jason.turgeon

Langerado roundup

jason.turgeon — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:05:00 GMT

The good folks at Langerado were kind enough to send me a press pass to the festival so that I could report on its greenness, or lack thereof. And while I wasn't overly impressed with the sustainability angle, the festival deserves props for a mostly stellar lineup and some truly spectacular performances.

Like all festivals, there was good and bad at Langerado. I'll start with the bad--it often felt like a disorganized mess. The traffic was a mess, the water situation was disgraceful (no free water in the festival grounds, inadequate water in the camping area), and the portolets were badly located and only rarely clean. The festival food was neither affordable nor tasty, press conferences were non-existent, and security failed to notice multiple tent break-ins and a bunch of hippies climbing into the one (empty) water tank. And in a move that disgusted about 500 hardcore Dan Deacon fans, management botched his show and had him on a stage a mile away and an hour earlier than his scheduled performance. I don't think I've ever seen so many truly angry people at a music show as I did when the roadie on stage let us know that we'd all been hanging around the wrong stage while he played somewhere else.

But minor logistics aside, the festival generally shone. With the exception of the gaping wound in the lineup that was R.E.M., the bands were a great mix of crowd-pleasers. The stages, although a bit too spread out for comfort, had fantastic acoustics and thanks to the distances involved there was no crossover of the music in most spots. The vendors were generally good--there was a fun emphasis on art, complete with paintings by local artist Lebo during sets--and the outside attractions included alligator wrestling and hippie watching.

The most important part of a festival, of course, is the music, and this is where Langerado really delivered. On Friday and Saturday I was treated to perhaps the finest sequence of live music I've ever seen. Every band brought their A-game--the performances were generally 5-stars across the board. On Friday alone, I saw jaw-dropping sets by

the Dynamites (the real deal of soul music)
the Beastie Boys (who knew they would be THIS good? it's just not natural)

G. Love and Special Sauce
and a special reunion set at the Chickee Hut by Phix, who really do sound just like Phish. There was even a full-on glowstick war. This group is so talented, I think everyone in the audience was wondering when they were going to start writing their own songs
and lesser (but still good) performances by Ozomatli, Sam Bush, the Spam Allstars, and Umphree's McGee

Moving into Saturday, the day again started out incredibly strong and kept going from there:

The Bad Plus drew a big--and appreciative--crowd for a virtuoso performance
The Wood Brothers (with Chris Wood from MMW) lived up to their growing hype with a growling, bluesy set
New Mastersound, a band that played a fill-in set on Friday to replace a late drop-out, played a second stunner on Saturday
Antibalas kept things grooving late in the afternoon
Thievery Corporation blew us all away with a non-stop dancefest
and pleasant surprise/stupid fun band of the weekend Ghostland Observatory drew a couple of thousand jamband burnouts down to the far reaches of the Chickee Hut with its implausibly fun laser light show and bizarre antics. If you get the chance to see this act, grab a handful of recreational chemicals and go!

Unfortunately, the organizers dropped us off from our high of Ghostland Observatory into a big pile of whininess with R.E.M. Given the choice of Michael Stipe or nothing, we left in droves--when I walked out to the campground, I observed in passing that it doesn't look good for your band when there's a 5 minute wait to get OUT of the festival and not one person in line to get IN, something that drew rueful agreement from my fellow refugees. Temperatures dropped into the low 50's at about the same time, and the whole scene took on a bizarrely depressed mood. As I walked around the campground looking for a party, ordinarily easy to find at a festival like this, I found myself alone. Everyone had bundled up into their tents or cars and the whole place was eerily silent, save for the distorted wail of Mr. Stipe in the distance.

After R.E.M. wrapped up, about half the festival came back in, but Saturday night's late-night lineup wasn't looking too good. There was the Disco Biscuits, the Dan Deacon Show, or gospel act the Lee Boys. You're either a Disco Biscuits fan or you're not, and those of us not snorting mollie went looking for a good time somewhere else, only to find that the Dan Deacon show had been rearranged. By midnight, the place was surprisingly empty and I was dejectedly walking back to my campsite when I swung past the Lee Boys.

"Sounds like warmed over Robert Randolph," I thought to myself, but I decided to give it a shot. Before I knew it, I'd been sucked in to a spot right in the front row and was having the most fun I'd have all weekend, dancing like a maniac with complete strangers, making eye contact with the bands' families, and throwing my hands up in the air in praise of the lord. At one point, I recall thinking that if a band of large black bible-bangers could get a group of white college jamband fans this excited about gospel and the blues, they could probably resolve tensions between Israel and Palestine. My notes from the show say "can this be the band that brings America together?" I think they just might be able to do it. This is what a live show should be--a unifying, uplifting experience, no drugs required.

We got an encore out of the Lee Boys just in time for daylight savings time to push the clocks to 4 AM and I made my way back to my tent, where I lay shivering for the rest of the night. Sunday morning brought warmth, so I stayed in my tent until after noon. After being denied cleanliness yet again by the lack of water I went back in for the final day, unfortunately too late to catch Josh Ritter. The music stayed strong, although perhaps not quite as strong as the first two days:

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals tore it up, culminating in a heart-stopping drum performance that had everyone in the band pounding on the kit at the same time
The Funky Meters lived up to their name
Gov't Mule played a surprisingly mellow first few songs
The National, a band I decided to see at the last minute and the last act of the festival for me, blew me away with a heartfelt set that alternated between lullabies and tormented screams. There's a good reason that this band was given Paste's album of the year.

