Music Festivals: an Environmental Catastrophe? (July Post)

While music festivals like Summerfest, Coachella, and Lollapalooza are great fun and economically booming for cities, they have the threat of being terrible on the environment. Simply aside from the waste that must be cleaned up at the end of the night, there is a huge amount of greenhouse gasses used to get people from all over the world to the site of the festival.

There is damage caused to the natural area that the festival is hosted at. For example: Grant Park in Chicago, home of Lollapalooza. Hundreds of thousands of people gather in this park for four days every year and wreak havoc on the ground they stand on. Although unintentional, the massive weight of that many people standing on bare soil, sand, and grass, causes a soil disruption. Packing the soil together makes it difficult for plants to grow there in the 361 days that there are not people standing on it. The ground itself needs to live on its own to allow for a certain level of vegetation to grow.

A real picture from one of the stages at Lollapalooza 2017.

Music festivals attract a large crowd of people from all over the world in some cases. Burning Man, although not labeled as a music festival, still attracts an enormous crowd from every corner of the world. People from all over gather, spending thousands of dollars in some cases, for a community event. The money they spend on this event usually comes from transportation costs. Driving to the airport, flying out, driving there, driving back, flying back, and driving home. The cost of all of this is much greater on the environment than on someone's bank account. The greenhouse gas emissions go up during "festival season" in the summer months, easily due to festivals.

An aerial view of Burning Man, 2017.

Music festivals have obvious pros and obvious cons. Few will view the environmental perspective of them, however. There are many sides to the case on music festivals. This post was made to help give a voice to the side that gets drowned out by the shouts of those for the festivals. I hope this helps you make a better decision about your position on these events.