Manchester, Tennessee- The first day of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, a day which has traditionally been a day of travel and arrival for most festival attendees, greeted an estimated crowd of seventy-five thousand music fans from around the world with some good old fashioned southern rainshowers. And this wasn’t a light rain, by any definition. The rain, which began shortly after the four-day festival’s first performances, didn’t dampen the mood of the smiling festivarians, but it didn’t help the speed with which people were able to enter the festival grounds and set up their encampments.

The elements may have slowed the entrance for many, but delays were nothing like those in years past. In 2002, for example, at the inaugural Bonnaroo, it took this author about 18 hours to cover the last 45 miles!

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In just seven years the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has emerged as the premier music festival in the United States, if not the world. With the biggest names in music from genres across the musical spectrum taking to thirteen stages and providing festival-goers with four days of good music, danceable beats and pleasing melodies, this year’s Bonnaroo, from June 11-14 in Manchester, Tennessee will be no different from the last seven.

But in addition to the mountains of music and non-musical activities, the festival, which last year was named one of eighteen music festivals worldwide to receive the Greener Festival award, added several new green dimensions to its already impressive greening efforts.

Like the much newer Rothbury Festival up in Michigan, festival organizers at Bonnaroo have been hard at work finding new ways to green the festival scene and engage fans in discussions, seminars and educational programs about important sustainability topics and the pressing environmental issues of today. In addition to incorporating an environmental mission statement into every vendor contract, festival organizers have built upon past successful sustainability efforts and mixed in some new ones to give festival attendees a greener music festival experience.

Below are a few of the pre-festival green highlights, but stay tuned to Green Options for green updates, photos, interviews and reports from the ground at this year’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival.

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What started as a dinnertime conversation could revolutionize disaster relief. Chuck Cooper and his friend Jim Shamp were chatting about a neighbor’s free-standing home photovoltaic system. What if, they wondered, you built something like this on a truck that could help out areas in need to electricity? Cooper, a North Carolina environmental entrepreneur, took that idea and ran with it.

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The four-day camping festival, held annually in Manchester, Tennessee, since 2002 has grabbed accolades galore just for the great variety of performers it attracts (this year’s lineup includes everyone from Pearl Jam, Chris Rock, Kanye West and B.B. King to Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, Willie Nelson and Janeane Garofalo). But it’s taken increasingly awesome steps each year to green the event onstage and off, and this year is no exception.

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