Below is the text of a letter that was sent to KRBE in late January regarding Earth Day 2002. We expect to hear a response from them soon. Please mark your calendars for CECs Earth Day celebration on April 13 to be held on the Rice campus. Contact CEC trustee Alesha Herrera at alesha5677@hotmail.com for more information about participating:

On behalf of the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition (CEC), I would like to thank you for partnering with our organization on the annual Earth Day festival. The five years we have spent working with both 104 KRBE and Enron have been a rewarding experience for CEC. KRBE’s generous donations of festival funds to CEC have enabled us to strengthen our programs. We have appreciated the opportunity to bring the environmental message to many Houstonians whom we otherwise might not reach.

However, we believe that the mission of an Earth Day event should be to educate the community about local and global environmental issues while demonstrating environmental principles in action. We imagine an event that includes, for example, recycling, waste minimization, use of low emission energy sources, organic and vegetarian food, and prominent environmental messaging. Houston now competes with other cities around the world for knowledge workers that demand a high quality of life. Environmental education and action, which will help improve Houston’s quality of life, is even more relevant today than five years ago.

The ideals described above have not been an integral part of the KRBE Earth Day event. As past partners with KRBE, we feel that we have failed in our attempt to help KRBE and its vendors steer the event towards those ideals. For these reasons, we have decided to take two actions.

First, the CEC will produce its own Earth Day event this year. We have partnered with environmental community leaders and nonprofit organizations to join us in this project. Houston Earth Day 2002 will be held on the Rice University Campus on April 13. It will be a day of education, celebration, and action that will bring the Houston/Gulf Coast community together and encourage understanding of and participation in local and global environmental issues.

Second, we would like to present KRBE with a challenge. We feel strongly that an Earth Day event – wherever it is held and whoever produces it – should demonstrate the principles upon which Earth Day was built. Our challenge to KRBE is this: reconsider what Earth Day means and produce an event that lives up to the name. Such a task is indeed challenging and requires thinking differently.

If there is genuine interest among KRBE’s management to take on this challenge, we, and likely many other groups and individuals, would be proud to help. At a minimum, it will require members of the KRBE staff to educate themselves about the environmental issues that are affecting the quality of life of Houstonians. It will also require rethinking the traditional “rock concert” approach that has been the focus of the KRBE Earth Day event.

If this challenge is not of interest or is not feasible, then we respectfully request that the phrase “Earth Day” be removed from the event title. We make this request on the principle that a true Earth Day celebration should be, first and foremost, an environmentally conscious event.

Once again, we would like to thank KRBE for the work done over the past five years as well as the support you have given CEC. We wish you the best in your future endeavors and hope that your 2002 concert is a great success. Feel free to contact me, or our board president, Mr. Justus Baird, at anytime by calling the CEC office at 713-524-4232.

Sincerely,
Alesha Herrera
Citizens’ Environmental Coalition
Earth Day Chair