The
Green Music Movement
PBS
NewsHour Weekend | 8min
Postproduction
script
Tom Casciato: The Grammy-nominated band My Morning Jacket is known for
Southern-tinged, moody rock, but at this gig at New York’s Forest Hills
Stadium, on frontman Jim James’s mind: climate
change.
Jim
James: I think people are
waking up and starting to do more and more stuff, but definitely
not at the speed that we need to. That's why we're trying to take more
of a stance, partner with people like REVERB to try and get at least the people
that are coming to our shows to like, learn more and think more about it so
that we can speed up the process of trying to deal with it.
Adam
Gardner: There's a one-to-one
ratio from recycling and trash …
Tom
Casciato: REVERB is the
brainchild of Adam Gardner and his wife, Lauren Sullivan.
Lauren
Sullivan We met at Tufts University. I was a freshman. He
was a sophomore. I saw him singing in his acapella group at my dorm
orientation. I thought, Gee, that guy's cute.
Tom
Casciato: Did you immediately
think someday I will start an environmental organization with this man?
Lauren
Sullivan No, by no means no.
No.
Tom
Casciato: There was other stuff
first. A master’s degree for Sullivan in environmental education. Co-founding
the rock band Guster for Gardner.
Adam
Gardner: We were touring heavily
with my band Guster. So as I
was falling in love with her, through osmosis, I was giving the environmental
lens put, you know, put in front of my eyes and started looking at the touring
world.
Tom
Casciato: One look at the debris
following an outdoor rock concert showed Gardner the touring world wasn’t
exactly what you’d call sustainable.
Adam
Gardner: Just looking at
all the plastic on the ground, our tour buses with the generators never
shutting off, knowing that they don't get very good mileage. All the
concessions, everything was just being thrown out and going right to landfill.
And at the time, we just shrugged our shoulders at each other, going, it's just
too bad it has to be this way.
Tom
Casciato: There have always been
these two sides of rock and roll. There’s trashing the hotel room and throwing
the TV into the swimming pool, and the other side was, like, musicians for safe
energy.
Lauren
Sullivan: Well, I think-- I think
the origin story of REVERB is actually very much
connected to that legacy.
Tom
Casciato: Musicians United for
Safe Energy staged the famed 1979 No Nukes concerts. The group was formed to
oppose nuclear power and promote renewables like solar. One of its founders was
singer/songwriter Bonnie Raitt. She would become an
inspiration for REVERB.
Lauren
Sullivan: After he and I were talking about my desire from the
environmentalist perspective to try to talk with folks outside of the
environmental bubble, his sister sends us this flier in the mail and says,
Bonnie Raitt is doing this.
Tom Casciato: Raitt’s effort, a nonprofit called
Green Highway, was a pioneer of the concept of connecting concert goers to
causes.
Lauren
Sullivan: I picked up the phone and called her manager, Kathy Kane, her
manager, actually comes from an activist background with Greenpeace as well and
said, “Yeah, I'll lend you all of the gear you can take it out, we’ll mentor
you. We've got a nonprofit.” And I quit my job and we took all
of that mentorship and gear from Bonnie Raitt
Screen Highway and brought it out on the road. And it's evolved into REVERB.
Tom
Casciato: The early days were
spent on tour with acts including Alanis Morissette
and John Mayer, Maroon 5 and the Dave Matthews Band,
with REVERB customizing tents and booths for the audience based on the
interests of each act and its fan base. For the bands themselves, REVERB would
provide access to biodiesel for tour buses, along with backstage recycling and
composting. On this day, Gardner is showing me around at Forest Hills.
Adam
Gardner: So
we've been working with Forest Hill Stadium for a number of years to make it
more sustainable. So we've had, for example, these
solar powered phone- charging stations.
Tom
Casciato: How do you convince,
like, a big, famous venue like this to take part in what you're doing? They've
got so much else to worry about, so much else going on.
Adam
Gardner: They’re understanding now more than ever,
that this is what artists want. This is what fans want. They're starting to get
that there's a responsibility here for the venue, that to meet the demand of
their audiences and their clients, the artists.
