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We want them to know more about Earth Day — and what it means for them and their future.
BROWNSVILLE — The rich smell of freshly dug earth and plants was in the air at Linear Park on Saturday as Brownsville Parks and Recreation Department held its annual Earth Fest at the Brownsville Farmers’ Market.
This eco-friendly event highlighted the benefits of “green” living while providing fun activities around recycling, conservation, and creating green spaces in your home and community in honor of Earth Day.
Each year on April 22, the United States celebrates Earth Day. The day is about highlighting concerns about environmental quality and resource conservation nationwide.
In honor of the day, communities are encouraged to plan events to help spotlight their community and ways for citizens to preserve their natural resources.
“We just want people to take care of our planet and each other,” Shannon Contreras, Special Events Coordinator with the Brownsville Parks and Recreation Department, said.
This year, Earth Fest featured booths from the Brownsville Public Library, Brownsville Parks and Recreation Department, The ACE program of Communities in Schools of Cameron County, Redfish Recycling, Healthy Communities of Brownsville, Inc., Sea Turtle, Inc., the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Texas Master Gardeners of Cameron County, Palo Alto Battlefield National Historial Park, The Brownsville Beautification Committee and Keep Brownsville Beautiful.
One of the activity partners, the Texas ACE program of Communities in Schools of Cameron County, brought together 10 campuses to provide crafts and games for visitors to the event. Each school prepared stations for golf, decorating plastic eggs, coloring crafts or building birdhouses for younger attendees.
“For us this is great because it is a good opportunity for us to get the families from the schools that we work with for after school programming out here on a Saturday to learn more about Earth Day,” Javier Garcia, Project Director for Communities in Schools of Cameron County ACE Program, said of the event.
“We just want people to take care of our planet and each other,” Shannon Contreras, Special Events Coordinator with the Brownsville Parks and Recreation Department, said.
For attendees with a green thumb, Keep Brownville Beautiful distributed over 200 plants donated by the Brownsville Public Works Department for residents to take home for their gardens.
Also on display was the Brownsville Beautification Trailer from the Parks and Recreation Department. The department offers the trailer for free to the community if they want to hold a cleanup or beautification project in a public space. Inside is everything a cleanup crew might need, from trash pickers to hoses and garbage cans. The department will even provide the paint if the group needs to clean up graffiti.
One of the main goals for Contreras this year was increasing the availability of activities for children at Earth Fest.
“Which I think we achieved because there are about 20 activities,” she said.
Attendees, both young and old, could build and paint birdhouses, play checkers or tic-tac-toe on recycled cardboard, do crafts, create chalk art, color with recycled crayons or plant some wildflowers of their very own to take home.
The event even had a contest for the best piñatas made of recycled materials through Healthy Communities of Brownsville, Inc. and Redfish Recycling.
Maira Guzman attended the event with her 6-year-old daughter Regina, friend Jennifer Villarreal and her 7-year-old daughter Arya. Guzman and Villarreal say the primary motivator for bringing their daughters was not just the activities but as a fun way to educate them about protecting the environment.
As an example, Villarreal held up one of the brightly flowering potted plants on the craft table where the two children were making birdhouses.
“They got a plant, and I told Arya, ‘You are going to get a plant, but it is your responsibility,’” Villarreal said. While she will help her daughter plant it, Arya is responsible for tending it.
“I feel like that itself, gives her some responsibility, and maybe she will be actively participating in Earth Day,” she said.
“We want them to know more about Earth Day — and what it means for them and their future,” Guzman said.
