Environmentalism crept up on senior Sarah Smith. As a sophomore, Smith volunteered to take charge of the musical portion of the annual Earth and Music Festival, a culmination of the events surrounding Earth Week. At the time, Smith was mainly involved for the music.\n"I thought, 'Yeah, the environment is cool and all,' but (music) is what I wanted to do," Smith says. \nTwo years later, things are a little different. Smith, treasurer of Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), has gone from being "in it for the music" to coordinator of all Earth Day events. Her work has its finale Saturday, with the Earth and Music Festival from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Dunn Meadow.\nFrom expanding interest from musical acts to adding a second stage for bands to making fliers and teaching others to take over next year, Smith's involvement in Earth Day has turned into something more varied and meaningful than her initial reason.\n"My personal philosophy has changed a lot (in the past two years)," she says. "I've grown a lot, like I wasn't a vegan when I first got involved and now it's something I feel really strong about as far as the environmental impact."\nSmith describes the change as "going more lightly on the Earth" or looking at her actions and how they will effect the environment.\n"It's not just about recycling but about reducing everything you consume, like the water you use to cook food in or take showers in," she says. "I self-examine how can I have a better impact or less of a negative impact."\nOn top of that, Smith wants to get other people involved, something she thinks can only be done and done well without preachiness or an "in your face" mentality.\n"I wouldn't want to be told what I'm doing is wrong or what I'm doing is isn't good for the environment," she says. "I've tried to learn to be proactive and to show by being a living example."\nWith bands, speakers, plays and pamphlets available to entertain, educate or both the goal of the Earth and Music Festival is its own "living example," reaching out to people who aren't aware of issues facing the environment. While students or community members might come to Dunn Meadow as fans of a musical act or a friend of a speaker, Smith hopes they leave Dunn Meadow with something more.\n"The goal of the festival is to get people there that wouldn't normally come to an environment-centered event," Smith says. "Maybe someone comes as a groupie from a band, hears a speaker and says, 'Oh cool, I want to get involved in that.'"\nSaturday's Earth and Music Festival encompasses 12 bands, eight speakers, three plays, two separate stages for performing, a kids corner for younger attendees and a number of community and student group information tables lining Dunn Meadow. \nTwelve bands, two stages\nVariety is the name of the game for the musical acts playing at the festival this year. Graduate student Jenn Hanink says finding bands with different sounds wasn't stressed when searching for acts in the past. Acoustic acts were also hard to come by, as organizers discovered they got drowned out by louder activities.\n"This year, I wanted to try and get them reinstated, and so we're having an acoustic on one stage and a jazz band on the other," Hanink says. "They really won't be competing for air space." \nBands were invited to submit demo tapes to be considered to play Saturday. Smith says SEAC did ask one group, Danagas, to play both this year's and last year's festival.\nDanagas drummer Ryan Fitch, an IU alumnus, has played three of the last four Earth Day festivals and couldn't refuse another chance to play for the event.\n"Plus, I just love playing outdoors." Fitch says. "It's a good cause, and people are so involved."\nSmith says most of the submissions that come in each year lean more toward punk, pop-rock and country-bluegrass sounds, with a few jam bands covering Phish or the Grateful Dead thrown in. Hanink says the group tried to pick the best from four or five similar sounding entries.\nThis year, SEAC received 26 demos for consideration. Undertow, a band based out of Lowell, Ind., will headline the first stage, while the other groups performing are Danagas, The Water Company, Indiana Trip Factory, baked goods, Pedigo, Serendipity, The Abercrombie Skins, Underground Charmin, Mode Street, A-GRAV Lab and Very Old Special Pale.\nVery Old Special Pale is based out of Indianapolis, and Hanink describes it as a jazz band.\nHeadlining the second stage will be the Abercrombie Skins, who Hanink calls "energetic" with a funk or punk-based sound. Serendipity is a female acoustic duet with a mellow sound. Pedigo consists of guitars, drums and saxophone with an upbeat sound, who Hanink expects to play covers of some current popular songs. The Water Company describes its sound as a mixture between bluegrass, jazz, progressive, rock and country.\nMike Meadows, lead singer for headlining band Undertow, was a little surprised when he got the call from SEAC saying his group would be the top act. Undertow's sound, what Meadows calls "a cross between Pantera and Godsmack," is a little heaver than what he though the organizers of an Earth Day Festival would be looking for. \n"When they called and said we're headlining, I was very surprised and very honored at the same time," Meadows says. "Being a metal band, I hope we don't scare anybody. When we got the fliers, they said there was a kids corner and three plays, and we were just very concerned we were a little too heavy. One of the first things I said was did they hear the CD or did they just like the name of the band. But it's all going to be good. We're coming with our full stage show and hopefully to do well as we do everywhere else."\nThe band is based out of Lowell, Ind., a "little hovel of a town" where Meadows owns a guitar store, Lowell Guitar and Sound. Besides Meadows, the group consists of Jim Shepard on guitar, Eamon Skube on bass and Noah Edmaiston on drums. The band's sound, heavy guitars with melodic vocals, came about during a conversation between Meadows and friend Jason Grebash. The two decided to combine Grebash's admiration of death metal with Meadows' own for the sound of 1980s vocalists such as Sebastian Bach. Meadows says he and the rest of the band plan to enjoy their first trip to Bloomington.