Overall, it was a great festival, despite logistical issues including an almost game-killing lack of water. The overall feel was very reminiscent of Bonnaroo, so much so that of Montreal called the festival "Langeroo" and then "Bonnerado." The stages were top-notch. I'm especially fond of the distant Chickee Hut, which the organizers made worth the trek by stocking with the kind of great bands you've always wanted to hear but never got around to. It's possibly my favorite venue, ever, especially with memories of Ghostland Observatory's lasers bouncing off the pine trees. The other hidden gem of the festival was the small but stalwart Greenerado stage, also loaded up with great bands that you won't see in such a small space again anytime soon. If the folks running the show can fix some organizational issues and keep the quality of performances up, this festival will soon be as well-regarded as its bigger cousin in Manchester.

My report card for Langerado:

Overall: B, thanks to logistical screwups and the deathly pall that R.E.M. cast over us on Saturday night

Music (Lineup): B, thanks to Michael Stipe and back-to-back late night performances by raver-friendly Disco Biscuits and STS9

Music (Performances): A, thanks to solid efforts by just about everybody. The artists brought it this weekend!

Logistics: C-, thanks to traffic hassles, screwed up artist schedules, lackadaisical organization, and really terrible water management

Greening: C. They're trying, but they're not there yet.

Venue: A-, great stages, big enough to spread out, and a fun backwoods spot but a bit hard to get to

From Butler to Biowillie: Sarah van Schagen Gets on the Bandwagon

MattC — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:11:00 GMT

Seems my passion for all things green and musical is rubbing off on Grist editor Sarah van Schagen, who has reported on the greening of Bonnaroo, given us a good comparison chart of the greenest music festivals, and now has posted an interview with Aussie artist Xavier Rudd, following up on last year's heart-to-heart with fellow down-under heartthrob John Butler. What is it about the Aussies that they keep popping up on the green-music radar?

But Sarah's got more than just a passing fancy for musical men at work--she's got a long and growing list of green music stories, as well as a smattering of Hollywood (ick) coverage and an oh-so-cute affection for alliteration.

So since I've been unable to line up my own interview with the Beastie Boys, I'll point you to her interview with Mike D for another big green concert last year.

How do we compare as green-music bloggers? Like me, Sarah was disappointed in Sasquatch for its halfhearted greening efforts at last year's festival, but unlike me, Sarah was actually there. And while Sarah posted way, way more about Bonnaroo than I did, and got to have interviews with musicians thanks to her all-access press pass, I still think my post on the big bash was pretty good. More recently, we've both commented in passing on surfer-boy Jack Johnson. And while we have also both covered BioWillie, she picked up on his book while I picked on him (but just a little) for the questionably sustainable concept of BioDiesel. And neither of us could make heads or tails of the Virgin Music Festival's decision to use Darryl Hannah as an official spokesflack. But while she gets interviews with fun musicians like Michael Franti and covers important, erm, news like the greening of Maroon 5 (only comment to that story: "such a shame they're terrible"), I dig out the real movers and shakers behind the green music scene with interviews like these. But I totally whiffed it on the Grammys. Sorry, kids!

Bottom line? It's not a competition, obviously, although I bet I could drink her under the table (a table at Bonnaroo covered in organic beer served in compostable cups, natch). Instead, I'll just continue to clue you folks in whenever she posts another exceptional article, and be glad that someone else out there cares about getting to listen to music without having to feel all guilty about it. And Sarah, I expect to see you at a music festival or 10 this summer. Until then, I'll be watching you!

Goin` Green News Roundup

MattC — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:07:00 GMT

Lest you think that all I care about is Langerado, here is a roundup of newsworthy events that have crossed my desk recently.

The Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ontario, (that's the great white north for all you geographically impaired Americans) goes where other festivals dare not tread: free drinking water, reusable beer mugs, and, no foolin', they will even wash your dishes for you to keep you from using paper plates.

Scotland's T in the Park festival makes an unsubstantiated claim to be the world's largest carbon neutral event. The festival will also be selling combined bus/festival tickets, something I'd like to see more of at US festivals.

Australia's festivals join up for a "summer of sustainability." Details, announced only through a myspace blog, are limited, but so far Falls Festival, Big Day Out, St Jeromes Laneway and Golden Plains have all joined on to the effort. Since the festival season has just wrapped up down under, I presume that this is an effort for summer 08-09 (sounds kinda strange, doesn't it?).

Also on the down-under tip, some old news that I'd meant to report on long ago, but never got around to. The Peats Ridge Festival, widely regarded as the most eco-friendly festival in the world, was unfortunately cancelled this time around due to massive floods. Enthusiastic Al Glore fans point fingers.

(update: the amazing venues and December Sunshine have now officially put Golden Plains and Peats Ridge as the two festivals I most want to attend but will never be able to afford airfare for. Check out the setup for the lucky 7500 festival-goers at GP. Woodstock, it ain't!)

