Los Angeles Green Festival - Hemp

Los Angeles just hosted its 3rd annual Green Festival in October at the LA Mart in downtown Los Angeles. This eco-friendly convention showcased many different companies, movements, and ideas surrounding the green/environmental movement in America and around the world.

While there are a multitude of topics I could cover, I decided on hemp, a prominent figure in the convention showing up in many different forms, and providing a wide variety of environmental benefits.

With the multitude of ways hemp can benefit American society, it is still illegal to grow in the United States, due to the stigma of association to it’s THC filled counterpart. The irony of this is that the US Constitution was written on hemp paper and was widely used and farmed for most of America’s history.

Amy Goodman on Independent News

I recently attended the Los Angeles Green Festival, an event showcasing eco-friendly concepts from sustainable food to hemp clothing to electric cars.

As a blogger/journalist, the highlight of the event for me was a talk by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! about her new book, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, a collection of  weekly column pieces co-authored with Denis Moynihan. As you may know from my Ladybud article on Pacifica Radio, I believe independent reporting is a must, and once again Goodman backed up my belief with eloquence.

Goodman began her lecture with a bang, explaining her honest belief that people who care about social issues like climate change, wealth disparity, and a broken prison system “are not a fringed minority, not even a silent majority. But a silenced majority.” According to Goodman, this silencing is coming from the corporate media, and control over media must taken back by the public.