Bands and their fans are making efforts to make concerts and festivals more sustainable, as CAP explains in this repost.
Summer is a great time to enjoy live music, and around this time of year droves of musicians hit the road to play shows for their fans far and wide. But the drastic environmental impact incurred by artists’ touring practices can easily go ignored, and concertgoers themselves often greatly contribute to live music’s carbon footprint. Thankfully, many bands and live music aficionados are acutely aware of their effect on the planet, and they’re incorporating alternative, sustainable options into shows.
Transporting musicians, instruments, and sound gear from show to show by car, bus, and plane requires huge amounts of fuel. But musicians such as alternative-country icon Willie Nelson and grunge band Pearl Jam run their tour buses with biodiesel fuel, which significantly cuts down on their carbon emissions.
Still, musicians are only half the equation when it comes to transportation. Getting hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands of music lovers from far-flung locales to the same venue can also spiral into an ecological nightmare. But fans are doing their part to cut down on transportation emissions by carpooling, taking public transportation, and biking to shows. They’re also attending shows at venues closer to home instead of traveling long distances to other cities to see a concert, which is a great way to both save money on gas and become more familiar with local music scenes.
Food is another area where musicians are taking steps to reduce their environmental impact. Bands need to eat when they’re on the road. But touring presents artists with few options for quality food, and most of the choices don’t do the planet much good. The usual touring standby, for example, is to pick up a burger at a fast food joint. A study by Stockholm University, however, shows that the greenhouse gases emitted annually in the U.S. production of cheeseburgers (a fast food staple) can be as high as the equivalent of putting 19.6 million SUVs on the road.
Fortunately, bands have found ways to bypass this wastefulness in a way beneficial to both the earth and their taste buds. Most cities have farmers markets, and artists have found that making pit stops at these gatherings is a great way to load up on tasty, locally sourced produce. Bands that buy food in bulk also cut down on the waste used in packaging.
Musicians also have to stay hydrated in addition to staving off hunger. But fans and band members commonly use disposable plastic water bottles at shows, which has an enormously negative impact on the environment. That’s why bands such as Radiohead only use reusable water containers, and even provide water flasks to other bands touring with them so they can do the same. And when bands and concertgoers alike thirst for something other than water””perhaps something from behind the venue’s bar””the green-savvy opt for on-tap beer that’s preferably locally brewed rather than the imported, bottled options that waste glass and transportation fuel.
Some decisions remain out of artists’ and fans’ control, such as how club owners choose to power their venue. To offset these activities bands such as Pearl Jam invest money in environmentally conscious programs such as Conservation International, an organization that works to preserve rainforest in Madagascar. Others employ novel ideas such as making their concerts ticketless events in which attendees pay for tickets online and simply show a credit card and ID for entrance, which prevents huge amounts of paper waste.
Being environmentally friendly and having a great time seeing live music are by no means incompatible goals. When artists and fans work together to create a greener concert-going experience everyone wins, including the earth.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Voice
The considerations in this piece are helpful and important, of course, and bands and fans should be trying to be as efficient and “green” as possible when creating and enjoying these musical (and social) experiences.
But there is something else that I feel is missing, big-time.
Far too many musicians and artists, and far far too many fans, seem to just give “lip service” to the climate change problem, to the lack-of-sustainability problem, and to related environmental problems.
Musicians and other artists are supposed to have heart — and they often or usually do — but the “heart” is just far too timid in most cases when it comes to actually adding their voices, emphatically, to the need for change.
I attend a good number of concerts. In my time, I’ve seen Bob Dylan several times, three of the four Beatles, the Rolling Stones several times, the Who several times, Led Zeppelin twice, the Grateful Dead, Willie and Waylon, Elton John, CSN&Y, Chicago, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Stevie Wonder, Ella Fitzgerald, Pavarotti, U2, the Tubes, and (yes) Madonna, and others. I like a good song and a good show.
But — without naming names — most musicians and top entertainers these days are not using their “voices” nearly as much as they should be using them, to inspire and prompt the changes necessary. Yes, you’ll often hear a song here, or a statement there, but not enough to really count or make a large difference. Either most artists don’t care, or most of them think that one song or one statement is sufficient to the task, or most of them are unaware of the positive influence they could be having, or most of them (and this is somewhat likely) don’t want to do anything that would “upset” the marketplace of potential fans, record buyers, and concert attenders. In other words, in the latter case, many artists could be putting their own commercial interests ahead of what they think they feel about the environment. In my view, that’s not much different from the way ExxonMobil execs are behaving.
And the fans? I’ve seen five times as many fans at some of these concerts — single concerts — as I’ve seen at ALL of the climate events I’ve attended put together in the last several years (with the exception of the EarthDay event in Washington D.C., which was itself a concert).
Paul McCartney is playing in San Francisco, at Pac Bell Park, in early July. I’ve forgotten the capacity of the park — 45,000 or 50,000 or perhaps 55,000 people. Many of them will be screaming and crying and remembering the old days. If McCartney looked straight into the eyes of people in the crowd, seriously and in a prolonged way, and said something like, “Dammit, we get it, and you get it, and if our generations are worth what we’ve always said we’re worth, then every person here tonight — and I mean every person — should start insisting, tomorrow, on change, and we should tell our neighbors, and you’ll be seeing me talk about this all the time in coming months!!”, that would begin to make a difference and begin to live up to the vision. Will he do it? (I also wish that John and George were still around: They wouldn’t be silent or passive.)
I’ve also seen Joan Baez (she is like an angel visiting from Heaven), and Pete Seeger. Now THEY know how to speak out — and they get it and feel it. They have credibility and soul. More artists should learn from them, and soon.
As Grace Slick used to sing, “Pick up the Cry!”
Jeff
It’s not that easy to be a musician. We think its easy because they’re just like singing or playing. We don’t know deep inside they feel so hard brining their instruments.