Festivals are horrible for the environment. The drink cups, the throw away camping gear, all of the travel.
There are so many layers of waste and environmental destruction produced by festivals, you cannot be an environmentalist and also go to festivals.I used to work at Renaissance Festivals across the USA. I traveled ten months of the year, moving every eight weeks or so to a new festival. The community of traveling artisans and entertainers are amazingly talented. The people who push rides and work the games are fun and exciting. There are so many wonderful aspects of the Renaissance Festival circuit, but the dumpsters at the end of the fair were our community’s shame.
There is a values system built into the festival scene which says it’s ok to trash usable things. There are so many tons of wasted food, piles of wasted bedding and mountains of wasted tents and tarps. It’s like this at music festivals, art festivals, beer festivals, you name the festival and I guarantee that their dumpsters are a shameful aspect of their production.
People will justify it. People who recycle everything in their daily lives and like to think of themselves as progressive environmentalists will still walk by trash on the ground and even throw their trash on the ground. Festivals are the present day equivalent to the Roman Conceptivae. I am willing to be a stick in the mud. I won’t be contributing to this value system which abandons tons of garbage with the justification that it’s for the public good, because it brings joy to the people.
This aspect of the summer has become a sore spot for me. I have seen too many landscapes trashed by faire goers indulging in dissociation from our kleptocracy. The need to escape the crushing debt, crumbling infrastructure and violent law enforcement is real. I can’t begrudge people the need to escape the current creeping fascism.
Asking people to be responsible for their waste doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. The problem is that we have become accustomed to “waste management” taking away our trash. We put it in the can then forget about it. Meanwhile the garbage has a much longer lifespan than the time it spends as our possession. Trash used to get shipped to China and India for “recycling” where it often ended up incinerated or buried, and often times ended up dumped into the sea. The corporations who took responsibility for disposing of our waste were bad stewards. They were more concerned with profits than environment. As a result there are places around the world where our plastic waste has formed massive trash islands in the sea. The waste which was buried now leaches toxins into the soil and water that is exposed to the waste.
We are at the point where foreign nations are no longer accepting our “recycling” and it’s beginning to pile up. Not unlike the way waste piles up during festivals, except on a nationwide scale. All of this aside there is also the fact that recycling could more accurately be called waste, because the energy required to process recycling is greater than so called “reduction” in the use of natural resources used in the production of new packaging and containers.
Please understand I do see the importance of having communal gatherings to escape the everyday reality of the oppressive society we live in. It’s dangerous to live in high stress situations like we do in the USA, this is a part of why we are all so engaged in our current culture of escapism based on television, the internet, sports, gambling, and festivals. In the USA we live in a dysfunctional society, the values system we exist inside of tells us that war is more important than feeding the poor, sheltering the elderly and teaching the children. We know this is wrong, yet we are largely powerless to effect meaningful change in our political, financial and education systems.
So instead of addressing the underlying causes of inequity and potentially creating a better world for all, the entitled class are indulging in orgiastic festivals of consumption. The people who cannot afford food or shelter are clearly not spending thousands of dollars to go to weekend music festivals. It might be that you are one of the people who saves their pennies the year through or takes out a loan to afford these events, but by and large the people who are trashing the world through these behaviors are those with extra money to spend on frivolous events. The same people who can afford to eat the food which isn’t poisonous are the ones who are poisoning the world for the rest of us. You may not agree with this, I get that, but to me festival culture and the resulting environmental devastation are a product of the class war.
It’s bread and circuses all over again. Except now it’s turkey legs and beer.
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Ah, bread and circuses. So true. I see many situations in the modern "developed" world that make me think about the Emporer Nero.
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Great post, it's is the same story here in Kenya, festivals and walks/runs leave the environment worse each time. I wonder who will save our environment if we don't do it ourselves
Thanks for the Kenyan perspective.
I knew it was like this in the UK, and that other countries have similar problems.
I know it's an issue which privileged people can afford to ignore, which is largely why it's being carried out without a care.
It always makes my heart sad when I see the aftermath of a great event. It happens everywhere like at the beaches after spring break. It is a shame the disregard for the impact this has on our beautiful planet.
I wish we could be more concerned with the well being of our world and the people who live here than the privileged few who can afford to ruin this world.