Isla Vistans meandered in and out of Anisq’Oyo’ Park on Saturday afternoon for Chilla Vista x Earth Day, practicing yoga, munching on free food, checking out student art and listening to local musicians.
Chilla Vista, an annual arts and music festival, and the environmentally conscious UC Santa Barbara’s local celebration of Earth Day, were combined this year due to their similar objectives and values, said Michelle Dambaev, Earth Day coordinator at UCSB’s Environmental Affairs Board.
“We decided to collaborate with (the Isla Vista Community Relations Committee) on this event because both of our events just correlated on so many different levels,” she told Noozhawk.
For campus clubs and organizations, the festivals are prime recruiting and advertising opportunities; filling out Anisq’Oyo’ Park were some 40 of them providing attendees information and activities and giving quick shout-outs to their tables between musical performances.
“All the orgs that came to the table today were 100 percent pushing for a more green, sustainable lifestyle,” Dambaev said.
The Associated Students Commission on Student Well Being led attendees through five different yoga sessions, while the Isla Vista Food Cooperative provided local and organic produce as well as cookbooks and measuring cups. Water was distributed by UCSB’s Life of the Party club.
Chilla Vista has been one of the biggest and most publicized public art exhibitions available to students, who displayed their work and set up temporary installations across the park.
Its crossover with Earth Day, Dambaev said, isn’t necessarily a permanent organizational change.
Jamming in the natural amphitheater formed along a hill in Anisq’Oyo’ were six local artists, headlined the last hour by The Olés, who also performed at Santa Barbara’s Earth Day Festival last weekend. The band, the most prominent of the last-few-years’ worth of I.V. musicians, mixes reggae, ska, rock, and even hip-hop, and has grown steadily in popularity on the South Coast.
Chilla Vista had traditionally been held in People’s and Perfect parks, the historical setting of protests and student activism during Isla Vista’s most turbulent years in the late-1960s and early ’70s. The festival has been one of the school year’s prime opportunities for bands and individual artists to get their music out into the community.
Like its larger Santa Barbara counterpart, Isla Vista’s Earth Day celebration has its roots in the local environmental activism and awareness that spawned from the 1969 oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel.
UCSB developed one of the first environmental studies departments in the country the following year, and Isla Vista went through a decade of nearly hippie-esque environmental consciousness.
“We just really want to show how easy it is to live a more sustainable lifestyle and to really show people the impact that they can make on Earth just by being more green and sustainable,” Dambaev said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
