Green Festival 2009 in Seattle

I spent the entire weekend of March 28-29 at the Green Festival. I went to listen to talks and check out green products on March 28 and spent March 29 volunteering at the Green Festival.
My first realization was that I definitely need to go to more conferences. It helps me open up to areas outside my immediate world. One thing that was common amongst the speakers I heard was praise for Barack Obama. I think it’s because they feel they will get somewhere when negotiating green policies with the current administration.

I heard Kevin Danaher in his talk on “Building the Green Economy”. He also happens to be one of the founders of Green Festivals. I liked his talk a lot because he was an entertaining speaker and gave many practical examples of green project and their saving. He had a strong focus on San Francisco and one interesting project he talked about was building a green building in downtown San Francisco that would be cheaper to operate, and then subsidizing it for teachers allowing them to live in San Francisco if they teach in schools in San Francisco instead of spending 3 hours a day commuting. It was refreshing to see green efforts help solve some of our social problems as well.

I then went to David Korten’s talk “Agenda for a New Economy”. I thought it was a bit radical, especially when David likened getting our ‘freedom and independent’ from Wall Street to when the US got independence from the British. He’s proposed a new economy that is wealth based with smaller community banks. And throughout his talk he really criticized Wall Street mercilessly. Because of such an immoderate stance, I didn’t come out feeling convinced with his talk.

Two talks were enough for a day for me and I spent the rest of the day checking out green products in the fair. There were many energy efficient products, organic food items, and schools with environmental studies. There was even a green massage that I was tempted to try out! I really wondered why some of the exhibiters had stalls in the Green Festival because they seemed irrelevant. I spent most of my time checking out energy efficient rooftop tiles as well as solar powered tiles. I’m no expert but I couldn’t really tell the aesthetic difference between energy efficient and regular rooftop tiles.

Volunteering the next day was fun. I was placed at the waste disposal facility and was sorting and differentiating compost, glass, cardboard, recyclable stuff, and waste. I also took out a trolley and went around the fair where other volunteers would empty their compost, recyclable, and waste cans into my trolley in separate bags. It did make me wonder why we even need to do all this sorting beforehand, why we can’t just have systems smart enough to do this all by themselves. I know it’s not that easy. There’s a process to raise all the tape on cardboard boxes by using heat. We’ll need something similar for pretty much every waste scenario. Still, something to think about.