About once a week, La Salle’s newly Earth Club meets in science teacher Mr. Matt Owen’s room. Led by upperclassmen senior Rowan Bienapfl, junior Ashley Kamhoot, junior Ali Moran, senior Ivan Ramirez, senior Vanessa Su, and junior Audrey Waters, the club discusses next steps to applying initiatives for the school.

This year, the Gardening Club has merged with the Earth Club.

According to Su, the Earth Club is “a nice way for people to get together and have something to do.” Su said. “Something to work towards, better our school community and our campus,” Su said.

The Earth Club focuses a lot on improving the school environment.

“The purpose of the Earth Club is to hopefully bring some sustainability to our school and our campus, and maybe to learn a little bit more about stewardship,” Su said.

The Earth Club is working on many projects such as: a coat drive, recycling drive, implementing reusable dishware in the cafeteria, and a tree-planting project. They plan on also having an electronic recycling drive sometime in the distant future.

With these plans, the Earth club is working toward improving La Salle and trying to make it an Oregon Green School (OGS), with the intention of reaching specific requirements, including an edible landscape, green lunchrooms, and reducing waste/recycling. 

As of right now, the cafeteria is what the Earth Club is focusing most on improving in order to become a certified OGS alongside Kitchen Manager and Head Chef Ms. Megan Jones.

The tree planting project was a time consuming initiative that the Earth Club had been organizing for the past year, and it finally happened on Oct. 30. 

Faced with the decision of what trees to plant, the club members had to make sure they didn’t require too much maintenance. They ended up choosing to plant two plum trees and three apple trees in La Salle’s academic courtyard.

The Earth Club’s motive with the tree planting was to educate the community “about stewardship,” Sue said. “And we really wanted to implement [an] edible landscape.”

According to Su, the tree planting is supposed to emphasize that people can do many things with the land they have, and it tries to teach the importance of developing and taking care of our surroundings.

Kamhoot thinks people should join the Earth Club because “we’re working towards bettering the environment, and that’s really important,” she said. “It’s really engaging and we’ve always got something going on and something you can get involved with.”

According to Kamhoot, the Earth Club is trying to build a relationship with the community through things like the coat drive and planting a garden to donate food from. 

“The community needs to start being more aware and taking more action with climate change, and Earth Club is helping do that,” Kamhoot said.

From Su’s point of view, the Earth Club is important for the community because “I think it kind of takes a gap in what we have here at La Salle and tries to fill that in,” she said. “I just think it’s a good thing.”