After weeks of effort to put together an Environmental Fair, the Environmental Science Investigation club postponed the event from Oct.27 to spring because of the lack of response from businesses that were invited to attend.

“We invited a lot of businesses and nonprofits from basically the eastern half of Kansas,” Livingston said. “We conceived and planned this thing in a very short amount of time and I think probably we just didn’t give businesses enough time to respond and… I think many businesses we invited already had things planned, so they couldn’t show up.”

The event, which was supposed to take place in Cico Park, had taken a substantial amount of planning by the ESI members.

“(It) is going to be just a fair where we have a lot of different groups and small businesses within Kansas come and demonstrate and teach families about the value of nature and what being a steward to the land is,” senior Alex Andreson, chair of the event, said.

The fair was planned to be a fun and exciting way for Manhattan to learn a little more about their impact.

“We wanted to have an event where different organizations and different businesses could come and kind of advertise the community, interact with the community about environmental issues and what they were doing to decrease their footprint and all of these kinds of things. We planned for there to be information and activities and vendors,” Clancey Livingston, ESI advisor, said.

Though they don’t have an official date yet, ESI is very excited for the new fair date next spring. 

“There was a lot of excitement and … if we can get it pulled together in the spring, it’s gonna be a really neat thing, a really cool thing to the community,” Livingston said.

With the extra time, ESI is hoping to have a better response from businesses, who will now have plenty of time to mark their calendars for the event. They are also planning on having much more advertising to encourage the community to come learn about the environment and their effect on it.