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By Amy Williams
'The thing about issues like global warming is that you can't always see them, unlike news pictures from Haiti - but the crisis is just as huge,' says LilyPop superstar Lily Allen is putting her music career on hold and is raring for the next stage of her life to begin. First stop: the Amazon, where she spent five days braving giant spiders and jungle humidity in order to remind us of the importance of saving the world’s rainforests. YOU’s Amy Williams joined her…
It is midnight, deep in the Brazilian rainforest, and Lily Allen is screaming – she has just discovered a spider the size of her palm in her cabin, and every man, monkey and toucan within a two-mile radius now knows about it.
Lily the multi-award-winning singer can of course hold a note, but I can report that Lily the intrepid adventurer has an impressively pitched squeal. A very effective one: within seconds her room is filled with potential spider slayers arguing over the most efficient way to remove the intruder from the mosquito net to which it is clinging. An ill-judged bang-it-to-the-floor-with-a-walking-boot option is chosen, predictably sending the petrified creature scuttling under her bed instead.
‘I should be embracing this experience, right?’ says Lily. ‘OK. Well I’m trying,’ she continues, ‘and it’s not very easy!’ Now somewhat hysterical with laughter, Miss Allen is coaxed back into her room and tucked underneath said mosquito net with the painstaking precision one would expect in the protection of a multimillion-pound pop star – even one who has quit music, and especially one who has travelled from London (a 28-hour schlep from door to tree) to raise awareness of the need to protect this forest, its people, its trees and, with that, its spiders.
It is as guests of Sky TV that Lily and I – along with Sky’s PR team, our photographer and Lily’s good friend Kim Jones (creative director of Dunhill) – find ourselves at a remote eco-lodge somewhere near the border with Bolivia and Peru.
They’ve recruited Lily to help promote their newly established charity, Sky Rainforest Rescue, which is working in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to get rainforest preservation back on Britain’s conscience. The Earth’s rainforests are disappearing at speed (an area the size of three football pitches is destroyed every minute in the Amazon) and as deforestation contributes significantly to global warming, the long-term picture is that we simply won’t be able to survive without them.
‘The thing about green issues, like global warming, is that you can’t always see them,’ says Lily, explaining her support for the cause on our minibus journey into the forest. ‘I mean, it’s not pulling at your heartstrings like watching news pictures from Haiti, or Comic Relief…there are no starving babies that we can cry about, knowing that if we donate money they might get fed. But the crisis faced is just as huge, which is why I’ve come over here. To give it attention.’
Lily learns to tap rubber
With eco-fashion pioneers Beatriz Saldahna (who works with rubber-tapping firms) and François-Ghislain Morillion (co-founder of Veja)The problem is, if you spend a day in this part of Brazil you realise that, with an issue this huge, the attention of a celebrity doesn’t really begin to cover it. On the very first morning of our five-day adventure we are treated to an aerial tour of the forest in a propeller plane. After some concern over whether Lily’s EMI contract would allow her to run the risk of flying in such a tiny aircraft, and with a satellite phone packed onboard – just in case – we take off at 7am. Nervously we chat, nominating roles for a Lost-style scenario in which we crash-land in the middle of the jungle, never to be found (Lily will be chef: ‘I’ll cook. Just don’t expect me to entertain you; I’ve given up singing, remember?’).
But within minutes we are silenced by the scene beneath us. The forest is waking up and a delicate mist is clearing, revealing an endless dark green carpet that stretches as far as we can see. This is the rainforest of our imaginations: flocks of birds swooping on and off branches far below; purple leaves, yellow leaves; impossibly tall trees shooting out alone above the canopy, and trees growing so densely together that, from above, they look like a mossy lawn. It is enchanting.
And then come the roads. After ten minutes in the air we spot the ugly, clay-coloured scars that stretch through the forest. They seem to appear from nowhere, but we are being flown on a specific path by our WWF guide, Bruno; one, he says, which best shows ‘the beauty and also the beast’. For the roads are quickly accompanied by vast cleared areas, the mossy carpet replaced by the pale green pasture that is so lucrative when used for cattle farming. From the air you get a sense of the scale of destruction: when a road is built it is estimated that, per year, a kilometre of forest either side will disappear. En route to the lodge we had driven along similar roads; past grass fields in which cattle graze among occasional tree stumps. Twenty years ago the road would have cut through thick rainforest; take a photo now and – save the odd palm tree – it could be a postcard from rural Devon.
Brazilian law dictates that, in this Amazon region, farmers can only clear trees from 20 per cent of their land, but in reality this is near impossible to implement.
The forest is too big for adequate policing (the area the Sky Rainforest project is working in is the size of Belgium) and the government has far more pressing concerns to attend to – such as poverty and violence in cities – than jailing opportunistic cattle ranchers. Politicians also have to balance international pressure to protect a precious ecological commodity with the international demand for meat (Brazil is now the largest supplier of beef to the world).
