AGF Insider: Em Hazelwood on sustainability at festivals
Welcome to AGF Insider, our insightful series where we bring you monthly interviews with industry experts.
Each month we catch up with an industry leader in the sustainability world to find the current trends and best practices
This month, we catch up with Em Hazelwood - director at The Green Gathering festival.
What are the best practices that you are seeing give the best results?
There are the obvious goals, like increasing recycling rates and booking more vegetarian food stalls. and then there are subtler but deeper initiatives, such as creating opportunities for nature connection and increasing community and political engagement beyond the festival.
If I can give a couple of examples...
Green Man festval has successfully changed its approach to recycling, using a combination of public and trader education, passionately engaged recycling teams, and a multitude of clearly labelled, colour-coded bins.
Meanwhile, at The Green Gathering we can't do much more on those practical elements, so we're increasingly focusing on how to support, encourage and inspire people to create a better world outside of the festival - for example by offering environmental activists free tickets to our event (both to support them and to encourage them to network and inspire others), while also hosting practical skillshares on things like how to set up cooperative housing and how to match electrical needs to renewable energy solutions.
What trends are you seeing this year?
A couple of years ago I wrote a Green Gathering blog about 'earth magic... where faerie tale meets gardening'. I wanted to rekindle a childlike curiosity in the liminal, in storytelling. I wanted to tap into feelings of love, reverence and grief for the Earth, because those emotions add power to our fight for environmental regeneration. I wasn't sure if anyone in the festival world would understand what I was getting at - was this all too whimsical and esoteric, do people just want to party?
Well, I've been amazed to see that nature connection is actually becoming a thing now, and this pleases me a lot!
What are the obstacles?
Oh, the usual! Time and money are often in short supply, which means doing the right thing can get de-prioritised. Ultimately, the over-arching obstacle is capitalism, and the fact that many festivals are set up as profit-making businesses, and even those that aren't have to rely on profit-making businesses to supply infrastructure and so on. This can make it difficult to focus resources in the most ethically and environmental responsible ways.
What’s the next big thing in sustainability in events?
I've been told all businesses are profit-motivated, but that doesn't have to be the case. Community Interest Companies and Workers' Cooperatives are just two models that are motivated by more than money, and I'm hopeful that more festivals could choose to change their underlying company structure... or set up anew using radical new models.
What would be the biggest game changer from your perspective?
Honestly? I'd like to see more small festivals, fewer big ones. It's much easier for smaller events to be run sustainably. Small events can create a community feeling, people tend to take more care of each other and their environment, stages can be smaller and so consume less energy... Wildlife is likely to be less disrupted by smaller events... Fewer artists are flown in...
Having said all that, my naughty secret is that I do love Glastonbury!
Keep an eye out for next month's edition of AGF Insider, where we'll bring you more expert perspectives and fresh ideas!
