The music festival is a feature of the automobile age. Even before Woodstock, the massive 1969 concert in Upstate New York, the Newport (R.I.) Folk Festival dates only to a decade earlier and the Newport Jazz Festival to 1954. Cheap gas brings people and musicians together.

The widespread understanding that this is a wasteful state of affairs isn’t much younger than the music festival itself. But only lately has anyone tried to do much of anything about it. Cliff Johnson and Ben Kogan, who met in Woodstock in 2021, decided to hold a festival with the aim of cutting waste and climate impact to nothing. The first Imagine Zero Festival was held in May 2023 in Brandon, Vt., at the home of SolarFest, one of the only music venues in the Twin States that runs on renewable energy.

The second festival takes place on Saturday at Fable Farm in Barnard. The ambition is the same — to hold a music festival that’s fun, but also deliberate about its impact on the climate and the environment.

“It’s just so imprinted,” Johnson said of how music festivals are run and how the public consumes them. “On both sides, it’s conventional and it’s nostalgic,” he added, referring both to musicians and audiences.

Imagine Zero is one of three music festivals taking place in the Upper Valley this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, the Main Street Museum in White River Junction is teaming up with the Windsor-based music collective What Doth Life to throw What Doth Rumble, a festival featuring 22 bands on two stages and a series of workshops for aspiring musicians. And the Green Mountain Reggae Festival is bringing a sprawling lineup of performers to the Bradford (Vt.) Fairground from noon on Friday until dusk on Sunday.

As novel as the Imagine Zero Festival is, both the Rumble and the Reggae fest are brand new this year.

What Doth Life has held a big showcase concert the past few years at the Windsor Exchange. But the exchange is under construction this year. Brendan Dangelo, of What Doth Life, which regularly sends its bands to the Main Street Museum for shows, got talking with Joie Finley, the museum’s chief volunteer and primary organizer. The museum held its first Rumble by the River, the brainchild of Western Terrestrials frontman Nick Charyk, last year. Hence, What Doth Rumble.

“It doesn’t make sense to hold two events,” Finley said in a phone interview, noting that last year’s rumble and WDL’s annual showcase happened on consecutive weekends.

The effect of combining them looks less like addition than like multiplication. The sheer number of bands and musical styles boggles the mind, ranging from pop singer-songwriter Ali T., to the far out country-western mayhem of the aforementioned Western Terrestrials. If I start listing them all here my fingers will bleed, but it’s worth noting that the festival will feature a bunch of the WDL bands, including Carton, Derek and the Demons, McAsh, and The Pilgrims. Activist and former Vermont state Rep. Kiah Morris also will be there, both to perform spoken word work, backed by the Terrestrials, and to lead a workshop on music and activism with Jamie Gage, an activist, poet and songwriter.

“We’ve been planning since March,” Finley said. In addition to all the bands, a bunch of the best sound and light operators in the area are volunteering, including Tim Duggan, the museum’s in-house tech wizard, Evan Parks, Vincent Freeman, of Randolph’s Underground Studio, and Chris Rosenquest, of Hanover Strings, who’s also donating the use of sound and light gear, Finley said.

The workshops fit with the museum’s wider mission, to foster access to the arts at little to no cost. Admission to the entire festival, and the workshops, is free, but donations are accepted. The workshops range from guitar maintenance to forging a successful music career.

The rumble is a sign that there’s new interest and energy in the local music scene since the end of the coronavirus pandemic. “I think people picked up the dusty guitar while they were locked up at home,” Finley said. “We’re so happy to be a part of that scene,” she added.

For a full schedule of What Doth Rumble, go to mainstreetmuseum.org.

Vermont used to have a long-running reggae festival. Started in Burlington in 1986 and held there for its first six years, the Vermont Reggae Festival was kind of a big deal, bringing in reggae luminaries from all over until it ended in 2002. There’s even a book about it, by Bobby Hackney, the Burlington-based musician and producer.

So there’s some history there, but it’s far back enough that the people behind the Green Mountain Reggae Festival can make it their own. Matt Strong, who operates East Coast Van Builds in Bradford, and books bands through Rooted Entertainment, his event management and production company.

“He’s really trying to resurrect what we had in Vermont over 20 years ago,” JD Green, a Barre, Vt.-based podcaster who’s handling publicity for the festival, said in a phone interview. Green interviewed Strong about the festival on Wednesday morning on his daily podcast, Aired Out, which he shares on Facebook and YouTube.

The GMRF promises to be more family-oriented than the old festival was. There’s a wellness tent and a kids tent with activities, and families can camp out for the festival. The opening event on the schedule is a yoga class. The aim is to make this an annual event, Green said.

I looked through the lineup and not being a big reggae listener, it was largely unknown to me. Two of the acts, Culture and The Meditations, played at a legendary festival hosted by Bob Marley in 1978, so there’s some more history. There’s a playlist of the bands on the festival’s website, greenmountainreggaefestival.com. There’s also a link to tickets, which range in price from $44 for the Sunday program to just shy of $140 for a three-day pass. Camping costs extra.

Among the three festivals, Imagine Zero might be the most ambitious. It’s asking a question that’s ever-present yet seldom stated: How can we run an event that’s both of the culture and runs counter to it at the same time.

About a third of the carbon footprint of a music festival is attributable to the audience’s travel to the venue, and another third is attributable to the venue’s operations, according to a breakdown on Imagine Zero’s website. To reduce those, Kogan and Johnson are bringing solar panels from SolarFest to power the venue; and they’re encouraging carpooling by entering people who have at least three people in their car into a raffle for a range of donated prizes, and there will be a shuttle bus running from downtown Woodstock and Woodstock Union High School.

In addition, food and drink available on site will be served in reuseable dishes and cups. The amount of trash generated by last year’s festival, which drew 650 people, filled a trash can only about a third full, Kogan said.

There will be music, of course, not just climate consciousness. Last year’s lead act, Dawes, was based in Los Angeles and Kogan and Johnson tried to persuade them to take the train to the festival, to cut down the carbon footprint. That didn’t fit the band’s plans. This year, the musicians are based close by. Most of the members of the Haitian music collective Lakou Mizik, the headline act, live in Vermont. The Ben Kogan Band will play a set, as will Beecharmer, the Wilder duo of Jes Raymond and Jakob Breitbach.

“The band travel is really the smallest part of the emissions,” Kogan said.

There are two ways to measure the festival’s success: by attendance and by environmental impact. Students from Dartmouth College’s environmental science program will survey attendees and try to measure the festival’s footprint.

“Really, what we’re trying to do is create a blueprint that the Coachellas of the world can follow,” Johnson said. If big music festivals took this approach, it might leave a mark.

For tickets ($50 by Friday, $75 at the door, $25 for kids and free for kids 10 and under) and more information, go to imaginezerofestival.com.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.