Raising Your Voice: AJR’s Adam Met, PhD, Encourages Artists To Promote Climate Action

A lyric from a song can have quite an effect on a person, changing their perspective on life and forever forging a connection between them and the artist reciting it. It’s the power of music, one that Adam Met, bassist for pop band AJR, encourages his fellow artists to not only acknowledge but also wield for good by talking about issues they care about, especially when it comes to addressing the climate crisis.

Through the nonprofit Planet Reimagined he founded six years ago, Met has worked toward turning the thought of helping the environment into action using hard data. The organization recently released Amplify, a report that found the relationship between artists and fans can spark a climate movement. According to the report, which gathered online surveys and in-person interviews, 72% of fans said climate change is an issue and are ready to act, and 70% of respondents aren’t opposed to artists using their platforms to speak out on the issue.

Met, who also has a doctorate and is a professor at Columbia University, took time while on the road touring with AJR to discuss Planet Reimagined’s work and why there is reason to have hope in the world.

Pollstar: Tell me how you became an activist and started Planet Reimagined.
Adam Met: I became interested in human rights and sustainability about 15 years ago or so. I was on a class trip in high school and went to see Mary Robinson speak, who is the former High Commissioner for Human Rights and was the President of Ireland. For the first time, I heard somebody make the connection between how people’s day-to-day lives are impacted by climate but from a human rights perspective. That inspired me to continue to study this from undergrad all the way through doing my PhD.

My goal now with Planet Reimagined is building the kinds of projects where we can do the hard-hitting social science and scientific research and turn that into something that’s really implementable, that can actually make a difference.

We just got bipartisan support in Congress and with the White House to expand renewable energy capacity across the United States. There’s 23 million new acres of oil and gas land that we can now put renewable energy on top of, and we were able to make that happen through one of our projects called Common Grounds. Now we’re into the next steps of actually building new renewable energy projects that formerly were never allowed to be used for energy

Our big release now is Amplify — it’s how we can use big convenings like concerts in order to build real advocacy and the climate movement. Around 250 million people attend concerts every year in the U.S., and the energy at concerts is so palpable. There’s actually an anthropological and sociological term for this: It’s called collective effervescence, and it was coined by Emile Durkheim. We wanted to figure out how we can take that collective effervescence and use it for good to combat the climate crisis.

What was your reaction when you saw the Amplify report?
It does give me a lot of hope. One of the things that I was really encouraged by is this idea that the era of “shut up and sing” is over. Historically, people have wanted concerts to be a space that’s separate from the rest of the world and wanted artists to be an escape, but now that everything is so integrated and people have access to artists through social media through concerts, they really want to be engaging with their favorite artists around the issues that are important to them like climate change.

The fans actually want artists to engage on this issue, and the other thing that was really interesting is it’s not about artists telling fans what they should be doing. It’s about artists doing it themselves and saying, “Fans, will you join me in this process?” That simple difference of language makes such a big difference.

What projects are next for Planet Reimagined?
If you think about how many people go to concerts, there are even more participating in sports and attending games every year around the world. There’s a huge opportunity there. Our next step is to do a similar kind of report and figure out how we can implement this in the sports space. And then on the energy side, we are building out pilot projects now that we have federal approval from the government to build out solar and wind on oil and gas land.

What have you taken away from your experience working with politicians from both sides?
The thing that I see most often when I’m working with politicians, whether it’s internationally, at the federal level or at the state level, is that when it comes down to it, people do actually care about people. If you can make the argument for your policy or your initiative in terms of people, then you’re going to be able to go so much farther.

We already see the effects of climate change with the extreme weather events that are happening more and more every year. If you frame arguments to fix the climate around people and people’s lives, we’re going to get so much farther and see so much less division between the political parties and between people.