Cal Students Welcome the Community for Earth Week Gardening Events, April 15 & 18
Cal student participants in the Herbicide-Free Campus group gather with a university gardener during a Weeding Day event. Photo courtesy of Herbicide-Free Campus.
Roll up your sleeves and head over to the UC Berkeley campus as students involved in the Herbicide-Free Campus (HFC) movement welcome the community to two upcoming events featuring herbicide-free gardening.
Help students create a space where bees and pollinators will thrive on the April 15 Pollinator Garden Planting Day hosted in collaboration with Haas Sustainability.
Come back on April 18 for Our Herbicide-Free Future, a community teach-in and weeding-day event put on by students running Herbicide-Free Campus in Berkeley, who will speak about the origins of this movement on campus and ways to get more involved. They’ll be joined by members of the UC Berkeley groundskeeping and gardening crew, who will talk about creating herbicide-free green spaces.
Students have already held about 60 weeding days to help maintain an herbicide-free campus. “We can heal the earth and protect people’s health by not using herbicides and working in solidarity with gardeners and agricultural workers,” says HFC Co-president Nyah Tisdell.
Herbicide-Free Campus began as Herbicide-Free Cal in 2018 thanks to the efforts of then-students Mackenzie Feldman and Bridget Gustafson. Read the story about how these two activist volleyball players created the campus organization in our Summer 2019 issue.
HFC is now a nationwide movement committed to creating college campuses that don’t rely on herbicides or pesticides. HFC just released a new report showing that colleges that stop using these toxic products and transition to organic land care save money and water. Schools like UC Berkeley, Harvard, Willamette, Cascadia University/UW Bothell, Seattle University and UT Austin are leading the way, showing that colleges do not need to rely on carcinogenic pesticides. Read more about the report here.
Pollinator Garden Planting Day
Friday April 15, noon–2pm
Outside of Haas Faculty Building along Piedmont Avenue
Our Herbicide-Free Future
Community Teach-in and Weeding Day
Monday April 18, 2–4pm
Between Durant Hall & Wheeler Hall
Questions? DM the student leaders @Herbicidefreeberkeley
