Even if you’ve somehow never heard one of his songs, you’ve gotta love Jack Johnson simply for being Jack Johnson. The Hawaii-raised 42-year-old has sold millions upon millions of records, and been a mainstay on the chilled-out singer-songwriter circuit since the '00s. But what’s most admirable is the way that he chooses to live his life off-stage—basically by using his celebrity and success to make the planet a better place. Catch him at Deer Lake Park tonight (July 23).

No "Waiting Room" in the living room. In his high-school years, Johnson played in a punk-rock group with the improbable name of Limber Chicken. He reminisces about those days in the song “Tape Deck”, in which he sings “Luke’s mom said that after school/We could rehearse in the living room/But that sure didn’t last too long/Guess she didn’t know we’d play Fugazi songs.” We think this is probably the only time the posthardcore band has been mentioned in a song by an artist who has made Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, but then again we haven’t given Ed Sheeran’s lyrics a full read-through.

Rehab done right. Sometimes something good comes out of something horrible. When he was 17, Johnson—who has surfed since he was a child in Hawaii—found himself on the wrong side of a wave the size of a small office building. Jumping off his board in a desperate bail-out, he ended up smashing face first into a coral head. The collateral damage included a broken nose and skull, missing front teeth, and enough stitches (150 or so) to make him look like a tropical Frankenstein. The upside all of this was that Johnson had plenty of rehab time before he could return to the beach. He used it to work on improving his guitar playing.

Soak up the sun. Johnson owns two recording studios powered by the sun. For about a decade, Johnson has been making his albums at the Solar Powered Plastic Plant in Los Angeles and the Mango Tree in Hawaii. All three of his sun-fuelled releases to date—2008’s Sleep Through the Static, 2010’s To the Sea, and 2013’s From Here to Now to You—have landed at the top of the Billboard 200, so Johnson clearly did something right be going off the grid. Here’s hoping his solar panels generate enough voltage to power an electric skillet, because a man needs his banana pancakes.

Better to give than... Some artists make a big deal of earmarking a portion of their ticket sales to charity. Others really step up when it comes to giving back—remember when Michael Buble used a headlining gig at Rogers Arena to announce he was donating the entire show’s profits to Vancouver Children’s Hospital? Johnson is famous for stepping up to make the world a better place, and not just in a token fashion. In 2008 he founded the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, which distributes money to groups active in arts, music, and environmental education. Between the years of 2010 and 2013 the singer donated all tour profits to charity. And you thought Chris Martin was a good guy. 

No shit. Johnson’s environmental commitment makes Gwyneth Paltrow look like a greedy oil baron. Not only does the singer run his cars off electricity—the excess of which he puts back into the Hawaiian grid—Johnson uses the natural resources available to him to create a flourishing garden. Namely, his shit. “We don’t have a sewage line,” he told the Telegraph. “We have an aerating system that basically breaks it all down to grey water. It sits long enough and it decomposes, and then every so often you got to have the guy come and pump it out.” Welcome to the future, folks.