Pharrell, Al Gore Bringing Back Live Earth in 2015
Eight years after the inaugural Live Earth spread environmental awareness and voiced climate change concerns around the globe, co-founders Al Gore and Kevin Wall will revive their eco-friendly worldwide festival in 2015 in the lead-up to this year’s UN climate change conference in Paris. Wall and Gore announced the details of Live Earth 2015 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were joined onstage by Pharrell Williams, who will serve as Live Earth’s creative director.
According to Gore and Wall, over 100 artists will perform across seven continents for Live Earth 2015 on June 18th. While no artists have been announced yet, the organizers shared that the concerts, each lasting four to six hours, would take place in New York, South Africa, Australia, China, Brazil and Paris, the latter being the location where the climate conference will take place in December, the BBC writes.
Williams, who performed at Live Earth Rio in 2007 but wouldn’t comment on whether he’d take the stage this time around, stressed that the festival’s lineup isn’t as important as its purpose. “Instead of just having people perform, we literally are going to have humanity harmonize all at once,” Pharrell said. The goal of the 24-hour festival is to collect one billion signatures urging world leaders to adopt a new climate accord at the Paris conference.
As for the criticism that the original Live Earth garnered about its own ecological footprint, Williams said, “You would have pundits and comedians who didn’t understand global warming and we were often ridiculed. We wanted to do something very different this time.”
The 2007 Live Earth was staged in cities like Washington D.C., Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Tokyo and Rome and venues like New Jersey’s Giants Stadium and London’s Wembley Stadium. Genesis, Metallica, Kanye West, Roger Waters, the Police, Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters and Madonna were among the artists who participated in the event. Over 19 million people viewed the event in the United States alone, augmented by a then-record online audience of 8 million, the Guardian writes.