SALT LAKE CITY — A group of Salt Lake City residents joined a worldwide effort to promote sustainability and healthier eating habits Sunday.
Volunteers repaired a greenhouse, planted produce in an organic garden and built needed equipment in a local charter school in Salt Lake City's Glendale neighborhood. The event was held in conjunction with the Global Work Party, a day of action to support climate-change reversal that included more than 7,000 events in 183 different countries worldwide.
In Salt Lake City, Urban Village Cooperative and volunteers helped work to enhance the organic vegetable gardens at The Dual Immersion Academy — a 3-year-old charter school in Glendale, according to Amy Jordan, the parent of two students at DIA.
"This is my neighborhood, this is where I grew up," she said. "With the work of the kids, the parents and the teachers, we worked together and created this space where kids can come out and learn about food and where it comes from, how it grows, grow it themselves and eat it themselves."
School and community organic gardens lower carbon emissions and bringing food closer to the people who will enjoy it, means no airplanes or trucks are needed for shipping, she added.
Organizers with UVC used a $1,000 grant to pay for supplies for the event, according to founder Jennifer Hamilton.
"We were looking for a (school) to help," Hamilton told the Deseret News. Besides the garden, volunteers helped clean up the school playground, and an artist completed a mural along the wall enclosing the schoolyard, she said.
Urban Village Cooperative is a solution-focused grass-roots group with a goal of unifying individuals, organizations, businesses, and government for a peaceful, healthy, sustainable and prosperous world through collaborative community action.
The work parties, which ranged from groups installing solar panels to tree plantings, were designed to send the message that citizens are getting to work on climate solutions and so should their politicians, Hamilton said.
Organizers estimate that during the Global Work Party, participants will plant more than 100,000 trees, install more than 100 solar panels, weatherize hundreds of homes and buildings, cycle over 1,000 miles and clean up at least 500 miles of coastline worldwide. The effort is aimed at lowering carbon emissions to 350 parts per million, the safe upper limit according to leading scientists, a news release stated.
A campaign called 350.org takes its name from the goal of reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its current level of 390 parts per million to below 350 ppm.
"The talks at Copenhagen didn't go far enough. We ended up with a goal of 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions, which isn't nearly deep enough to bring us to a ppm of 350, the amount needed to preserve a moderate climate," said Joanna Straughn of Urban Village Cooperative. "We want to show that there is a burgeoning grass-roots movement to go farther to the reduction needed (of) 40 percent and to build community connections and resilience in the process."
"We hope our leaders will start following our example," she said.
e-mail: jlee@desnews.com