Seeds of Sustainability

Sustainability Week’s Wednesday event focused on teaching students about foraging, composting, and seed bomb making. Club Grow held the speaker led event at Santa Monica College’s (SMC) Organic Learning Garden where students also had the chance to engage in hands on learning activities on Wednesday, October 24.

Pascal Baudar talks talks about the ingredients in his home made hummus that he served to students after his talk of foraging and cooking during Sustainability week at Santa Monica College. October 17, 2018 in Santa Monica, California, (Nicole Washington / Corsair Staff)

Speaker, and local forager, Pascal Baudar taught the dozens of students in attendance about sustainable foraging and composting, his way of planting seeds into the heads of students. “So, I’m planting seeds today [to] make them think a little bit about sustainability and also how we are surrounded by food that is absolutely not used… Our modern society… know how to live in a city, but you go into the wilderness, you don’t know anything… Three or four generations ago, your ancestors knew all those plants,” said Baudar.

Students gathered around the table that held food that Baudar had foraged himself. One of the students indulging in the sustainable food was Lucia Aguilar. She not only learned about foraging, but how foraging could help the earth. “We have to give credit to our ancestry and to really appreciate the land like they did. That’s where the consciousness comes in. Without that true awareness, we’re never going to be able to restore our planet to the way that it should be,” said Aguilar.

Students Emmanuel Bautista(left) and Safari Alan(right) enjoy fresh juice made by guest speaker Pascal Bauder and a book of recipes written by Bauder doing sustainability week at Santa Monica College. October 17, 2018 in Santa Monica, California, (Nicole Washington / Corsair Staff)

Ferris Kawar, SMC’s Sustainability Manager, spoke of the knowledge within sustainability that he would like students to learn and understand from the event. “We want students to just really understand, in all the different areas, what the problems are and what the solutions are, cause I think people feel like very overwhelmed by the problem, the global problems we face, but we want to show them that the solutions are actually pretty simple,” said Kawar. “And if we each take personal responsibility, we’ll be making a big difference. We can’t just wait for our government to solve all our problems.”

According to Kawar, sustainable foraging and consuming will not only benefit the planet, but also some issues many college students know to be true. “Food insecurity, helping people save money… Our poor, broke students don’t have a lot of money. This would help with their budget,” said Kawar. “A lot of this stuff is pretty easy, and it’s just showing them the steps.”

For more information on SMC’s environmental clubs and other sustainability related information, click here.