I attended the Going Green at Home festival yesterday at Wheaton Regional Park sponsored by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. The tables and presentations covered a wide variety of subjects including green building materials, green homes (energy self sufficient!), organic farming, making your home more energy efficent, and so on (nothing about corn stoves though–we needed Mary there!)
One thing that I was only vaguely aware of was the Capital Cresent Trail, a bike trail converted from an old, unused train track, that runs from Silver Spring all the way down to Georgetown–a potential model for alternative commuting!
There was a decent number of people moving through the exhibits. I found two who were interested in the Green Party and wanted to change their registration (woo hoo!) although a large portion of the crowd consisted of hard core democrats who don’t especially like the Green Party.
But the interesting thing for me was to see the such a thriving example of grass roots green economics at work. Unlike many European government, U.S. governments don’t give significant aid to sustainable economics (except for California.) As a result, these technologies can only spread through grass roots efforts like the Going Green festival, which, while admirable, will probably not effect rapid, large scale change. But they are evidence that green sentiments are there, percolating under the surface, ready for somebody to mobilize them.