If it weren’t for a small garden outside of a one-bedroom apartment on Trigo Road in Isla Vista, Jack Johnson as we know him may never have taken root. During his senior year at UCSB, the Hawaiian-born film studies major moved in with his girlfriend Kim, whom he’d marry a couple years later. Their apartment overlooked an empty lot on the corner of Camino Pescadero, and that’s where they tended to zucchini and huge sunflowers next to a fountain that Jack built from an old bike tire and spray can caps.
“We planted a garden and saw things grow,” Jack told me over the phone during a tour stop near Houston last month. “We got that feeling together, that there’s something in this.”
It wasn’t long after those early squash harvests that Jack’s rocket ship to global stardom as a big-wave surfing singer-songwriter took off, with Kim steadily in the cockpit, charting their career trajectory behind the scenes. Since 2000, he’s recorded nearly a dozen albums that sold more than 25 million copies, performed more than 250 songs that have streamed at least 10 billion times, played hundreds of concerts in every corner of the world, and become the soundtrack to trendy restaurants and big-box department stores alike.
But that spirit of putting seeds in the ground and watching them grow remains core to Jack and Kim’s missions beyond the music. In addition to building environmental education foundations for both Hawai‘i (Kōkua Hawai‘i, founded 2003) and everywhere else (Johnson Ohana, founded 2008) — which have contributed more than $40 million of album and tour proceeds to countless charities — the Johnsons took over eight acres of land on the North Shore of Oahu in 2019 to develop the Kōkua Learning Farm…