"We're trying to get more outreach for the program and get more students on campus and future students to hear about it," Alex Marx, an environmental biology freshman, said. "It's also giving us a chance to implement our grants that we got passed for the year and other types of programs."

RISE has been on campus since 1995 and operating out of Bailey Hall for the past four years, director Laurie Thorp said. The events put on today are the result of a project that all freshmen environmental students are required to do through their freshman seminar in environmental issues program.

"It introduces them to RISE and to the breadth of environmental issues that we face in the world," Thorp said. "As part of that class, it's an assignment we have where they have to write a grant to do some kind of project that's going to improve the sustainability of our campus."

The log inoculation is one example of freshmen-led project in sustainability. Thorp seemed to beam with pride while discussing the ongoing payoff from the efforts of freshmen students. After organizing the project idea, Thorp and others worked with students to help them write the grant before proposing it to the Be Spartan Green student project fund.

Most students in attendance at the event were members of RISE, such as horticulture senior Allison Stawara, who has been doing environmental volunteering since her freshman year.

"RISE has really just given me a holistic perspective on living a more environmentally conscious life, how to integrate that into different disciplines and I think that's the core value of RISE, is teaching students how to incorporate environmentalism in any discipline that they go into," Stawara said.

In the four short years that RISE has operated out of Bailey Hall, its growth and outreach has steadily increased. Not just limited to environmental groups, the Earth Day extravaganza saw volunteer work from other organizations like Alternative Spartan Breaks, or ASB.

"For us we went on a spring break trip to Costa Rica and we were working on an organic poppy farm and we were learning more about sustainability, eco-tourism and these big components," Rachel Manssur, an interdisciplinary studies senior and member of ASB, said. "Since coming back (from Costa Rica) I've gotten more into environmentalism. I don't know, I think it just comes along with being a student at MSU, it's very much the 'go green' mentality and trying to be sustainable with our cafeterias and stuff like that."

Ryan Yantz, a microbiology senior and also a member of ASB, was busy getting his hands dirty while planting some lemon verbena and helping RISE volunteers harvest some of the greenhouse crops.

"I guess the biggest thing for me today was realizing that everything has an impact on everything else," Yantz said. "So you could be using plastic and if you don't do it right you can have like X, Y and Z of things that can go wrong."

Thorp tied the event into larger concerns about climate change.

"It's really neat to see this energy and this enthusiasm and it's a positive thing," Thorp said. "It seems so much of the news we hear about climate change and ecosystem degradation and destruction of habitats is depressing and it makes you feel like there's nothing you can do. So for me it's been how do we create spaces for students to feel empowered to make change and not feel overwhelmed by the bad news that we hear all the time."