A Music Festival That Gets It Right
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
My quest to promote urban sustainability landed me in the strangest of places this past weekend. Camping. At a music festival. Out in the country. But if you think about it a tightly packed campground isn’t all that different from a city. Both have high populations packed into a small area. Both are highly regulated. And both are what you make of them. They can be noisy, smelly, dirty cauldrons of excess. Or they can be paradises. What it comes down to is design and intention. Thankfully, the Kerrville Folk Festival turned out to be as well designed a built environment as I’ve ever set foot in.
The folks who put it on are obviously doing something right—the festival is 37 years old and still going strong. Much of its power comes from its intimacy. There’s one main stage, and, even if you wander in late, you can usually find a nice spot up front. And if you still haven’t had your fill of music after watching five acts play on the main stage chances are good you can catch one (or more) of them hosting an impromptu jam session around a campfire late at night. Such performances have inspired legions of fans, some of whom have attended the festival 20, 25, even 35, years in a row.
For me, the most impressive aspect of the festival, beyond the music itself, was its mind-blowingly simple policy of asking fans to bring their own cups instead of dispensing cheap plastic ones that would simply get thrown in the trash. Bonnaroo, one of the biggest and best known music festivals going today, prides itself on how “green” it is, and yet the statistics provided on its website belie that fact. In 2007, an organization called Clean Vibes recycled 60 percent of the 593 tons of waste produced at the festival, but 27 percent of that waste was plastic, which, we should all know by now, doesn’t truly get recycled. It gets “downcycled,” that is, made into stuff like fleece jackets. It’s this kind of thinking that’s gotten us to where we are today—surrounded by growing mountains of trash. I applaud the folks at the Kerrville Folk Festival for using their heads and eliminating the trash problem before it could even become one.