Speaking of enthusiastic fans, the NY Times gets all fan-boy about Jack Johnson, waxing poetic about both his lyrics and his green creds. To his credit, Johnson has the decency to note that his music is "mellow to the point of annoying."

Speaking of eco-stoners, green-leaning festival Bonnaroo announced their lineup not long ago. Johnson will be headlining this year, with fellow green scenester Willie Nelson also on the bill. Hot tip if you're headed to Bonnaroo this year: do not miss Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. I don't know how green she is, but her voice is pure gold and her moves are red-hot. Run don't walk, kiddies, because between her set and My Morning Jacket, the tickets have already paid for themselves.

And on that note, take it away, Sharon!

An interview with Shanda Sansing of C3 Presents

jason.turgeon — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:56:00 GMT

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending more than an hour on the phone with Shanda Sansing, the person in charge of patron services and event greening for C3 Presents. You might not have heard of C3 Presents, but you definitely know their products. C3 is the production company behind Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits (ACL), the Big State country music festival, and one-half of the newly announced Vineland festival to be held in NJ next August.

Shanda is the driving force behind the greening of C3's events, but she's got the support of company management and Lollapalooza founder Perry Ferrell. This support has shown up in the recent greening initiatives at Lollapalooza, ACL, and to some extent at Big State. The company is actively looking to make 2008's events even greener. In our wide-ranging discussion, we talked about everything from the difficulties of using biodiesel to getting the audience to wash other people's dishes and how to best serve a plate of hot barbecue to a judge.

Perhaps the most exciting news on the greening front will come out of Vineland. Live Nation and C3 are teaming up with Festival Republic, the production company behind the UK's Glastonbury festival, perhaps the most successful festival in the world, to put on this event. Glastonbury has a long history of working towards a more just and sustainable world and has taken many steps to green its festivals over the years. Hopefully when we put the two together, we'll see something that will rival Peats Ridge in Australia in terms of its green credentials and positive social impact.

One thing that really jumped out at me from this interview was just how much work goes into greening these events. It is still far easier for someone putting on a festival do go about doing things business as usual. Greening a festival that's attended by 225,000 people is a huge task, one that requires not just money but a tremendous amount of time and energy. If you're a festival goer, make sure you take the time to thank the organizers and the volunteers who help make these shows happen as sustainably as possible.

Jason Turgeon: How did you end up involved in the greening efforts at C3?

Shanda Sansing: I manage the volunteer program and access program for people with disabilities. Part of volunteer program has always been recycling, so it was an extension of that work. It also happens that I'm very interested in greening, so this was a natural fit.

JT: You got a lot of good press for your greening campaign at Lollapalooza this year. Did you do the same thing for ACL? What are your plans for Vineland?

SS: We did the same sort of things for ACL as for Lollapalooza, there just wasn't as much of a media focus. It's too soon to know what we'll do with Vineland, but I assume that we'll have the same focus. Really and truly, the stuff we did was a matter of stepping back and taking a look at how we could better produce our events. Anybody could take these actions.

JT: What are some of the challenges you've had trying to green the festivals?

SS: One of the hardest things has been dealing with waste. You have to have control over everything that comes on to the site to ensure that you can dispose of it properly.

JT: Speaking of waste, did you use compostable cups at these events?

SS: We would really have liked to use compostable cups, even though they would cost us about four cents a cup, but a beer sponsor will normally give us non-recyclable #6 cups for free. But we heard from New Belgium beer that some of the compostable cups they were using were melting in the heat. All of our events our held in the hottest part of the summer, so we couldn't take that chance. There are also disposal issues. Even with a good staff of volunteers at all the waste stations directing people how to dispose of things properly, it can get very confusing.

But Blackstone Winery used compostable cups for their wine and had no problems. We've heard that some people store the cups with the beer kegs in refrigerated storage, although that can create a logistical issue when we have many beer stations. So we're going to take another look at these cups in the future.

Instead of using compostable cups, we had recycling incentives at Lollapalooza and ACL. We served beer out of 2 kinds of cups, #1 and #5. Number 1 is the less expensive disposable cup you're used to, and #5 is the kind of white souvenir cup that you see at football stadiums. We got people to collect stacks of cups and bring them to us for t-shirts and other prizes. The #5 cups got sleeved in a plastic sheath that had printed directions which asked people to take the cups home and wash them and reuse them. We were handing people stacks of dirty cups and we couldn't keep them in stock. People loved them. It was fun. Until it happened, I didn't know whether it would work or not.

JT: Wow, you actually got festival-goers to do someone else's dirty dishes. Aside from the cups, did you have a composting program at any of this year's events?

SS: We opted not to compost at Lollapalooza because the closest facility that could take food waste was in Wisconsin and it couldn't be integrated into regular waste management system. We have been working with a Chicago-based composting entity to build more capacity. We will be looking at that in the future. There are other issues with composting. It must be staffed, and you can't have any meat, or grease, or cheese mixed in. At the very least, we might be able to do it backstage. It is easier to do with caterers. Then we could have as few as 3 stations.

