Return of the Green Festival Man

Gareth Jones tells us how he got on being green at Glasto.

Gareth does a spot of charity shopping. An innovative use of recycled bottles. Gareth enjoyed sampling the local cider. There certainly were no bones for Gareth Jones who went meat free for Glastonbury.

Back In June I made a list of 10 ways to be a more green festival goer. I lived by my green festival rules at Glastonbury, here is what I learnt;

Firstly…
It’s mega difficult to convince the meat-eating crowd to give up meat and pursue environmental vegetarianism even if it’s just for a few days. Filled with passion to change the world I tried to get 200 people to join me in my vegetarian quest using PledgeBank. I drummed up support through MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and various festival message boards. I got only 12 sign-ups and also a load of stick for trying. Altogether pretty disheartening but I’m eternally grateful for those 12 that helped. I stuck with it and had a fantastic experience. It came as a surprise to me that there’s more to vegetarianism then just lentils. But then I am an ignorant meat eater. The bean burritos from Pura Vida Mexican were my favourite and I’ve started to eat more vegetarian food throughout the week now.

Secondly…
Public transport isn’t that bad really. Well it was for a lot of people at Glastonbury. Coaches delayed by hours due to roads flooding, poor communications, but I was one of the lucky few. The coach was good fun on the way to the site and I slept like a baby in all my mud-drenched gear on the way back.

Thirdly…
Recycling, charity shopping, using recycled loo roll, buying local food and of course drinking local alcohol, well it’s all pretty easy really. Actually it was so easy that I wonder what all the fuss is about, I just hope other people realise it to.

I never got 200 people to sign my pledge, but I did get the message out to over 200 people on MySpace and continue to get new MySpace friends and messages of support on a weekly basis. Last month Greener Living Magazine contacted me, as they wanted to include a small piece about my experience in their magazine. Was it worth the effort? Damn right it was. There’s only one way to change the world - Live it, Be it, Do it.