A Celebration Focused on Forests and Sustainable Urban Development
By Kara Kukovich, Outings & Events Chair, Sierra Club’s Allegheny Group and Matt Peters, Hazelwood resident and event organizer
Sierra Club’s Allegheny Group is joining community organizations in the Hazelwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh for an Earth Day celebration on Saturday, April 25. The event will be an all-day music and arts festival, with an array of booths and tents where people can take action and get involved with grassroots organizations working to protect forests and confront climate change. Hazelwood has more than a third of the city’s non-park forests, making it an appropriate venue to both celebrate and protect our green spaces.
The Earth Day celebration will begin at noon at Blair Street Park, with local bands from the Hazelwood neighborhood performing throughout the day on a solar-powered stage provided by Zero Fossil. There will also be a variety of educational workshops, arts and crafts activities, green vendors, community organization booths, and locally sourced food.
In addition to coming together as a community, this event aims to spread awareness about the need to protect forests, especially forests here in the eastern half of the continent. “Climate change, combined with relentless industrial logging on our public lands, is making forests out West hotter and drier, resulting in the massive wildfires we see on TV. But that same climate change is making our eastern forests wetter and shadier, growing lusher and denser in response to the added carbon in the atmosphere and the longer growing seasons each year. This means that protecting forests here in Appalachia is key to developing real solutions to the problem of global climate change,” says resident Matt Peters, one of the main event organizers.
Kara Kukovich, an event organizer who serves on the Executive Committee of Sierra Club’s Allegheny Group, recognizes the local to global benefits of Pittsburgh's forests. “I don’t think Pittsburgh would be the vibrant, thriving city it is today without its parks and forests,” she reflects. “We need the shade, clean air, and green infrastructure that these forests provide, but beyond that we need these places to help us stay healthy and sane in an increasingly stressful world. Additionally, the city’s forests help in curbing the effects of climate change and serve as an example of how nature, wildlife, and people can coexist in an urban environment.”
Sierra Club’s Allegheny Group joins a variety of other local organizations supporting this event, including Hazelwood-based groups such as Arts Excursions Unlimited and Offroute Art, as well as grassroots climate organizations such as the Pittsburgh chapter of 350.org. This unique collaboration underscores the importance of coming together as a community for a shared cause that affects all of us. Additionally, it emphasizes the significant role of the arts in our social and political discourse.
In addition to donations from the Sierra Club’s Allegheny Group and other community organizations, this event was made possible thanks to a grant from the Direct Support Fund, which is a project of the Mountain Watershed Association. The Direct Support Fund is made possible by the Heinz Endowments, the 11th Hour Project, Cloud Mountain Foundation, and the Plastic Solutions Fund, and is a project of the Mountain Watershed Association. For more information or to apply, please click here.
To join, volunteer, or learn more about this event, contact Kara Kukovich at kara.the.lorax@gmail.com. You can find the event page at Earth Day in Pittsburgh.
This blog was included as part of the April 2026 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!