The Sustainability Courtyard at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is easy to miss.

Though it’s on the campus map, the courtyard — centrally located between Kuykendall Hall and the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics — has no sign. Yet over the years, it has served as a gathering place, a venue to raise awareness of environmental issues and a spot to grab a vegetarian plate lunch.

It is also the site of the university’s Earth Day Festival & Concert from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. April 24.

"It’s a space and time to just celebrate and show the positive aspects of the environmental movement," said student Earth Day event coordinator Doorae Shin, 21, of Manoa. "It’s a time to get students engaged through volunteering or even signing a petition."

Students volunteer to organize the festival, an annual university tradition, which this year will feature more than 40 environmental advocacy groups and businesses. There will be music, poetry, potted plants and locally sourced, vegetarian food for sale.

The event’s carbon footprint will even be offset with tree plantings across the campus.

Earth Day falls on April 22, which marks what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970, according to the Earth Day Network, a nonprofit group that evolved out of the first event. On the first Earth Day, an estimated 20 million Americans gathered in parks and college auditoriums for what they called an environmental teach-in.

Today, it’s a global celebration commemorated by beach cleanups, festivals and recycling drives documented on social media.

The UH Sustainability Courtyard represents a commitment toward green practices and is still evolving.

On any given day, there are students and professors eating lunch and sometimes a drummer on the lawn. There is a recycling bin and native landscaping. Two food trucks, Govinda’s and Da Spot, offer locally sourced vegetarian food.

"People need somewhere to come together to really think about sustainability, and there’s no real place on campus other than the Sustainability Courtyard for that," said Zach Parlee, Earth Day participant coordinator and a junior studying natural resources and environmental management. "It’s a center for those types of ideas."

Shin, a junior pursuing a degree in sustainability from a social sciences approach, often meets friends there.

Recent activities include painting a sign to go up at the courtyard entrance and a membership drive for the Surfrider Foundation’s UH branch, which held a BYO (Bring Your Own) campaign and gave away sets of reusable bamboo utensils and stainless-steel Hydro Flask water bottles.

Cycle Manoa regularly offers free bike repairs, while Student Organic Farm Training members hold a produce sale at noon every first Monday of the month.

The edible garden, formerly a grassy stage bordered by rocks, is now a raised plant bed with kale, Swiss chard, sweet potato, beans, lettuce, arugula, cucumber, cilantro and parsley. Students planted the garden as a demonstration on Earth Day a few years ago, and now they volunteer to care for and harvest it.

"My hope for this space is that it just becomes more educational," said student Michi Sweeney, a senior majoring in sociology. "The goal is to show people what our food looks like when it’s growing because there’s so much of a disconnect, yet food is central to our lives."

Starting the Sustainability Courtyard took work and effort from volunteers, students, faculty and staff, according to Bruce J. Miller, a marine ecologist and former director of the UH Office of Sustainability.

The idea was conceived in 2002 as part of strategic planning sessions led by university administrators. A few years later, a former parking area was designated for the courtyard.

Miller, now a part-time resident on the Big Island who is working on a book about reducing consumptive life­styles, recalls a concrete parking lot with large storage containers.

Architecture students from Charles Palumbo’s class worked on the design of the courtyard, which at the time was to include water features. With help from Roxanne Adams, director of buildings and grounds management, hundreds of volunteers removed concrete and put in soil and plants.

Miller said it took more work to break through the layers of bureaucracy to allow, for instance, independent vendors to sell food on campus.

Shin, who moved to Hawaii from Pennsylvania to attend UH, got involved in the environmental movement because of her love for Hawaii.

"I think environmentalism needs to be seen as a more holistic concept instead of, ‘Oh, those hippies,’" she said. "It’s really about having a healthier life and thinking more deeply about the consequences of all our actions."

She’s a vegan who rides her bike everywhere, always brings her own bag to the store, carries her own eating utensils and takes short showers.

Shin and other students cited energy and fossil fuels as the defining environmental issue of their generation.

Freshman Lisa Grandi­netti said food security is a major concern, given that such a large percentage of Hawaii’s food has to be imported.

Miller, 72, is worried about the current generation of college students.

"I look at young people today and my concern is that everybody’s so distracted — by cellphones, by Twitter, Facebook, this, that. When you’re distracted, you don’t have time or energy to focus on things that really matter," he said.

Miller recalls helping to organize the first Earth Day in 1970 as a graduate student in New Hampshire. Back then, his generation — inspired by Rachel Carson’s book "Silent Spring," which exposed the dangers of the pesticide DDT — believed it had only 30 years to turn the world around.

More than 30 years have passed, and the situation hasn’t improved.

"If you look at trendlines, every trendline is wrong," he said. "The species diversity is dropping, use of pesticides is increasing, use of water is increasing, number of fish available is dropping, CO2 (carbon dioxide) is increasing, temperature is changing.

"Every trend that we were worried about is worse. That doesn’t mean we can’t reverse things, but time is running out."

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