Columnist Susan Snyder: EcoJam has run aground

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004 | 8:13 a.m.

EcoJam has hit the skids.

Clark County Parks and Community Services officials have canceled the annual April Earth Day celebration, citing a lack of money and community interest.

"We weren't funded for it (this year)," Leslie Mihalko, the county agency's spokeswoman, said. "And we were not getting the participation."

EcoJam was a daylong festival conducted in Sunset Park on the Saturday nearest Earth Day, which is recognized nationally April 22. Clark County has hosted it for the past nine years, Mihalko said.

The event featured vendors hawking ecologically sound items such as solar-powered ovens, handmade soaps and origami art made with recycled paper.

Government agencies and private, nonprofit groups sold ecologically sound ideas such as water conservation, using public transit and protecting wildlife and wild lands.

But saving the Earth just wasn't drawing the kinds of crowds it used to, Mihalko said. Three years ago 6,500 people attended EcoJam. The following year it dropped to 4,000.

Barely 2,000 people showed up last year.

That's not a festival. In a city of 1.5 million that's barely a countywide soccer tournament.

Maybe it's not a lack of interest so much as too few weekends to go around.

"We've had some other festivals take its place," Mihalko said of the fated EcoJam.

A quick look at the county parks department calendar shows an outdoor concert and two festivals in March, six festivals in April, seven in May and four in June, she said. And people turn out in droves for some of them.

The county's March 27 Extreme- Thing festival at Desert Breeze skate park on Spring Mountain Road attracts some 12,000 people -- mostly youngsters interested in skateboard/BMX stunt riding and its music and culture.

But Southern Nevada weather can be tough for festivals. There are only about a dozen weekends when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold. When the festival calendar is packed, it's hard for people to choose.

And those skateboard riders are pretty cool.

"It's changing trends, changing attitudes," Mihalko said.

Well, Earth Day is 34 this year. That's almost middle-aged. Maybe it's just not cool to plant a tree anymore. Or maybe we've forgotten just how easily we can lose ground that hasn't been paved over.

"The outreach we got after the fact -- 12 schools and 1,240 students in the month after EcoJam -- that's really big for us," said Lisa Calderwood, urban forester for the Nevada Division of Forestry and a past exhibitor.

"I think we owe it to the community and owe it to ourselves, as we grow to the edges of the valley, to teach environmental education," she said.

As of the end of last week, no one had requested the EcoJam vendor list in preparation of staging a similar event, Mihalko said.

"Hopefully, it'll come around again as it did before and as people get more interested in protecting the environment," she said.

Hopefully.

One can never be too interested in protecting the environment -- even if it's only about hitting a festival for the T-shirt.