Filed under: Event Planning, General, Waste diversion, Water | Tags: berkeley model united nations, BMUN 57 conference, BMUN canteen, BMUN Sustainability, stainless steel canteen
Hey everyone,
We are so excited to see you in just a few days! All of us here in BMUN have been busily preparing for your arrival. Like I mentioned last week, the sustainability staff has been preparing in lots of ways for this 
conference, too, and I wanted to take a moment just to remind you to bring your reusable canteen, or alternatively to bring $10 to buy one of BMUN’s stylish blue stainless steel bottles! There’s me on the left holding one.
There will be signs directing you to water fountains on campus where you can fill up during the conference weekend. We will not be selling water bottles at the dance, and we encourage all of you to participate in our greening activities by avoiding the use of individual plastic bottles over the weekend if you can help it. We’re hoping to achieve a 75% waste diversion rate – help us reach our target! We’ll be dividing our trash into recyclables, compost and waste, and you’ll learn how to sort these things if you’re not sure.
Can’t wait for BMUN 57!
–Marie
Filed under: General, Green education | Tags: Berkeley Project, BMUN Sustainability, Claremont Canyon Conservancy, community events, community service, UC Berkeley, volunteering
Hello everyone. I’m sorry for not posting in a while. With the Thanksgiving vacation this week, and finals approaching, I have been a bit lax in keeping up with the blog. 
Today I wanted to let you know about a really great community service day that Berkeley Model United Nations members participated in on November 15th, 2008. It’s called the Berkeley Project and is a community-wide volunteer day in which thousands of people are dispersed to tons of locations across the East Bay for projects ranging from gardening and landscaping to mural decoration and public works projects. The project is in its third year, having been pioneered in 2006 by two Berkeley undergraduate students – read the story here.
Our group of 15 volunteers was assigned to a site in the Berkeley Hills called the Claremont Canyon Conservancy. It’s a beautiful area, which I had never had the pleasure of visiting before, and we were lucky to have a beautiful sunny day in which to work. We split into small groups with some other volunteers, and were working on landscaping projects – mostly removing an invasive weed called the French broom which is displacing many locally growing plants in certain areas of the canyon. (Check out a really big one that Rachel removed to the left!) 
Some of us also reseeded a cleared area with California native plants. And in this picture below, we are spreading out bark across a hillside to prevent erosion.
We had a great time! I’ve included a few of the best pictures from the event here. For those of you living in or near the Bay Area, I encourage you to consider participating in the Berkeley Project day that’s happening in the spring of 2009. They haven’t set a date yet, but check back on their website for more details next year.
Here’s one last image that our media editor and photographer Francis put together.
