Have you ever had one of those weekends where you wake up Monday morning and you’re in the baggage car on a train heading to Chicago and you don’t have a clue how you even got to the station? Me neither. But today I did wake up feeling like I got dipped in yogurt and sugar then rolled in granola. The feeling originated from my attendance this weekend at the Seattle Green Festival, a multi-city traveling roadshow of all the things people are doing to save the planet. The idea of a bunch of granola-heads in Birkenstocks and Tevas, mingling with people trying to sell stuff, in Seattle where it is against the law to throw away light bulbs but also against the law to toss them into the recycling was too much to imagine. There has got to be a blog or two in there somewhere, I thought.

I learned about the Green Festival, www.greenfestivals.org, through an online coupon deal I received last week. I read through the deal, Two-for-One, and signed up. I figured that it was going to end up being some thinly-veiled marketing confab featuring companies seeking to greenwash their corporate images with all the things they’re doing to promote, in the words of the festival’s literature, “[a] Sustainable Economy, Ecological Balance, and Social Justice”. Boy, was I ever disappointed. It was much worse than that.

I arrived at the Qwest Event Center with my two-for-one ticket in hand and, my social life being what it is, alone. I stood in the ticket line until a likely looking person walked up. “Did you buy your ticket yet?” I asked. “Nope.” “Want to get in for free?” “Sure.” We passed through the ticket checkpoint and got our non-recyclable wrist bands. “Thanks. Have a nice day,” she said and vanished into the crowd. Life goes on.

First off let me briefly reiterate my views on our current environmental crisis. First, and this is important, the crisis is global. This means that any solution will have to involve a vast majority of the nearly seven billion of us living here. Second, we’ve never even been able to get an overwhelming agreement on anything so no solution is possible. But that shouldn’t keep us from trying because, hey, you never know, there could be a first time.

The exhibitors at the Green Festival look at this conundrum and say, as one, “Gee, looks like we can make a buck here.” Now don’t get me wrong, there were a number of booths and presentations focusing on social issues, community involvement, and personal environmental choices, but by-and-large the exhibitors and presenters were all trying to sell stuff; lots and lots of stuff.

And what stuff it was.

Ford was there showing off its fancy new electric car – which is actually kind of slick. There were electric scooters. Then there were several companies pitching the solar panels – yes, they even work here in rainy Seattle – that you would need for your electric vehicle to avoid forcing a utility somewhere to burn more coal while you charge it. The thing that surprised me most was the number of construction companies represented. Most of which featured products made of wood and plastic. Sustainably produced wood and plastic no doubt. Then there were the food companies hawking everything from crunchy individually-wrapped-in-non-recyclable-packaging granola yogurt bars to soy milk (from soy cows?) to orange juice imported from Italy, because, as you might imagine, juice shipped all the way from Europe is so much more environmentally friendly than juice produced in, say, Florida. There were twenty different print periodicals represented; all trying to get even more paper into the stream and into your home. There were companies encouraging the purchase of stuff made in the local area and there were people encouraging Fair Trade: the purchase of stuff from far, far away. You can go on a “Global Reality Tour” where you and a group of like-minded Americans can sit around with “activists” who are “working for positive change” around the world and learn, through the thoughtfully provided translators, the real story, unfiltered by the “mass media”. All this includes a double-occupancy accommodation and two meals a day. At one booth sat the National Geographic Adventure group offering to send you to remote places at great expense while directly opposite was a booth where you could sign a petition to try and get National Geographic to start using any recycled paper at all.

As much as it was the Green Festival it was also the Festival of Mixed Messages. On one hand the festival proudly states that the “Seattle Green Festival had a[n] 88% resource recovery rate”, while on the other they promote an environment where thirty-odd thousand people can create – from soy bar wrappers and the tiny sample cups of soy milk and Italian orange juice – over four tons of garbage in sixteen hours. And that’s not counting the handouts and flyers the festival-goers take home with them. On one hand there are the presenters speaking out against single-use disposables – such as tiny paper sample cups – standing alongside the companies that produce reusable alternatives, while on the other are the companies like SoyJoy who package their extruded nutritional goo in aluminized plastic wrappers that cannot be reused or recycled.

My inner cynic did have a few disappointing moments. There were some exhibitors that had some good ideas and some good stuff. There was a local company that is producing a compost based pelletized fertilizer. Some of the building companies were promoting recycled construction materials. There were FrogBox and KarmaBoxx who rent out reusable moving boxes and then pick them up when you’re done. There were companies selling products made from recycled rubber. These are some really good ideas that all have a positive, even if small, environmental impact.

