Blake Team Up With WWF

Beautiful Earth the haunting song by classical Brit award winners and 2010 nominees, Blake, has today (8th March 2010) been announced as the anthem for WWF’s Earth Hour in the UK.

At 8.30pm on 27th March 2010, millions of people will show they care about climate change, by turning off their lights for ‘Earth Hour’. The Honorable Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States of America and an environmental activist, has written to wish Beautiful Earth and the campaign ‘much success’ and his ‘best wishes’.

Earth Hour 2009 was the world’s largest mass participation event on climate change, with around a billion people in over 400 towns and cities, across 88 countries, switching off their lights for one hour.

In total 1,059 iconic landmarks around the world switched off their lights, including Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, The Strip in Las Vegas and the Pyramids in Egypt.

Colin Butfield, Head of Campaigns at WWF-UK said: “Earth Hour is a global signal that people all around the world want action against climate change and we are delighted that Blake have dedicated Beautiful Earth to celebrating the event ”

The Blake/WWF relationship formed after a chance meeting at the global climate change conference held in Copenhagen last December, and as a result Beautiful Earth was included in the People’s Orb (a globe containing a massive digital storage space, filled with information about climate change and pledges of support from millions of people around the world). This was presented to the UN during the summit.

Says Stephen Bowman from the group - “Ever since a child in the 80's I've known WWF and it's iconic panda logo, but I never dreamed one day I'd be able to do something to help them around the world.

Being in Copenhagen during the climate talks, it became clear that politicians could only do so much. Those billions of people at home, following on the TV and internet, were the ones with the real power. We hope that us joining the Earth Hour campaign, using a simple song to spread the message worldwide, will show we're all in this together”.

Adds Blake’s Humphrey Berney –“WWF has always been at the forefront of campaigning and acting to preserve the planet. It is wonderful to be involved in their great work, especially at such a critical time”.

The charity single, Beautiful Earth, written by Jeff Chegwin and Adrian Munsey, will be released digitally on March 22nd 2010 and all profits - a minimum of 25p per single - will be donated to WWF.  In addition, a Special Edition of the album Together will be released on March 29th 2010 featuring ‘Beautiful Earth’ and two other new tracks. All profits from the ‘Beautiful Earth’ track will again be donated to WWF.