San Francisco’s sixth annual Green Festival opened today, cosmically juxtaposed with a nasty oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The best and worst, simultaneously in real time, that’s Cali for you. I wanted to be on hand not just because this is the grandaddy and you can talk to Kevin Danaher himself while strolling down the aisles, but also because Greenfest is coming to Seattle for the first time next April. “We think it’ll be huge,” Danaher told me, recounting how Chicago’s first event last May drew more than 31,000. “They were lined up two hours before the doors opened,” Danaher said. Keynoter Mayor Daley was going around saying “his festival this, his show that,” Danaher laughed. “I don’t care if he takes the credit, in fact, it works better if he does.” That’s good, Kevin, because we’ve got this Daley groupie mayor in Seattle…
I’ve been coming to the Greenfest since the beginning, when it was funky, crowded, sweaty and a bit contradictory as too many plastics and toxins were still in evidence. This year’s event, though, has to be the cleanest yet (last year only 4 percent of all the waste generated during the three-day event drawing 35,000 people found its way to the local landfill; we’ve come so far since Woodstock). On exhibit are flushable green diapers, highway-certified electric scooters (62 mph, 66 miles on a charge), artworks made of recycled chopsticks (so if you happen to get hungry…) and hemp oils, underwear, energy drinks, garden furniture, smokes. Er, I made that last one up. Unlike Hempfest, Greenfest is only about the planet.
Anyway, this year’s show is the graying of green, as it reminds me of the countless tech fests I used to go to back in the day. Free goodies everywhere, Clif bars, Organic Valley cheeses, Real Foods apples and bananas, Fruitabo fruit leather, Seeds of Change chocolate, lots of mags and lit, all portable in bio plastic or canvas bags. More suits (albeit natural fibre) than tie-dyes, and lots of big-ticket items like cars, adventure travel, homes. Green is going corporate all right, and no harm in that. Like I kept hearing, the price of oil isn’t going down any time soon.
A lot of the stuff here will be familiar to Seattle greenies, but a couple of booths caught my eye. One had paper products made from elephant dung all the way from Sri Lanka, which seemed fine till I caught myself unconsciously putting its promo sheet in my mouth to free my hands. Apparently elephants are being killed in Sri Lanka not for tusks (few have tusks) or for hides but because they get in the way of agro-business. If they can find a way to make money off elephants, the reasoning goes, the farmers will stop killing them. Not sure how many trees it saves, but one elephant churns out 500 pounds of poop a day.
My show fave is Reware, which makes solar-powered backpacks you can plug your cell phone or iPod or whatever into for recharging while you cycle along in the sunshine, or even, um, bright cloudy days like we have in Seattle (they’re waterproof too). There’s even a fold-out cordura panel for recharging laptops. The bags are pretty sturdy and you can even puncture a panel and have them keep working. You mainly want to avoid surface abrasions (like a sandstorm, for instance) on the clear plastic. A Kenya user sticks his on top of the roof of his jeep. Other folks use them to trickle-charge their car batteries parked at airports during long road trips. And so on. Really clever. I’d write more except my PowerBook is running out of juice…
“one elephant churns out 500 pounds of poop a day”
Is that all? I could’ve sworn the elephant in the White House churns out millions of tons of bullshit a day. An elephant making bullshit — now there’s a sight!
1 That particular “elephant” bears remarkable resemblance to a weasel.
@1
Hehehe…
I want an electric scooter!
See what I meant by technology solving our environmental problem?
Geez, it looks like Algore is full of shit… as usual:
Quoting from the gawd of global warming: “Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming. Ladies and gentlemen, the warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.” http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0912-32.htm
Unfortunately, the facts don’t support Algore’s ill informed alarmist predictions.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
Decade Category 3,4,5 Hurricanes
1941-1950 10
1951-1960 8
1961-1970 6
1971-1980 4
1981-1990 5
1991-2000 5
2001-2004 3
2005 10
2006 0
2007 0
For you moonbats who know how to use Excel, try this: Take the above data and plot it in chart form. Then apply a second order polynomial trendline to it. Clearly the number of major hurricanes has been decreasing for 60 years while industrialization and human activity has been accelerating. 2005 is what is known in the adult world as an “anomaly.
If Algore was right, we should have had at least 15 major hurricanes in 2006 and 2007. How many have we actually had? Umm…. Zero. None. Zip. Nada. So where is the “string of terrible catastrophes”?
Could it be that Algore is full of shit? Could it be that the link between hurricanes and global warming is weak at best? Could it be that there is no fucking “crisis”? Could it be that you foolish koolaid drinkers need to re-examine your position? Nah….
Mark,
Lol. Didn’t you know that liberals can’t do math?
Just sayin. Second-order polynomial trendline? They have enough trouble balancing a fucking checkbook.
Anyways, now that you have offended their dear Goracle you will feel their wrath…
@6 You owe Goldy $100. Put up or shut up, loser.
Actually the dems owe us six huricanes already. When are they going to happen? The donks in Washington probably feel like a huricane hit last tuesday. ehehehehhee roof roof. I cant wait for 08!!!!
@1 Roger Rabbit says:
““one elephant churns out 500 pounds of poop a day”
Is that all? I could’ve sworn the elephant in the White House churns out millions of tons of bullshit a day. An elephant making bullshit — now there’s a sight!”
Roger, you should not feel so threatened since you churn out and poop billions of tons of rabbit pellets per Horses Ass entry and since there are multiple entries each day you certainly exceed any ratings for carbon emissions. You are certainly not ‘Carbon Neutral’.
MTR, what do you say, shall we sacrifice some libs by throwing them into a volcano. On Monday, I drove to Eastern
Wa to visit the new windfarm PSE built and it is fantastic.
The enviros are bitching about the giant blades killing
birds. I can’t imagine a bird having navigation problems with those blades. 1.8megawatts per turbine. WOW. Can I buy one? So they bitch about coal power, nuclear power, hydro power, and now wind power. I say vote against any
form of power production, no power for you. Vote again in 10 years. Cut off every liberal moron from being able to buy gas for their car or power for their house since they are so against everything. There, fucking problem solved by 50 fucking percent. Wheres my fucking carbon credits now
AL
I was a little confused by #6 until i realized that there is only one country on the entire globe–the US; nothing else apparently matters at all. That seems to be the sole criteria by which all fascist straussian/randians view the world around themselves. Hoping that every other human being they don’t like dies off quick enough to allow them to sustain their lifestyles on into the future without upsetting their particular levels of convenience and comfort. Good luck!
Woodlawn Park Zoo (zoo.org) sells elephant dung paper in their gift shop. Great stuff. It’s no different than other artisan papers. I’ve bought some for gifts.