By Andrew Baker
The 1980s saw the beginnings of Hands Across America, Live Aid and Farm Aid. This weekend, we may see the event that will define this decade. Saturday, 7-7-07, will be Live Earth, a 24-hour concert that will take place on all seven continents.
Live Earth's official concerts will take place in in New York, London, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hamburg. In addition, it will be broadcast on tv, radio and streamed on the web. in the US, Live Earth will be broadcast on the NBC network, the Spanish language Telemundo network, the Sundance Channel, Bravo, MSNBC, and Universal HD. It will be streamed live at liveearth.msn.com.
Over 100 of the world’s top musical acts will perform and organizers are projecting an audience of over 2 billion people. More than 7,000 other events have been scheduled to coincide with and support Live Earth. These range from small meeting in homes to large festivals with big screen broadcasts of the concerts.
But Live Earth is about much more than music. Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year campaign led by the Alliance for Climate Protection (led by former vice president Al Gore), The Climate Group and other international organizations.
SOS is the ongoing messaging campaign and larger movement behind Live Earth. The mission of the SOS campaign is to empower individuals to change their consumer behaviors and motivate corporations and political leaders to enact decisive measures to combat the climate crisis. The message of SOS is that everyone, everywhere can and must answer the call to solve the climate crisis.
In addition to providing over 100 simple actions people can take in their daily lives, which will have a tremendous positive impact when carried out on a large scale, Live Earth will ask people to support a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 and a comprehensive international treaty on global warming by 2009. Visitors to the website who sign a pledge and agree to take action against the climate crisis by doing several things can expect to see their name on screen during the broadcast.
A single music festival can be a nightmare for the environment, but Live Earth has pledged not to make the mistakes of past festivals. Live Earth will implement a new Green Event Standard that will become the model for carbon neutral concerts and other live events in the future. Artists that play at Live Earth will travel in hybrid cars, generators will run on biodiesel, and attendees will use utensils made of biodegradable plastic.
With the ever-increasing attention being paid to environmental awareness, Live Earth and the Alliance for Climate Protection hope to make difference in how the world views the importance of individual responsibility for our own carbon imprint. With a little luck, Live Earth will not only help to define this decade, but it may also help define how this generation views the world.
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