The Vegan Bus

The Vegan Bus rests at Porcupine Hill Farm for the winter

2009 was a transitional year for the Vegan Bus. We were often frustrated by mechanical difficulties, mainly having to do with the brakes and brake lines breaking, true to their nature. We were thwarted from bringing the bus to a planned July 4th event in Philadelphia and then the Farm Sanctuary Hoe Down in August. We still attended by car, and out of these adversities we grew stronger.

2009 is the year we formed a non-profit called Evolvegan to fund the bus, Vegan Radio, and other projects that combine art, media and outreach. We put together a really great board of directors to help us face the challenges of the future. We also got to get the bus out on the road in October. We were filmed by the Supreme Master TV for a documentary clip, and handed out vegan donuts and propaganda at the Ashfield Fall Festival (view the photos here).

The Vegan Bus crew with Supreme Master TV at the Ashfield Fall Festival in Massachusetts

Once the weather got too cold to run the bus we took it off the road and stored it at board member Heather Bargeron’s farm, where it is (hopefully) sitting now. Founder and president Derek Goodwin migrated to New Orleans for the winter to form a southern base for the project. Not one to waste any time, he soon became the New Orleans Vegan Examiner and joined in helping organize the New Orleans VeggieFest. He is planning his return in May to begin working on upgrading the bus inside and out for a planned tour in July.

PROPOSED VEGAN BUS JULY 2010 TOUR:

• July 4th daytime: Public Eye Philly’s Kid’s Club Vegan Barbeque in Philadelphia, PA
• July 4th night-time: Vegan Drinks Philly in Philadelphia, PA
• July 7-11: Vegetarian Summerfest in Johnstown, PA
• July 15-19: Animal Rights 2010 National Conference in Alexandria, VA (near DC)

The Vegan Bus crew will also be making an appearance at the Veggie Pride Parade in NYC on May 16th. Unfortunately they won’t allow the bus in the parade…

Stay tuned for updates on the tour, fund raising events and other shenanigans as the warm weather returns to New England and the bus wakes from hibernation!

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The weather’s warming up, the veggie oil is starting to flow, and another season of bus maintenance is upon us. Watch this space as the bus begins to take shape and we awaken from our winter slumber. The interior is getting a work-over to bring new levels of comfort to our animal liberation tours. Acoustical issues are under scrutiny. The ever-present issue of oil filtration continues to inspire. Where do we begin?

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Our web site has been a bit quiet lately, and I apologize. The bus was taken off the road for the winter in order to save money on insurance. We found out on a trip to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in November of 2007 that the heating system was not adequate, and doing any kind of remodeling on the bus in the midst of a harsh New England winter did not seem like much fun.

Now that the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, and the grease is becoming more viscous, we are looking forward to getting the bus back on the road!

July 24, 2008: We regret that we will not be taking the Vegan Bus to Burning Man this year due to finances and circumstance. We look forward to doing it up right in 2009…

Burning Man 2008!
The BIG news is that we have decided to go to Burning Man again this year! Last year we got the bus less than a month before we drove 3000 miles to Nevada and it made for some stress and frantic work schedules. This year we have more time to plan and more experience to contribute, so it should be a smooth ride… he he. The exact dates are still to be determined, but it will be the last part of August through the 1st week of September.

We are looking for some new riders this time around, to mix things up a bit and keep it fresh. Anyone who is somewhere between Northampton, MA and the Black Rock desert in Nevada is welcome to apply, just contact us through this site! We will provide a earth-friendly ride, vegan food and optional camping. We are willing to veer a bit off route to pick people up. Check out the route we took last year for an idea of the route this year.

August 1-3: Farm Sanctuary Hoe Down
We have a weekend trip to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY planned for people who want to take a shorter trip and see one of the most peaceful and inspiring places on the planet. Here is the blurb from Farm Sanctuary’s site about that:

Join like-minded animal advocates for an energizing and educational weekend conference at our New York Shelter. Offering up-to-date information on critical farm animal issues, groundbreaking campaigns, and effective advocacy strategies, the Hoe Down is an inspirational event for activists of all experience levels. Highlights include an exciting lineup of animal protection speakers, shelter time with the animals, delightful vegan food, and an evening barn dance.

We will provide travel and the option of sleeping on the bus, or you can bring a tent. Prices TBA.

We will also be doing some day trips to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY.

If you are interested in hearing more about upcoming events, or participating in the Vegan Bus project in any way, please sign up for our email list here:
http://groups.google.com/group/veganbustamove

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I found this photo of our friend Molly on the web wearing a Vegan Bus shirt and standing looking sultry next to a pool table. Thanks for the photo shout out Molly!

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Vegan Bus Crew Members / Vegan Radio Co-hosts Scott Lahteine, Megan Shackelford and Derek Goodwin

Now that the winter snow is finally arriving in Northampton, MA, and the Vegan Bus is parked in an unspecified location for renovations… it is high time I started updating you on our past adventures as well as our hopes and dreams for the future. This post is the first of many to come…

The Vegan Bus evolved from a series of vegan projects that have consumed much of my free time since moving to Western Massachusetts in 1999. When I first moved here I had a job as a web designer. It was during the heady days before the “dot-com bubble” burst, and I had dreams of making lots of money designing web sites and then funneling it all back into vegan activism. I bought some domain names back then based on these dreams, including Veganica.com, VeganRadio.com, and one that has not been put to use yet… VeganPolice.com.

