2009 Monolith Dates Announced – Tell Your Friends! (Photo: The Kills)

We’re excited to announce that the 2009 MONOLITH FESTIVAL Presented by ESURANCE will be September 12th and 13th, 2009! Once again, the festival will be rocking the unrivaled RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATRE —Mark the date and tell your friends! In the meantime, we’re working hard around the clock to create an amazing 2009 festival, stay tuned…

Join our new Official Facebook Page right now to get the latest info…
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Official Facebook Page

The MONOLITH Festival is coming back and it’s gonna be even bigger and better for 2009. Check back often and tell your friends!

FOR 3 DAYS ONLY, GET YOUR MONOLITH GEAR FOR 50% OFF!
Hoodies for ! T-Shirts for .50! and more?! We have just added a new stock of 2008 and 2007 merhandise and you have this one-time opportunity to snag cool OFFICIAL MONOLITH Festival gear including T-shirts, Posters and these must-have Monolith Hoodies, all for 50% off!

Buy before this Friday to get all your Official 2007 and 2008 Monolith Merch for 50% off!

ORDER NOW: First 50 Orders will receive a special edition Monolith Poster by Canadian artist Steven St-Pierre!
MONOLITH Festival Holiday Sale >>

We’ve just added tons of exciting new pictures from the 2008 Monolith Festival (maybe you’ll see yourself)!

Check out 2008 MONOLITH Pictures Now >>

Click above to view pics from the 2008 Monolith Festival, crowd shots and the kick-off party!

Did you get your picture taken? At the 2008 MONOLITH Festival, Esurance partnered with Polite In Public to offer free photos to the festival attendees at the Esurance Eco Rockstars booth. Follow this link to download and save your photos.

Browse and save your photos now >>

Thanks for making the 2008 Monolith Festival a huge success! Stay tuned as we will be posting tons of great pictures over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s some teasers (photos by John Moore) ...

More pictures coming soon.

UPDATE: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14TH FESTIVAL TICKETS ARE STILL AVAILABLE DAY OF SHOW!

Monolith Festival has just released a large block of single day Sunday tickets. That’s right, Just show up today to Red Rocks and Get Your Monolith Festival tickets TODAY WITHOUT PAYING TICKETMASTER SERVICE CHARGES.

It’s the easiest way to experience the greatest event in Red Rocks history. Come rock today with JUSTICE, TV ON THE RADIO, BAND OF HORSES, CSS, THE AVETT BROTHERS, TOKYO POLICE CLUB, THE KILLS, SHARON JONES AND THE DAP KINGS AND MORE!

NOTE: The box office opens each day at 10am, But, we will be releasing tickets all day long until late into the night. Just use entrance #2 into Red Rocks park. See You there!

And, for a list of items permitted into Red Rocks, FAQs, etc:
VIEW RED ROCKS FAQs NOW >>

Cloud Cult

Tonight is the Monolith VIP Kick-Off Party (Friday, Sept 12) at the Bluebird Theater in Denver featuring environmentally friendly and #1 CMJ artist Cloud Cult, with The Dutchess and the Duke, Young Coyotes, with DJ sets by Figo and Tyler "Danger" Jacobson. Doors open at 8pm. The schedule for all the MonolithVIP Parties is online now.

Don’t have your VIP passes yet? No problem, you can still Buy VIP Passes online now until 5pm. If you miss the deadline you can still buy your VIP Badges tomorrow at the Red Rocks Box Office.

Buy MONOLITH VIP BADGES Now >>

by Heather Browne, I am Fuel, You Are Friends

Hailing from Minneapolis, Atmosphere is an indie hip-hop collective defined by rapper Sean Daley (aka Slug) and DJ/producer Anthony Davis (Ant). Slug’s rhymes tend towards the bleakly honest confessional with an enunciated style of lyric reminiscent of Hieroglyphics’ A-Plus or the West Coast’s famous Freestyle Fellowship. The 2008 record When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Sh*t Gold (Rhymesayers) pushes boundaries of genre, with guest vocals from Tom Waits and TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. On tunes like “Sunshine,” Slug emotes that every woman looks better in a sundress. Remember that advice, ladies.

