Welcome to The Vine!

Ok, hello, welcome to EarthCo.'s new blog "The Vine", which isn't a great name. Here's some background info:

EarthCo. is Columbia's oldest student environmental group...but we're not entirely sure when it started. In the 60s? Early 90s? Who knows. But, it exists and its members do lots of great things for the environment and for Columbia...especially where those two entities intersect.

We meet every Monday at 8 pm in Hamilton 413. Sometimes there is free food. Meetings usually last about a half hour to an hour. Anyone from Columbia (Barnard, Columbia, Teacher's College, and more!) are welcome. You can contact the coordinators here.

EarthCo. operates as part of Community Impact, Columbia's wonderful non-profit service organization. Check out their website here. Community Impact is seriously an excellent organization, with 25 student groups and 950 student volunteers serving over 8000 people in the Harlem, Morningside Heights, and Washington Heights communities. You should participate in one or more of its many groups, even if not EarthCo.

EarthCo. has two branches: campus and community action and Earth Tutors.

The action side takes on a number of campaigns each year. We have some recurring events, such as Earth Tutors, Go Cold Turkey!, and of course our ever popular Earth Week events.
We'll also be continuing other projects, like community gardening and plastic bag recycling. We also try to tackle a number of other campaigns during the year. In the past we've headed letter writing campaigns against unsustainable mining and logging, worked to change Apple computer's environmental policies, encouraged Columbia's dining halls to convert their waste grease into usable biofuel, and most recently gotten Columbia's dining services to switch to sustainable seafood. Lastly, we're always ready to help out the many other Columbia environmental groups in their own initiatives, such as SEEJ's Wind Power Now campaign.

Earth Tutors is a tutoring program we began in spring 2006 where we teach public grade school students in the South Bronx about environmental issues. In Fall '08 Earth Tutors expanded to another school, the Future Leaders Institute, in Harlem. Earth Tutors is a truly great program for our campus and our community. Find out more details here.

I'll post some information soon about the campaigns listed above, and the many other things that we do, and hopefully make this website look a little better. If you want to see the old website, which looks really good but hasn't been updated since Spring '06, go here. If you have any sort of web design skills and want to help update that site, or help create a new one...please contact me!

Ok, I suppose that's about it. So if you are so inclined, stop by one of our meetings or send an email, we're always looking for new members and opinions!

Thanks for visiting!

-Jason