This April, Sunrise Brown is hosting “Reclaim Earth Month,” turning last year’s planned weeklong Earth Day programming into several weeks of events and collaborations with a wide array of groups, including activist and affinity organizations.
Last spring, Sunrise Brown intended to host “Reclaim Earth Week,” but the campaign was canceled in support of the encampment on the Main Green for University divestment from Israel.
Earth Day — and by extension, Earth Month — is “primarily focused on nature conservation and some of the more mainstream environmental ideas that can contribute to erasing the issue of environmental justice,” said Charlotte Calkins ’27, a Sunrise co-hub coordinator.
While celebrating Earth Day began with good intentions, the campaign has deviated from its original purpose in recent years, Emma Blankstein ’26, another Sunrise co-hub coordinator, wrote in an email to The Herald.
More recently, “corporations have used their participation in Earth Day to greenwash their devastating impacts on the environment and unjust labor practices,” Blankstein wrote. She added that in the past, Earth Day campaigns on college campuses were mostly driven by white students.
Blankstein wrote that Sunrise Brown is working to make their Earth Day events inclusive while maintaining a focus on environmental justice through involvement from marginalized groups.
“We are hoping to create a more inclusive, more expansive vision of environmental futures that everyone can see themselves in,” she wrote.
This month, Sunrise also hopes to expand conversations about environmental justice on campus to include “different communities who maybe didn’t see environmental justice as relevant to their work before,” Blankstein said, adding that the group is trying to broaden the definition of “who is able to participate in environmental justice work.”
Last Tuesday, the group collaborated with Stonewall House for an event focusing on the experiences of LGBTQ+ students in environmental justice.
Finn Tronnes ’28, Sunrise communications co-lead, said that collaborations with different student groups allow Sunrise to connect environmental justice to activities — such as music or art — that the student body is “already interested in.”
Later this month, Sunrise Brown plans to host a workshop to repair old clothes with the Brown Design Workshop, an open mic night in support of the Providence Student Union and a screen printing event with Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, according to Blankstein.
To incentivize attendance at Earth Month events, Sunrise has also organized a raffle system, where attendees are awarded a ticket for each event attended.
At the end of the month, the group also plans to release a zine on environmental justice. Tronnes said the group will reframe pieces that have already been published in existing campus publications with an environmental justice lens, writing blurbs connecting the pieces to the group’s mission. The zine will be assembled at a zine folding night with the Sol — a Latine student newspaper on campus.
Tronnes said that “by connecting with issues that people care about,” he hopes the programming will continue “bringing people into the environmental justice movement.”
Annika Singh is a senior staff writer from Singapore who enjoys rewatching Succession and cheating on the NYT crossword.
