Last weekend, Goshen College’s EcoPax club hosted their second event of the semester. They watched “Kiss the Ground”; a documentary focused on regenerative agriculture that explores the imperative role

that soil plays in human and planetary health.

This movie was particularly apt for the members of this year’s EcoPax club. As detailed by Isaak Prince, the president of EcoPax, their goals are heavily aligned with environmental peace and promoting sustainable actions.

EcoPax has been the campus’s student-led environmental and sustainability club for over 17 years. Jonathon Schramm, the faculty advisor for EcoPax since 2014, said, “To boil it down, the mission of the club is to help people on our campus connect to the outdoors and to the rest of creation, and to find better ways to care for it.”

Schramm explained that some years the group has been more interested in outdoor activities that help people connect to the environment, such as going on hikes or bike rides together or playing broomball at Merry Lea in the winter. Other years, the group has focused more on activism around environmental topics and encouraging the campus to continuously act on their environmental and sustainability ideals. Other times, they’ve been interested in environmental information, exemplified by the movie showing hosted

this weekend.

Schramm said, “EcoPax does a lot of things, and it depends a little bit year to year on what students want to emphasize.”

Isabel Woodcox, a member of the leadership and planning committee of EcoPax, said, “Our goal is to help promote

more sustainable actions on campus, like in students’ everyday lives and then to make

larger sustainable changes.” She goes on, “Previously, they had worked to implement a full functional compost system across the campus.”

While the college also has a sustainability committee, the previous director retired and according to Woodcox, the committee’s meetings became less frequent. “That’s how the compost system kind of fell apart,

because the administrative structures in place to support what we were doing kind of fell out,” Woodcox said.

However, she said, “We’re still trying to get back to that point and do what we can in small ways to support students making sustainable choices.”

Woodcox explains the sustainable actions they promote include minimizing food waste, taking a bus or biking rather than driving a car, and getting involved with places like Merry Lea “to help out with their various programs and their work in being connected to the outside world.”

Although this year’s club members are working hard to promote sustainable changes, they also want to emphasize their main goal of connecting people to

the outdoors.

Prince explains, “If you think about the average college student, how many of them can say they’ve walked out onto a frozen wetland and played broomball? How many can say they’ve

gone canoeing or planted a tree? Our goal is to try and expand that and offer new opportunities for people who typically might not have had them.”