Atmosphere is performing on on Saturday, Sept 13th

Buy MONOLITH Tickets Now >>

Summertime is here and it's time to get our green in gear.

Typically summer is a time where we waste a great number of resources, like water to fuel our summer fun and energy to keep us cool. We tend to travel more by land and air in summer, which drives our carbon consumption off the charts.

Here are some simple ways to help green our summer:

1. Try a staycation instead of a no-holds-barred, see-the-world vacation. Vacationing closer to home will save energy and can ultimately be more relaxing than a full-on travel adventure. Exploring our local environs can be very rewarding and surprising. We certainly won't miss getting a ripping cold from recirculated air on a plane.
2. Conserve and recycle our gray water for the garden and lawn. This is a wonderful way to green our summer, literally and figuratively. A small bucket in the shower to catch over-spray, a small pan in the sink to catch the mostly clean water we use to wash our summer bounty. These two things alone can make a great overall difference. We can also try diverting our washing machine rinse water onto our gardens and lawns. Water is so precious, we don't have a drop to waste.
3. I know this next one is going to sound like a bummer but we need to get real about separating what our needs are and what are our desires are if we want to make a difference. We humans oftentimes get to feeling that we are entitled to more than our share of comfort. Turning off our air-conditioning and feeling the summer through our windows and doors is what I am talking about. Unless we are elderly or have health issues like asthma or some other serious disease, there is no reason why healthy humans can't put up with a little, or a lot, of heat in summer. In case you are wondering, we installed only one air-conditioning window unit at our house this year, a little oasis of cool for those especially desperate hot days. We use old-fashioned oscillating fans to cool ourselves when needed. The good news is, we have not melted yet.
4. This is an important one: Let our lawns be. Stop trying to kill every weed and bug in sight. Pesticides and herbicides are harming much more than what we intend them to harm. They can ruin our health, environment and wildlife, all for the sake of what? A green lawn that looks like a carpet? Are we crazy? We need to live and let live, in some great measure, all of the cogs in this great wheel.
5. Support local farming by shopping outside the box at your local farmers market or CSA. Becoming a locavore is a great way to keep our dollars working to better our own communities. It also saves on fuel consumption and fosters a great sense of community. Treat yourself this summer to some great local dining out as well.

In a world where news is noise and there is plenty of it to go around, it is important to practice discretion.

Global warming, climate change, environmental innovations, gains and disasters... I could go on all day, but I won't. Suffice it to say that it is important to find and distill reliable green news, so that we can be informed and act effectively on behalf of our beleaguered environment.

As a lean, green society of eco-advocates it is essential that we band together to make a loud green noise.

Here is a list of helpful green-focused websites and resources:

1. Yale Environment 360 is an online magazine "offering opinion, analysis, reporting and debate on global environmental issues."
2. Environmental News Network--ENN's mission is to "inform, educate, enable and create a platform for global environmental action."
3. World Wildlife Federation--WWF's mission is the conservation of nature. "Using the best available scientific knowledge and advancing that knowledge where we can, we work to preserve the diversity and abundance of life on Earth."
4. Global Green USA, "is Global Green is working to address some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. In the United States our work is primarily focused on fighting global climate change by creating green buildings and cities."
5. Environment and Sustainable Food at Change.org highlight the latest news and actions pertaining to sustainable food and the environment.
6. Treehugger, which declares itself "a media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream."
7. Grist, "a beacon in the smog, seeks to draw out the real meaning behind green stories and to connect big issues like climate change to daily life."
8. The Environment and Health division of the nonprofit news organization Mother Jones is a great up-to-the-minute resource.
9. Worldchanging's mission is "to inspire readers around the world with stories of new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future."
10. Green blog at The New York Times seeks to "introduce us to many of the central figures in the environmental landscape, asking them questions on our behalf.

You just couldn't resist the whistles and bells of that iPhone, but now that it needs a charge, you're feeling a little guilty about plugging into the grid. So don't! Pop your iPhone or iPod into the first Apple-certified solar charger, instead. Two hours of fresh spring sunshine gets you 30 minutes of 3G chatting. The -80 price tag is a little steep, but you'll be sustainably styling when you're packing one of these cases.

The Solar Surge case is available now from Novothink.

