About Our Blog
For many years, Planet Bluegrass has been focused on a mission of sustainability - lessening the negative impacts of our festivals and encouraging festivarians to bring these lessons home to their everyday lives. In the beginning, the difficulty was in the carrying-out of our sustainability initiatives. We worked closely with festivarians for years to steadily improve the basic issues of controlling the festival waste-stream, through recycling, compost, and reuse.
But as we began tackling the larger issues of festival energy and carbon footprint, the fundamental decisions themselves became complex. Every day we are learning more about the latest technologies and practices and thinking about these subtle issues So rather than distilling our years-worth of findings into several static web pages, we’ve decided to open up our research and internal discussions. This blog is our evolving “doctrine of sustainable festivation.”
The “sustainability industry” relies to a large degree on trust and transparency. Often many of the changes we can make in our festivals and daily lives are important but nearly invisible to the public. Third-party organizations are cropping up in every aspect of the sustainability movement to validate and prove that people and businesses are really doing what they promise (Green-E, Forest Stewardship Council, etc). We recognize the need for this independent verification, but we also think organizations should themselves be more open about their sustainability practices.
We encourage folks to join the dialog, challenge our claims, and suggest other ways for us to look at these issues. This blog is a public two-communication. If you’d like us to cover a specific topic or have other non-public comments, please email us at green@bluegrass.com. Or start a new thread at our festivarian commmunity forum.