JT: There is a growing movement to get people away from bottled water and into reusable bottles like Nalgenes. Are you looking at doing anything like that?

SS: The problem with the hard plastic water bottles is that they can be used as a weapon, so there is a security concern. It was a big struggle even to get people to be allowed to bring in their own Nalgenes. So for now, we don't have a good solution to that problem.

JT: Did you use biodiesel at your festivals this summer?

SS: We use Blue Sun biofuels. We started this process a couple of years ago. There was a big learning curve. Many of the vendors' generators would have had their warranties negated by biofuels, but recent industry changes have permitted B20 mix, so we now use B20. We also use as much shore power as possible.

JT: How about solar-powered stages? I know that Sustainable Waves is also located in Austin.

SS: We have not done anything with solar stages, but we have talked to Sustainable Waves. Their stages are not large enough for even the smallest stage we use--not even the kids area at ACL or Lollapalooza. The biggest stage is 16 x 24. But hopefully someday we'll get to a point where we can use a solar stage.

JT: What about your water and wastewater use and treatment at the festivals? Do you reuse any of the greywater or do anything else special?

SS: I have a strong interest in these issues because when I was a peace corps volunteer I built rainwater catchment systems in the Dominican Republic. The village I was working in had a irrigation canal, but we had to hike a mile to get clean drinking water. We do as much as we can at the festivals. The ACL production area is hooked into city water. Austin does not allow graywater reuse, because there are worries about contaminating the groundwater table. We are obligated to collect gray and black water from our vendors, as well as grease. Grease is collected by outside vendors for reuse. We still use regular portolets. We're open to anything that can help us manage our water and wastewater use.

JT: This year you held Big State, your first camping festival and your first strictly country music festival. Did you put the same amount of work into greening this festival?

SS: We did a lot of stuff behind the scenes. It was a great festival. It was in the middle of an oval race track, and we had a car race each day. We also had things like a barbecue competition. People loved it and we had a great time, but with things like a barbecue competition and car races, it was difficult to really make any big claims about being green.

One of the hardest things was the barbecue. People come to compete and they spend hundreds of dollars to be there. The way these things work is that at the last minute, everyone puts their food on styrofoam and they rush it up to the judges because they want the food to be as hot as possible. We tried as hard as we could, but we could not find a good alternative to styrofoam that would keep the judges and contestants happy, so we had to go with styrofoam plates for the competition.

There were some other things that we wanted to do but we couldn't because the festival was in Bryan College Station, a small town about 2 hours outside of Houston. There were no facilities that could offer us composting or biodiesel, for instance. But we did as much as we could. We had basic recycling. All of the beer was served in cans, which made it easier to recycle. We did carbon offsets and had a display area with greening info for the patrons.

JT: Do you talk to other production companies about what they do to green their events?

SS: Sure, we're generally on pretty good terms. It's like the corner with four car dealerships. They're competing, but they also help each other out by being there and drawing more people to the area. We've talked a little bit with the folks who run South by Southwest, but with 150 venues, it's very hard for them to manage this kind of thing. We've talked to the folks at Bonnaroo. They helped us out with the biodiesel, told us about their experiences with some of the generators shutting down at first because the biodiesel is so much cleaner it was cleaning the deposits in the engines and clogging the filters. So now we have lots of extra filters on hand.

JT: What are some other things you do to green your events?

SS: We try to integrate it into everything we do. For instance, all of our volunteer shirts were organic cotton. We wanted to support these industries, the organic cotton, the bamboo shirts. And we have things like Green Street at Lollapalooza. Green Mountain Energy handles all of our offsets for us. We offset everything we do, including the office and all of our travel.

Quickie: Echo Project Follow-up

jason.turgeon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 02:33:00 GMT

The Vanderbilt Orbis has a good follow up on the Echo Project. Their take: no one in their right mind would go to a seminar on greening when Thievery Corporation was on stage, and plenty of people refused to play nice with the recycling and anti-littering messages. Fair enough--getting 10,000 drunks to do anything isn't easy, but hopefully we'll get a better analysis from someone else with a real focus on the hype vs. the reality.

Green festival roundup: Monterey Music Summit, SolarFest, Green Apple Festival, Big Green Gathering to close?

jason.turgeon — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:09:00 GMT

Here are four festivals that really take being green to heart.

First up is the Monterey Music Summit, held a couple of weeks ago in Monterey, CA. If you're reading this, you probably think of a different festival when you think of Monterey, but it seems that after 40 years, the town fathers are ready to carry the torch. This time around, they're also picking up the torch of environmentalism. This year's event was billed as "a forum for new thought and inspired intervention regarding the critical political and environmental issues of our time."

I can't emphasize how much I would like to separate environmentalism from politics, but it seems that there are still plenty of people out there who really want to associate doing well for the planet with some sort of political agenda. That said, it looks like it was a pretty good show, and I hope it was successful because they had a great lineup, featuring bands you've actually heard of, including Michael Franti and Spearhead, Ozomatli, Cake, The Roots, and G. Love and Special Sauce.