"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still" Dorothea Lange

"Photography is a small voice at best but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness" W. Eugene Smith

Nature photography has a way of grounding us subtly with the world around us. It is a way of looking in, that expands our outward view. Photographing the biodiversity of the natural world is a great way to grow our green consciousness.

We begin the Spring contest season at Super Eco Group on flickr with a two week contest: "Green Run Amok". Our two week contest will run from Saturday, April 3rd through Saturday, April 17th.

Please feel free to join our group on flickr and help us to celebrate the utter beauty, joy and lushness of Green Nature.

Grab your camera and we'll see you there!

(Photo credit:jude in SuperEco Group on flickr)

I have always loved collecting and reading books.

I love the smell of them, the tactile sensation of turning the pages, using a special bookmark to mark my place.

Certain books are like old friends to me. I would never give them up.

But the world of reading is changing and it is important to change with it. To blend the old with the new.

There are so many new and old ways available today to green our read:

1. Book swapping is a great way to make our reading greener. Outside of swapping books with nearby friends and neighbors, websites like PaperBack Swap, BookMooch and Swaptree make it easy expand the swapping circle.
2. Shopping for books at used bookstores is a fun eco-friendly way to expand our library.
3. Donating books that we feel comfortable parting with, books we do not plan on reading again, is a great green idea. Local library, VNA and other fundraisers are a great place to bring our used books.
4. Gifting lightly read books at the holidays and for birthdays is also a very green practice. Including a beautiful bookmark and creatively presenting a used book, can make it a very special gift.
5. Sierra Club suggests eco and nature themed books as a way to green our reading.
6. Support authors and publishers who print on recycled paper and do not support the cutting of old growth forests.
7. Buying used textbooks and then recycling them by reselling or donating them is a great economical and green practice for students. Using online textbooks is a great choice as well.
8. Using our local Public Library is a very green practice.
9. There is some question as to how green the Kindle device is and according to this article in The Chic Ecologist "it is if you use it enough".

When it comes to hitting the books, college students prefer to keep hitting the books—this, according to a new study on replacing traditional textbooks with e-readers. Students using Amazon Kindle DX e-readers at several major universities missed the ease of use in flipping through and taking notes in traditional textbooks.

Students' main concern was not being able to open more than one text at a time. According to a report at USA Today, "Students whose curriculum requires them to organize information culled from many different sources are particularly concerned with being able to navigate multiple documents at once, said Michael Koenig, director of operations at Virginia's Darden School of Business, which also ran a Kindle DX pilot program last fall. 'At the point where you need to highlight and notate in a fairly high-paced classroom—to be able to move back and forth between business cases, class readings, your own notations, your own highlights, your own analysis—it's just not as flexible or nimble as having your paper notes or your laptop right there,' he said, adding that the Kindle was 'not quite ready for prime time."

Old-fashioned note-taking techniques also proved hard to duplicate. With backpacks traditionally bristling with neon-colored highlighters for color-coding different types of information in different texts, students were unhappy with the difficulty of highlighting text. They also disliked the clunkiness of typing notes on the Kindle's keypad. "Many users thought that the addition of a touch screen and stylus would make for a much better device," wrote Princeton researchers.

Far from being a disappointment, the research results appear to confirm that Amazon has hit its mark with the Kindle. The e-reader was designed specifically for recreational use rather than hardworking study or professional applications. While 75% of the Darden students said they wouldn't recommend the Kindle for other students, about 90% gave it a thumbs up for casual reading. Whether or not it's a greener choice—now that's a topic for another day!

(Photo credit:Plutor, flickr)

It's almost the weekend! Set the mood with these eco-savvy and ethically aware artists. Check out our list of 15 green musicians for your playlist, or try our sampling of songs—from classic Joni Mitchell, to thought-provoking Cloud Cult, to the feel-good warmth of Bob Marley—below.

(Photo credit:uyo14, SXC)

What's the point of going to see a blockbuster movie like Avatar in 3-D if you end up despoiling the entire environmental message by tossing your fancy plastic 3-D glasses into the trash can when the movie's over? Not to worry. USA Today checked up on the mountain of glasses (42.1 million pairs of glasses worn for 3-D Avatar, some 935,834 a day) and found that all four of the companies that manufacture them have recycling programs in place.

