Earth Day Festival Gains Momentum
by Celine Ruben-Salama, New York, NY on 04.26.07
Without skipping a beat, plans to expand America’s biggest Earth Day celebration for 2008 have begun. This past Earth Day, the Green Apple Music & Arts Festival was attended by over 200,000 people in New York, Chicago and San Francisco and reached millions more through print, radio, TV and online media. If all goes as planned, next year the festival will take place in additional cities.
By combining live musical performances from diverse genres with educational outreach and cultural events the festival successfully disseminates the environmental message to a wide audience. TreeHugger Jessica Root, who manned our booth at the New York arm of the festival, confirmed that indeed the Green Apple Music & Arts Festival was reaching a new audience. “Plenty of business people stopped by on their lunch break,” Jessica reported. “Many had never heard of TreeHugger before, but were curious and enthusiastic about the concept. Lots of people signed up for our daily and weekly email newsletters too.”
The event, that was carbon neutral and put the Earth Day message into practice by “greening” all of the participating venues, included performances by Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, Willie Nelson, Bob Weir and his band Ratdog, The Decemberists, Kaiser Chiefs, The Laurie Berkner Band, The Walkmen, Taylor Hicks, Stephen Marley & Junior Gong, Brand New, Jon Anderson of YES, RJD2, English Beat, Andrew Bird.
Thanks to organizers Peter Shapiro, Relix magazine, the Earth Day Network and JPMorgan Chase for a job well done. Here’s looking forward to next year. :: Green Apple Music & Arts Festival
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i hate to bear terrible news, but i work in one of the music venues where the green apple festival took place this year, and everything was thrown away. everything. the green apple festival literature that was out on the tables, the beer bottles, the plastic cups for cocktails, the straws. EVERYTHING. the biodegradable safer cleaning products never even left their box, as the usual toxic ones were used by our cleaning crew each day. nothing was recycled, the employees knew nothing of the purpose of the festival, anything. everything went straight into the garbage, much to my dismay. i can not afford to lose my job, so i had to keep quiet, and just watch as everyone who was trying to do so much for the environment was lied to, as so much waste was created and tossed into the dumpster.
my advice for next year, especially if you plan on expanding, is to have people at the venues coordinating the recycling efforts and putting all systems in place to prevent this happening again.
i would tell you which venue, but i fear i may have already said too much.