According to a press release, the festival is offsetting its CO2 by planting 1000 trees on the Monterey Peninsula and generating a full carbon statement. Regular readers know how I feel about offsets, but tree planting--especially locally--is always a good thing and by looking at their carbon production, the organizers undoubtedly tried to minimize their energy use, another good thing. Other steps toward greening included biodegradable products, organic food, and alternatives to bottled water.

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SolarFest is a yearly festival in Vermont that sounds like a good time for you green-leaning types. Dig it:

Plan to join us in our 13th year for two days of great music and educational opportunities. See who is performing at SolarFest 2007 on our solar-powered stages. Check out the 2007 workshop schedule with 40 workshops on renewable energy and sustainable living.
Visit nearly 100 renewable energy and sustainable living exhibitors and vendors, people whose business it is to provide practical solutions to the complex problems facing us in a post-carbon society.
Check into the family-focused fun with Frank Asch's Theatre-in-the-Woods, Kid's Corner wandering minstrels and clowns, and other serendipitous entertainments. Plus, free walk-in camping on beautiful wooded acres.

Without doing a full analysis, it sounds like this is one of the greener festivals around, although many music fans probably would prefer a stronger lineup and a little less politics with their music. But at only $25 for a weekend pass and free camping, I might just make the trip up there next summer to enjoy the show. 2008 dates are already out: July 11, 12, & 13. For more info and pictures, check out this blog post.

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A much larger green event/music festival happens every year on Earth Day. The Green Apple Festival, which has now expanded beyond the Big Apple to venues in Chicago and San Francisco, promises over 500 acts at 200 venues. Unfortunately, the website has almost no info about past events or the activities they've taken to go green, but it does promise that this will be an entirely carbon-neutral event. In other words, expect lots of offsets, but given the nature of the festival hopefully we'll see plenty of other greening at the assorted venues, too. The nice thing about a festival like this is that with so many venues involved, we have a golden opportunity to really educate a lot of the decision-makers in the entertainment industry about the mechanisms involved in being green. Here's hoping they do a good job!

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A similar music fest with a green focus in England that has been running since 1994 is running out of cash and might be forced to shut down. The Big Green Gathering, an offshoot of the UK's legendary Glastonbury music festival, has been attracting 15-20,000 people a year to its annual event comingling green living and music. Unfortunately, the festival is organized as a non-profit and seems to have taken that status to heart. After losing money in 2005, 2006, and 2007, the festival organizers are now looking for a lifeline to stave off bankruptcy. While I hope that the festival is able to figure out its finances, the message seems to have gotten through to its much larger (and financially solvent) parent festival. Glastonbury has been notably green of late, and since Glastonbury is about 10 times larger than the BGG, the impact there is much greater. The idea all along has been to take green out of the sidelines and into the mainstream, and while I'm not happy about the the end of the BGG, I think maybe it's a sign that it's served its purpose and it's time to move on.

Quickie: Sasquatch Goes Green, maybe

jason.turgeon — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:49:00 GMT

Megan Prusynski over at Green Options breaks down the greening of the Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington State in this post from last June. Her summary? Despite the green hype the festival wrapped itself up in thanks to a partnership with Carbon Harmony to offset the event, the other green aspects of the festival were pretty much non-existent. In short, it was greenwashed, not green. She says it better than I can:

Nice try, Sasquatch. It was fun and all, but you can't just slap a carbon-neutral sticker on an event and call it sustainable. Apparently the Sasquatch needs to evolve…

It'll be interesting to see if Sasquatch does more next year.

Quickie: My other blog

jason.turgeon — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:22:00 GMT

So on the strength of this blog, I got invited to write for JamBase.com on their Greenbase blog. Woot! So here's a quick plug: If you're into the whole green music thing, check out http://green-base.blogspot.com/ I'll continue to do lengthy posts on the greening of the festival scene here at melodytrip, but all the other stuff that doesn't really fit here will go onto that site.

Meanwhile, I wish I was at the echo project. If you went, I'm jealous. Post in the comments or write a blog post to let us know how it was!

The Greening of Festivals: The Echo Project

jason.turgeon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:22:00 GMT

The Echo Project looks like a great event, with an impressive lineup. I'm not crazy about the headliners, but the second-stringers are all acts I'd love to see (or see again): moe., thievery corp., michael franti, spoon (don't those boys sleep?), and for the hip-hop-headz Cypress Hill and GZA. I wish I could go.

Even cooler is the total commitment to the environment. This is what the Monolith festival would have looked like if it had really tried to live up to its own hype. The festival still isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than most of the others I've seen, Bonaroo excepted. Check it out:

They hired Sustainable Waves to help them do the right thing. Consultants aren't cure-alls, but the fact that they went out and got somebody good to help them along shows a commitment and maturity that a lot of festivals are lacking.
Before the festival--which sits on the vanks of the Chatahoochee River in Georgia--begins, they're asking the audience to help in a massive river cleanup. This is great, and I hope that fans respond well and other festivals follow the lead. Volunteering is a great way to build community, and while that may sound like hippie-speak, think about it: do you love festivals just because of the music, or do you also enjoy the sense of community you get at a festival that you can't get anywhere else? I know that I'm into the festival scene as much for the crowd as I am for the music, and I think that's true of a lot of other people, too. Even if only 10% of the audience participates, they'll still have thousands of volunteers working together to clean up the river.
They have a solar stage, also provided by Sustainable Waves. Bonnaroo had one of these, too--hopefully we'll see them get bigger in the future as more people ask for them.
They're doing all the usual offsetting, recycling, etc. Again, I don't care for offsets, but at least they're trying.

