This time I decided to attend the Green Festival as a spectator. There are a huge array of speakers, many of them the guilding lights of the green movement. It wasn't long after I got there that I ran into Amanda & Catherine. Amanda mentioned she was on her way to this talk, so I followed them there. The title was certainly provocative, Economy 3.0.

When we got there the speaker was Peter Barnes, who is flogging his new book titled Economy 3.0. He feels that companies like Wal*Mart have gotten so good at externalizing the costs of their low prices that we need to reinvent the role of the economy to correct that. Listening to him, I got the feeling that the same effect could be acheived by recognising that Wal*Mart had poisoned their reputation in the public eye. Later I figured out their advertising budget probably keeps that fact from seeing the light of day. Anyhow, I didn't quite get his concept of the new economy. I'm glad he's thinking big though.

After that talk I christmas shopped for a while. I found lots of organic cotton kiddie clothes vendors for some reason. There were also lots of organic specialty foods and solar power vendors. I got myself some hemp seed nut butter, an organic cotton bath mat, and a few suprises for my rug rat relatives. Then I came across the main hall, where Thom Hartman was speaking to a large and very attentive audience.

When I got there he was explaining that his belief in democracy is based on the way it works in nature. He told the story of the way herds of deer decide where to drink. If there is a choice between two or more watering holes, the herd shows no particular preferance until 51% of them have gathered at one. Then all of them gather there, that being the choice of the majority. He said ichthyologists have noticed the same kind of pattern in the way fish schools decide where to go next. He said it is up to us to get our movement to grow to the point where enough people find the ideas so compelling everybody goes for them. He got a good hand when he finished talking.

  

John Robbins also packed them into the big hall. He began by introducing himself, explaining that he had grown up as an heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream business. He had lost interest in that when he realized that too much ice cream is bad for you. The wake up lesson had been his father's partner dying of heart disease in his fifties, a young age for a healthy man. When he explained the disconnects in his fathers world view, he sounded something like Al Gore explaining why he had quit growing tobacco.

The bulk of the talk was Robbins sharing his latest research. He had studied four human cultures where people live productive happy lives that extend well into their 80's, 90's or beyond. Robbins had found that these people had vigerous daily routines that were all about being valuable members of the team or community. They also ate mostly plant based locally grown foods. Their languages didn't have words for all of the addiction problems our society has to deal with, an indicator they didn't have those problems. Robbins said the information was laid out in much more detail in his book, "Healthy at 100". He got a standing ovation at the end of his talk.

I went up with friends, who decided at about that point they wanted to go back to Mountain View. I went along, mostly because my backpack was full of stuff I'd gotten, and I didn't want to carry much more. Sunday I went back up for the afternoon. That time I spent some time working the crowd. I remember talking to a guy in an Earth First! T Shirt who told me "Peter Camejo would be a better Green Party Candidate if he listened to some of the speakers at this event for a while." I'm hoping some of the people that did listen take those ideas into the public arena, one way or another.