Speak now, Taylor: How Swift can use her voice to help save our planet from climate change

Against the background of wars and wildfires, drought and swollen seas, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has delivered its stable, sparkly radiance into the collective imagination since March. Swifties are choreographing lip-syncs at summer camps, selling homemade bracelets for concert tickets, singing her songs in choir class, playing them in orchestra, and studying her iconography at New York University and Stanford.

Even if you’re not lucky enough to see any of her 151 live shows that will span five continents, you might have left your theater seat to sway with grandchildren and nostalgic millennials in record-breaking crowds at "Eras Tour" the movie.

To my daughters and to the students I teach, it has all the power of religion; at a time when we need a collective escape, it is one of our best American exports. 

Taylor Swift fan died as heat index soared at concert

But even this, in all its majesty, came crashing to planet Earth on Nov. 17, when a concertgoer died from sweltering heat moments before Swift took the stage in Rio de Janeiro. As tens of thousands of fans filed in for the concert, their excitement turned to fear for survival. The temperature reached 102, the humidity was 70% and the heat index was nearly 140 degrees.  

The show was organized by Time4Fun. Fans complained of excessive heat in the stadium and limited access to water. Firefighters say a thousand fans fainted from dehydration.

One of them was Ana Clara Benevides Machado, a 23-year-old psychology student. She was resuscitated at the stadium for about 40 minutes, and on the way to the hospital, she had a second cardiac arrest and died.

As testament to Swift’s command of the zeitgeist – or perhaps to our own collective denial − this event overshadowed another heat record broken that day, when for the first time, the global average temperature was more than 2 degrees Celsius hotter than levels before industrialization. The next day, this threshold was again crossed. It seems almost certain that 2023 will be the Earth's hottest year on record. 

Yet on that stifling Friday night, the show still went on. Swift did as Swift does: She and her flanking legions of talent gave all of it – all 44 songs, all 10 elaborate set designs, all 16 outfit changes, all 3 1/2 hours.

Taylor Swift didn't just speak to me.'Speak Now' changed my life, and taught me English.

As a father of Swifties, I appreciate the symbol of this unrelenting work ethic. She has played in pouring rain and now in heat so strong she had trouble breathing. Even her toughness is transcendent. 

But as she learned of Benevides’ fate, Swift's toughness was challenged by her grief. “It is with a shattered heart that I say we lost a fan earlier tonight before my show. I can't even tell you how devastated I am by this,” she wrote to her 277 million Instagram followers.

The heat index the next day again crept toward the nearly unimaginable 140-degree mark and the show was postponed. On Sunday, conditions improved and in front of 65,000 fans, Swift sang a heartfelt version of “You Were Bigger Than the Whole Sky” with its refrain of “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” Given the context, it was a wounding performance.

While Benevides' death made news worldwide, many others have gone more quietly into the night. The World Health Organization has forecast that climate change will be the direct cause of about 250,000 deaths a year between 2030 and 2050.

The New England Journal of Medicine sees that as “too conservative” an estimate.

Swift could help inform her fans about climate change

When daily highs surpass 110 degrees, even 115 degrees and linger there, especially in places that have no air conditioning, there is more risk of heat stress, malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition. As food shortages and poverty increase, people are more vulnerable to health problems.

And then there are the 10 million people who die from air pollution each year. 

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Even Taylor Swift is not big enough to take all this on. But I hope recent events will rouse her to enlighten her fans, which include 53% of U.S. adults.

People have been painfully reluctant to make sacrifices for the sake of the planet, and yet 4 out of 5 Swifties would be willing to skip showering for a month to see her concert; a third would be willing to skip a friend or relative’s wedding. In Argentina, some fans camped out for more than five months to try to get a spot closer to the stage. 

There’s no doubt nature is foundational to Swift’s worldview. Her lyrics reference stars and sun, crescent moons, auroras, comets and purple-pink skies. There are golden leaves, grass, clover, mistletoe, wisteria and weeds. There are cold hands and snow in winter and salty air in the summer.

On the “Folklore” album cover, she is walking through the fog in a stark forest; on “Evermore,” she is entering a wood as snow falls. She sings of kids exploring creeks in their backyards and others who daydream in public parks.

She’s a Romantic in the 19th century sense – valuing nature as a character in her poetry as much as she does people. In the Eras concert, she plays a moss-covered piano before the projection of massive, bare trees, then she lies on the mossy slope of an A-frame house. 

Out of the mediated, screened-in existence we’ve been building ever since she first dropped "Lucky You" in 2002, Taylor Swift has reached so deeply into her fans’ psyche that they are willing to risk their lives to see her play. That is a mighty platform.

Please, Taylor, for the sake of this, our only planet, use it. 

Tim Donahue is a high school English teacher at Greenwich (Connecticut) Country Day School. He writes about education and climate change.