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…