Posted: 4/29/2026
SNR has Earth Day with pizza on prairie, pies to faces
By Ronica Stromberg
About 80 School of Natural Resources employees and students celebrated Earth Day on April 21 on the back lawn of Hardin Hall. They took part in activities like viewing a newly installed bat house, listening to music, eating pizza and ice cream and throwing pies in colleagues' faces.
Ten professors and administrators volunteered to have whipped cream pies thrown in their faces as a fundraiser for the Student Excellence Fund, which supports student experiences and equipment. The school's student ambassadors, Sophia Rojas, Charlie Krug, William Cunningham and Jane Jewell, organized the Earth Day celebration and came up with the idea to sell raffle tickets for a dollar each for purchasers to have the chance to throw a pie into the faces of the 10 volunteers.
"Hats off to the professors that participated in this," said Kenneth Pyle, the student success coach who oversaw the students with the rest of the academic advising team. "I mean, I know you become a doctor and a professor, and that's a very serious thing, and that pieing was a very non-serious thing. It was a lot of fun, and I think everybody laughed."
Pyle said the pie-throwing served as a stress reliever for some people at this point of the semester. He took a couple of pies to the face himself and said it was a first-time experience but tasty.
"I don't usually have whipped cream, but the whipped cream had some cookie crumbles in there, and I was just like, 'All right, let's go,'" he said. "But I will say it was pretty disgusting, like, later at 5 o'clock, I had a class to go to, and I just stuck my finger in my ear, and I had gooey whipped cream in my ear still."
Rheece May, coordinator of Habitat Management and Fire Education, had been on hand with a backpack sprayer to spray whipped cream off faces, but the equipment typically serves for prescribed fire work.
Faculty members Lindsey Chizinski and Ann Powers avoided the pies and sprayer well by showing up in their hazmat suits when it was their turn to get "pied."
Even the director of the School of Natural Resources, Larkin Powell, took a couple of pies to the face and threw one at another professor even though he said he didn’t know how his name was drawn since he never bought a raffle ticket.
"It was an interesting experience on both sides of the pie,” he said as a newbie to both.
He said it was fun seeing the students be creative and come up with the ideas for the Earth Day event. The pie-throwing engaged the crowd, and the Earth Day events, which went from about noon to four, made good use of the prairie the school has planted in its backyard, he said.
Before the pie-throwing started, John Carroll, wildlife ecology and management professor, and Joe Kouba, student president of the Wildlife Club, revealed a bat house they had helped install in the back prairie. The bat house joins the chimney swift tower and birdhouses already installed.
In the last hour of the Earth Day celebration, student musicians performed in the main auditorium of Hardin Hall.
Earth Day dates back to April 22, 1970, as a day to protect the environment. The School of Natural Resources aligns with this purpose in its programs and the degrees it awards.
"This is our holiday," Powell told those gathered to celebrate Earth Day.
He said the celebration was a great way to showcase the Hardin Prairie, and it felt natural for the school community to be out there together. Last year was the first year to officially celebrate Earth Day as a school, but it was a smaller gathering, with ice cream and the display of hammocks installed in the school's backyard.
Powell said he hoped students would continue to carry out the Earth Day celebration in the School of Natural Resources annually.
"It just seems so perfect that we would have a student-centered, student-designed event on Earth Day because I always say the little catchphrase is 'The School of Natural Resources, where it's our job to help you find a way to make the world a better place,'" he said. "And so, Earth Day is really the day that we have to celebrate as a school, kind of what we do, why we do it, when the whole world is thinking about that and there's a lot of other people celebrating that day too."
