The Answer Is Blowin' in the Wind

College-pop rock outfit Guster has been incorporating food drives into its concerts for years, nudging the band's sometimes-insular student fan base to care about community service.

Now Guster is kicking off the first annual Campus Consciousness Tour, a cross-country college spree meant to raise awareness about sustainable energy alternatives. Guitarist Adam Gardner shared his thoughts with WireTap about biodiesel tour buses, wind power, student apathy and making environmentalism cool on campuses.

WireTap: Where did the idea for the Campus Consciousness Tour originate?

Adam Gardner: This is a new project of an environmental nonprofit that my wife, Lauren Sullivan, and I started called Reverb. The whole idea of Reverb is to spread environmental awareness through touring musicians, to capitalize on that relationship between a band and their fans. Reverb has worked on a bunch of tours we started in 2002 with a co-headlining tour featuring Barenaked Ladies and Alanis Morissette, and since then we've been on tour with Bonnie Raitt, Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews, O.A.R. But this is the first tour that Guster and Reverb have done together, and I'm excited because finally my own band is involved.

The Campus Consciousness Tour is directed, obviously, toward college students. The majority of social change in this country has happened on campuses, historically, and Guster's fans are college kids, for the most part. So Guster seemed like the perfect choice for this tour, since we have that relationship with students. We're hoping to turn kids on -- I shouldn't call them kids (laughs). I sound old 'cause I feel old! -- to turn people on to the viable options out there in their everyday lives that will lessen their impact on the environment.

WT: What is this tour going to look like?

AG: The tour itself is green. We're running the buses on biodiesel, which is a more environmentally friendly fuel than straight diesel. It's made out of vegetable oil, and it has all sorts of implications that I like. I like the fact that it's a domestically based fuel we don't have to go to war over it in foreign countries. It helps support the American farmer, and the actual exhaust output is significantly less. So that feels good as a band. You know, we're rolling around in these buses; it would be nice to not be spewing our exhaust everywhere.

We're also offsetting each concert's power consumption. We've partnered with NativeEnergy, which is a Native American-owned wind power company, and they are assessing how many kilowatt-hours each concert is consuming. We'll then replenish the grid with that amount of clean power. So it's not like we're directly powering my electric guitar with a wind turbine it's an offset that happens afterwards.

We'll also be doing our own recycling. There's a lot of plastic used on tour, and we use a lot of batteries. So we're going to make sure we don't just throw out our 9-volt batteries; at the end of a show we're going to collect them and make sure they get disposed of properly. So we're just being mindful of our own imprint. We want to make sure that we're walking our talk.

The main front of our tour is what we're calling a Consciousness Pavilion, which will be present at every show. It'll be a consortium of kiosks and tents and whatnot, sort of a festival atmosphere, where people can go and learn about renewable energy and offset their own power use. So we're putting it in terms college students can understand, like, "Hey, come sign up for a Cool Tag," which is basically a renewable energy credit for wind power, "and offset your laptop for a semester, or offset your dorm room for the year."

WT: What was it like converting a cross-country bus tour to biodiesel fuel?

AG: One of our key partners is the National Biodiesel Board, which is helping us organize the fuel stops on the tour. You know, biodiesel is available at 600 pumps around the country, but you can't just pull into any gas station and get it.