A New Generation Coming On

Though still on hiatus from TBV, while engaged in the Big Move across the country to New Mexico, I am not completely unplugged from the events of the day. I'm reading my collegues' covers of the important stuff, and keeping up with news as best I can. We arrived here in the desert Southwest on Saturday, having traveled that day in astounding heat through Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and eastern New Mexico. Everyone here tells us how "unusual" and "surprising" it is for it to be this hot this early in the season. I keep telling them it may be time to get used to it, start considering heat and drought as normal, not unusual.

So, global warming is once again my subject here, sort of. The organization Stop Global Warming was in Florida Wednesday, calling attention to the global warming of ocean temps and its influence on hurricane season, and next week will be in Manchester, TN at a music festival called Bonnaroo.

I wish I had the energy to make it back across that much of the country to this festival, for many reasons. The artists that I, as an official Old Fart, recognize make me want to be there (Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello and the Imposters, the Neville Brothers, Radiohead, Buddy Guy, Blues Traveler and more), but the fact that the organizers of the festival are paying lots of attention to "greening" it, seems even more important to me. My generation has done a fine job of leaving a big mess for younger people to tackle, despite our origins in the sixties and seventies as champions of the environment.

That a music festival is partnering with NRDC, World Resources Institute, Stop Global Warming, Clean Vibes, and Earthchange Technologies is a source of great hope to me. Even if the majority of artists have names like Sonic Youth, Death Cab for Cutie, Balkan Beatbox, I-Nine, The Cat Empire, and Toubab Crewe, none of which have any recognition value for me, in my Old Fartdom. But Sonic Youth and global consciousness, that's all fine by me.

From the Bonnaroo press release on the festival greening:

Bonnaroo 2006 Green Initiatives:
· Over 25,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel (B100) to replace diesel for non-music stage generators
· WastAway refuse handling process to recycle over 250 tons of garbage
· Concession food served with biodegradable wraps, plates, cups and cutlery manufactured from a renewable resource
· Festival wide recycling and composting program
· Cool Tags wind credits purchasing (and facilitation of purchases for patrons)
· Solar stage and sound system
· Organic cotton and hemp t-shirts
· Post-consumer recycled toilet paper for portolets
· Post-consumer recycled paper for all administrative needs
· Aggressively seeking ways to make Bonnaroo 2007 even greener

Solar sound stage and sound system! Recycling tons and tons of garbage! Woodstock was never like this, and neither were any of the festivals I actually attended in the sixties and seventies. Tons of garbage were left strewn everywhere, and after cleanup went straight to the landfill. A new day is dawning, evidently, and it's about damn time. Anyone in the reading area who might be attending this festival, please - report in on it in the comments to this post, I'd love to get a vicarious vibe.

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