We're pleased to announce that we have a new addition to our website team for this year's Festival. Rachel Wallace (pictured above), who writes about green issues (including a chapter in the excellent
Fair Trade Revolution book) will be reporting on the Festival's green, ethical, local, organic and Fairtrade initiatives. Here's an introductory blog from Rachel...
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Arriving at Glastonbury Festival feels to me like entering into an alternative society for a few days full of fun, adventure, tolerance and solidarity. Losing myself in music, day dreaming staring at the passing clouds and fluttering flags, tromping around in my wellies, I stop thinking about work, houses, heating, cooking, baths and whatever else and enjoy a simplistic existence with my fellow festival lovers. It’s an equaliser but it also heightens my awareness of our heavy footprint on the Earth.
I feel uncomfortable about the amount of water and petrol I get through and the rubbish we generate. Glastonbury seems to highlight how we don’t really need most of the stuff we think we do. Friends, family, companionship, food, warmth and spirituality – be it through music, religion, whatever – is about what it boils down to for me, I realise, and maybe a hot pear cider as I’m lying in a field.
Surveying it all from a vantage point up above The Park, it’s striking when there are 175,000 of us in a few fields just how much we consume and produce, even in our rustic state. We look like an insatiable, spoilt and very happy refugee camp. If this is a microcosm for my idealistic society, I want to be able to be as green, ethical, local, organic and Fairtrade as possible in it for a few days, learn some new stuff about it all and go away inspired and with renewed resolve to make some changes. I want it to seep under my skin as I live and love the Festival.
Glastonbury has some brilliant initiatives, including all the tea, coffee, hot chocolate and sugar being Fairtrade; championing local veg, meat and milk producers; recycling 50% of all the rubbish; only using recyclable and compostable crockery; solar-powering showers and stages; getting the water from its own purpose-built reservoirs; and rewarding you for arriving on your bike, a train or bus.
I’m going to be finding out more about all this over the Festival and blogging back with photos, snapshots, insights and interviews. Please join me!
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Introducing our green blogger