There were also, as you might expect, some “green-fringe” exhibitors. There was “Swheat Scoop” who address the excess of food in our country by turning wheat into cat litter. There was the company who sold mushroom growing kits which were basically a bag of fungus-infused coffee grounds that you could take home and harvest mushrooms from in a couple of weeks. OK, full disclosure, I bought one. There were the guys selling “fair-trade” crocheted Frisbees from Central America. One guy was selling paper products made from elephant crap – you do realize that it’s impossible to make this stuff up. There was Good Clean Love which has an online magazine and sell “natural personal lubricants”, “nature’s aphrodisiacs” and “body candy”. I’ll leave the rest to your green imaginations. And when all is done and you have departed this mortal coil for whatever comes next there was Go Green Cemetery.

I spoke at length with the woman who started Go Green Cemetery, www.gogreencemetery.com, and found out much more than I really needed to know about this furthest outlier on the green-fringe. In nutshell, Go Green Cemetery (GGC so I don’t have to use up so many words) is a place you can go online and remember your deceased antecedents, friends, and family. This saves you the hassle of having to get into the car and drive to the cemetery to sweep away the leaves on dear old Dad’s headstone or swap out the flowers. It is a place for the Facebook generation to exchange an actual physical memorial experience with whatever deep feelings you might get by looking at a “gravestone” with “flowers” next to it and the deceased’s name and dates “engraved” into the “marker”. Probably while you’ve got a game of FreeCell going on in the window next door.

One of the things about visiting a real cemetery is that there are actual dead people there. Lots of them. Not only is it a place to remember but it is a place to get a feel for the long-term continuity of this whole being alive thing. They are places where the scale of life is spread up the hill in a field of memorials and not just a single “gravestone” flickering on a computer screen. Real cemeteries are places where you are reminded that your turn will come and, while considering the headstone of a distant forebear, that someone else’s turn will come after. GGC provides none of that. There is no place there. It is the anti-social network.

Now GGC is pushing this concept to “to lower the cost of burial by providing a gravesite for your family and friends to visit, and to reduce the environmental impact, and amount of resources consumed by traditional burial methods.” Huh? But they don’t take the body. I’m guessing, since you still have to lose the corpse somehow, that “to lower the cost” means you’re expected to toss Grandma in the compost bin and fork over a hundred and fifty bucks to GGC for the digital gravesite. Otherwise, it’s just an additional cost.

I reflected, out loud to my eternal embarrassment, that this was one of the strangest ideas I had ever come upon in my life. I quickly found an upside in that it might be interesting for somebody still alive to have a place to put the things that he or she wanted to be remembered for, what was really important in their lives, and to have a place to ponder one’s own mortality. Sort of a self-memorial. “Nope,” I was told. “You have to be dead. We check.”

Trying to keep an open mind about the whole thing, I visited the “cemetery” on my return home. First off you need an account to get in and you can’t get an account until you buy a “gravesite”. But, there are some public memorials that you can visit. Bruce Lee, he of Kung-Fu fame, has a gravesite in GGC. So does John Smith. 

Which, as I like to say, is where it gets interesting. 

John Smith, which may be the single most abundant name in English, hailed from Kenmore Hills, VA. He was born in 1927 and died in 2011 at the ripe old age of 84. Sniff. There were several vases filled with attractive flowers left “graveside”, no doubt, by his bereaved kin. Sniff.

It is all a lie.

“John Smith” could not have come from Kenmore Hills, VA because there is no Kenmore Hills, VA. The place doesn’t exist. In fact, the closest place to Virginia named Kenmore Hills is in Queensland, Australia. My curiosity piqued I dug deeper. Fortunately for me, John’s grief-stricken loved ones posted several pictures of Grandpa in his prime.

There is this great website called tineye.com. It is basically a Google for pictures. Show it your picture and it goes forth and tells you where else on the web that picture shows up. Well…… It turns out that there was never any John Smith from Kenmore Hills, Anywhere. He is a fabrication of GGC. The pictures posted on GoGreenCemetery.com of “John Smith”, deceased, are really images of Tom Harkin, alive, the U.S. Senator from Iowa. I wonder if Senator Harkin knows. He should.

My cynicism and skepticism fully fueled for the foreseeable future I looked back on my experience at the Green Festival. It showcased all the things that are right with the Green Movement, and all the things that are wrong. We just all need to keep our eyes open so we can tell the difference. But the thing I took away from my visit, above all others, and I swear on my eventual ash scattering site, is that if anybody ever puts my memorial “in” the Go Green Cemetery, I will come back and haunt you forever.