\n"We're coming for the party," he says. "The cause had an impact because I am a little into preservation of the landscape as we know it instead of watching it degrade."\nHanink hopes the addition of Undertow and the others will attract as many different kinds of people as possible.\n"We are hoping to reach a wide listening audience," she says. "Some people think of Earth Day celebrations as being acoustic Grateful Dead jam bands, but that just reaches one arm of the public; it doesn't attract a wide audience, which is sort of our logic."\nThree plays\nAbout a dozen students will take part in presenting three plays at the Earth and Music Festival. Junior Lance Thurner organized the play portion of the event this and last year. He says all three plays are targeted toward elementary school students. A version of the Dr. Seuss story "The Lorax" about the destruction of trees in a fantastical environment will be presented again this year. A puppet show called "An Earth Day Story," written by senior Laura Hartman, deals with "someone realizing how their daily life affects the environment," Thurners says. The third play is a five-minute performance called "The Kid in the Commercial" and deals with advertising and consumerism.\n"A lot of the people who come to Earth Day have children, a lot are families that come, and there needs to be some big events for the kids," Thurner says. "They learn about how to appreciate that natural world around them."\nThurner and the other students involved spent all semester building puppets, painting sets, building a stage, making costumes, writing scripts and rehearsing. \n \nEight speakers\nCurrent events and key environmental issues are what drives the selection of speakers for the Earth and Music Festival. Smith says she and the other organizers look to see what people in the community and on the news are talking about and what kinds of opportunities for environmentalism they might not realize are available to Bloomington residents. In the past the group has had speakers discuss the World Trade Organization and the proposed expansion of Interstate 69 into Bloomington.\nThis year's speakers will discuss a little bit of everything from tree sits to grocery shopping to urban sprawl.\n"We try to schedule speakers on some of the bigger topics around some of the bands we thought would draw more people," Smith says. "It's all really important and really diverse."\nFor those who don't know anything about environmentalism, Smith suggest coming to hear Mike Englert talk about Bloominghours, a local currency system that encourages bartering for goods.\n"(Bloominghours) is how to keep money in the community," she says, "and to support the community by not having money going to Kroger or Marsh or Mr. D's by helping us rely more on each other."\nSome other speakers include Dan Willard, a former School of Public and Environmental Affairs professor, speaking about wetlands; Melissa Kreiger from the Monroe County Solid Waste District speaking about recycling and the "Green Business" program; and other speakers covering topics such as urban sprawl and veganism.\nLucille Bertuccio, an instructor in the department of recreation and park administration from the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, will participate in a panel discussion and is also speaking about an initiative to have Bloomington declared a Wild City, a project being coordinated through the Center for Sustainable Living, which operates out of the Bloomington Environmental Center.\n"Wild City" is a distinction given by the National Wildlife Foundation to cities who have registered 20 percent of homeowners, 10 percent of apartments, schools and a demonstration area as having set aside a portions of yards or green areas for nesting, food and shelter for the creatures living in the area. Only three cities in the United States are registered as wildlife habitats, including Zionsville, Ind. \n"It makes your yard more beautiful, gives it more variety and makes the yard more attractive," Bertuccio says. "It increases biodiversity. Biodiversity tells you how healthy a city is. If a city's only animals are mice, rats and sparrows, you know you live in a city that is not healthy."\nWhile the "Wild City" speech will concentrate on Bloomington's outside locations, Susan Bright, store coordinator for Bloomingfoods, will speak about environmentally sound ways to do an inside activity -- grocery shopping.\nBloomingfoods is a cooperative grocery store started by a group of 30 naturalists 25 years ago. The 2,000 members of Bloomingfoods are all "part owners" of the business with the option of working for a discount on food. If Bloomingfoods makes profit, members are given their share based on how much they purchased at the store.\n"Since people are part owners of the business, they feel like they have a say on what they want and they feel good because they have a say on what they want us to carry," Bright says. "We have a lot of alternative lifestyle people shopping at our store, and I guess with those alternative lifestyles, we have people that are more concerned about (environmental issues)."\nIn her speech, Bright plans to talk about buying habits that encourage environmentalism, such as buying things purchase in bulk instead of prepackaged products or buying locally produced goods to save on the exhaust produced from long-distance shipping.
One Cause\nSince becoming involved with SEAC and Earth Day events, Smith has heard from past organizers about Earth and Music Festivals of past years. Professors have told her that 1970s Earth Day celebrations attracted thousands of people to Dunn Meadow. Although the festival no longer draws those kinds of numbers, SEAC is trying to get more people interested this year by moving the festival from the weekend of Little 500 to the following weekend. \n"I think students at IU, as well as the general public, feel apathetic towards the environment," Smith says. "I also feel like environmentalists have the stereotype of being really eccentric or being radicals who go out to vandalize stuff and tear stuff down and hurt people."\nSmith hopes this year's Earth Week events and the Earth and Music Festival work to undo both of these feelings among the community while also letting people enjoy outdoor entertainment from a variety of acts.\n"Really anything to reach out to people who are not part of the choir, per se," Smith says.
