Common Ground: Under One Roof

December 2006 | From the Editor

Under One Roof

As I write this, Green Fest 2006 ended an hour ago.

This annual festival that’s landed in San Francisco each fall since 2002, attracts throngs of the eco-conscious who cram the Concourse Exhibition Center to hear from the likes of Alice Walker, eat organic food and stroll the miles of booths where activists and entrepreneurs are selling, promoting and educating about every facet of the burgeoning green economy — everything from the latest solar technology to cat litter made out of spent wheat.

Maybe you stopped by the Common Ground booth and said “Hi.” We also might have met you in person at the amazing Bioneers conference three weeks earlier in San Rafael. These Green-centric confabs can really charge you up because they’re like spending a day in utopia. Here, under one roof, the green movement’s best and brightest are not only presenting the visionary fruits of their labor, but also fulfilling their grandest ideals in full effect, down to the soy-ink-printed post-consumer literature activists circulated amongst the crowd. Their innovation, tenacity and tireless inspiration flowed through and poured off the thousands of attendees all determined to make a difference. Wow.

Unfortunately, it’s not a permanent utopia but a “Shangri-la” that packs up and drives away when they roll up the booths, ship out the compost on biodiesel trucks and turn out the solar-generated lights. Back in the warming cruel world, well, it’s hard not to notice the contrast.

To wit, I ate at a chain-y taqueria for dinner tonight near our magazine’s office downtown. Don’t send me hate mail, though, that was the only thing open here on a Sunday night! Or send it. Maybe I deserve it (even though I’ve boycotted McDonald’s since 1992). As Eric Schlosser wrote in Fast Food Nation, fast food is engineered to taste good, and yes, it did. But unlike the utopian cuisine at Green Fest, the burrito was almost certainly a factory-farmed ConAgra product riddled with hormones, antibiotics and Satan knows what other fillers, preservatives and carcinogenic time bombs, genetically modified and grown by exploited labor under the auspices of some soulless multinational. The utensils set out for the customers were definitely not the bendy biodegradable ones made from potato starch, but petrochemical ones that will inherit the earth along with the meek. Not a single thing at this restaurant was fair trade, organic, local, sustainable or any shade of green, probably. And the line was long.

So, yeah, it’s going to take a sea change to get that roof from Green Fest and Bioneers to extend across the entire world. But the “system” itself is a titan of an opponent. Since the ‘70s, graft and greed have won nine out of 10 battles over this dam or that gas mileage standard, and now we suddenly have to win eight out of 10 of these battles to avoid environmental collapse by 2050? That’s daunting. But as November’s election results show, big change can happen fast.

Many of the answers are here now. It’s heartening. Thrilling, even. But equally important is who, in fact, cares about the question being answered. Which is, “Isn’t life as we know it worth saving?” And it’s up to us — those who care first — to lead and cajole our parents, peers and partners to help us create an equitable, sustainable future. Many of those doing that right now are featured in this issue, along with brilliant quotes from Bioneers. Thanks for reading and being a part of the solution. Enjoy the issue.

—Todd Spencer

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