Chicago Lands World’s Largest Green Fest
Chicago’s green creds keep piling up. Next April 21-22, on Earth Day weekend, Chicago will host the wildly innovative Green Festival at McCormick Place. Begun in 2001 in San Francisco as a collaboration between Global Exchange and Co-Op America, it has in recent years expanded to an East Coast presence in Washington, D.C. Chicago is now the third major city in the nation to host this pioneering green business and lifestyle convention, and the first in the middle of the country.
“It is a very dynamic and positive event,” said Chicago Director Isabel Schechter. “The goal is to inspire and mobilize and galvanize people towards solutions.”
Green Festivals stated mission of ecological balance, social justice, and sustainable economy aims to make our world “a more humane and sustainable place though local green economies and community involvement.” In the great Chicago tradition, new ways of doing business will be on display both at the Festival and at the Green Business Conference the same week.
What can one expect to see at the Green Festival? “What won’t you see,” said Schechter. “You’ll see nationally known speakers alongside local heroes, and exhibitors which range from social justice groups to green investment firms.”
Organizers put special emphasis on the participatory aspects of the festival, which includes a movement room for yoga and dance, a lifestyle lounge for music and organic drinks, audience Q & A panel discussions, and “more food than you can eat in a year,” said Schechter. There will also be off site tours of green sites and businesses throughout the city.
Regional participation from cities like Minneapolis, Madison, Des Moines, and Cincinnati is expected to give this festival a distinctly midwestern flavor. Green Festival has partnered with the Chicago Department of the Environment, who were instrumental in bringing the festival to Chicago. To register or for more information visit greenfestivals.org.
— Charles Shaw
Impact the Environment—One Concert at a Time
Zero Impact Touring. That’s the new plan in the world of live music — an opportunity for fans to reduce their environmental impact from attending a concert, or following their favorite band on tour.
Musictoday, a company that connects artists and fans through online fan clubs, artist e-commerce and fulfillment with over 700 clients, recently launched two environmental initiatives, the Tickets Plant Trees and Carbon Neutral Concerts programs.
The Tickets Plant Trees program allows fans to purchase a tree, grove or forest of trees in the neediest areas of the world by adding .15 cents to the cost of tickets or merchandise from their favorite artist through Musictoday. The Carbon Neutral Concerts program lets fans offset the equivalent of CO2 produced by driving 150 miles to and from the show by adding .40 cents to their Musictoday transaction. The tree planting and carbon neutral programs are administered by Musictoday partners Trees for the Future and NativeEnergy.
“There is a strong movement among artists and fans today toward minimizing their individual impact on the environment,” said Musictoday founder Coran Capshaw. “We launched these programs in partnership with our clients because we believe fans sincerely want to improve the environment and these programs make it very easy for them to do so.”
According to Musictoday, initial tests showed that up to 50 percent of an artist’s fan base will participate with a voluntary contribution. Along with their partners, Musictoday expects to plant millions of trees and offset more than a hundred million pounds of carbon through the programs in the coming year alone.
For more information visit musictoday.com, treesftf.org, or nativeenergy.com.
— James Faber
Sex Tour Stimulates College Campuses
That’s “Sex AND the Environment,” not “Sex in the Environment,” college students were jokingly warned before the presentation began at the University of Chicago. “So if you are here for (the second one), you’d better leave now!”
A significant difference, but students in the auditorium stayed put, as did the audiences in all five locations when two student leaders from the “Sex and the Environment” movement toured Illinois in late September. The presentations stressed that sex education and the environment “are really related and how supporting one is really supporting the other,” said Shelby Knox, one of the two student leaders.
“The world population is growing, and that means more consumption, which means an increase in global warming,” said Knox, a junior studying political science at the University of Texas. “A lot of women around the world have a lot of children and would want voluntary family planning. Giving them contraception and teaching them how to space their children decreases the consumption that’s going on.”
Knox said the tour played to rooms filled to capacity and got a “really good response,” though a dissenting note was sounded at Western Illinois University, where some in the audience disagreed with the call for sex education and advocated abstinence education.
That exchange, Knox said, ties in with developments in Springfield, where state Sen. Carol Ronen (D-Chicago) has introduced a bill that would provide “comprehensive sex education” available to all Illinois youth. (See responsiblesexed.org) The bill’s provisions include requiring that sex education include teaching about abstinence, as well as about contraception and preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.
— Jack Bess
Ethanol Fueling More Controversy Than Cars
It’s another one of those situations where you ask, “Whose side are they on?”
Increased ethanol production will eat into the world’s food supply and require more farmland to be used for growing corn to produce the alternative fuel, warns a new study by a Washington DC-based think tank.
The study “Biofuels, Food, or Wildlife? The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol” was released in September by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which describes its mission as “advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government.” The Institute made news in May when it released a pair of TV ads attacking “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s film on global warming.
The Institute, which argues that there are environmental, health and economic benefits in the rising amounts of carbon dioxide, ended its ads with the line, “They call it pollution; we call it life.” According to sourcewatch.org, the Institute receives funding from ExxonMobil Foundation and some conservation foundations.
