Justin Timberlake: FutureGreen

Excerpted from The Green Book The trip that I recently took to Africa was really an eye-opening experience for me. It led me to this place, a place I hadn''t thought about before in my mind. You see so many things and you want to help. It''s an education. We met a group of kids being educated on HIV, some people my age. Over here, we learn about some of that stuff in the fifth and sixth grade! A lot of things like that stuck with me, because there are so many problems and so many people who need help. And it all goes back to the environment, and our relationship to it, and what we can do to help ourselves. Water is such a huge issue, and food. Then you think about where that all comes from. Then you think about sanitation and how that can lead to disease. Like I said, there''s so much. I wanted to save the world in the palm of my hand. Anyone with half a heart who sees the statistics would want to do as much as they could and contribute as much as they can. But you realize that it''s a marathon, not a sprint. So I wanted to do what would be most effective with my time and my energy. I was working on this album at the time, and I knew I was going to be putting a tour together for it, so it just made a lot of sense to think about carbon offsetting. It all just coincided with my schedule. I hadn''t really thought about how much you emit on tour, how much all those trucks emit. In your mind, you simply don''t think about all that pollution. So here I am going on tour, and I''m thinking carbon offsetting is going to make a huge dent in my footprint; I am going on tour for a whole year. It''s what I can do right now. --Justin Justin on the Green Carpet at the Shrek Premiere Excerpted from The Green Book www.ReadTheGreenBook.com by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen Available at Barnes and Nobles Photos Wireimage