Courtesy of The Independent

Within the same week, both the Call to Moral Action for Climate Justice Rally on Thursday, September 24 and Landmark Music Festival Saturday/Sunday September 25/26 will occur on the National Mall. At first, the only connection between these two events is their location and my presence. However, there has been increasing criticism on music festivals for their devastating effects on the environment.

The land the festival takes place on is often destroyed. Think grass stomped on by a stampede of elephants. But instead of elephants, it is thousands of intoxicated people, which may, in fact, be more destructive.

One obvious issue is the sheer amount of trash left by festival goers. While this is ultimately left up to the actions of individuals, there are still ways in which festivals can limit the amount of harm inflicted upon the planet. The vast majority of this trash are items left by festival-goers and even more belongings are abandoned at festivals that include campsites.

Some music festivals are less ecologically problematic than others. Burning Man (Black Rock City, Nevada) has invoked a MOOP policy of not letting matter out of place even touch the ground. Outside Lands (San Francisco, California) has attendees stand at each waste station to assist in sorting recyclables and trash. Firefly (Dover, Delaware) provides attendees with a black bag for their trash and a blue bag for their recycling. On the flip side, the streets of South by Southwest (Austin, Texas) are flooded with litter. Electric Daisy Carnival (Las Vegas, Nevada) provides ample waste containers, but attendees are often too engrossed in the music to take advantage of them. In less than two weeks, we will see where Landmark falls on this spectrum of sustainability. Landmark is sponsored by the National Park Service, so Lord help us if it does not live up to the green standard.

Music festivals thrive off of a contagious carefree attitude. Dancing around, leaving your plastic water bottle in the grass. Hakuna Matata. But the environment is not something we can be lackadaisical about. Strong actions are required.

A Greener Festival is a nonprofit devoted solely to solve this problem! A Greener Festival utilizes a ranking of festivals environmental impacts, a national conference, and many initiatives both large and small to encourage festival organizers to become more green. Naming and shaming is employed to show festivals that their anti-environmental behavior is unacceptable.

While the planners of musical festivals definitely need to take environmental concerns into further consideration, I would argue that the majority of the burden falls on the festival goers. If we each did our small part in cleaning up after ourselves, like Barney taught us, the earth would surely thank us.

I will concede that this whole going green may be somewhat abstract, and that people will certainly believe that they do not have any responsibility to be environmentally conscious or are not willing to spend the money to be sustainable. But the reality is that human lives are at stake. Since environmental injustices affects those of lower socioeconomic status at disproportionate levels concerns about the environment are really human rights concerns.

So come out and rally for moral action on climate justice! And come out to Landmark too, just clean up! 😉