Rocco Strain can cover the 2.5 miles on his road bike from home to school in under seven minutes.

“Six minutes, 47 seconds,” Strain said this week. “I did it yesterday.”

Riding to Skagit Valley College’s Whidbey Island campus in Oak Harbor is Strain’s way of doing his part to help the environment and to emulate a healthy lifestyle.

Setting a good example is important to Strain, the campus’ student government president.

It’s also important to Kevin Adams, the student government treasurer.

The two of them have teamed up to organize a major event at the Whidbey campus next week in celebration of Earth Day’s 45-year anniversary.

From noon until 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 22, Skagit Valley’s Whidbey branch will be the center of Earth Day activity and discussion on the island.

Experts in the environmental field, more than 15 community organizations, college and high school students and a handful of global sustainability sponsors will all come together as part of “Earth Day 2015,” a community-wide collaborative event.

Not only will there be classroom sessions on topics such as hydrology, earth history, renewable energy, “The Sixth Extinction” nonfiction book, and ocean warming and acidification, there will be a keynote speaker and open community symposium led by a panel of six environmental experts.

To keep things fun, there also will be yoga instruction, a poetry contest, giveaways and raffles and a free salad lunch made up of 33 items.

The school held a similar Earth Day event last year organized by former student government president Andrew Pearce.

“We had really good discussions about global warming and climate change and the sensationalism of it,” Pearce said. “The climate is changing, that’s the truth of it. But it’s not as if we’re at the end of the world. We talked about how we can mitigate the actual damage it is going to cause.”

The discussion continues this year with a particular focus on “The Sixth Extinction,” a book written by Elizabeth Kolbert published in 2014 that chronicles past mass extinctions of species on earth and demonstrates that the earth is in the middle of a sixth mass extinction — yet the first attributable to a single species.

“We want to show trends of what is happening based off of scientific evidence and what our resource consumption looks like in the future,” Strain said.

The six panelists who will lead the discussion are Angie Homola, former Island County commissioner; Kelly Kielwitz, founder of Whidbey Sun & Wind; Maribeth Crandell, environmental specialist with Island County Environmental Health; Steve Ericson, restoration ecologist and litigation coordinator for Whidbey Environmental Action Network; Steve Rothboeck, retired planner from the engineering division of the Public Works Department of Whidbey Island Naval Air Station; and Susie Richards, longtime Whidbey educator and coordinator of Whidbey ECO Network.

Rothboeck will deliver the keynote address.

“This year, it’s grown a lot,” said Pearce, a sophomore at the college.

“We were flooded with responses,” Adams said, referring to when he began looking for community organizations interested in attending. “Everyone has been willing and ready to help out and talk about things they work on all year. There are tons of different organizations that directly relate to Earth Day topics.”

The event will start with the community eco-fair from noon to 3:45 p.m., followed by classroom sessions in Oak Hall 3:50-4:30 p.m., Rothboeck’s keynote speech at 4:35 p.m. and the community symposium in Hayes Hall 5:15-6:30 p.m.

There is no cost for the event.

“It’s a great way for people to acknowledge that there are resources that need to be taken care of and that the earth is an important thing,” Strain said.

The Oak Harbor Public Schools also will be participating in Earth Day activities in partnership with Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.

Some classes will be involved with worm composting and building solar houses while some schools will practice reducing electricity use for the day.

The Whidbey Conservation District, City of Oak Harbor and newly formed Oak Harbor Garry Oak Society will be assisting Heather Fakkema-Hovde’s fifth-grade class at Hillcrest Elementary School with the planting of five Garry oaks at the school.

In relation to Arbor Day, which is April 24, the Oak Harbor Garry Oak Society also has created a self-guided Garry oak walking tour around the city. Twenty-one Garry oaks have been marked with lime-green ribbons and tags that share information about the trees. Tour maps may be found at the City of Oak Harbor, Oak Harbor Library and Oak Harbor Chamber of Commerce.

In recognition of Earth Day, the Navy also is hosting several activities and cleanup efforts on the base, including a cleanup along the Seaplane Base’s Maylor Point Trail.