In real life, Cameron Diaz is as green as Princess Fiona, the character she voices in Shrek. The four-time Golden Globe-nominated actress drives a hybrid Prius, uses offsets for carbon-neutral travel, recycles, and buys environmentally friendly products. She also traveled the world to examine environmental issues in her MTV show Trippin; helped develop and wrote the foreword for a new book just out called The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time; is currently appearing in a new series of green-themed public service announcements; and traveled to Nashville to take a training course taught by Al Gore about global warming. It was her admiration for the former VP that led to her current involvement helping promote his latest project, Live Earth, a 24-hour, seven-continent series of nine concerts taking place on July 7, 2007, that will bring together more than 150 music artists (including Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Rihanna, and the Police) and (according to Live Earth's website) 2 billion people to ''use the global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis.''
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How would you describe Live Earth?
CAMERON DIAZ: It's a big party. [Laughs] It's to bring awareness and have a kick-off, basically. But it's a big party. Having these concerts I think is a way to just kick off what is going to be the next step of the movement — making people aware, and bringing attention to this cause. Which is everyone's cause: It's the one thing that we actually all share in common: the planet.
What aspects of Live Earth are you most excited about?
I'm looking forward to the energy. I'm looking forward to bringing people together. I keep thinking of it as a sort of premiere party for this campaign which, once we get through the concert — which is going to be a lot of fun and everybody's going to come together and hopefully become more aware of what's going on — we're setting the ball in motion.
You said at the February press conference for Live Earth that ''This is the only issue in the history of mankind that affects every single one of us.'' What a statement, then, to have an event take place simultaneously on seven different continents around the world.
I think so, absolutely. We're a global society; we're a global community. Everybody's surviving off the planet, surviving off the land somehow.... We all require the same things and we all get it from the same place. So in that alone, we have become a global society. What I see is all of it coming together now that we're all connected. Especially through music — that's not even global, that's universal. [Laughs]
NEXT: Diaz's tips on going green
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