When George Johnson asked us to help him produce a music video around climate crisis in time for Earth day, we felt honoured. Dr. Johnson is a creative writing and English professor at Thompson Rivers University in our hometown of Kamloops, BC.
We hope people will like and share it. Please help us create awareness for climate change and the adverse impacts we are seeing.
We have a climate emergency. Extreme weather events increase daily, leading to more deaths and destruction, especially in the developing world. Despite this, many, from young to old and including prominent politicians (ie. in Canada, the US and UK) remain in denial about the reality.
Climate Crisis was written to hammer home this reality. The song is both a protest against the excuses not to act and a raw hopeful call to action. George Malcolm Johnson, the band’s founder and lyricist, wrote the song while immersed in wildfire smoke in Kamloops, B.C. in the summer of 2021. A certain political party’s denial of climate change aroused him to anger and the lyrics and a tune came quite quickly. His then 15-year old activist son Ben composed the music in his bedroom and recorded the first version using a computer program.
“Climate Crisis” is one of the songs featured in Johnson’s award-winning eco-comedy, Boomerangst. In it an impulsive baby boomer forms a retirement commune in remote Toad Valley with his former high school rock band mates in a band called Intensive Care. The band gets back to the garden of their youthful ideals. They dig up more dirt than they can handle before uniting and rocking out against a mining company threatening to expropriate their land.
It has been called “an extraordinary original comedy” by Stephen P. Dunn, Assistant Director of The Big Chill, Chocolat, Book Club. It has also won several screenwriting awards, including The Best Comedy Film in the Only the Best Film Awards in 2022.
Forming a band called Intensive Care is something of a boomerang for Johnson, since he played in a high school band in the 1970s by that name. The new iteration of Intensive Care is by intention a multi-generational band, since the climate emergency affects everyone, regardless of age. The band is also believed to be the first Canadian solar-powered band.
The music video was respectfully filmed on the traditional lands of Secwépemc people north of Skeetchestn and northwest of Kamloops.
Johnson hopes that the band’s efforts will help raise funds for the stage play production of Boomerangst in Kamloops. A local fundraiser will be held on Earth Day, April 22nd. Tickets at Eventbrite: http://shorturl.at/wIRTX
The longer-range goal is to attract financing to produce Boomerangst as a T.V. Series with Mastermind Studios. The pilot for this series has already won Best T.V. Script, Wiki Screenplay Contest in 2022.
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