Environmental Activism Through Music: From Transcendentalism to Modern Protest

Environmental activism through music

Although songs celebrating nature’s beauty go back to ancient Greece and Rome, using popular protest music to advance environmentalist ideas really took off in the 19th century alongside the American Transcendentalist movement. A song from 1837, George Morris and Henry Russell’s “Woodman! Spare that Tree!”, is generally seen as the first in this tradition. Over the next century, various sentimental—and often fairly ordinary—songs about gardens, landscapes, and American plants and animals helped promote the Conservationist and Preservationist movements, both of which laid the groundwork for modern environmentalism, which emerged in the 1950s. Back then, few of these songs actually sparked protest. But in the last hundred years, musicians have created a sizable body of environmentalist protest work in all sorts of musical styles. Over the past fifty-plus years, environmental themes have grown dramatically in music. In that way, music has played an essential role in building subcultural protest and a larger social movement concerned with sustainability politics.

Many musicians associated with environmentalism come from folk, alternative, and independent scenes: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Earth Crisis, Ani DiFranco, Michael Franti and Spearhead, and Dead Prez, for instance. Yet surveys of the most influential and lasting environmentalist songs show that they often come from major mainstream pop and rock artists such as Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Neil Young, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead. The last few decades have also brought spectacular benefit concerts focused on environmental messaging, including No Nukes (with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Graham Nash), Farm Aid (Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp), Rock for the Rainforest (Sting), and Live Earth (organized with former Vice President Al Gore).

Today, environmentally conscious songs are everywhere, performed by artists on every continent—among them Björk (Scandinavia), Ladysmith Black Mambazo (South Africa), Youssou N’Dour (Senegal), Maná (Mexico), Paulo Lara (Brazil), Mr. Children (Japan), and Midnight Oil (Australia). Paul D. Miller, better known as DJ Spooky, recently released a multimedia work about climate literacy, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, a kaleidoscopic tone poem built from sounds he recorded during a trip to the South Pole. These broad expressions of musical environmentalism can be seen as the cultural counterpart of an emerging planetary community rooted in conservation and social justice —the defining shape of 21st-century environmentalism. Yet, like other forms of spectacular mass culture, the commercial, trendy side of eco-conscious music can become corporate greenwashing: promoting the style but not the substance of sustainability as a feel-good consumer norm. The question that arises is whether a global media culture that offers unprecedented sales and market access to recording artists can itself sustain a genuine environmental movement.

The classical tradition

Leaving aside “Woodman! Spare that Tree!,” most environmental music from the 19th and early 20th centuries did not directly spark activism; instead it influenced cultural attitudes through romantic, emotional portrayals of nature and the American landscape.

During that era, the most important style for such music was likely classical orchestral rather than popular. The reason: Dwight’s Journal of Music, the most influential American music publication of its day, argued that the Romantic classical music of composers like Mozart and Beethoven formed an organic intellectual and spiritual union with the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. The journal’s publisher, John Sullivan Dwight, was himself a well-known Transcendentalist who once served as music director at the utopian commune Brook Farm. Although Dwight’s European tastes didn’t make a lasting mark on the mainstream, his influence passed the Transcendentalists’ ecological ethos to later generations of American composers, among them Horatio Parker, Anthony Philip Heinrich, Charles Ives, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and John Cage. This ethos still appears in contemporary works, such as Philip Glass’s score for the 1982 environmental film Koyaanisqatsi and Andrew Culver’s Ocean 1—133, which explores “tensegrity”—a structural concept coined by ecological thinker R. Buckminster Fuller.

Folk music as protest

With its populist spirit, tradition of protest, and reliance on acoustic and homespun instruments, folk music is often seen as the genre that best suits the environmental movement. Especially when electrified into “folk rock,” it has left an enduring environmental mark on the public imagination and wider culture.

The first notable American folk environmentalist tune may be “The Boll Weevil Song,” whose initial verses about the cotton-eating insect are credited to a man named Gates Thomas in 1897, though the lyrics changed repeatedly in following decades. Later, Carl Sandburg included a version in his famous American Songbag (1927). The song dramatizes a kill-or-be-killed exchange among farmers, sharecroppers, and political leaders regarding a tiny beetle that invaded the Southwest from Mexico around 1892 and then spread eastward, devastating the cotton-based economy of the South. Though sometimes sung at the time as a protest against bureaucratic mismanagement of agriculture, the song now reveals an awareness of ecological dangers in industrial monocropping and how invasive insects can cause regional catastrophes. Ornily enough, environmental historians today consider the boll weevil invasion a prod that pushed Southern farmers to finally diversify crops into staples like peanuts that the weevil could not harm.

