All in, the tour managed to keep some 103,620 water bottles out of landfills, and led food drives that fed more than 4,000 people. These ventures and their results, outlined in the Reverb report, offer a model that Eilish hopes other artists can replicate. “Climate anxiety is so real,” she admits. “But goddamnit, we can only make a difference if we really do something.”
While on the road, Eilish was joined by legendary director and National Geographic Explorer James Cameron, who wanted to capture Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour on screen. The experience gave the pair a chance to connect about their shared passion for the planet, allowing Cameron to see up close that Eilish is driven by what he calls a “necessity to battle climate change… and to spread that message to other young people.” Cameron’s new 3-D Billie Eilish concert film, co-directed with Eilish, hits theaters on May 8.
Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird—herself a sustainability advocate and the founder of the plant-based food nonprofit Support + Feed—remembers being told early in her daughter’s career that there was little use in being concerned about the excessive buses and the wasteful water bottles. “I literally was told, ‘This is how the music industry is, we’re operating on such tight margins and such tight time frames,’” she says. “Everyone was overwhelmed, and the last thing they wanted to talk about was sustainability.”
Today, just as Eilish has refused to accept the conventions of pop songwriting in her music, she’s also embracing disruption in the way her tours operate. “Things don’t have to be done the same way they’ve always been done,” she says. “I make sure that in every single area of my career, and my life, that the first thing I do is ask the question: How can we do this in the most sustainable way possible?”
From the start, Eilish’s career was a family affair. Her brother, the artist FINNEAS, helped produce her 2015 breakout song “Ocean Eyes.” (Eilish was just 13 years old when it was released on SoundCloud). They have worked closely on all her albums since. When Eilish’s pop career really began to take off in 2017, she was joined on the road by her brother and their parents. It’s fitting that Eilish’s environmentalism is also a family project, spearheaded in large part by Baird, a vegan who, as Eilish proudly notes,“ devotes her time and energy to all things environmental.” A Colorado native with a serious nature-loving streak, Baird was always interested in being mindful of the environment. When she had kids of her own, they slipped easily into conscious eating, too. Eilish admires her mother’s conviction, and points out that her mom is not afraid to give anybody “an earful about how animal agriculture is just completely destroying the planet.”
