They urged us to hear the groans of this earth by screaming into their microphones. Al Gore himself sees it as a "mass persuasion campaign" in an "accessible form".
Three months back, he believed that a mega series of concerts called Live Earth could help save our dying earth from the clutches of climate change.
For the uninitiated, Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series that took place on 7th July 2007, bringing together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement, in order to solve the climate crisis.
Live Earth had reached this worldwide audience through an unprecedented global media architecture covering all media platforms - TV, radio, Internet and wireless channels.
Before I unleash my skeptical ranting, I thought I should at least equip myself with enough information on it through its website, since I barely caught snippets of it on television.
Suffice to say, it appealed to the music fan in me, but it hardly got me going on environmental issues. Shakira burned up the stage with her songs, but I don't see any earth-shaking messages besides her body shaking to the tunes. Same for Bon Jovi or Kanye West for that matter.
What caught my eye were the glitzy stages adorned with neon lights, giant screens and huge audio set-up. The term "situational irony" from my literature lectures suddenly seemed so apt in this case.
Here they are championing to save our earth, but with what? Seven stadiums that house billions of people are enough to guzzle a whole lot of electricity. Just ask my mother. Five people in a miserable square box of a home is already enough to get her grumbling each time the power bill comes.
It is also one thing to invite celebrities to perform and another to hold them as our "earthly" role models. Come talk to me only when you guys have shed your self-indulgent diet of flashy cars and big houses. The cynic in me only wonders if this was just a one-off publicity stunt for them to get their faces seen, voices heard and of course, albums off the racks.
Nonetheless, to give credit where credit is due, it is commendable that the celebrities are using their power to influence positively and undeniably, music is one of the more effective mediums to reach out to the masses given its appeal.
For a start, this concert indeed helped to raise public awareness on the urgency of climate crisis.
However, raising public awareness is not enough, are people practicing what they know in their personal lives? Can a public concert change private habits?
Or do we need to enforce environmental-friendly practices? To practice, what we preach?
Singapore's National Environment Agency (NEA) has recently introduced Bring Your Own Bag (BYOB) Campaign, whereby on the first Wednesday of each month, shoppers are encouraged to use reusable bags for their purchases in major supermarkets island wide, since each plastic bag needed would require a ten cents donation to Singapore Environment Council to fund environmental activities.
Perhaps most tried to use fewer plastic bags with the micro view of saving money, rather than the macro, humanitarian view of saving the earth. So, should we aim to change attitudes for the long run or should the goal of reducing plastic bag usage simply be an end in itself?
Taking the Live Earth concert into context, did it fully utilise its massive influence on the masses? Was the message clearly and effectively driven into them? Or was it simply a publicity stunt with a short-term effect?
Given the large amount of resources it took, it could have been put to better use in smaller-scale but more personal projects like subsidising and marketing environmental-friendly products in supermarkets or bringing sheltered and impressionable kids out on an educational field trip to areas facing extreme environmental degradation, in order for them to get a first hand account of the rapid deterioration of Mother Earth.
The Live Earth concert harboured noble intentions, but did it go beyond our television screens? Hooked
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Written by Guest on 2008-09-25 09:15:21
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