This page refers to our Earth Week events for 2020, the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, all originally planned events were either canceled or shifted to online formats. The schedule below includes online events organized by EcoCultureLab or its partnering organizations and open to the public. All times are U.S. Eastern Daylight Time.

All week

• EarthDay+50 Student Eco-Arts Exhibition (Pandemic Edition). Hosted by ENVS 165 “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media” class, co-curated with Noah Zhou, Davis Center student art curator. Held online. Virtual opening on Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. Click here for the Exhibition page.

Monday, April 20

• All day: Earth Day@50: Aspiring for Sustainability, Striving for Justice, Crafting the Planet. This event is hosted by our partnering institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Register here.

• 6:30-8:30 pm: Motherload, screening and discussion of this award-winning, crowd-sourced documentary about a new mother’s quest to understand the increasing isolation and disconnection of the digital age, its planetary impact, and how cargo bikes could be an antidote. Hosted by Vermont Clean Cities. Register here.

Tuesday, April 21

• 2:00 pm: EarthDay+50 Student Eco-Arts Exhibition (Pandemic Edition) opening and guided walkthrough. At the virtual exhibition web site. Click here for further information.

• 2:30-4:00 pm: Sustainability in the Pandemic Era. Gund Institute Fellows’ Panel covering topics including food insecurity, disease ecology, mental health, and economic recovery. Further details here. Register here.

• All day: #OneThing4Earth: Post videos on social media platforms with the hashtag #OneThing4Earth. See Vermont Clean Cities Coalition web page for details.

Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22

• 10:00 am-4:30 pm: Summit on Research & Teaching on Sustainability. Gund Institute/Grossman School. Online, further details here. Register here.

• 12:00 noon to 1:30 pm: When Corona Met Climate Change… What Changed? A series of live, short (under 3 minutes), and creative responses to the intersection of coronavirus and climate change, hosted by EcoCultureLab. 12 noon EDT / 4 pm GMT, online. Please note that this will launch EcoCultureLab’s Feverish World: From Pandemonium to Ecotopia project. Further details here. Submit proposals for “When Corona…” here. Follow this link to join the talk.

• 4:30-5:30 pm: Disturbance, Recovery, Discovery: Lessons from Tropical Rainforests. Earth Day Keynote talk by rainforest ecologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and women’s science advocate Nalini Nadkarni. Follow this link to join the talk.

• All day: Community Building and Storytelling Day: see https://strikewithus.org/. And EarthRise: Visit earthday.org and learn more about ways to take climate action.

Thursday, April 23

• 4:30-5:30 pm: “Boil the Ocean”: Engaging the Public in Matters of the Ecosphere. EcoCultureLab’s Earth Week speaker, media artist Marina Zurkow, will speak on climate change, oceans, and the post-natural condition. Zurkow is one of the leading contemporary artists addressing how we think and feel about climate change and related ecological issues. In works like "Dear Climate," "Wet Logic," and "Oceans Like Us," she and her collaborators work with the tools of new media, virtual reality, video installation, and others to encourage personal engagement with the "wicked problems" of our time. This talk will feature a conversation with Zurkow’s Dear Climate co-founder, eco-theater pioneer and New York University professor Una Chaudhuri, whose books include "Animal Acts: Performing Species Today" and "Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change." Follow this link to join the talk.

• All day: Divestment actions: See https://strikewithus.org/.

Friday, April 24

• All day: Nationwide youth voter registration day: See https://strikewithus.org/.

Postponed/Rescheduled Events

• The Obelisk performance/action, with spoken word & theatre focused around the real-time relocation of Bren Alvarez’s monument of bureaucracy, “File Under: Southern Connector, 2002” (aka World’s Tallest File Cabinet), has been postponed until a later date this summer or early fall.

• Burlington Geographic’s “Biodiversity and the City” series has been postponed until further notice. However, the Burlington Phenology Clock project is moving forward with data gathering using the iNaturalist app. Read further details here.

In addition, please see the digital Earth Day events listed here, here, here, here, and here.