April 22nd was Earth Day, and across the US, 8 cities staged concerts in honor of (and as a plea on behalf of) this place we all call home.

In New York a number of acts rocked out in Central Park, and as Ricky Skaggs himself pointed out, he and the Kentucky Thunder went greenest with their all acoustic line up. Here they are getting down and dirty for Earth:

Bluegrass gets green

After a long intro, during which we were encouraged to sign up for sourced energy (claimed to add 7% to your household energy bill, but our local energy monolith provides us green sourced electricity that costs quite a few more greenbacks than that), go paperless and fully recycle, Ricky Skaggs and his bluegrass band came on and lit the place up. The events across the US aimed for a minimal carbon footprint. The whole thing wrought some oddities: companies handed out seeds embedded in, admittedly recycled, paper to plant, my partner complained about such a paper-consuming gimmick which contrasted with the ‘paperless is better’ message. In the end the music was good, and hopefully encouraged overall better habits from us the audience: I’ll try to delve further into my trash for recyclable type things and read more papers on screen (ugh). And we were gently reminded again of the infamous trash barge that left New York in 1987 then spent 112 days running down to Belize then back to Brooklyn, unable to find a State willing to take our trash.

Lest we forget

Next time: Untangling the tree of life