One group hopes to make touring an eco friendly affair
Speaking with the United Kingdom’s The Guardian last fall as part of a climate change campaign, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke dropped a bomb almost as shocking as the band’s recent pay-what-you-want Internet-only album release: he threatened to stop touring.
“I would consider refusing to tour on environmental grounds, if nothing started happening to change the way the touring operates,” Yorke said. “Some of our best ever shows have been in the U.S., but there's 80,000 people there and they've all been sitting in traffic jams for five or six hours with their engines running to get there, which is bollocks.”
Yorke’s threat may be drastic, but his general sentiment is something many other musicians share. And while there are plenty of ways to reduce the “ridiculous consumption of energy” that results from touring, not all artists have the know-how to make it happen. That is why Adam Gardner, guitarist and vocalist for the band Guster, started Reverb.
Founded in 2004 by Gardner and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, an environmentalist, Reverb is a nonprofit organization based out of Portland, ME. According to Gardner, Reverb is “dedicated to educating and engaging musicians and their fans to promote environmental sustainability.”
Reverb has worked with more than 45 major national tours to help artists reduce their impact on the environment. This year alone, the organization worked with artists as varied as Andrew Bird, Beastie Boys, Norah Jones, Linkin Park and Dave Matthews Band, among many others. If one similarity exists among these artists, it’s that they all play stadium-sized concerts, which can create anywhere from 500 to 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per show.
Major efforts have been made by Reverb to fight against carbon dioxide emissions by embracing biodiesel as an alternative fuel source. To this date, the organization has facilitated the use of more than 250,000 gallons of biodiesel, and, as a result, reduced CO2 emissions by more than 25,000 tons. Reverb’s efforts were even recognized by the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, who invited Gardner to testify about the future of biofuels.
“The use of biodiesel is radically changing the music touring industry, and there's no reason why we couldn't continue to broaden its reach,” Gardner told the committee.
But making the switch to biodiesel can be difficult, Gardner admits, and even his own band had some difficulties.
“For Guster, making strides toward kicking our own oil addiction hasn’t been easy,” Gardner says. “We had to leave our first bus company to find one that would allow us to put B20 in the tanks!”
In addition to utilizing bio fuels, Reverb works in other ways to make touring greener. The organization partners with NativeEnergy, a Vermont company, to purchase renewable energy credits to offset the amount of carbon produced by each tour. Many times these credits are paid for by a percentage of ticket sales from each show.
Consulting artists on how to be more environmentally friendly is only half of Reverb’s goal. The other half consists of reaching out to fans and educating them about how they can live greener lives. Reverb-organized tours feature Eco-Villages, which consist of informational tents for teaching fans about ecological issues. With the Eco-Village concept, Reverb has involved more than 1,400 local and national environmental groups to reach more than 4.4 million fans to date.
Today’s music fans, Gardner says, are part of a generation willing to face up to environmental issues with the optimism and commitment necessary to face such a challenge.
“I see this moment in time — a relative flicker when considering the Earth’s age — as a critical one,” Gardner says. “The growing wave of momentum to defeat global warming during this small window of opportunity could very well determine what life will look like on the other side of that flicker.”
Jon Wiesner
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