It was when he was clearing a beach of plastic debris that rapper Jimmy Hall felt he had to put into words his sense of despair at the growing environmental crisis facing his generation.
“After a beach clean, I just felt so frustrated by the amount of plastic that I was seeing and I just needed to get it out and that was that was my way,” Hall, who performs under the name SunnyJim, said.
The 25 year-old was speaking to Reuters after delivering his Plastic Wrap rhyme to around 30 young demonstrators who gathered outside a media centre in Falmouth, southwestern England, for journalists covering the Group of Seven leaders’ summit.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, U.S. President Joe Biden and the other G7 leaders were meeting 25 miles away in the seaside resort of Carbis Bay for their three-day summit at which they will discuss their plans to slow climate change.
“Young people, younger than me and my age, we realise that we’re the ones who are going to have to deal with this, and our children are going to have to deal with this,” Hall, who is studying for a masters degree in marine environmental management, said.
“We saw with the pandemic how quickly the world can change when we really needed to,” he said. “But there are millions of people already seeing these threats in less economically developed countries.”
In his rap, Hall laments the consumer-driven economy and its waste: “The creation of a nation, built on unsustainable foundations, aimlessly generating generations of waste by the second, conveniently blinded by convenience, but ignorant to the disposal, ship it off far away, maybe dump some in the ocean, most efficient way to turn those mountains into mole-hills.”
