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I
WANT TO TOUCH PEOPLE BEYOND GENDER, BEYOND COLOR, BEYOND
BOUNDARIES.
 If
life is a school, then musician, songwriter, entrepreneur,
activist, and director Robby Romero
went for his doctorate at an early age. Spending his
childhood traveling with his mother, actress/writer Rita
Rogers, between Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, where he
lived on Dennis Hopper’s ranch, Romero was surrounded by
some of the most ingenious artistic minds of the time.
All this
immeasurable experience, coupled with an apprenticeship of
sorts with Native American activist Dennis Banks in the
80’s, could only lead to one road: Robby
Romero was destined to become America’s answer to
Sting. So it is really no surprise that Sting and his wife
Trudy asked him to perform at the recent Rainforest
Awareness Week fundraiser in New York.
Why wouldn’t
they want him? Not only is he a successful musician, an
award-winning filmmaker, the creator of several
groundbreaking PSAs for MTV’s “Free Your Mind”
Campaign as well as a Special U.N. Ambassador of Youth for
the Environment, but he’s also an organizer for the Save
America’s Forests campaign.
Romero’s
recent film project about this important issue, Hidden
Medicine, produced by Roland Joffé and Horst
Rechelbacher of Aveda, was a standout at Sundance. And
portions of the profits from the film’s soundtrack,
scored by Romero himself and performed by his
“alter-native” band Red Thunder,
are being donated to the Native
Children’s Survival Awareness Campaign to protect
the four percent of American forests that remain.
But Romero’s
roots work doesn’t end there. He is currently developing
Indigenous, a line of
lifestyle products for Aveda that contains ingredients
from North America, as well as partnering his Thunderdancer
line of organic and wildcrafted native herbal products
with Intelligent Nutrients. Two documentary films are in
development. One, tentatively titled New Buffalo, promises
to be a controversial examination of Indian gaming.
For more
information about the Hidden
Medicine Forest Campaign or to learn more about The
Act to Save America’s Forests, log onto Red
Thunder’s site, www.eaglethunder.com
or www.saveamericasforests.org.
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