One of the must-do events for eco-conscious folks is to attend one of the Live Earth concerts this July. According to the official website, the event will be a "24-hour, 7-continent series of 9 concerts taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis." And yes that does mean that there will be a concert on the continent of Antarctica, which, however, can only be attended by the 17 research scientists already there. But in terms of the other continents, anybody can go listen to music and learn about how to save the planet.

In recent years, Al Gore has been one of the greatest influences in the rise of interest to conserve the planet. His highly popular documentary An Inconvenient Truth helped the cause of global warming; and, through his efforts, environmentalism is no longer a bad word. But the question of ecological responsibility during huge mega-stage musical events seems illogical.

The Live Earth organizers claim that this event will use new Green Event Guidelines (GEGs) as outlined by LEED, the Green Building Rating System. A quick visit and search on the LEED website didn’t show any sort of GEGs. A call to their customer service to find out about this led to only a voicemail saying to leave a message. Granted, the new GEGs could be so new that there is no information about them yet, but since this concert is such a big event that could yield a lot of publicity for LEED, one would think they would have info about it.

The place that there are GEGs is in the Live Earth press kit, which of course they want to publicize. So according to this, Live Earth will use renewable energy and biodegradable plastics, recycle, offset carbon emissions, and use hybrid vehicles among other things. Environmental advisor John Rego says that this event is breaking ground for the live event industry and is a learning process because of the newness. He goes on to say that educating the people involved in this event about minimizing their environmental footprint, from which they will be able to take and make good in future events, is key.

The real question is what sort of impact will happen regardless of all the so-called environmental precautions taken. Thousands of people converging for a day in one area has to have a negative effect. Most of the people who will attend this concert probably think they care about the environment enough, so how does this event really "trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis?"

keeping the earth ever green

For more on LEED visit their website.

For more on Live Earth click on their website.

Lisa Tae-Ran Schroeder