Hundreds of attendees and dozens of tables and tents packed the town common for the 12th annual Amherst Sustainability Festival a few days before Earth Day. At least 50 vendors signed up, according to organizers.
The festival featured education and entertainment, connecting residents with environmental advocates, town committees focused on green initiatives, or just some decent food and music throughout the day.
The town’s Director of Sustainability, Stephanie Ciccarello, says the festival was born of a coming-together of two other events over a decade ago – the Earth Day Festival and a renewable energy fair.
“It's an educational event in festival clothing,” she told WAMC. “It's really meant to give people an opportunity to meet with solar providers, meet with advocacy groups, and hear from other representatives that can give them information about how they can be more eco-friendly in their home environment and in their lifestyle.”
Among those groups was the Subduing Knotweed Coalition – set up with its paper banners and flyers, as well as a call for volunteers.
The coalition refers to itself as a community initiative that “focuses on awareness, education and solutions in Massachusetts and beyond” when it comes to knotweed – an invasive species capable of smothering plants and damaging the ecosystems they infest.
“We started it because we were looking at rivers in Massachusetts and Montague and the Deerfield River and there was nothing but knotweed,” Mary Jo Maffei explained. “It was just 10 feet tall and the river had lost all their insects, all their native plants - the fish didn't have anything to eat, so they had died. It's just a huge problem and it's spread mostly by human activity.”
Elsewhere on the common, local artisans offered up an assortment of sustainable crafts while music acts played.
If you managed to get on the commons early, you may have also been one of the few hundred people to grab a tree seedling from the Public Shade Tree Committee.
“I think we had about 200 seedlings today and we seem to be down to about the last 20 or 30, which is not great, because we're to be here for another three-and-a-half-hours, so, they've gone quite quickly,” said Britt Crow-Miller, a member of the committee and one of several people promoting its work Saturday.
That work includes preserving, protecting, and promoting town shade trees in Amherst, including monthly tree plantings and evaluating potential tree removals on public land.
“Raising awareness about the principles of human welfare and how they're interconnected with ecological health as well is really, really important,” she said. “And so, it's great to see everybody out here kind of spreading that message in their own way.”
Ciccarello says the turnout for the festival was “great,” especially given the dreary weather, which later gave way to sunshine.
Another boon for getting folks to the sustainability fest – pairing it with the farmers market on the other side of the common.
Honey, veggies, and freshly baked goods were on full display just a few tents down.
That included vendors like Bread Euphoria, where co-owner Mark Pollard could be heard greeting and cashing out customers as his wares slowly ran out.
“The gibassier went really fast today – and the baguettes, they always go fast,” he told WAMC.
