On Thursday, April 13, 2000, Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, along with their assorted friends in the music business, will assemble at New York City's Carnegie Hall for the 10th Annual Rainforest Foundation concert.
But the celebrity glitz of these annual concerts belies the origins of Sting's passion for the rain forest and the creation of The Rainforest Foundation charity that he and Trudie co-founded in 1989. It all started at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival when Sting first met Belgian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Dutilleux. After their initial meeting, the Belgian "J.P." reputedly made an absolute nuisance of himself by bombarding Sting with phone calls, in the hope of luring him into activism that might help save the Amazon Indians' land.
The Amazon rain forest has been equated as the lungs of the planet. The 1960s began the systematic destruction of the forest by logging, mining, and ranching by ever-encroaching non-indigenous settlers. By the 1980s experts were predicting that the rain forest's destruction would be complete in 100 years. It was Dutilleux's mission to halt that destruction.
Later, in December 1987, allegedly against the advice of manager Miles Copeland, Sting visited the rain forest and the resident Kayapo while on his ...Nothing Like the Sun tour in Rio de Janeiro. How could he have known the visit would become a life-changing event for him and his family...least of all an Earth-changing event as well.
Sting, quickly enamored of the Kayapo and Chief Raoni, promised to help in their cause. "I shall tell your story to whomever I can because you are the only protectors of the forest," he told them. "If the forest dies, then so does the Earth. Even a white man can understand this."
Some people said Sting was a changed man after only one visit, that he talked of little else. Some people also suggested that the rain forest was the project that kept him from dealing with his father's recent death while others suggested Raoni became a father figure to Sting. In an excerpt from his co-authored out-of-print book, Jungle Stories, Sting wrote:
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