30th Earth Day celebration spans a month at Cornell and in Ithaca

With more events than even a special day can handle, the 30th anniversary celebration of Earth Day (April 22) will span the month of April at Cornell and off-campus locations.

Free, public events begin April 3, with the first in a series of lectures at Cornell, and culminate Friday, April 21, with the Cornell Earth Day Fair on campus and Saturday, April 22, with an Earth Day Festival in Ithaca's Stewart Park.

Campus events are co-sponsored by many campus organizations and are being coordinated through the Cornell Center for the Environment, which maintains a web site schedule at www.cfe.cornell.edu/earthday/ , and include the following:

• Monday, April 3, at 7 p.m. in G-10 Biotechnology Building, "Learning Home -- The Bioregion, the Community and the University," by Freeman House, founder and executive director of the Mattole Salmon Support Group and author of Totem Salmon: Life Lessons From Another Species. A book-signing session will follow his talk.
• Wednesday, April 5, at 7 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall D: "Living Downstream -- Human Health and the Environment," Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment and visiting professor in Cornell's Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors (BCERF) program. The biologist was named Ms. magazine's 1997 "Woman of the Year" and currently serves on President Clinton's National Action Plan for Breast Cancer.
• Thursday, April 6, at 4:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith D: "Cultivating a Sense of Place," a lecture and reading by author and professor Deborah Tall. Tall is author of From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, the editor of Seneca Review and a faculty member at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
• Monday, April 10, at 4:30 p.m. in Phillips 101: "Environmental Careers in the 21st Century" will be discussed by Kevin Doyle, development director for the Environmental Careers Organization.

Other campus Earth Day Festival events are an interfaith celebration of the Earth in Sage Chapel on Tuesday, April 11, and a campus fair Friday, April 21. The campus fair will include booths and presentations by student groups and university programs and departments, refreshments and entertainment. Earth Jam 2000, a benefit concert for the Center for Environmental Sustainability, begins at 8 p.m. and continues through midnight in Willard Straight Hall, with the Sim Redmond Band, The Uplifters and others.

Saturday's Ithaca Earth Day Festival in Stewart Park, on April 22, is planned with more than 30 booths and displays by community organizations, musical entertainment by a dozen local bands, dance performances, nature walks, a cleanup of trash around the park, lectures on biodiversity, cabaret-style performances by Compost Theatre and a flotilla of human-powered and wind-powered boats of all kinds.

The festival is being coordinated by the Center for Environmental Sustainability and other community organizations.