It has been a great first few days hanging around Boulder, taking advantage of my good buddy Will Ganley's hospitality. Boulder is possibly the most bike friendly place I have seen; with bike lanes and paths around every road, pedestrian streets with bike racks everywhere - people actually ride everywhere! There's hope for us yet.

Will and I went up to see New Belgium Breweries on Wednesday. Brian Simpson, their director of media outreach gave us the grand tour. I must say that on every trip I have taken out west, I have become quite the fan of Fat Tire Ale - New Belgium's flagship beer - but I had no idea what a cool company it was. Employee owned and sustainability driven, New Belgium is, like ClifBar and Patagonia, a groundbreaking corporation that values its employees, customers, community and the environment while producing a great product.

In 1998 New Belgium became by employee vote, a wind powered company (the utility premium came out of their annual bonuses). Their LEED certified building facility makes great use of natural light, using sun tubes and daylight combined with motion sensor activated lights to conserve electricity. They re-use heat from boilers in other steps in the brewing process and even to melt snow off the parking lot in the winter. They run delivery trucks off biodiesel and in an industry that uses 5 to 15 barrels of water for each barrel of beer, they use 4 and hope to cut down to 3.5 in the next year. They have a gym in the building for employees, free bikes for commuting to work and around town and have just released their first all-organic beer: Motherload. While I am sure the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling wears off eventually, this is definitely one place I could happily call 'the office'.

After our tour and a trip to the tasting room to help with quality control, we headed down to Red Rocks Amphitheater to talk with Michael Kang from String Cheese Incident, a bluegrass band who were doing their farewell concert over the weekend after a decade and a half of touring. Michael is making use of his time off to start Our Future Now:

Our Future Now is a non-profit project promoting ecological responsibility through greening initiative programs, high-profile awareness campaigns and community involvement opportunities.

We are currently forming partnerships with prominent music festivals and their host communities to publicize best practices in front of the millions of people who attend these gatherings. Our goal is to transform large-scale gatherings into artistically inspiring models of human responsibility; triggering attitude and behavioral shifts in communities worldwide.

Our focus is to enhance the experience at music festivals by introducing compelling art and technology demonstrations. These installations will showcase ecologically responsible best practices and renewable energy technologies while providing a framework for deeper community participation. - Our Future Now

Unfortunately we were speaking during sound check, so I don't know if we'll have usable audio from the interview. Anyway, I asked Michael if he felt entertainers had a responsibility to use their star power to promote social and environmental good. He saw it not as a responsibility, but an opportunity, and that he was starting this initiative because ecological issues were close to his heart. I couldn't help but be touched by his sincerity; it is inspiring to see a well known artist looking for ways to use his influence to spread a positive message. He even set us up with free passes to the long-ago sold out show. The show was great, they played everything from their songs to pink floyd and looked like they had a great time doing it.

My only regret is that I forgot to ask Mike what the 'string cheese incident' was... I'm really curious.