As seniors of Earthkeepers leadership, we are writing this letter as we approach the end of our time at EMU. We hope this letter helps to give the EMU community reading this a glimpse into the past year of our lives as students helping to shift the momentum of sustainability on campus.

This past year, we have done a lot and are feeling burnt out. In the fall semester, Earthkeepers held a climate strike, wrote a letter to the administration listing our demands including rehiring of a sustainability coordinator and meaningful action towards the climate action plan, initiated a student writing letter campaign, and met with President Huxman, Fred Kniss, and Tim Stutzman about sustainability at EMU. We also engaged in serious talks around increasing EMU’s solar power production, presented to SGA, and started planning out the next big steps for the coming semester. In the spring, we met with Jackie Font Guzman about the collaboration of goals between EMU’s sustainability movement and the office of DEI, held town halls on the intersectionality of sustainability and climate action at EMU in partnership with Creation Care Council, and initiated a meeting with other student leaders about future collaboration and club support.

Did we even mention that we were trying to run a club and develop fun events that create space for club members and the greater campus? We hosted town halls, speakers, outdoor activities like canoeing, regular Parkwoods Cabin Hangouts, movie nights, plant swaps, game nights, pumpkin carving, apple cider making, and events around Earth Week like water coloring, Parkwoods clean up, and trivia. 

Can we add that we are both students involved with athletics, taking academically intense classes, working, and trying to enjoy our last semesters on campus? We have spent a lot of time the past few semesters doing a job that was never officially assigned to us. It is a job that we voluntarily stepped into because it is a position that you have not filled. This is a burden that should not rest on the shoulders of students, and the way we have been carrying it cannot continue. We are proud of the work we have done and the time put into these projects, but it has also been an exhausting and draining senior year. While we thought our senior year meant enjoying the last moments on EMU campus with friends, professors, and classmates, we spent the year feeling guilty and overwhelmed with a “Sustainability at EMU” burden that was not supposed to be on our shoulders.

Let us be clear that we are appreciative of the time you have given us to meet and consider our ideas for how to make EMU a better place, but that only goes so far. We need EMU to commit to taking real and impactful action as an institution of higher education claiming to hold sustainability as a core value. There will certainly be sacrifices involved in these decisions, and they will not always be easy, but it is our responsibility to do so. 

Though we will be leaving EMU in a few short weeks to join the thousands of other EMU grads working to make a difference in their communities, the movement that has been sparked at EMU will remain. There are other students just as passionate as us about pushing EMU to be an environmental leader again, and they will be the ones taking charge in the coming years. We hope you can see the work we have been doing and acknowledge the importance of your role. We as students will continue pushing for change, but there is only so much we can do without you.  

Sincerely, 

Isaac Alderfer and Andrea Troyer