Global Cool
Global Cool
One of the Fuji Rock Festival's most admired qualities, especially by visiting musicians, is how clean the festival site stays throughout the weekend. There are, of course, a number of reasons, the chief one being the presence of NGOs who police the festival site, constantly reminding people to separate their refuse and place them in the proper bins. There's a kind of nagging efficiency to this policy that anyone who's lived in Japan for a length of time will recognize from train platform announcements ("please don't rush through the doors") and even weather reports ("be sure to bring an umbrella today"). But probably the most important underlying reason is that the kind of people who attend the festival are conscientious about such things.
It seems only right, then, that this year's festival will mark the opening of a ten-year world campaign called Global Cool, a new initiative to stop global warming. Fuji has for a number of years been a carbon-neutral festival, meaning that all carbon that the event produces over the weekend is offset by means of a variety of initiatives, such as planting trees and funding sustainable energy projects. Global Cool goes further, but attempting to spread carbon-reduction initiatives to the individual level. The idea is to get one billion people to save one ton of carbon dioxide each per year by simply switching off electrical appliances and not leaving them on standby, as well as turning off cell phone chargers when they aren't in use.
Smash President Masa Hidaka will launch the campaign on July 28 when he opens the festival in front of an estimated crowd of 35,000 people. On July 29, Global Cool will get its second wind when it's introduced to an audience of about 110,000 people at Milton Keynes Bowl in the UK, and on July 30 in Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium for about 55,000 people. These events will be broadcast at one point or another in their respective regions, thus multiplying the effect astronomically.
In addition, a single person will be chosen at Fuji Rock to make a pledge that he or she will reduce the amount of CO2 that person produces in a year. The person will be posted on the Fuji Rock website and from there it is hoped that more and more people will join the pledge. Those who do will be rewarded with exclusive access to high quality film content on the website.
The Global Cool campaign will be conspicuous for the whole weekend via banners, T-shirts, and booths. It's the sort of nagging efficiency that Japanese institutions are very good at, but for once it's for a purpose that's undeniably important.
