Clif Bar offers a green travel cheat sheet

Energy bar maker teams with bands to make their tours tread more lightly

By Barbara Mitchell

Pamplin Media Group, Jun 12, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Australia’s Xavier Rudd is logging a lot of miles on his current tour, while a Clif Bar outreach program helps make those miles a little easier on the planet.

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“If the environmental changes we need won’t come from the top down, they’ll have to come from the bottom up,” Grady O’Shaughnessy says.

O’Shaugnessy isn’t some lofty idealist naively crusading for change. He’s the lifestyle experience manager for Clif Bar & Co. and a major force behind GreenNotes — the company’s innovative program that partners with musical acts to help them reduce their environmental impact while on tour.

At the moment, that means working with acclaimed Australian songwriter Xavier Rudd, a green-leaning favorite of the jam-band set and a perfect fit for the program.

Rudd starts his U.S. tour in Manchester, Tenn., at the Bonnaroo Festival (another organization that Clif Bar has helped with its greening process) and appears in Portland on June 29 at the Roseland Theater.

Other artists the company has worked with are like-minded souls like Gomez, O.A.R., Guster, the John Butler Trio and Martin Sexton. Clif Bar is actively involved in the greening of the tours — acting as consultants to help find biodiesel tour buses; finding recycled paper, soy-based inks and organic cotton for printed and merchandise materials; requesting local and organic food backstage; minimizing the idling of buses when not in use; offsetting CO2 emissions through wind energy credits; encouraging recycling; and pointing the bands toward more sustainable hotel options.

Bands, concerts only a start

O’Shaughnessy and his compatriots are using the information they’ve gleaned from their own greening process to help others along the way. In addition to Bonnaroo, they’ve partnered with South by Southwest and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and worked with Berkeley’s Greek Theatre to make last year’s concert season climate-neutral.

But it’s not artists and organizations that are the ultimate target.

“While working on the bands on their impact and calling it good would have been a good thing, we all know the true potential for significant change is with the thousands of people out there that listen to Xavier,” he says.

“The goal of this program is to share info with fans and hopefully inspire them to do something in their own lives, becoming evangelists for positive change themselves,” O’Shaughnessy says.

To date, GreenNotes bands and fans have pledged more than 16 million pounds in carbon dioxide reductions. Clif Bar provides a pledge form on its GreenNotes Web site (www.clifgreennotes.com) to help people get started. It’s a list of simple changes that — if implemented by enough people — can have a long-term and significant effect.

O’Shaughnessy notes that getting started is often the hardest part, which is what led the company to share the knowledge it had accumulated in the first place.

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