Green Festival Kick-Off

Global Exchange and Co-op America, the co-sponsors for the festival, kicked things off at about 11am this morning. Some of the highlights of their speech:

• The event industry is the second worst waste-generation industry, second only to construction. The Seattle Green Festival will compost or recycle 98% of the waste generated at the convention. In fact, there are volunteers at each recycling center throughout the facility to make sure the right stuff goes into the right bucket. And at the end of the festival, they'll sort through it all AGAIN to make sure the maximum amount of recycling can take place.

• The seeds of the sustainable & green economy have been planted in every industry and sector now and have about 5% penetration across the board. The next stage is growth, particularly capturing the early adopters which would bring share up to about 12%. Helping facilitate this growth is a primary goal of the festival.

• One of the speakers stated that there are two different and often polarizing approaches to being green: the "No" strategy, which is about stopping the damage happening now and bringing down the conglomerates that are making it happen, and the "Yes" approach which focuses on how we live after we stop the damaging habits ("After the revolution, there will be pizza!"). She encouraged the audience to not worry about which of these approaches they advocated for so long as they took action on something. She promoted cooperation and encouragement as the orders of the day over debate on philosophy and approach.

• A quote I liked:
  "If you're on the Titanic, and it's going down, you have three choices: 1. You can run around screaming your head off, 2. You can re-arrange the deck chairs and play some music as its going down, or 3. You can rally some people to build a wind and wave powered boat that pulls up next to the Titanic complete with girls in bikinis drinking cocktails, and encourage everybody else to get on."

Mayor Nichols is supposed to be up next, but it seems he's running late.

Comments

[Meghan N.]

Re: the quote you like and option 3 (wind and wave powered boat/bikinis/cocktails), my husband suggests one should chose to do that even if the Titanic *isn't* sinking.