Tom
Casciato: One of REVERB’s
specialties is asking fans to donate for refillable water bottles, then let
them fill up at free water stations instead of buying hordes of single-use
bottles that might go from the show directly to the dump. REVERB says it has
eliminated some four million single-use plastic bottles since 2004.
And through efforts at
more than 350 tours, it calculates it has eliminated over 180,000 tons of
carbon – the equivalent of taking about 39000 cars off the road for a year.
One of the acts
participating with REVERB is Grammy Award winner Brittany Howard.
You have a following,
which means you have a voice. Why do you choose climate change as something for
which to use that voice?
Brittany
Howard: You know, I think it
just comes from me growing up outside.
TOM
CASCIATO: Howard’s an avid
outdoorswoman who grew up in Alabama, lives in Tennessee, and loves to fish.
She hopes working with REVERB will help increase the level of concern about
climate change.
Brittany
Howard: I think a
lot of people don't take it seriously enough because we've spent generations
and generations on this Earth and everyone's always been able to handle the
heat, you know. We're down in the southeast, but we've got TV and internet and
everything like that, like, we're watching what's happening to the world.
Tom
Casciato: Has climate change found
its way into your writing?
Brittany
Howard: That's a good question. I guess it's something I
consider when I think about the state of the world today
Tom
Casciato: I'm wondering how you
would approach it as a writer. If you write something too on the nose --
“climate change is bad. climate change is bad” -- nobody wants to hear
that.
Brittany
Howard: I don’t know, I'd like it (laughs) – if the
beat’s funky and the music is good. I don't think it needs to be that there’s
nowhere to go. I think that kind of dawns on you. It’s hot everywhere.
Tom
Casciato: Do you worry at all
about your fan base, that there are people who are
climate change deniers who would say, “What’s the Jacket doing talking about
climate change?”
Jim
James: No, I mean, if anybody is a climate change denier,
I don't – I mean, I just can't. I can't get down with that because it's just
not true. We all need to face the fact that climate change is real and that we
need to deal with it before it's too late.
Tom
Casciato: The list of names in the
REVERB fold is impressive, including Billie Eilish,
Pink, Harry Styles, and dozens of others. Still, the Forest Hills promoter,
Mike Luba, notes that many sectors of the business have not gotten on board
yet.
Tom
Casciato: Do you have to fight in
the music industry to make your point and to get what you want done vis-a-vis
climate change?
Mike
Luba: Yes. And the music
industry has to actually spend money to take the steps
to fix this legacy of giant busses, private planes. And the music business has
the opportunity to lead and it really hasn't. And
that's the bummer. And I think it's just come down to, people have to put their money where their mouth is, and that's
what REVERB is trying to do.
Tom
Casciato: This past summer, Adam
Gardner and Guster played what the band called the
first carbon positive show ever held at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks
amphitheater. Along with the usual efforts, a portion of the ticket price
supported
a Denver nonprofit
caring for recently planted trees, and a project in Colorado sequestering
carbon. It does remain to be seen whether the whole music industry can ever be
made sustainable, given all the travel, the difficult routing, and of course
the flights many bands take.
Lauren
Sullivan: There is some kind of systemic logistical piece that needs to happen
there on the sustainability front. And I don't know if we have the answer to
that quite yet But we can do complicated things,
right? I think that's one of the things that over time, we will need to, as an
industry, figure that out.
###
|
TIMECODE |
LOWER
THIRD |
1 |
1:19 |
ADAM GARDNER REVERB |
2 |
2:28 |
LAUREN SULLIVAN REVERB |
3 |
4:18 – 4:30 |
350 TOURS – 180,000 TONS OF CARBON – 39,000 CARS OFF THE
ROAD FOR A YEAR |
4 |
4:42 |
TOM CASCIATO @OKAPIFILM |
5 |
5:11 |
BRITTANY HOWARD MUSICIAN |
6 |
6:04 |
JIM JAMES MUSICIAN, MY MORNING JACKET |