AMHERST — For a longtime Amherst resident, it is not unusual to wander through a daylong festival dedicated to sustainability, or to watch a protest head down the street with banners waving. 

But for those who haven’t lived in the Valley as long, like University of Massachusetts Amherst student Jacqueline Cote, the annual Amherst Sustainability Festival was nothing short of stunning. 

“There is really something special about the Valley. Look at this, it’s hard enough to make people care about climate change and here you have this whole event dedicated to it,” Cote said. “There’s this pool of people who care so much.”

Cote is from Wilmington in the eastern part of the state. She said she got choked up watching people participate in the March for Science earlier in the day. The march converged on the Amherst Town Common, where the Amherst Sustainability Festival was held. 

Hundreds of people walked from booth to booth at the festival on Saturday, which began at 10 a.m. and lasted until 4 p.m. Throughout the day, performers ranging from children’s singers to reggae artists took the stage. Booth setups ranged from solar panel installation companies to local activist groups to crafts for sale like jewelry and knit items.

Cote, a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying English, was in charge of a booth organized by “Talking Truth: Finding Your Voice Around the Climate Crisis” at the festival on Saturday.

At her booth, Cote encouraged attendees to write down their feelings about climate change, and then she hung them up for others to read. The “Talking Truth” group is a community of UMass students, faculty and staff dedicated to discussing the different facets of climate change. 

Cote said many people who wrote down their feelings shared similar sentiments of anger and frustration about climate change. It seemed helpful for participants to see others felt the same way, Cote said.

Andra Rose, of Amherst, ran a Mothers Out Front booth at the festival. She encouraged children who visited the booth to paint shields to “protect against climate change.”

Rose is an activist with the Amherst chapter of the national organization. Nationwide, Mothers Out Front has encouraged members to wear red superhero capes to represent saving the planet at events like marches and festivals. 

The Mothers Out Front booth featured a painted backdrop of a town, Rose demonstrated, where participants could lean forward and pretend they were flying like superheroes. 

Additionally, the booth featured a map of Amherst with holes cut out where natural gas leaks in town are located. Rose encouraged passers-by to play a cork toss game to “plug” the gas leaks. 

Mothers Out Front was also involved in the creation of the Climate Transformer 1.0. The project, created by Mothers Out Front member Alisa Pearson, aimed to combine perils of climate change with the beauty of the world. 

The structure featured five exhibits: The World We Love, the Chamber of Horrors/Solutions, the “Talking Truth” booth UMass student Cote worked at, a performance space and a community build to create a plastic bottle greenhouse. 

“I’m so pleased. It’s not really perfect, but that’s why it’s called 1.0,” Pearson said, expressing gratitude for the groups that helped the project come together. The project is funded by an Amherst College Arts at Amherst grant, the Gazette previously reported.

One one side of the structure, folks worked to create a structure out of recycled plastic bottles. On another, several musical groups performed, timed to begin when louder bands were setting up or breaking down on the louder main stage.

In the grass near the main stage, about a dozen children played in the grass and listened to the music. Toussaint Losier, 35, brought his children, ages 2 and 4, to the festival. The South Hadley resident is a professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass. Losier said it is important to expose his kids 

“It’s about their future. I think it’s important for them at a young age to have a sense of people protesting and to see what folks are doing around sustainability,” Losier said. 

Teens work to help bats

Did you know the little brown bat — one of the two bat species that live in Massachusetts — is well on its way to extinction due to a disease called white-nose syndrome?

Hadley girl scouts Grace Koehler, 14 and Arwen King, 13, are working to stop that. The seventh-graders shared facts and raised money to help stop the spread of white-nose syndrome among the bat population in Massachusetts.

White-nose syndrome is a fungus that destroys a bat’s sense of smell and echolocation abilities. A bat will get the fungus on their wings first, the girls said, and spread the fungus to its face when it tries to clean its wings.

The young women sold bat houses for $20 at a booth at the festival. Folks could either sponsor a bat house or take one home. The houses, rectangular wooden boxes which have an 1 ½ inch wide opening, are a good place for female bats to have their offspring, the girls said.

Arwen and Grace built the bat boxes for their Girl Scout Silver Award, the highest award a Girl Scout Cadette can earn. Bats like to be close together, Grace and Arwen said, so the bat houses could hold some 40 bats.

Protecting the state’s bat population has positive environmental impacts, Grace explained.

“Bats are actually really misunderstood,” Arwen said, debunking the common misconception that bats are gross or creepy. They are pollinators, Grace added, and are natural pest-controllers. 

According to Grace and Arwen, an adult bat can eat up to half a million mosquitoes per year. Considering bats can live up to 40 years, that’s a lot of mosquitoes.

Stephanie Murray can be reached at stephaniemur@umass.edu.

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