Every year in October, CSUN’s Institute for Sustainability holds Sustainability Day, a free event where students, faculty, staff and the greater community can learn about various topics related to sustainability that have local and global impacts. This year’s theme was biodiversity loss and the effects it can have on the land, water, food supplies and different cultures.

Biodiversity is the variety of life in a particular habitat, ecosystem or the entire world.

This year’s event featured three workshop sessions: Land and Water, Cultural Diversity, and Biodiversity and Food.

In between the second and third sessions, Schooling the World, a documentary on how modern education can affect sustainability within indigenous cultures was featured. It was meant to raise a dialogue on how introducing modern schools into indigenous communities can lead to a sudden separation of children from nature and family, and the effects of expecting children to suddenly adapt to a sedentary lifestyle versus an active one within their community.

 The day ended with a workshop on being friendly to pollinators — animals or insects, such as hummingbirds and honey bees, that pollinate plants — hosted by CSUN’s Marilyn Magaram Center and held in the Wellness Garden in the Sequoia Hall courtyard.

Grad student Frida Endinjok, who minored in sustainability along with her public health major and who collaborates with the Institute of Sustainability, led the pollinator workshop alongside Kelly Rodriguez — a senior undergrad also majoring in public health — giving attendees information on how they could create a friendly environment for pollinators, such as making sure there are spaces set aside in gardens for them to hide, rest or make a nest or hive.

For example, Rodriguez said that during the biodiversity and food workshops she learned that if someone finds a beehive in their home, they should contact a beekeeper, not an exterminator.

Rodriguez even donned a yellow T-shirt proclaiming “Save the Bees” for the event.

“I’m all about our pollinators,” Rodriguez said.

Bees, CSUN Sustainability, Institute of Sustainability, pollinator, Sustainability Day