Earthtones is an annual festival to celebrate, engage with, and learn about environmental justice in art and action.
Explore Earthtones
Our History
Earthtones is a decolonial reimagining of Earth Day that centers the stories of those with lived experience, as well as an educational space where Bay Area residents and Stanford affiliates are invited to learn about environmental justice. The initiative seeks to create change through a symposium that uplifts and compensates student artists who are working at the intersection of environmental studies and social justice, a line-up of local activists to speak about and engage attendees in their work, and a myriad of hands-on workshops and demonstrations to directly connect attendees with the land they live on. The festival provides a centralized space to celebrate, engage with, and learn about environmental justice in art and action.
Earthtones seeks to address the historical neglect of narratives of people of color in environment and sustainability, despite low-income communities and communities of color being most impacted by climate change threats. We also make space for questions of environment, social justice, and identity to inspire thoughtful and productive conversations amongst our community. We are intent on uplifting activists and artists of marginalized identities, and it is important to our mission to compensate these speakers for their time. In past years, the festival has featured speakers from Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action, Black Earth Farms, Cultural Power, Stanford researchers Dr. Cherie DeVore and Dr. Jef Caers, and celebrated local artists such as CeCe Carpio.
The Earthtones Festival welcomes all members of the Stanford community, as well as our neighbors from around the Bay Area, to join the conversation and celebration.
2024 Festival
Cultivating Connections
2024’s festival was held on Sunday, April 21st from 11 am to 4:30 pm. Centered on Cultivating Connections, the event invited the Stanford and Bay Area community to engage with speaker panels on youth organizing, view student art and performances, and to enjoy catered vegan food. The day ended with a set from Luna Luna, the headlining musician.
The day started off with a keynote speech from educator, activist, and storyteller Isaias Hernandez (Queer Brown Vegan), who spoke about their journey creating an online platform that elevates environmental justice issues.
Earthtones 2024 also featured two panels: Climate Activism on Campus, featuring speakers from Fossil Free Stanford and Coalition for a True School of Sustainability, and The Role of Youth in Environmental Justice, featuring speakers from Vida Verde and Youth Climate Collective.
Over a dozen student organizations and community partners, including the Stanford Native Plants Garden, Stanford Housing Justice Working Group, and Climate Resilient Communities tabled throughout the day.
Student art exploring environmental justice issues and students’ connections with the environment was displayed in Huffington Barn.
Earthtones 2024 featured performances from Talisman, Cardinal Calypso and Noopur. Additionally, Earthtones partnered with Stanford Concert Network this year to bring in Luna Luna.
Workshops are always a highlight of Earthtones! This year, attendees could choose from a wide range of workshops, including flower crown making, screenprinting, and tea making. Attendees could also attend a workshop on sustainable fashion, hosted by Coachtopia, or a workshop on Environmental Justice in the Middle East. A clothing swap also took place throughout the day.
Earthtones carves out space for our communities at Stanford and beyond to critically consider what we envision a just world to be: one where all people have the right and access to a safe, healthy, and thriving environment.
2023 Festival
(Re)envisioning Our Future
Earthtones 2023: (Re)envisioning Our Future was a 7-hour affair on Earth Day that gathered over 450 people around the mission of envisioning a sustainable future through challenging the systems that perpetuate injustice, colonialism, and discrimination.
2022 Festival
Rooted in Community
Earthtones, Stanford's 3rd annual Environmental Justice Art Festival, was hosted from 11am-3pm on Saturday, May 14th, 2022 at Stanford's O'Donohue Educational Farm.
Earthtones is an Earth Day celebration with the goal to be as colorful as the people on our planet. The theme in 2022 was "Rooted in Community," where students of color and their connections to the environment were centered and celebrated. The event included interactive workshops with cyanotype printmaking, tea making, and farm harvesting/planting. It featured amazing student artwork, live music, and free lunch (for the first ~ 150 attendees) catered from Vegan Hood Chefs. In addition, the event had a clothing swap, where participants were encouraged to bring their old clothes to exchange, as well as a speaker panel. The panel included members from local EJ organizers, including Black Earth Farms and Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action.
The goals of Earthtones are to: (1) Highlight and support artists of color on campus; (2) Provide a healing space that is culturally relevant; (3) Redefine the narrative of environmentalism, show that it must be inclusive!; (4) Connect students with environmental justice community organizing in the Bay Area; and (5) Inspire action! 2022's event was the first in-person version since the pandemic.
2020 Festival
2019 Festival
Earthtones was first dreamt up as a capstone project in 2018. Darel Scott and Stephanie Fischer co-founded Earth in Color alongside a team of other students of color, including John Zhao, Amulya Yerrapotu, Paloma Hernandez, Katie Lan, Kendall Burkins, and Indya McGuffin. They had a vision to create a festival that gathered people around the goal of decolonizing our relationship with Earth Day and honoring the cultural ties between Black and Indigenous people and the environment. Thus the first Earthtones (originally known as Earth in Color, a name that lives on through the Black-led creative studio founded by Darel in 2019) was born.
Since it's creation in 2019, the festival has morphed into an annual, student-led environmental justice arts festival that aims to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Celebrating the connection between people of color and the environment–and honoring the relentless and long-standing contributions that communities of color have made to movements toward liberation and just climate futures–the festival highlights environmental justice activism and artistry through speakers, live performances, workshops, book raffles, and a student art gallery. Earthtones takes place on the O’Donohue Family Farm in the spring and is often the first time that many community members spend time on the farm.
The legacy of Earthtones has evolved with each new year and each new group of passionate students guiding its mission.
