This past weekend I attended Seattle’s first Green Festival [ed note: that's JP looking surprised at the Green festival!]. The Green Festivals are a joint collaboration between Co-Op America and Global Exchange and are held in cities across the U.S. (this year in Seattle, D.C., San Francisco and Chicago).

The Festivals invite in luminary speakers to participate on panels and give speeches. This year’s speakers included Frances Moore Lappe, famed author of Diet for a Small Planet, Amory Lovins, brilliant founder of the Rocky Mountain Insitute, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and plenty of others both local and national. But the main focus of the festival and by far the biggest draw for most of the thousands of attendees were the commercial booths. If you were looking for a bumper sticker to express your love for the planet while driving your car, t-shirts, Amazonian miracle fruits, books, lotions, Bush punching bags or any matter of other liberal hype crap, then the Green festival was the place to find it.

Before I get too critical of the Festival, I do want to say that it wasn’t all bad. A few panelists actually seemed to understand the magnitude of the problem and the actions needed to address it and the festival organizers were nice enough to set aside a panel focused on the youth movement. And random run-ins are always nice networking opportunities.

But now for the critical. Let me focus on the commercial aspect to start off. There was so much crap being sold at the festival that it made my head spin. Too much of it was simple Bush bashing and the stuff that wasn’t was utterly unnecessary, the kind of stuff that regularly fills up our landfills and our thrift stores. Now of course, all these vendors went through a screening process to make sure they were both people and earth friendly, and all those t-shirts were organic cotton, but really, who gives a damn when it’s still something we simply do not need. Simplicity people! And simplicity does not mean owning ten pairs of Simple brand shoes. What scares me the most is that the large majority of people will leave this hyper-green consumerism and go out into the real world again with that same consumer mind-set and buy, buy, buy, whether their purchases are eco or not.

Moving on; at the Green Festival everyone has the answer. Everyone. And I spent hours and hours listening to them tell me the answer. Now, how much of that time was spent on them issuing calls to action? Next to none. It was a feel good event, a preaching to the choir of the worst kind, the kind that nods when it hears we have a problem and smiles when it hears that somewhere out there a guy or gal has created a solution. ‘Thank God someone is doing all that good’ it thinks and then leaves and goes back to business as usual. And therein lies my greatest beef with Green Festival. They had half of Seattle at their fingertips, all these wonderful green people and what did they do with them? They talked at them, signed their books, sold them some crap, and sent them on their lovely way. I saw two petitions (one by RAN) in support of Seattle’s new proposed paper and plastic bag tax and that was close to the extent of the action I saw during the entire fest. We need to capitalize on such gatherings to help build the movement.

One more beef. The extent of youth involvement at the fest was the one poorly attended panel on the youth movement. Thankfully a few youth friendly folks (and IGHIH bloggers) gave us a shout out at a few panels, but it is frustrating being relegated to the “cute-kids” status when we are in fact leaders in the movement and deserve to be treated as so.

So, in conclusion, if the Green fest folks think that the solution to our environmental woes is buying more crap, whether it’s green crap or not, is going to fix anything, I’m afraid for our future. As Bill McKibben says, “A movement needs to keep moving,” and at the Green Festival I saw a lot more gawking at consumer goods than building a movement.