report from the SF Green Festival

this is an excerpt from a post in my personal journal. unfortunately due to having to work over the weekend I only made it to one of the three days of the festival but it was lots of fun and I wish I had been able to make more days of it!

Sunday we got up early and took caltrain into the city to meet up with fructivore for brunch at TiCouz and then auros headed off to meet theonlyruth at the opera and fructivore and I went to the SF Green Festival. It was an interesting combination of stuff - a lot of green building companies there (solar cell installers, straw bale house builders, carpeting and upholstery makers), a lot of tasty food things, a lot of organic fiber clothing sellers, and a whole lot of natural and organic cleaning products. And then there were the talks and panels. We went to one talk by a sustainability planner from Marin. And one that claimed to be about "our solar future" but was really about a wide-reaching plan to combat global warming, only one component of which is solar. The plug-in-hybrid talk was the most well attended of the talks we went to. I didn't actually learn anything major I didn't already know but it was a good overview for people new to the concept. And I got to see an actual converted plug-in Prius - part of the PG&E fleet. After the plug-in talk we had an hour until the festival closed so we hit the wine-tasting booth. Mmmm, yummy organic wine. We got 4 tokens for $5 each. And since it was close to the end of the day and the booth were getting ready to close up they all pretty much filled our little tasting cups instead of just putting a splash in the bottom. And a random girl I was chatting with handed me 3 extra tokens she didn't want. So I had probably 3 full glasses worth by the time we were done and was plenty tipsy by the time we left the festival. Fortunately I was taking the train home :)

Walking back to Caltrain we passed an open roll-up garage door. Inside it appeared to be a combination garage and living space. In the back were couches and a TV. In the front... there was a gorgeous maroon 60s-era Plymouth station wagon. A guy saw us drooling and waved from the back. I told him "gorgeous car" and he came and started it up for us and it GROWLED. It was really beautiful.

And it got me thinking about how in the past year I've really been trying to pull myself away from loving cars because I know that with global warming and smog and peak oil I'm not going to be able to have them forever. I've been trying to teach myself to love biking and walking and transit instead. And the outcome seems to be that it's half-working - I *do* love biking and walking and transit. But I also still love cars. I just can't seem to kill that part of myself. And maybe that's OK. Loving cars leads to good things too - people who love cars created the Tesla. The Tesla is beautiful (and was mentioned very briefly in the plug-in hybrids talk).

The future I see for environmentalism isn't one in which people are punished for wanting luxury, though I do see the need to accept SOME limits. The future of environmentalism I see is one in which it isn't a niche for hippies or a trend for hipsters - it's something EVERYONE does because green solutions just plain MAKE SENSE in terms of long-term economic viability and social well-being. Green buildings for example may cost more to build at the outset but the payback in terms of energy savings is generally on the order of 3-5 years. That just makes sense! Sorting out our compostables and recyclables from our trash so that the stinky landfill down the street doesn't fill up and cause us to have to pay hundreds-of-thousands to truck out trash elsewhere? That just makes sense!

Oh and speaking of composting - I think pretty much every food container, bottle, and utensil sold or distributed at the festival was a biodegradable of some sort. Including a water bottle made from corn that looked so much like clear plastic that I had to bring one home with me to put in my compost pile because I have such a hard time believing it's NOT plastic!