By Catherine Wolf, KWMU
St. Louis, MO –
Twenty-five thousand people are expected to attend St. Louis' 20th annual Earth Day Festival in Forest Park on Sunday.
Terri Reilly is the event's executive director. She says festival numbers have grown significantly in recent years, with only about 7,000 people attending as recently as 2005.
"It really kind of started with Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, which really peaked people's interest. They started to pay attention more, and so it's all about awareness."
Reilly says this year's festival will be set up in a new way. More than 300 vendors will be separated into so-called "neighborhoods," rather than arranged on a first-come, first-served basis. She says each neighborhood will have demonstrations, hands-on activities and discussion areas.
"So they've really become little, little microcosms of the neighborhood so that you're very much immersed in the topic of that neighborhood."
This year's festival will have about one-third more vendors than last year.
About twenty thousand people went to last year's event.