An area of the rainforest ravaged by deforestation
Lily with young people from families who work as rubber-tappersSaving the rainforest is a more overwhelming mission than any of us on the trip had envisaged, and its complexity makes this campaign a brave choice for Lily. For her, the visit comes as part of a year of ‘all change’: as well as stepping back from music, she is launching a new clothes store in London and ploughing energy into supporting charities. ‘A lot of my life is very vacuous. It doesn’t have a lot of substance and I guess I feel it’s a bit pointless,’ she says. ‘And, yes, coming here makes me feel I can put my fame to good use. I’m not pretending to know everything and I don’t understand this as well as I should, but I’m here to get my head around it.’
At a presentation given by Claudio Maretti, the head of WWF in Brazil, both Lily and I struggle to concentrate on the facts; it is, we agree, a bit like being transported back a decade to geography GCSE – with jet lag and jungle humidity thrown in. We both spend a good part of the lecture slumped over the desks, chins propped up on elbows, willing
our eyelids to stay open. It is a little frustrating for Lily – she wants, understandably, to be able to hammer a simple message home, but encouraging people to sponsor a tree for £3 a month suddenly doesn’t seem like the only answer. Sky is aiming to raise £4 million to save a billion trees over the next three years. You can’t help but wonder how on earth they will monitor this target in terms of trunks, branches and leaves saved but, crucially, by helping WWF support education programmes and encourage sustainable business, this money should go some way to change the current fate of the forest. We visit a condom factory (yes, highly amusing, especially with a brilliant running commentary from Lily) that uses wild rubber ‘tapped’ from local trees – the factory provides jobs for more than 500 families while encouraging the traditional skill of ‘rubber-tapping’, which utilises trees without destroying them.
In the UK, the Lily Allen generation – who have been raised on the idea that green is cool – are likely to buy into forest-friendly products, such as trainers made by hip French brand Veja (whose soles are made from sustainable rubber), but we are all guilty of simply associating the cutting down of trees with the need to cut down our personal paper mountains when, in fact, reducing our meat consumption could be just as vital.
Initiatives such as ‘Meat-Free Monday’ promote cutting out meat for one day a week to help stop global warming, although Lily is not entirely convinced: ‘My boyfriend wouldn’t be impressed if I told him he couldn’t eat meat any more – on a Monday or any day!’ she laughs. ‘But absolutely we need to be aware of what we are buying. Yeah, eat your hamburger, but at what cost?’
Cattle grazing in fields that were once forest; Lily and a member of the river police who patrol the Amazon
Lily is conscious of not preaching what she cannot practise: ‘Up until this point I haven’t lived a very green life. It’s difficult to in London. I’ve tried to put solar panels on my house, but it’s listed so they won’t let me. I want to recycle, but Westminster Council never deliver the recycling bags – it drives me mad! At my dad’s house in Stroud we are much more eco. It’s just that you can’t be like it all the time, can you?’ Lily’s relaxed, realistic attitude to green living is much the same as her attitude to our trip. There is no evidence that she’s been swotting up beforehand, as other celebrity ‘ambassadors’ may have felt obliged to, and she is incredibly laid-back about allowing me to join her for such a length of time. In fact, hanging out with Lily quickly becomes like hanging out with a good girlfriend – albeit one who gets all the attention. Aside from the Prada sundress she travelled in, and the Prada handbag (made from kangaroo: ‘it’s the toughest type of leather, so I think that makes it OK for the outback!’), she effortlessly presents herself as completely normal and spends most of the time in the jungle make-up-free in drab grey walking trousers, mud-covered boots and long-sleeved T-shirts. I tell her she is probably the least glossy celebrity I have ever met.
‘I see it as my responsibility to be like that,’ she replies. ‘There are always pictures of me looking like s*** in the papers, but you can’t wear make-up all the time, and if you do, just because you are famous…well, I don’t think it’s a very good message to send.’
At 25, Lily takes her role-model responsibilities seriously, and – in between excitably chatting about wanting to settle down and have babies with her adored boyfriend, builder Sam Cooper – she is keen to talk about her other work away from the microphone: helping develop jobs for young people ‘behind the scenes in the music industry’, and supporting the charity War Child. She is past caring what people think about her decision to quit music (‘Lady Gaga came along and I was like, “OK, you win!” I am such a fan,’ she jokes) or about what newspapers write about her – ‘It doesn’t affect me. If people want to say things that aren’t true I can sue them and give all the money to charity’. And she insists that she has curbed her partying – disappointingly, she is not on speed dial to Kate Moss with tales from the Amazon: ‘You know what, I don’t even think I have Kate’s number in my phone any more. I just hang out with my boyfriend and his friends. That’s it.’
I am reminded who’s the superstar, though, when we arrive back at our hotel in town and a group of 20 or so screeching teenagers is waiting for Lily. Word is out, and those not hyperventilating in her presence are beaming with pride that she has visited this remote part of Brazil. Lily may be longing for the next stage of her life to begin, but while she’s still an international pop princess she is very happy to be doing her little bit. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had a break in my diary long enough to do this. Hopefully me being here can show that there are people working really hard for the environment, who support an issue that will affect everyone – every single one of us.’
Sky Rainforest Rescue offers a number of ways for you to help tackle deforestation. For £3 a month you can sponsor an acre of forest, or a donation of £20 will help save 1,000 trees.
source: dailymail
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