The latest salvo in the ongoing battle between ethanol supporters and critics, the new study puts forward “green” arguments against developing crop-based alternative fuels. Asserting that there are “significant trade-offs” in expanding the production of corn and other crops for fuel, the study states that the main trade-off “would be a shift of major amounts of the world’s food supply to fuel use when significant elements of the human population remain ill-fed.”
To produce “economically significant amounts” of ethanol, the U.S. might have to clear an additional 50 million acres of forest, the study states. In addition to using up cropland now enrolled in the Conservation Reserve and resulting in a rise in soil erosion, “ethanol mandates may force the local loss of many wildlife species, and perhaps trigger some special extinction,” the study asserts.
The full study is available at cei.org.
— Jack Bess
IL Humanities Council Weighs in on Frankenfoods
The issues around genetics research are complicated and have far-reaching impact, so the first step for anyone concerned about the topic is to be better informed.
That’s according to Jocelyn Malamy, associate professor of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago, who served as a panelist for the discussion, “What Will We Eat? Genetics and Food,” held Oct. 28 at the Notebaert Nature Museum.
That event was part of a year-long series of forums sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council entitled “Future Perfect: Conversations on the Meaning of the Genetics Revolution.” The next program is “How Free Are We? Genetics and Free Will,” which is scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Nov. 8, at the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center for the Arts, 1001 W. Roosevelt Road, Chicago.
Some activists have raised alarms about possibility of health threats resulting from genetically modified crops and the role of large agribusiness corporations in developing this form of biotechnology. But Malamy said the issue is too complex to be reduced to simple statements.
“It’s not appropriate to talk about GMOs as if it were all one thing,” she said. “We’re talking about plants in which genes have been engineered to make them different from the originals, but there are a lot of ways in which that can be done. I don’t think one can ask questions about the safety of all genetically modified plants. Each type of genetically modified plant has to be evaluated by itself.”
Peoples’ feelings about large-scale agribusiness biotechnology are one thing, but that should be considered separately from the issue of GM technologies, Malamy added. While some GM technologies do come from agribusiness, others come from academia, the private sector, she said.
But it’s a sign of the times when organizations like the IHC are getting in on the public debate about GMOs and recognizing that there is a great need for these types of forums, where people can learn more about the science behind the issues and obtain greater understanding.
— Jack Bess
Illinois Feeling the Heat
The effects of global warming were clearly felt this year, when Illinois had its second warmest January-July on record, according to a report released by Environment Illinois.
The report, “Feeling the Heat: Global Warming and Rising Temperatures in the United States,” analyzes temperature numbers from the National Climatic Data Center. The data comes from 255 weather stations in the 50 states and in Washington DC. “Feeling the Heat” is available at environmentillinois.org.
The report comes at a time when Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been sending mixed messages to environmental activists about the global warming issue. On Aug. 22, Blagojevich released an extensive “energy independence plan” that includes a proposal to spend $775 million on building up to 10 new coal-burning gasification plants to produce diesel fuel, natural gas and electricity.
That provision “would actually increase the amount of global warming pollution per mile that we drive, so we know that that piece of it is bad from a climate perspective,” said Rebecca Stanfield of Environment Illinois. But other provisions of the plan might reduce global-warming pollution, so it’s hard to say anything definitive about it, she said.
But, Stanfield had positive words for Blagojevich’s executive order on Oct. 4 that creates the Illinois Global Warming Advisory Group. The group’s purpose is to develop strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution across the state.
“He’s come up with a greenhouse-gas emission target for the state, and no Midwestern state has done that so far,” Stanfield said.
Environment Illinois’ Global Warming Solutions “platform” calls for a 10 percent reduction of global-warming pollution over the next 10 years, and a 75 to 80 percent reduction by 2050.
— Jack Bess
17th Humanities Festival Takes on Peace & War
When the Chicago Humanities Festival debuted in 1989 it was a one-day affair held at the Art Institute. In almost twenty years it has grown into a cultural powerhouse, a two and a half week festival with hundreds of presentations at different sites around the city. Attendance hovers around 60,000. This year, the festival’s theme is Peace & War: Facing Human Conflict.
“It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Peace and War would be an important topic,” said new Artistic Director Ren Weschler. He contends that the CHF isn’t trying to be risqué or controversial, just pertinent, that nothing human is too foreign.
“A festival just about war would have been a drag, but in fact we’re talking about something even more momentous and powerful and seizing of the imagination than war, and that is peace. War is easy, peace is hard.”
Notable presentations and discussions include Cyberconflict—Representations of War in New Media and Electronic Games, Rights During Wartime, The Search for Internal & External Peace, Teaching a Culture of Peace and Justice, Our Strategy in Iraq: A No-Holds-Barred Debate, Holy Terror and Holy Love, and The Culture of War.
Weschler is particularly enthusiastic about the programs that deal with what happens in war “when the cameras are gone,” the aftermath of a conflict when a culture is left to re-gather and rebuild.
If there is a social and political statement made by the Festival, Weschler adds, it is “pay attention.”
“Whether you are for or against the war in Iraq, please let’s just be clear and lucid about what is involved in it. [This year’s festival] is about just being aware of how horrible war is and how amazing peace is and how much the one is folded inside the other.”
Visit chfestival.org for the full schedule.
— Charles Shaw
