Nathan Glynn is a man on a mission; he is a single student determined to bring Earth Day awareness to the Western Community. With the help of the art department, Nathan hung 1,000 plastic grocery bags up on trees all over the campus. The bags took approximately five hours to hang up were collected from grocery stores during general shopping trips.
“The bags are all going to be recycled,” Glynn said. “I think the project really made people think about how they don’t recycle. I would like to begin a dialogue among the viewers in response to what we use and discard. I want to take something very simple and familiar and replicate that on a larger scale for the impact. With this project, I want to portray our use [of bags] not only on visual terms, but in auditory terms, as well. I am hoping that the viewer will gain a sense of concern for the space around them and perhaps think twice in regard to their own personal consumption and waste production.”
Many students were left puzzled by what message the bags where trying to portray.
“I was wondering what those bags meant,” sophomore Moses Fields said. “I thought it was either a prank or a memorial for the Virginia Tech shootings.”
Junior Traci Haug agreed.
“I had no idea what it was,” she said. “They should have put some kind of sign up. I guess if they would explain why the bags were there for everybody, we wouldn’t be clueless to their meaning because it looked like trash to me.”
Since April 22, 1970, Earth Day has been celebrated by million of people all over the country to spread the message of how important it is to take care of the environment.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who said that he “was determined to forcibly thrust the issue of environmental quality and resources conservation into the political dialogue of the nation,” originally founded Earth Day.
This creation of Earth Day eventually led to the passing of the Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1977) and the setting of efficiency standards for the use of fuel in automobiles.
The University currently does not do anything on its own accord for Earth Day, but after this year’s demonstration, Glynn hopes a larger awareness campaign can be put together for next year.