According to the publication's research, most companies solve the trash issue by washing and reusing plastic 3-D glasses. IMAX uses a special machine to clean theirs. Other companies provide theater owners with instructions on how to clean the glasses after use. The easiest and most common method seems to be a quick cycle in a commercial dishwasher. Another company simply sells the glasses, in hopes that movie-goers will keep them and re-use them for future movies. We're dubious that most glasses won't end up trashed or lost in the bowels of a dusty junk drawer ... But we can appreciate the intent.

The least eco-friendly option appears to be that of Real-D, which provides collection containers so that theaters can ship used glasses back to an LA-area facility for cleaning and re-shipping. Adding a bigger carbon footprint doesn't sound like the best solution to the recycling/waste problem. And then there's the problem of theaters that still use old-fashioned cardboard 3-D glasses for some movies—an apparently unwashable, un-recyclable option.

(Photo credit:JuliaArts, flickr)

Director James Cameron's four-year labor of love, the 3-D sci-fi action-adventure Avatar, not only appears to be an entertaining story but an important statement on the sustainability. The film premiered last night in London, and Cameron's comments about his creation display an informed concern about current environmental issues. "The point is that we are devastating habitat and biodiversity at a terrible rate," he told The Sun. "We are causing a global climate change that's going to be absolutely devastating to the coral reefs. Science is unable to keep up with our industrial society. We are destroying species faster than we can classify them. We are destroying the food chain faster than we can understand it. The politicians are over in Copenhagen talking about climate change now—but there are other issues, as well."

Avatar is Cameron's first narrative film since the Oscar-winning Titanic in 1997. As it turns out, those years were spent working under the sea. Cameron, who has collaborated with NASA on several space projects, spent years after the Titanic in deep-sea diving, creating his own robotics and vehicles.

Avatar's cast includes Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Michelle Rodriguez. The movie premieres worldwide on Dec. 18.

(Photo credit:Avatarmovie.com)

I don't get this season's top toy, the Zhu Zhu Hamster. Why not just buy your kid a real hamster? Oh, right. Real fur balls "poop, stink and die," so says--go figure--the makers of the fake hamsters. True, but real hamsters don't emit potentially hazardous levels of antimony, like Zhu Zhu Hamsters allegedly do.

The toy testers at GoodGuide, a particularly green product safety testing group, claim one of the Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters, the adorably named Mr. Squiggles-Light Brown, is unsafe for children due to "higher than recommended levels of antimony." Prolonged exposure to antimony, a textile fire retardant, can cause lung and heart complications, diarrhea and stomach ulcers.

What does the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission make of Mr. Squiggles? As reported by Reuters today, the CPSC said it "is looking into the Zhu Zhu pet toy and will complete its review swiftly." Still, Mr. Squiggles hasn't been recalled and continues flying off shelves at Target, Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us.

Some say GoodGuide is slinging mud for publicity. Doubtful. Their toy safety ratings aren't fluff. They're based on reports from HealthyToys.org; the City of San Francisco; the Center for Health, Environment & Justice; and Healthy Child Healthy World. And all of these entities base their safety ratings either on existing U.S. or E.U. toy safety standards. Not the National Enquirer.

Cepia LLC, Zhu Zhu Pets' parent company, is crying foul. In a press release refuting GoodGuide's claim, executives assured, "Mr. Squiggles is absolutely safe and has passed the most rigorous testing in the toy industry for consumer health and safety." Where's the proof? In an official EN71 testing report, which Cepia posted on its web site for public review.

Mr. Squiggles, the only Zhu Zhu pet to come under fire so far, isn't the only reportedly toxic toy you should nix from the shopping list this holiday. Take it from GoodGuide. They've got the goods on "the health, environmental and social impacts" of thousands of toy makers worldwide. Plus, their web site is anything but a clunky government mess, like the CPSC's.

This safe and sustainable toy list should get you started, or you could do the earth one better and buy nothing. WWJB (What Would Jesus Buy), I wonder? Probably not Mr. Squiggles, even if his name is so darn cute.

(Photo credit:MommyNiri.com)