“Listen, watch and act” is the motto of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Producer Flume's beats reach all the way down to the ocean floor, to breathe new life into the Great Barrier Reef.
Colonies of colourful fish and blazing corals dance on the ocean floor. But the colours soon fade and the setting shifts: vast stretches of industrial construction, as far as the eye can see, shrouded in their own pollution. This series of contrasting scenes unfolds in perfect synchrony in the new composition by producer and DJ Flume.
Harley Streten, known as Flume, was the revelation of the 2016 Australian electronic music scene with his album Skin, which led him to win that year's Best dance/electronica album at the Grammy award. Two days ago he shared an unreleased track across all his social media channels, gently asking his fans to tune in: "This is important," he said. Just 20 hours after it was posted, the track had already clocked up hundreds of thousands of views across the artist's various social network pages.
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The video accompanying the song is produced by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and was created as an ode to the Great Barrier Reef, a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1981: comical clownfish peek out from soft seaweed, giant turtles swim across lush ocean floors.
The vivid colours, however, give way to shades of grey, and the life of the corals and the more than two thousand animal species they host gives way to their extinction: the enemy is global warming, in particular the rise in sea temperature of up to 4 degrees Celsius caused by CO2 emissions produced by fossil fuels.
"The 2016 event was the third most severe to have struck the Great Barrier Reef, following the more recent heat waves of 1998 and 2002," said Terry Hughes, professor and head of the Arc centre of excellence for coral reef studies. "The bleaching that occurred in 2016 reinforces the urgent need to limit climate change, as agreed by world leaders in the Paris Agreement," added David Wachenfeld, co-author of the study.
A study published in Nature argues that there can still be hope for the Great Barrier Reef only if urgent measures are taken to reduce global warming and keep water temperature under control. The aim of the video in question becomes explicit at the end: "Do something about it" — let us add our voice to those of thousands of people in the petition calling on governments to implement these measures, immediately.
Greenpeace has chosen an effective way to raise awareness of this issue, engaging a broader cross-section of the population than usual, in the hope that everyone can become as passionate about defending the oceans as they are about a song by their favourite artist.