Every summer, a large and growing number of music festivals blankets the US.  They range from relatively small one-day events like Boston's EarthFest to four-day long Bacchanalian blowouts like Bonnaroo.  Held every year in June about an hour south of Nashville, the festival boasts dozens of artists over 4 days on 5 stages.  Roughly 80,000 people attend the show, coming from around the country and beyond to camp, party, and listen to some of the finest music around.  The festival has been an unqualified success, helping to spawn a nationwide summer festival scene that now features dozens of events large and small.  Major competitors now include Coachella,  held just outside Palm Springs, California and the revitalized Lollapalooza, now rooted in Chicago.  A similar festival scene has existed for decades in Europe.

The mind boggles at the resources required to organize a festival on the scale of Bonnaroo.  The promoters are essentially assembling a medium-sized city for four days.  In fact, at Phish’s final concert in Coventry, Vermont, held in August of 2004, the festival itself was temporarily the largest city in the state.  Logistically, the organizers have many of the same responsibilities and challenges as a municipal government.  They have to dispose of mountains of trash and oceans of sewage while providing rivers of water.  Festival goers typically camp in fields without electricity, but the power needs of the multitude of stages and the hundreds of on-site vendors are still significant.  And then there is the food:  those hundreds of vendors provide somewhere on the order of a half-million meals over the course of a four-day event like Bonnaroo.

The recent trend towards greening corporations, cities, and homes has resonated with the generally young and liberal demographic that attends events like these.  Festival organizers are going out of their way to green their events, or at least give the appearance that they’re greener than they used to be.  But there is no consensus about what constitutes a green event, and efforts vary from trying to increase recycling at festivals to staging completely carbon neutral events. 

In the following posts, I’ll take a look at what different festivals are doing to be green and look at what else they could be doing.   The series will cover Bonnaroo extensively, both since I’ve been lucky enough to attend twice and because Superfly Productions agreed to an interview and brainstorming session about ways to green the festival.  It’s hard to compare a 3000 person event on the beach in England to Bonnaroo, but all festivals have a certain amount in common.  They find a location, bring in some bands, market like crazy, and hope that they sell enough tickets to make a profit. Once the audience arrives, promoters must provide a wealth of services to keep their customers safe, healthy and entertained.  At every step event organizers have the option to make the festival incrementally greener.

Anytime I'm lucky enough to attend another festival in the future, I'll come back here and add my impressions of that event's greenness (or lack thereof).

If you'd like to get in touch with me, hit me up at jason.turgeon [[AT]] gmail.com.