Inside San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Hall, the Green Festival is raging in full swing. A swirling mass of people, dressed mostly in natural fibers and, in the case of the women, curiously bereft of makeup and highlights, explore booths hawking everything from solar power and products made from recycled materials to the Peace Corps and fair trade coffee. But the good vibrations inside the hall are dwarfed by the excitement outside surrounding a bus parked out front, colorfully painted and named "Go Further."

The eco-friendly bus, powered by bio-diesel fuel derived from hemp, belongs to actor Woody Harrelson, who stands beside it as a point of light amidst a large throng of friends, journalists, and fans. In spite of the fact that Harrelson is a TV and movie star with half a dozen Emmy nominations (and one 1990 win for Cheers), a 1997 Oscar nomination for The People Vs. Larry Flynt and a new Hollywood movie After the Sunset, the reporters are not the usual entertainment beat writers. There is a news guy from one of the local TV stations, a camera crew from the satellite public TV station Link TV, as well as several writers, but not a movie person in the bunch.

We're all gathered to talk about Harrelson’s other movie, the Ron Mann documentary Go Further, which chronicles the actor's 2001 1300-mile bike ride along the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle to southern California. I'm Harrelson’s last interview of the evening, timed to give him a few minutes to spend inside the hall before he has to introduce that evening's screening of the Mann's film.

But I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get a chance to talk to the 43-year-old Midland, Texas native. As more and more people join the crowd, he obviously knows many of them, acknowledging them with a hug or a warm handclasp. Others, like the man who gifts him with a box of organic (and presumably vegan) chocolate bars are simply admirers, perhaps not fans of Natural Born Killers or White Men Can't Jump, but certainly of his work on progressive causes.

And maybe because I've spent the afternoon watching Jesus of Montreal, it strikes me that many are approaching this amiable man as if he is some kind of secular messiah. Maybe he is; certainly few celebrity activists are willing to walk the walk to the extent that he is.

Harrelson finishes a TV interview and finally breaks away from the crowd. We board the bus, although there is hardly more privacy there. Steve Clark - the personable production assistant and self-described former junk food junkie who Harrelson met on the set of Will & Grace and invited along on the epic bike ride, transforming him into an instant scene-stealing documentary star - is there, along with eight or 10 other people sitting on benches at the front of the bus. We move past them and the tiny kitchen area where Harrelson's chef performed her raw-food miracles in the movie.

In the very back, in what looks like a sleeping area, another crowd gathers. We finally settle down on cushions on the floor in the midsection of the bus, the only empty area, next to Clark's sleeping dog. A radio plays The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," but it doesn't drown out the song that lodged in my brain the minute I boarded the vehicle - The Who's "Magic Bus."

How did Harrelson, who like most other American kids was raised on Lucky Charms and Froot Loops and whose acting career is about as mainstream as it gets, become a vegan and a committed social activist? His rap sheet is far more interesting than most - with arrests for planting hemp seeds in Kentucky and creating a public nuisance when he was among a group that scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to hang a banner protesting logging. And the website he maintains with wife Laura Louie, VoiceYourself.com, is not the usual celebrity publicity site, but is instead dedicated to promoting organic living, political activism, and other causes that the Harrelsons are passionate about.

Harrelson describes a chance encounter that happened not long before Cheers and the exploding stardom that came with his role as Midwest naïf Woody Boyd. He remembers being 23 or 24 and riding on a bus from St Louis to Oklahoma City when a young woman sat down next to him and noticed his acne and how he kept blowing his nose.

"She looked at me and said, 'You're lactose intolerant!" he recalls. “I said, 'What?' I mean, this is like the first second I met her. 'What are you talking about – lactose intolerant? How do you know?' She said, 'If you stop using dairy for three days, all those symptoms will go away.'"

Harrelson took her advice. "They tell you milk does a body good,” he continues. “But they leave out that's a calf's body – it doesn’t do a human body any good."

The result of that three-day experiment left Harrelson with clearer skin and cured his nasal drip, leading him to adopt a vegan lifestyle. But, more importantly, it also started him on a slow evolution based on seeing things other than the way they seemed. “The more I studied about ecology, the more I cared and wanted to do something, to help in some way even if it's a small way," he says.

The 1300-mile bike ride that Go Further documents is an outgrowth of that attitude. Harrelson wanted to make the ride with his brother Brett and his friends, but also looked to follow an eco-conscious model; hence the bio-fueled bus that served as the riders' base camp. Along the way, Harrelson lectured on college campuses and visited organic farmers, a hemp paper company and other bio-friendly concerns with his friend Mann, who previously worked with Harrelson as narrator on his 1999 documentary Grass, on board to record the proceedings.

One detour captured on film means the world to Harrelson, a visit with writer Ken Kesey on his Oregon farm, just a few months before Kesey's 2001 death. In naming his own bus "Go Further," Harrelson paid homage to Kesey's infamous, '60s-era, psychedelic bus "Further," the traveling base -- piloted by Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac's inspiration for On the Road's Dean Moriarty – for Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they traveled the country in an LSD-fueled adventure.

"That guy, he was one of a kind," says Harrelson of Kesey. "Nobody even thought like he did. I love those guys. I love the Pranksters. You know that advertisement for Apple, 'Think Different?' Those guys did literally think different. They had to have a bizarre humor to do these happenings that are, like, so out there. I love those guys. They stirred it up."

Stirring it up is certainly something that Harrelson can identify with. That is the reason he made Go Further, the reason he operates his Web site, and the reason he is at the Concourse on this early November day, with barely a minute to himself. Even during the course of our interview, he is constantly interrupted.

A woman who describes herself as "Vaughn's muse" says hello; Clark bring over an organic beer maker who has come by to drop off a case of his wares; someone else introduces Harrelson to a man who deals in bio-diesel fuel. The many interruptions are a perfect illustration of how the actor sees his social activism: "I think my best skill in this whole deal is as a conduit to try to bring people together, because I think it's in our unity that we'll have the greatest strength."

But while Harrelson remains fully committed to his activist pursuits, he is still passionate about his acting career and mindful of its commitments. While he was busy Saturday night promoting and screening Go Further, the next day he was boarding a plane for New York to take part in the publicity junket for After the Sunset. And he relates a story that speaks volumes about his passion for his chosen profession and his capacity for work.

He was in Toronto earlier this year to film the drama, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, in which he stars opposite Julianne Moore and Laura Dern. He decided while he was there that he might as well direct a play, Kenneth Lonergan's This is Our Youth, which ran at Toronto's Berkeley St. Theatre September 18-October 18.

Harrelson laughs at the memory. "I did almost have a nervous breakdown,” he admits. “I thought I'd be able to do both at the same time, because I'd directed the play the previous year. I figured it was going to be easy, but it was not easy. That was like two full-time jobs."

"Other than that, you know, I find that if I stress, then it seems like there's not enough time, and if I don't stress, there's more than enough time."

And he is adamant that he will always have time for progressive issues. "I care a lot about this and I want to see this world change,” he maintains. “I think most people do. I think most people in the world, they see that it's not working the way that it is, and they want to see it change."

Like many people, Harrelson is distressed by globalism, the continuing degradation of the environment and other social and environmental ills. But there really is something of Woody Boyd in him as he remains resolutely an optimist. "It's OK,” he declares. “We're going to turn this little ship around.”

“Every person is their own model; every person is the light under their friends,” he suggests. “Individual action is the most important thing. Individual action in concert, maybe with a lot of other people. It is an exponential growth."

And with that, he gestures expansively towards his happy, raucous friends inside the bus and the crowds milling around the Concourse outside. "Look at all these people,” he marvels. “It's already happening here."

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