Could this festival do more? Sure, but they're off to a great start. If they took the local food/composting aspect of Farm Aid and the composting toilets of Peats Ridge, I think they'd be getting close to maxed out on the green card.

Also, check out this interview with the festival's promoter, 25-year-old Nicolas Bouckaert, whose family owns the farm the festival is being held on.

The Greening of Festivals: Farm Aid

jason.turgeon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:49:00 GMT

Part 3 of a rapid fire series left unedited so that I can go outside and play.

Until Google's little alert sent me the bit of news that Farm Aid was doing some greening, I'd completely forgotten about the long-running festival. Which is odd, since as a festival nut, I'm kind of their target audience. I guess the marketing budget's been a bit low in recent years. Anyway, on to business.

Farm Aid had its 22nd event this year in NYC, with a new focus on buying food from local organic family farms. I'm a member of a CSA and I am here to tell you that local veggies taste better. Honestly, the environmental benefits are simply the icing on the cake--the veggies I get taste ridiculously good, and I don't have to go to the grocery store nearly as often, plus I get to try out all kinds of new stuff I've never heard of. Eat local!

But enough proselytizing. Was the festival green? By outward appearances, not really, at least not in the traditional sense. The press release doesn't mention any of the usual green items except recycling. No carbon offsets, no ridiculous "reforestation program," no holier-than-thou pledges to sign, no talk about global warming or pictures of polar bears. But then again, this is one of the few festivals NOT to jump on the green bandwagon.

So why am I blogging about Farm Aid if it's not green and doesn't claim to be? For a few reasons. First, they are a great organization, doing good things to help good people. The whole cause is inherently green. And unlike pointless pledges to print out fewer emails, you really can make a difference to the environment and to your community if you search out locally-grown produce. Second, we all know that Willie Nelson is all about the biodiesel, so there's a pretty good chance he's done some stuff behind the scenes on the festival but hasn't been out there rubbing our noses in it. And third, they do a lot more with the one action they did take than most other festivals I've seen.

Check it out:

Farm Aid "will be the first major music event to serve local, organic and family-farm foods at its concessions and to artists, crews and VIP’s backstage. Every concessions stand at Farm Aid’s September 9 benefit concert at Randall’s Island in New York City will meet these criteria. Farm Aid hopes its unprecedented food procurement will demonstrate how family-farm foods can be integrated into everyday life.

Menu items with local, organic and family-farm ingredients include traditional festival snacks like pizza, burritos, hamburgers, corn dogs, sandwiches, pitas, ice cream and baked goods, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables. More than 80 percent of all ingredients found in these menu items are local, organic and/or sourced from family farms."

That's a big deal. Farm Aid was able to line up a lot of food in the NYC area from local farmers, so if you live in or around the Big Apple, take the time to find out where you can get some of the same. The food ethic also spreads to their recycling and composting program:

"Farm Aid will also implement a recycling and composting program at the event. The Council on the Environment of New York City (CENYC) and its office of Recycling, Outreach and Education has assembled a team of 400 volunteers that will work to ensure that paper, glass, plastic, and aluminum are recycled and Farm Aid will also have compost bins for food waste and compostable food utensils.

Sprint Recycling of New York, will reclaim recyclables and transport the compostable waste collected at the festival to McEnroe Organic Farm in Millerton, New York. At McEnroe Organic Farm, what was once waste, will be turned into valuable compost that will sustain future crops."

That's what a recycling and composting effort should look like--volunteers to help out, since many people are lazy or new to the concept. Transparency in the composting process, with a good local organization benefiting. And a reasonably modest announcement about the whole thing. Kudos! Hopefully in future years, we'll see the event go green in other ways, too.

The Greening of Festivals: Piedmont Park's Green Concert

jason.turgeon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:35:00 GMT

This is part 2 of a rapid-fire, unedited series to help catch up on all the recent green festival goodness. Pardon the typos and gaps in logic, but I'm rushing through these so I can go play outside. It's a beautiful day in Boston!

OK, this was less a festival than a concert, but with the lineup of the Allman Brothers and Dave Matthews and the green message, I had to blog about it a bit.

The big green aspect of this, for a change, was the other green: money. This event was a fundraiser to help pay for a 53-acre expansion of Piedmont Park. Along the way, organizers touted the event's green credentials, which mostly consisted of asking people to take public transportation. Apparently, Atlanta has public transportation but nobody uses it, since the 50,000 festival goers who took MARTA trains to the show doubled the normal ridership.

