Earthstock 2019, Stony Brook University’s annual Earth Day festival, brought learning, commitment, and fun to campus in a week-long celebration of sustainability. Credit: Faculty Student Association, Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook, NY, April 22, 2019 - Capping off Stony Brook University's (SBU) Earthstock 2019, a week-long, campus-wide, event that is free and open to the public, was the annual festival, in which environmental organizations and other participants offer up an earth-friendly message.

For New York Sea Grant's (NYSG) part, several of its specialists offered interactive activities at SBU's Earthstock event on April 19th, including:

Go-Fish: The go-fish activity engages students to try their luck at catching and learning about various seafood species, most of which are readily available locally. It also explores some of the impacts that human activity can have on this valuable resource.

Marine Debris: This hands-on activity uses “slime” to mimic the stomach contents of a marine animal, with participants asked to look through and determine which items belong, and which ones shouldn’t be there. Participants use their hands to work through the “slime,” discovering several representations of other marine life (which a marine animal may actually eat), as well as debris items that don’t belong in an animal’s stomach but unfortunately end up there all too often.

Coastal Emergency/Evacuation To-Go Bag: This activity allows the participant to pick from a variety or sensible and nonsensical objects that they could carry in their backpack if they needed to evacuate in the face of a weather-related hazard.


In addition to offering some interactive activities, New York Sea Grant's Ocean and Marine Outreach Coordinator (Krista Stegemann), Coastal Processes and Hazards Specialist (Kathleen Fallon) and Long Island Sound Study Outreach Coordinator (Anna Weshner-Dunning) provided festival-goers with fact sheets on rip currents safety and newsletters like Sound Update, which provides a snapshot of efforts being undertaken by Long Island Sound Study, a NYSG partner organization. Credit: Krista Stegemann/NYSG.

Stony Brook University is at the vanguard of the sustainability movement. Its commitment to a green future is evident everywhere on our 1,400 acres: from reducing our carbon footprint, to advocating recycling and using recycled materials whenever possible, to promoting alternatively fueled transportation.

NYSG offers its "Green Tips for Coastal Living" at www.nyseagrant.org/greentips.

More Info: New York Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 33 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program.

Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly. Our program also produces an occasional e-newsletter,"NOAA Sea Grant's Social Media Review," via its blog, www.nyseagrant.org/blog.