Back to Nature Bono
These days, the television programming that comes into your house contains more nature shows than you can watch in one busy lifetime.
However, Bono doing such a show on BBC-International — Bono: Back to Nature — makes complete sense at this point in cultural and television history.
This Irishman is a celebrity, like many other celebrities, whose later career boils down to being visible, especially if your last few albums didn’t come close to the glory of older ones, not that that matters since U2 moved their song catalog to Holland to avoid Irish taxes.
Additionally, Bono has long not needed Adam, Larry, or Dave to be Bono anymore. Bono is Bono the Brand. It’s a label you stick on things, and a label that sometimes has to be redesigned to then be re-stuck on itself. Hence, this particular redesign at this stage of the game: the environmentally focused, sustainably survivalist Bono.
While behind this probably lurks a business deal involving Elevation Partners (which has invested in other media properties, among them Forbes Inc.), if this honorary Knight of the British Empire can bring his magic touch to demonstrating how sustainable lifestyles would replace over-development, so be it. The show, as described, might actually work well.
Sure, it’s a mash-up – a little Man v. Wild, a little This Old House – but it actually sounds interesting. Based on descriptions in press releases, every episode details the creation of a temporary rural or semi-urban structure, inhabitable for several months or possibly longer, and which can be easily disassembled and moved. The structure is surrounded by various forms of indigenous “permaculture” and effective clean-water collection.*
Bono gets his hands dirty, but he’s really just the host. Various experts from numerous rural and wilderness cultures – African, First Nation, Sami, Pacific Islander, and others — oversee the shelter construction based on traditional methods, in what anthropologists call “paleo-neo cultural-crossover,” i.e. teaching us moderns how to replace our fancy living with equally effective aboriginal methods.
The mix of gear and celebrity image should be interesting. In one scene of publicity footage that’s gone viral, Bono wears North Face clothes (and Armani sunglasses) while on a river in British Columbia, helping members of the Kali’oompas tribe use hand-made wooden tools to build a fish weir.
Viewers also should probably expect regular, earnestly preachy moments. In other pre-released footage, Bono gazes from the seat of a kayak at a small group of rare narwhal and says, “Industrialization almost took this species away from the people who rightfully eat them.” On location in Hokkaido with the Ainu people, he breaks into a few bars of “A Celebration,” then looks right into the camera with his I’m-going-to-convince-you-completely stare and declares, “Religion began in the trees of the mountains, and those trees must be left to stand.”
A BBC publicity release of April 1 is short on protein, however, as there’s no word on whether Bono will fish or hunt, a’la Bear Grylls. Could you picture The Fly rising from cover to shoot a moose with a bow and arrow he made himself?
Who wouldn’t tune-in for that?
*While The Edge has no connection to Bono: Back to Nature, a guest appearance can’t hurt, given his problems trying to prove that his gigundo Malibu CA compound, still in the planning stage, will in fact “respect and honor the landscape.”
[This dispatch brought to you in honor of le poisson d’avril.]# # #