jen Delos Reyes, a self-described creative farmer, educator, writer and radical community arts organizer based in Chicago, began. In their talk, “There Are Other Ways: Less is Enough and Other Approaches to Radical Reduction,” Delos Reyes shared their relationship with societal institutions as well as their vision on institution building and enacting cultural change.
Through their life experiences, Delos Reyes gained a tolerance for working with institutions, recognizing that institutions can be tender and vulnerable because they are built, upheld and maintained by people.
Delos Reyes was a first-generation low-income college student who faced financial and housing insecurity. Their experience of poverty and having a single immigrant mother were formative factors that made them “resourceful, adaptable and persistent.” Through their life experiences, they gained a tolerance for working with institutions, recognizing that institutions can be tender and vulnerable because they are built, upheld and maintained by people.
Delos Reyes founded Open Engagement, an organization created to support the creation of “socially-engaged art,” as described on Delos Reyes’ website. Their work as the organization’s director aimed to provide funds to economically disadvantaged artists. Delos Reyes emphasized the importance of neighborly and community bonding in the face of world crises including climate change. Open Engagement went on hiatus in 2019 after 12 years of large-scale organizing, allowing Delos Reyes and their colleagues to gain some much needed rest from the burnout associated with that level of organization.
In 2021, after using gardening as a coping mechanism to grieve their partner’s death in March 2020, Delos Reyes founded Garbage Hill Farm, located in McKinley Park in the city of Chicago. For Delos Reyes, the opening of Garbage Hill Farm meant creating a space for the surrounding community to use and where artists could rest and recharge, while also helping people see the value in the things around them, particularly in garbage.
For creative lifelong learners seeking to incorporate art into their life, Delos Reyes affirmed that making changes within systems involves considering institutions as inherently human. They emphasized the importance of community, stating that “together is better.”
However, Delos Reyes also reflected on the importance of knowing one’s own identity in a way that was not defined by the institutions around them. They emphasized the importance of self-knowledge, stating that “[everyone has] what [they] need” to give themselves agency and a sense of identity.
Sustainable Skills Workshop teaches sewing basics
Many of the sentiments invoked in both Delos Reyes and Kung’s presentations were exemplified through the Sustainable Skills Workshop, held on the third day of Earth Week.
Hosted by Jordan Lassonde ’16, assistant director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment, the workshop focused on teaching basic sewing skills to make participants’ closets more sustainable. By fixing pre-loved clothes, creating new clothes entirely or adding embellishments to existing clothes, attendees learned how to reduce individual contribution to waste by reusing pre-existing materials and giving them new life.
Taking place in the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab, the three-hour workshop allotted time for detailed step-by-step instruction of both hand-sewing, stitching and sewing machine basics. Participants practiced these skills to repair or embellish either their own clothing or the provided clothes sourced from the free bins in student residence halls around campus.
Small, sustainably-created sewing kits were provided to all who attended the workshop, giving all participants resources to continue using their skills for future clothing. All kits were contained in reused glass jars and included instructions for making your own pincushion as well as starter needles, thread, pins, a tape measure, a thread clipper and starter buttons.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo gives keynote speech
The last event of Mount Holyoke College’s Earth Week activities was a keynote presentation featuring Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Lubicon Cree activist from Northern Alberta, Canada. As an Indigenous woman, she stated that she, her community and family are impacted by the effects of colonization and capitalism every day.
“Our way of life is being replaced by industrial landscapes,” she said. Laboucan-Massimo emphasized this point with a statistic: out of seven billion people on the planet today, about 390 million Indigenous people are protecting 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Her organization, Sacred Earth Solar, was founded based on her and her community’s personal experiences while living near Alberta, Canada, close to a current tar sands excavation site, a notoriously environmentally destructive practice.
According to an article by Melissa Denchak for the Natural Resources Defense Council, tar sands are large deposits of sand, water and black bitumen, which is used to make synthetic oil. Excavating these pits is energy and water intensive, involving the strip mining of forests. Tar sand excavation was described by Stephen Leahy in National Geographic as “the world’s most destructive oil operation,” and is impacting all aspects of the environment and Indigenous communities in Alberta, including Laboucan-Massimo’s community.
During the keynote speech, Laboucan-Massimo explained that she and many others are impacted by not only the tar sands, but by many other injustices actively harming Indigenous communities around the world. In referencing healing justice, a term that acknowledges the impact of violence on Indigenous communities and aims to create solutions that work to heal this trauma, Laboucan-Massimo stated that the future involves “reclaiming our sacred connection and responsibility to protect Mother Earth.” She emphasized how the protection and healing of Indigenous communities is directly associated with the healing of damaged land and the wider climate.
Laboucan-Massimo also presented an interview she did with CNN, wherein she stated that the disproportionate numbers of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, girls and two-spirited people, have had a staggering impact on her own life as well as thousands of Indigenous families. Laboucan-Massimo’s sister was found murdered only a few months after her college graduation, and has yet to receive justice. During the video she presented, her interviewer from CNN stated that in America in 2016, more than 5,700 cases of MMIW were reported, while only 14 cases were investigated.
Highlighting the legacy of residential schools on Indigenous communities, Laboucan-Massimo said that she was the first generation in her family not to attend one. Created by the Canadian government, residential schools were boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly sent to be stripped of their culture and heritage for the purposes of assimilation into Euro-Canadian and Christian societies, according to the First Nations & Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia’s website. Laboucan-Massimo’s closest kin to survive these schools was her father.
Concluding Earth Week 2022, Laboucan-Massimo provided attendees with resources to further their education and allyship to Indigenous communities, including books, podcasts and organizations fighting for Indigenous and climate justice.
“Decolonization is a personal, systemic and collective process,” she said. “The future looks like self-determination through healing the land and healing ourselves.”
