Activists will gather to celebrate mother nature at City College’s Earth Day Festival where free organic smoothies and other healthy treats will be offered to the Santa Barbara community.

Earth-loving City College clubs like the Student Sustainability Coalition and Vegan Club will be tabling at the festival in support of the Earth Day Club which will be organizing and hosting the event. Jackson Hayes is president of the Student Sustainability Coalition and Associated Student Government’s commissioner of sustainability.

“It’s important to have one special day when more people are encouraged to get involved,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to increase people’s interest in environmentalism.”

The festival will take place from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Thursday, April 20, on the West Campus

lawn in front of the Luria Library.

Attendees will receive free organic smoothies, popcorn, and the chance to win many raffle prizes. At noon, the City College music department’s string quartet will perform classical music for the festival.

Students, faculty, 30 local environmental organizations and Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider herself will all come together in a combined effort to educate the community about how they can contribute to protecting and preserving the environment.

“The way I see it we are at such a critical stage in our environmental degradation that it is vital to inform people about just what a crisis we are truly in,” said Robert Coronado, president of the Earth Day Club. “Hopefully the Earth Day festival sets off a light bulb for people and they begin to realize their personal impact on the environment.”

The festival will also aim to provide students with practical eco-friendly changes they can implement in their own day-to-day lives such as better recycling methods and decreasing vehicular carbon emissions through the use of public transit or carpooling.

The Earth Day Festival will be followed by a work day Friday, April 21, at the Permaculture Garden located on West Campus from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The event will provide students with an inside look at the kind of sustainability work being done by individual City College students, clubs and coalitions on campus.

The day will include weeding, planting, and laying mulch in a group effort to further improve the rapidly growing garden. The work day will also help demonstrate to students how large goals can be accomplished when individuals volunteer their time to a cause bigger than themselves.

“Right here at institutions such as SBCC is where real change should be happening towards the future,” Coronado said.

He said that he hopes these events will help guide students away from thoughtless wastefulness and instead show them how they can make positive contributions to their local environment and the Earth every day.

“We live in a materialistic society where people don’t want to be inconvenienced, but just want to consume and not think about their impact on the environment,” Coronado said. “These events are incredibly important and hopefully will get students thinking about how they can be a part of the solution rather than the problem.”