I first began work on Veganica.com, which I envisioned as an online community for vegetarian and vegan artists. In my subjective anthropological studies of the vegan movement I noticed a higher-than-average percentage of creative types, and being one myself thought it would be cool to have a place we could all share the products of our creativity. I myself am a photographer and musician who dabbles in other wacky stuff. I wanted a site that could have images, words, audio and video. I enlisted my programming genius friends Alex Jarrett and Scott Lahteine to create the databases and code to bring it slowly to life. Over the years since then I have guided Veganica along to make it what it is now, a social networking site for vegan artists and cultural creatives with hundreds of members. Scott is still working with me and over the winter Veganica will see some upgrades that should take it to the next level. If you are an artist or creative person who is vegetarian or vegan you should definitely sign up for free (or get a paid merchant account) and share your stuff!

Around the same time as I began work on Veganica I purchased the Vegan Radio URL. I had an idea that I would create a streaming audio website that would play music by vegans interspersed with vegan propaganda 24 hours a day, perhaps tied in to Veganica. It was put on the back burner when in 2000 I got tired of schlepping corporate web sites and decided to start my own photography business. I renewed the URL over the years because I knew the domain name was worth saving. In 2005 a group of volunteers and activists in Northampton succeeded in getting a license for a community low-powered FM radio station and Valley Free Radio was born (Northampton is in a part of western MA commonly referred to as “the valley”). I convinced my friend Megan Shackelford that it would be a great way to get the vegan message out there if we had a show about veganism on FM radio, since we would get random listeners who might otherwise turn their heads. At the same time Podcasting was becoming popular and it was a no-brainer that we should make the show into a Podcast for the world to enjoy. Thus in October of 2005 Vegan Radio was born. Scott Lahteine joined us as our third co-host when he moved back to the valley in 2006.

I like to think of The Vegan Bus as a continuation and the current culmination of my activism. I conceived the idea after participating in the Burning Man festival of 2006. Burning Man is a week long experiment where 40,000 people create a community in the harsh Nevada desert based on sharing and radical self-reliance. Most people who have attended a “Burn” will tell you that it is a trans-formative experience. I personally sensed an emerging new consciousness there, one that could spread out into the world like the playa dust that the participants unavoidably carried back with them on their clothing and gear. Here, I thought, is a place that needs a vegan consciousness. Here where a new paradigm for community and society was being beta tested. I felt that perhaps my life path had led me to this, to help bring veganism to this place, to make sure that if this was a seed for the next evolution of society that animals would finally be respected and considered as “the subjects of a life”, as Tom Regan puts it so thoughtfully.

How to slip veganism into the consciousness of a modern day cultural rebirth? The Vegan Bus popped into my head one day while pondering the conundrum. A vehicle of transformation. It resonated with me, a transformed bus transforming people everywhere in the world it went. Not by force but by contagiousness of an cultural enlightenment whose time has arrived. I funnelled my resources and contacts gained from my 12 years of vegan activism into making it happen. One year later the Vegan Bus made an improbable journey across the USA in 3-1/2 days running on waste vegetable oil and got to Burning Man carrying eight exhausted passengers/drivers. We were all transformed by the experience. One person went from omnivore to being nearly vegan, our first conversion (besides the bus itself). Vegan Radio episode #44 features a reunion of our band of “grease pirates” who went to Burning Man on the bus and lived to tell. I will be blogging about it soon as well.

Two months later that all seems like a lifetime ago. The future of the bus that excites me now. It is what I fall asleep at night pondering and what I wake up in the morning fantasizing. I am seeing that the bus is not something separate from Vegan Radio and Veganica, rather it encompasses and enhances them. The Vegan Bus will slowly be transformed inside and out by the types of creativity found on Veganica until it is a morphing of bus, RV and art car. It will run not only on waste vegetable oil but by the efforts of a community of activists, teachers, and artists. It will be an ongoing subject of Vegan Radio discussions and promotions as well as a vehicle to bring us to the people and stories we will feature on future episodes.

A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected and can be seen as a single work, as well as three individual ones. I conceptualize the Vegan Bus, Veganica and Vegan Radio as evolving works of art, effecting the fabric of culture. I hope to have a community of inspired activists, teachers and artists collaborating with these works, and through our efforts to bring some fun into the world and effect positive change.

I am looking forward to this winter, to writing down on this blog my many thoughts and visions. I hope to make my activism a means of supporting myself by the end of 2008 so I can dedicate my whole life and being to greening the earth and teaching compassion. I hope to also create jobs for others to join me. With the bus I quit dreaming small. The times demand more from me and from all of us. Every time I look at the bus I realize that I can make a crazy dream into reality. Anyone can. So let’s shake this mofo up a bit and co-create a better and saner world for whoever comes next, be they plant or animal. Yes, us animals too. We matter, just like they do. Even the matter of the state of matter matters. So what’s the matter? Go Vegan. Get on the Bus!

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John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats poses with his wife Lalitree wearing their Vegan Bus Tee Shirts

Help support the Vegan Bus by helping yourself look ultra-hip in one of our new Vegan Bus Tee Shirts! Our sweatshop-free cotton tee shirts with the stylish Vegan Bus logo (lovingly printed by Moonlight Designs) are a great way to spark up a conversation about veganism, bio-buses, or anything else you want to talk about, because when people see you wearing one they will just want to talk to you!

Derek got a chance to meet John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats at Farm Sanctuary’s Zoop! fundraiser. He was quite a down-to-earth guy and was happy to pose with his equally wonderful wife Lalitree for this photo wearing their brand-new Vegan Bus Tee Shirts. Derek also interviewed John for Vegan Radio, you can check out that interview on Vegan Radio’s 40th podcast.

Order your very own Vegan Bus Tee Shirt at The Vegan Bus Store!

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