So the event raised money for a park, which is ostensibly a green factor, and it got 50,000 people not to drive for a day, which is fantastic. But what else did it do? Well, it asked people to turn off the lights when they leave the room. And, um, it asked them to print fewer emails. Oh, there were some recycling bins. And it provoked a rather bitter YouTube rant (below) from a guy who was annoyed that he was mildly inconvenienced by people who wanted to go to a show, although he did point out that there were plenty of energy hogging, fossil fuel burning tour buses and lighting rigs all over the park. And that's about it, from what I can tell in the press. Since no green event does anything these days without telling the whole world about it in a series of press releases, I'm left to believe that the green concert wasn't, at the end of the day, very green at all, just greenwashed.

The greening of festivals: Monolith

jason.turgeon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:14:00 GMT

I've been stashing all these great events to blog about in my inbox for the last couple of weeks, and now I'm realizing that there's just no way I'll have time to do each of them justice in their own blog posts. Update: going with multiple posts, all at once, to keep them from getting too long. So I'm going to just write freestyle about all of these for an hour and post it. Pardon the typos, inconsistencies, and choppy writing style that will inevitably result, but it's a beautiful day and I need to prepare (er, start drinking) in advance of the Boston Blues Festival this weekend.

First off, we'll start with last weekend's Monolith Festival at Red Rocks, featuring a pretty decent lineup including Cake, The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips, and the now-ubiquitous Spoon, plus a whole pile of bands I've never heard of. I've never been to Red Rocks, but it's probably number 1 or 2 on my list of venues I want to see before I die. Monolith seems pretty sincere about their greening efforts, but sincerity isn't always enough. Some of the stuff comes off as kind of hokey or borders on greenwashing.

For example, they make a huge deal about the fact that they planted 7 juniper trees on the site. Yes, planting 7 trees is great, but is it really such a newsworthy event that it needs a press release and not one but THREE names that sound like they're straight out of the EPA? The trees planted were done so under the auspices of "The MONOLITH Tree Planting Program," also called the "Tree Planting Initiative" and the "Reforestation Program." For the record, that's 7 trees planted and 10 words in the assorted names for the tree planting. C'mon. "Reforestation?" Really?? It smacks of greenwashing. Plus, it makes me think of Stan Marsh:

But what else is Monolith up to? Well, they got together with car-rental insurance esurance.com, which might be doing a bit of greenwashing itself, what with claiming that its paperless billing is really all about the environment, not just a great cost-saver. So the main stage is now called the Esurance stage. And we got a video game--no, really--that is somehow supposed to be about saving the environment. Pardon me, as I snicker. Oh, one more great thing came out of the partnership: they commissioned a displaced artist from New Orleans to build a big old rocketship out of trash and pieces scavenged from yard sales. I'm all for public art, but how, exactly, is this green?

The festival also did the other de rigeur stuff--carbon offsets, recycling, "awareness campaign" (i.e., booths), etc. A nice touch was their choice of a sustainable printer for all the tickets, posters, and other paper goodies. But carbon offsets, even with super-politically-correct Native Energy, really bug me. They continue to promote the ridiculous notion that renewable energy should be more expensive than fossil fuels. I'd much rather see the festivals take all the money they're spending on RECs and offsets and spend it lobbying Congress to rejigger the subsidies so that renewable energy can compete on a level playing field. Coal and oil and natural gas are not inherently less expensive than wind and solar. They're subsidized in ways that renewable energy sources aren't, and it's a massive boondoggle. As far as recycling goes, I don't think having a recycling program buys you any bonus points, it just prevents you from getting a slap in the face. Also note that they didn't go for composting, despite the fact that there is certainly an organic farm not too far from Red Rocks that could make use of the food scraps. And "awareness campaigns" are nice, and probably necessary, but I think most of us hate to be nagged. The idea is to make greening more mainstream and natural, not to keep it on the left-wing political fringe.

So it's nice that the Monolith organizers care, and that they made an effort, but I give them a C overall for actual effectiveness. But this is their first year, so maybe next year they can build on this. Hey Monolith, a few off-the-cuff suggestions to do more next year (these apply to other events mentioned in my various blog posts, too):

Raise ticket prices by $1 and use the money to fund a full-scale energy and water audit of the venue.
Since this particular venue is owned by the City of Denver, it shouldn't be hard to get the city to commit to getting the facility LEED certified. Offer to pay for or otherwise assist in that process.
Talk the venue into getting waterless urinals and switching to low-flow, dual-flush toilets.
Negotiate with the venue to get solar panels put on top of the stage, or work with one of the various solar powered stage companies out there.
Compost
Source your food locally and organically, from family farms.
Work on recapturing rainwater
Plant trees in a section of Denver that doesn't have enough of them
Work with local youth-service organizations in some capacity to provide mentorship
etc., etc., etc.

The Green Festival Bandwagon

jason.turgeon — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Every day, I get a google alert with another news piece about green festivals. Sometimes the festivals are what I'd consider really green, sometimes they're greenwashed, and most of the time they fall somewhere in between. Since I can't write about all of them in depth, I figured I'd start this blog post to log the ones that get away. I'll update it as new green festivals make the news.

05 September: Abbot-Kinney Street Festival Goes Green - Solar power, compostable foodware, "green living tent," proceeds to environmental and youth orgs. Note--having compostable foodware is only good if you can actually get people to separate their trash and put the compostable stuff in the compost bin.

