Kingsborough Community College

As Theodore Roosevelt once said, conserving our natural resources is fundamental. “Unless we solve that problem, it will avail us little to solve all others.” As a moral imperative, since 2005, Kingsborough’s faculty have organized an annual three-day Eco-Festival—coinciding with Earth Day—providing students, faculty, and members of the community to gather together, under a common banner, to engage in a dialogue centered on the environmental problems and challenges facing humanity at the dawn of the 21st century.

The mission of Eco-Festival is to raise ecological literacy, foster civic and global citizenship, promote meaningful dialogue about environmental issues and sustainable development, and inspire grass-roots environmental action and stewardship. Eco-Festival (www.kbcc.cuny.edu/eco-festival) is constituted by a diversity of people and activities, which include students and faculty from many disciplines, keynote speakers, panel discussions, workshops, art exhibits, community leaders, environmental activists, writers, performances, films, and lectures, all laced together by a common theme. Over the years, keynote speakers have included Andrew Revkin, Science Writer, The New York Times, and author of The North Pole Was Here and The Burning Season and James Gustave Speth, Dean of Yale University school of Forestry and Environmental Sciences, and author of Red Sky at Morning. We have included such films as Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour,” hosted by faculty members from our Biology and Physical Sciences Departments. Other highlights have included Student Town Hall Meetings organized by students from the KCC Honors Club and KCC Student World Assembly. Special events have included “The Teepee – Living in Harmony with the Earth” and an Earth Slam—Eco-Festival Day of the Arts—featuring poet George Held, author of Winged and Grounded, music and poetry by students and the Woody Guthrie Singers. Workshop titles have included “Agricultural Impact on the Environment,” “Salvaging Wild Places: Ethical Conflicts,” “Birds of NYC,” “The Nature of Kingsborough: Exploring Green/Open Spaces on Campus,” and “Planet Earth: Global Warming and Paradigm Shifting.”

As many of our students come out of impoverished backgrounds from developing countries, they bring a global perspective to the environmental crisis, and raise questions about issues of poverty, and sustainable development in an environmental framework.
Eco-Festival provides an open forum for students to participate actively by raising questions, facilitating workshops, and becoming environmentally active. Eco-Festival is a student-centered endeavor. The organizers campaign vigorously to involve students in this three-day event. We strongly believe that Eco-Festival is raising ecological literacy and fostering global citizenship about environmental issues. And, now, more than ever, its mission is to encourage others across CUNY to actively work together in an endeavor to simultaneously celebrate and sustain the diversity of life on Earth through educational activities such as Eco-Festival.

The event is free and open to the public. Around 900 people attend Eco-Festival annually.

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