Activists march inside a conference center under a giant statue of a spider to demand urgent action to address climate change at the U.N. climate talks in Doha, Qatar, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012.
At UN Climate Talks, Chanting for Change
A leading eco-entrepreneur who took the Rolling Stones on a carbon neutral tour wants people around the world to lend their voices to save the planet.
Dan Morrell is co-founder of the CarbonNeutral company, which encourages governments, industries and individuals to offset their carbon emissions with environmentally beneficial, carbon-reducing actions.
Now Morrell has created a charitable organization called CHANT. It’s working to protect the environment by inviting you, and everyone else, into a kind of virtual global choir.
To participate, you would log on to the website, where you'll see seven environmental causes, each with a tone associated with it. Sing into your mobile device or laptop the note associated with your chosen cause and then upload your musical tweet.
Morrell credits what happens next to CHANT co-founder Youth, the stage name of Martin Glover, a producer for Paul McCartney, U2 and other leading artists.
Dan Morrell, president and CEO of CHANT, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Doha. (Photo by Spenser Style)
“He then disseminates this music, turns it into music and puts it out to the music industry," Morrell says. "As you can imagine [that’s] a lot of pure notes. So by using your voice it goes into songs that actually generate revenue that goes back to the causes.”
Morrell took CHANT for a test run at the United Nations climate talks in Doha.
In the cavernous National Convention Center, he corraled a group of volunteers from Venezuela, Ecuador, Canada, the United States and Suriname to chime in to help the world's forests.
Those voices, and others from Doha, will be added to CHANT’s first global recording, available for free on the CHANT website when the climate talks conclude.
Beyond Doha, Morrell hopes to continue engaging the world.
“If you say a land is enchanted that means that people have chanted there," he says. "So we want to get as many people as we possibly can to provide unbridled, optimistic goodwill towards the environment and create an initiative that really makes a difference.”
CHANT’s ultimate goal: to get one billion people to chant for environmental reform by 2014.