14 August: Event Planners Make Gold from Green - story about green conference planners who were in charge of greening Giants Stadium for Live Earth

10 August: Northwest World Reggae Fest to be green - festival will have organic food and recycling, info booths

10 August: Santa Monica Film Fest to be green - not a music fest at all, but note that for these guys, being "green" means no print advertising or printed programs. Having been to film festivals, I can tell you that a lack of printed programs is not a good thing. Much better to print an appropriate number on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

5 August: San Jose Jazz Fest goes green - corn-based foodware, recycling and composting stations, organic T-shirts

24 July: Montreal Jazz Fest Goes Green - LED lights, recycling, cup surcharges (pay $1 for the cup and reuse it for subsequent beers), free water

"Green" backlash at Bumbershoot

jason.turgeon — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:35:00 GMT

BoingBoinglinks to a story on a blog called crapolicio.us titled "Allegedly 'Green' Bumbershoot Crapoliciously Forces Concert-Goers to Throw Away Hundreds of Bottles of Water. The gist of the story is that at the 37-year-old Bumbershootfestival in Seattle on Saturday (1 Sep), security guards forced everyone to ditch their water bottles, most of which were full or partly full. Notes in the comments section of BoingBoing's post suggest that this might have been in response to idiots throwing full bottles of water at various band members the prior year.

From what I can tell from the comments threads, patrons could buy bottled water inside, but the bottles were immediately decanted into disposable cups, as were the other beverages including bottled beer. There were a handful of water fountains with predictably long lines, and from the volume of comments, it seems that lots of people were pretty upset about the whole thing.

What we have here, folks, is a failure to communicate. Bumbershoot not only failed to communicate its policy to its customers, it explicitly told them on its websitethat they could bring in plastic bottles of nonalcoholic beverages. Bumbershoot also failed to communicate to its security staff the message that it was supposedly going green this year, so after making people ditch their water the festival then carted off the bottles to a landfill instead of recycling them.

Let's take a closer look. Bumbershoot's food and beverage policy is actually pretty generous for a modern festival. Quoting from the site: "You are permitted to bring your own food and non-alcoholic beverages in plastic containers into the Festival." Aside from the usual restrictions on booze, glass, and cans, that's it. In an era of promoters who routinely ban outside food and drink so that they can charge extortionate prices from their captive audiences, this is a refreshing change. The festival's organizer's also went to a good deal of trouble to make the festival greener, from sourcing biodegradable signs to recycling food vendors' grease for biodiesel to promoting carpools and public transit.

So what happened? My best guess is that for some reason or another, someone in their security division independently decided that bottled water was a security risk and independently decided to ban bottled water. The result, as always happens when you treat your customers like criminals, was to piss off a bunch of otherwise peaceful music-lovers.

This little fiasco should have stopped there--with a bunch of people upset with festival management over what is, at the end of the day, a security-related incident. Instead, the green movement got taken down with the festival by people who note the hypocrisy of claiming to be green but forcing people to chuck plastic bottles full of perfectly good water into the trash. Now any number of people who only read the headlines may equate being green with being inconvenienced, or worse yet may regard attempts at sustainability as mere marketing BS with no substance behind them.

Bottled water is decidedly un-green, and forcing people to throw away bottles of water which are then disposed of in a landfill is even less sustainable. There are plenty of ways the festival could have handled this better, starting with communicating with patrons that water bottles wouldn't be allowed in early in the process. If the promoters were worried about water bottles flying around, they could have encouraged people to bring in plastic mugs and provided adequate supplies of potable water. They also could have sold branded souvenir mugs and allowed people to fill these up with ice-water at beer stations as part of the fee for the cups, so that people willing to pay could skip the long lines at free water stations. This would give people a way to skip lines at free water stations and partially offset the revenue losses from not selling bottled water. Instead, they chose the worst possible solution--banning refillable bottles, communicating the policy poorly, not making enough water available, and selling cups full of bottled water instead of cups of municipal water.

Here's hoping that the festival gets its act together soon, and that we soon have some sort of independent rating system which will help clarify for festival-goers just what a festival means when it claims to be "green."

Greening Burning Man Roundup

jason.turgeon — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 21:02:00 GMT

I was all set to write a big roundup of the efforts to green this year's Burning Man, with a theme this year of The Green Man, but Micki Krimmel over at WorldChanging.com did it for me. Coupled with the excellent-as-always treatment that the big fiery festival got a few weeks ago from Grist.org and a surprising good article CNNMoney.com, there's not much else for me to say.

One cool event worth pointing out is the Single Cell Solution, an art project that's going to use urine (an excellent fertilizer) to grow algae. The algae will get even more stimulation from the exhaust from some of the many generators around the site, sequestering the CO2. These particular algae give off an oily byproduct that can then be burned as biodiesel in the same generators. It's all pretty cool stuff, and organizations like the USAF and Honeywell are busy trying to get these algae to do their thing on a larger scale. Check it out: link.

If you're going to Burning Man, have a great time and leave comments about what you thought of the green theme.

Update 18 October 2007: Clayton Cornell over at GreenOptions went to Burning man and has two very good posts on how the whole green thing panned out. Post I. Post 2.