Photo: The Do Lab @ Coachella 2008

Environmental activism is all the rage these days.  Al Gore did more for himself and the environment with one 30 minute presentation than he did with eight years as Bill Clinton’s VP and another year on the presidential campaign trail.  We are slowly being corralled into a European mindset regarding oil consumption, with hybrid cars becoming en vogue at even General Motors.

It’s a new era in policy and perception, but are Americans hitting the pavement in truly impactful ways, or is this more fad than trend?  Recycling has become commonplace, and more people are thinking about how to reduce their gas usage, but this only scratches the surface.  And while An Inconvenient Truth is compelling, watching a slide show in a movie theater isn’t a hands-on method of teaching people significant lifestyle change.

Enter Southern California music and art collective The Do Lab.  They have been making a name for themselves in the Southwest with performance installations at Coachella, Burning Man, and The Electric Daisy Carnival that feature quality underground electronic music from their own artist network  and extensive visual & performing arts elements.

Anyone who has stumbled into their area at Coachella knows that The Do Lab puts on a stellar party without a single name-brand musical act.  Their unique, organic, earthy-inspired aesthetic has also made appearances in Japan and Ireland.

Their crown jewel, however, is Lightning in a Bottle.  It’s a three day music and arts festival which also focuses on sustainable living, with panels and workshops geared towards making green lifestyle changes.  The third annual LIB (as it’s called by all involved) takes place this weekend (May 23 – 26) just north of Santa Barbara, tucked into the foliage of the Live Oak campground.

“It’s no longer just enough to recycle,” said Shena Turlington, the festival’s Eco-Sustainability Director.  “There’s always something more that can be done.”

Turlington, who did her graduate work in sustainable development, has been a part of The Do Lab family since she was a dancer for the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, one of this year’s headliners from The Do Lab artist network.  She took time out of the insanity leading up to the festival to chat with me for a bit, and spoke of how many in The Do Lab family were there nine years ago when LIB was just a party in the woods with 100 people.  Nine years later, founders Jesse and John Flemming have created a tight-knit clan of people, all with a singular purpose: to offer an amazing music and arts experience that doesn’t leave a giant black footprint.

“Josh and Jesse always cringed at how much waste there is at other festivals,” Turlington said.  Their passion for throwing parties led them to rethink where other events were failing miserably.

Among the eco-friendly touts of Lightning in a Bottle this year are:

• an onsite 20 kW solar panel installation that will provide power for much of the event’s energy needs along with two battery backup solar arrays and biodiesel generators.
• remaining energy needs, such as staff transportation, will be offset by purchasing renewable energy credits
• a recycling and composting program, solar and energy efficient lighting
• an eco-fashion show
• 100% biodegradable kitchenware for food vending
• printing on recycled paper using soy inks
• a large-scale campsite greening initiative
• free workshops on green building, renewable energy, and other facets of a sustainable lifestyle

But the biggest difference from most any other festival or musical event you’ve been to though, is perhaps the most obvious as well:  free water.  Anyone who brings their own container can use it, and for those who came empty handed, you can buy one there for use all weekend and beyond.  This not only saves on recycling costs, but the energy to make and fill the bottles, as well as transportation costs and energy consumption for delivery.

“Let’s simplify and get back to the basics and use the tap water,” Turlington said.  “We just need to make sure it’s clean.  Sometimes the best solutions are also the easiest,” she said.

As easy as some solutions are, many end up costing The Do Lab.  Turlington did her undergraduate work in economics, so she is no stranger to the practical pitfalls of bearing lofty green standards.

“You gotta look really hard for suppliers, everything is ten times harder than it should be,” she said, estimating that their stringent standards add about 30% to what they would normally pay.  Something as simple as stickers, which cost $0.08 each to print, jump to $0.60 each when they are done with eco-friendly adhesive and printed with soy or water-based ink.

An economics background also keys Turlington in to the need to quantify their success.  People can have a personal revelation during the show and use their own drink container for a weekend, but actually publishing statistics not only shows the individual impact on a macro level, it gives concrete information to anyone else wanting to try their hand at a green festival.

Turlington calls it The Green Report.  Check out last year’s here.

“It takes so much effort to put it together and track everything, but for me, it’s the most important aspect of a green festival,” she said.  ”People need to see numbers.  It’s really important to not only set the bar as high as we can, but to also track everything so we can share it and educate the population to give people insight into what’s really going on.”

It’s all a cycle, she says.  “Businesses out there see that there’s demand and opportunity here.  That will inspire them to provide products to promoters that can help them make their events more green in the future.”

Just as easily as the report can be used to show the collective power of sustainable living over the course of just three days to an individual participant, it can also be used to determine the areas the festival failed to meet benchmarks and needs to work on for next year.

Beyond setting the example for all future concert promoters, LIB also takes aim at how people live their lives.  As with many progressive causes in California, there is a legion of people who will arrive at the show consummately educated on all of the talking points, and there are those just coming for the music.  How do you strike a balance that resonates with both groups?

For the newbies, Turlington tries to “make it as participatory as possible so it doesn’t feel like you’re in a lecture.”  Among the many workshops, they offer one on edible foods in the wild that features a hike where participants can see and taste what they learn about.  They offer a solar cooking workshop where they show you how to build your own solar cooker for about ten bucks.  You can find out about little details, such as purchasing locally grown food to cut back on production and transportation energy usage.

“And for people who know a lot already, we have the extremely advanced workshops, like how to make biodiesel, and the Paddle Power workshop that goes through each piece you need to turn your bike into a paddle power machine,” Turlington said, clearly getting excited over the phone the more she talked about the opportunity to catalyze long-term behavioral modification.

They also have panels lead by prominent speakers, such as one on sustainable transportation led by Chris Payne, the director of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car. And this is without mention of any of the music that will be available over a three day period, with talents ranging from big international DJ’s like the Stanton Warriors and Adam Freeland to US superstar Bassnectar and up and coming SoCal based electro-crunk outfit The Glitch Mob. With dance workshops to compliment the eco-conscious ones and three stages, this is clearly not the cracked out SoCal desert rave of the 90’s.

It’s easy to get caught up in the zeal with which Turlington describes the entire affair, especially as one who ascribes to her way of thinking, but the green movement is not without its critics.  While talking about sustainable transportation, I ask her what she would say to those who claim that biofuel consumes more energy to produce than it actually conserves through usage.

“I think it definitely depends on your source of biofuel,” she explains.  “Unfortunately America is very behind the times in this respect, using corn,” a source for which the criticisms hold true.  One of the focuses in the sustainable transportation panel will be the use of algae as a more efficient means of creating biofuel.

“As the economist, I always look at the cost and benefits,” she said.  “I’m not saying it’s not wasteful to make biofuel right now, but I am saying that it’s the beginning stages and it’s going to cost more now in resources to make things.  But when you open the door of thought in some way, there’s always going to be encouragement to make it better.  What we spend now is going to be way outweighed by the benefits in the future.”

And that is probably the best description of the entire LIB experiment.  Someone has to step up and do it first.

“Our goal is to just keep raising the bar and inspiring people,” Turlington said.  “The more people that come to our festival, the more are going to look to it as the standard.

“We don’t want to do it any other way.  It’s just the way it has to be done.”

*****

Look for more upcoming LIB content, including an interview with rising electro/hip-hop/glitch/crunk/chill-out stars The Glitch Mob and a full review of the festival next week.

Lead photo by Chris Nelson