green festival sf '06

I spent all weekend at the SF Green Festival. I have all sorts of thoughts about it that are tied into work, because SustainLane.com was the main sponsor of the event and we had a pretty huge presence in front of an estimated weekend crowd of 50,000. But one feeling I had most of the weekend was that a lot of the exhibits were missing the point. One of our booths, for example, was across from invitees from the Rennaisance Fair. How you spend your free time is your business, but you're certainly diluting the idea of green pretty far there, no?

anyway these thoughts from another attendee, le, which i think are very pertinent:

on saturday it was so crowded i could't move, and was very frustrating and not fun because of that. sunday was better, i actually managed to buy a couple of things and ran into some friends.

my mixed feelings revolve around this thought: part of being "green" should be to reduce consuming items we don't need and a LOT of what was happening at the green festival was crap people just don't need for sale. that was disheartening. a lot of organizations were giving out a lot of useless paper in the form of brochures and one pagers, which will just be thrown away later.

i'd like to see the green festival give out a green festival branded pen and pad to everyone, so they can write down URLs, and then ban their participants from handing out brochures.