On the Road: The Green Revolution

There are smaller gestures as well, including selling concert and band T-shirts made with organic cotton or hemp and gathering broken and used instrument strings from the stage after shows to be recycled into jewelry, as Barenaked Ladies do.

The Vans Warped Tour's 19 trucks and 17 buses run on biodiesel fuel, and, tour founder Kevin Lyman says, "our industry is going to have to adapt to change to be able to survive. We're bringing 3,000 gallons of biodiesel a day on site, which costs a little bit more, but we're going to absorb the cost of delivery."

This is the fourth year for the tour's ever-expanding Warped Eco Initiatives, and "we're slowly learning how to do it," Lyman says. "It's not an overnight process. We started with recycling three summers ago. I recycle at home. I thought, 'Why are we not doing it out on the road?' I believe the only real change is going to come from the 12- to 19-year-olds of the world. If we don't do something, their lives are going to be more affected by it than myself or my parents who have grown up in this consumer nation." (A 2006 MTV/CBS News Poll of 13- to 24-year-olds found them citing the environment as the most important problem their generation will have to deal with.)

Terrence D. Jones, Wolf Trap president and chief executive, has appointed former transportation secretary Norman Y. Mineta as chairman of the new National Advisory Council for the Arts and Environment. As the National Park Service's only performing arts center, Wolf Trap was already green-conscious, using biodegradable products at its concession stands and subsidizing the Wolf Trap Metro Shuttle to encourage and provide public transportation to shows. The future will include transitioning to alternative fuel and high-efficiency vehicles, purchasing wind credits to offset carbon emissions and moving to becoming a paperless operation, with the ultimate goal of making the park, according to Wolf Trap officials, "a zero waste organization and carbon neutral."

Willie Nelson, who'll be at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Sept. 6, has a three-year-old company, Willie Nelson BioDiesel, and his own trucker-friendly blend called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. His latest tour bus, Honeysuckle Rose IV, runs on BioWillie; what Willie runs on is also organic.

The Dave Matthews Band, at Nissan Pavilion on Aug. 11, also uses biodiesel and works with NativeEnergy to offset the climate impact of emissions from its tours. The band has also invested enough money into renewable energy to offset its fossil fuel use for the past 15 years.

Meanwhile, Save Our Selves has partnered with the U.S. Green Building Commission, creators of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard, and award-winning sustainability expert John Picard on the Green Event Standard, which will offer how-to guidelines for production managers, venue managers, merchandisers and artists.

Live Nation and AEG, the two dominant concert production companies, are working on green initiatives as well.

Guster's Gardner says: "Every year, the demand from artists, and now other entities in the music industry, to go green has been unbelievable, and overwhelming. Venues and bands don't know what to do. Sometimes there's a disconnect between intentions and actions, and a lot of it has to do with that it's not their main priority. When you're a band, you're just so busy, and everyone who's out there on the road, their plate is full with their job."

But that's changing, and beginning last year, Guster has done several Campus Consciousness tours featuring eco-villages. Gardner calls them "part eco-science fair, part environmental showcases" and part promotion for such tour sponsors as organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farms and Ben & Jerry's.

There are also town hall forums and "Pimp My Clean Ride," in which students are invited aboard Guster's tour bus to learn about biodiesel, alternative transportation "and the nontoxic, eco-friendly products we use on the bus," Gardner says.

The Guster bus was once dubbed "the Earth eater," but switching to biodiesel has allowed Guster to keep 100,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a single year. And through its offsets, the band says, 2,100 tons of carbon dioxide have been neutralized -- the equivalent of not driving 4.2 million miles or powering 262 homes for an entire year.