Leith Sharp, director of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, delivers her closing address yesterday to the Northeast Climate Conference held this weekend.

About 400 students descended on Harvard last Friday in an environmentalist convention organized by Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee (EAC) and the Climate Campaign, a coalition students against global warming from Northeastern universities.

Though the event’s attendees were primarily students at Northeast universities, the Northeast Climate Conference also brought together students hailing from Canada, Michigan and Montana.

Workshops were held throughout Harvard Yard, from the Science Center to Emerson Hall.

“This is the largest event of this kind focused on the environment,” said Zach D. Liscow ’05, one of the conference’s planners and co-chair of the EAC.

The convention took on a partisan flavor as keynote speakers attacked the Bush Administration’s apparent lack of concern for the environment.

The organizers of the conference also expressed hope that momentum from the weekend would motivate their campaign to convince the Harvard administration to invest in renewable energy.

Last year, the EAC started its campaign to make the new campus at Allston sustainable.

Though University President Lawrence H. Summers agreed to create a committee to push for campus-wide sustainability, EAC members said Harvard is far behind the University of California system, which hosted referendums wherein students agreed to each pay a few extra dollars to cover the expenses of renewable energy initiatives on campus.

“We are at a beginning stage. We hope that this conference will add to the discussion and increase awareness. If Harvard becomes a sustainable campus, it would be monumental,” said Allison I. Rogers ’04 who co-chairs the EAC and helped organize the conference.

The students spent three days listening to keynote speakers and participating in workshops with topics ranging from constructing a more viable activist network to crafting an environmentally-friendly building.

The workshop sessions included “State Break-Outs,” where students convened with others from their own states in an effort to coordinate environmental projects on campus.

“We are trying to make a more cohesive environmental network,” said Andrew Kroon, a Yale senior.

Although Rogers said the conference aimed to fight stereotypes of environmentalists as “super-hippie and anti-corporate,” there was a clear anti-Bush sentiment among participants.

Alongside a congregation of brochure tables for groups such as Green Peace and the Sierra Club was a table of bumper-stickers, bearing slogans like “Re-defeat Bush in 2004” and “More Trees, Less Bush.”

The keynote speakers seldom passed up an opportunity to take a jab at the Bush administration.