Re:Wild Your Life: Bringing Another Kind Of Wildlife To Lollapalooza

Lollapalooza, with a global footprint across North and South America, South Asia and Europe, has drawn millions of mostly young people to festivals from Mumbai, India, to Santiago, Chile, to Chicago and beyond. Re:wild is a conservation organization, founded by actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio and several environmental scientists, also with global reach and impact, inspiring people to become part of the prevention and cure to climate crises.

So it made perfect sense when it was announced in January that the two would partner up to protect the planet. And they wasted no time, launching the first collaborative activation in Mumbai Jan. 24 and sweeping through Chile, Brazil and Argentina in March.

“What really excited us about them is we knew that in each of the markets where the festival operates, Re:wild has a local partner organization that is on the ground doing this amazing work,” C3 Presents Chief Operating Officer Emmett Beliveau says. “It was the Wildlife Trust of India that was the entity on-site in Mumbai with our team.”

From Mumbai, the festival, produced by C3 Presents since 2005, traveled to South America – where Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell saw firsthand the value of the organization’s local partners.

“Re:wild program staff is in South America doing amazing things,” Beliveau says. “They were at each of those three festivals last month, engaging with our fans, doing education. And that’s how the partnership started last year, when Perry Farrell and his wife Etty had the chance to tour one of the sanctuaries that Re:wild works on outside of São Paulo while they were in Brazil for Lollapalooza in 2023.”

Lollapalooza and Re:wild share environmental education through festival messaging channels, providing space on festival grounds for Re:wild partners to speak directly with music fans, and working with vendors to help fans make better environmental choices.

Activations include immersive installations that teach festivalgoers about, for instance, the benefits of eating more plant-based meals, conserving water, and how to “re-wild” their personal environments once they go home.

“One of things we are working on with the C3 team is increasing plant-based food options,” says Carrie Hutchinson, Re:wild’s director of marketing and brand. “One of the best things that individuals can do for the planet is to eat less meat and dairy. Meat and dairy are really big contributors to deforestation and a lot of pollution and basically ruining biodiversity. Another is if you have access to a yard or even if you don’t, start planting. A lot of people like to grow things and especially if you grow your own food, like just an herb garden or even flowers or vegetables, there is a sense of satisfaction and joy that comes from it, and it helps you reconnect with the outdoors.”

The Lollapalooza and Re:wild partnership is more than just getting people to watch videos and grow tomatoes. The partnership seeks out ways to involve vendors to offer more plant-based and vegan food options and urges fans to utilize public transportation or carpooling to attend Lolla.

“You can get 50 people on a bus, which means 50 fewer Ubers or even personal cars, to come to the festival,” Beliveau says.

The partnership also means engagement of not just music fans, who might take some of what they saw at a Re:wild installation at Lollapalooza and be inspired to take personal action at home; it also represents an opportunity for expanding corporate awareness, investment and participation.

“Companies are looking at supply chains and reducing their footprint,” Hutchinson says. “We work with a lot of organizations to take that a step further and invest in protecting biodiversity because protecting a place before it’s too late is the hard part.

“These are taking it beyond sustainability. It’s investing in the planet. There’s a lot more attention being paid, not just to the sustainability piece, which is a lot about harm reduction, but about being additive, and investing in biodiversity projects. And that’s why a lot of organizations contract to work with us. We’re investing in and protecting the most important places in the world for biodiversity.”