Another man-made environmental disaster from the Great Depression shows up in many folk songs: the Dust Bowl of the Midwestern plains. Woody Guthrie’s iconic “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” (1940) is a ballad describing how people interpreted the fierce dust storms, caused by intensive over-farming, as a sign of the end times. Guthrie is best known for writing what is sometimes called America’s alternative national anthem, “This Land is Your Land.”

While this song appears to celebrate the diverse ecological heritage of the United States as a unified homeland, it also includes protest verses often omitted in school settings. The chorus “This land is your land, this land is my land” was deliberately ambiguous: its positive reading suggests a commons belonging to everyone, but a critical reading points to institutional private property, dividing land into “yours” and “mine” to our collective disadvantage. Guthrie penned many other proto-environmental songs, including “Trouble at Redondo,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Roll On, Columbia,” and “Eleckatricity and All.” The last three were part of a set of twenty-six he was hired to write in 1941 promoting dam and electricity projects by the Department of the Interior’s Bonneville Power Administration. Yet, like “This Land is Your Land,” those songs playfully blend in or lend themselves to critical readings of the projects they seem to unquestioningly celebrate.

Guthrie’s collaborator, Pete Seeger, brought folk and environmental activism even further. He released what many regard as the first environmentalist album, God Bless the Grass (1966). The title track and many others came from his friend Malvina Reynolds, who deserves recognition as one of the greatest environmentalist songwriters ever. Her titles include “Cement Octopus” (about California freeways), “The Faucets are Dripping” (water waste), “Let It Be” (wilderness), “There’ll Come a Time” (pollution), and “What Have They Done to the Rain” (toxic fallout). A committed activist, Seeger particularly focused in the late 1960s and 1970s on cleaning up the heavily polluted Hudson River in New York. Living in a cabin he built by hand in the river valley, he founded the organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Through this nonprofit, he renovated a historic 106-foot sloop that set sail in 1969. On board, he publicized the river’s plight by singing songs like “Garbage” and “Sailing Up, Sailing Down,” led environmental education programs for all ages, and began an annual music-and-environment festival. Clearwater is seen as a major milestone in the environmental movement and helped bring key indicator species like the Bald Eagle and Striped Bass back to the Hudson River.

Today the work of Guthrie, Seeger, and Reynolds may seem marginal. But in the 1960s, the folk revival and the environmental movement were both mainstream, fueled by an era of intense social engagement. Countless artists wrote songs with either direct or implied environmentalist conscience—musicians including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Country Joe McDonald. By the decade’s end, Joni Mitchell, who alongside Dylan had begun blending folk with rock and other genres, released one of the greatest environmentalist songs of all time, “Big Yellow Taxi” (featuring its famously lamenting chorus, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone; they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot”). A year later in 1970, she gave the world “Woodstock,” a commemorative countercultural anthem implying that the legendary concert embodied a hippie environmentalism based in cosmic connections to land and nature’s healing power.

In 1971, John Prine released another highly respected environmental song, “Paradise,” telling how Peabody Coal engaged in destructive mountaintop removal and ruined his father’s childhood hometown in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. The tune has been widely covered, including by John Denver, who had a top-ten hit with his own environmental ode to mountain life, “Rocky Mountain High.” Denver mixed folk and country and built a strong career as an activist and environmental songwriter from the 1970s through the 1990s. His music promoted the virtues of simpler rural living and opposed the desecration of areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by business. He also founded a sustainability education nonprofit (Windstar Foundation), a native reforestation organization (Plant-It 2020), and very publicly supported wilderness conservation, species protection, global humanitarian relief, and an end to nuclear energy. For these reasons, many see him as the leading environmental musician during his time of active recording.

Not all folk took a mainstream path, however. Some of the most important music-driven environmental activism comes from songs played by—and in support of—radical groups like Earth First! The most famous of these musicians, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, were organizing campaigns to defend old-growth redwoods in northern California. In 1990, a pipe bomb exploded in their car. The Oakland police and FBI quickly arrested the pair, impounded their instruments, and labeled them “ecoterrorists.” Ultimately no charges were brought. Later evidence pointed to widespread corruption in the investigation and possible government involvement in the attack. A federal civil suit awarded Bari and Cherney $4.4 million in 2002. Cherney’s song “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” documents the story and appears in the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Song Book (36th edition, 1995).

David Rovics—though not an Earth First! member—is now regarded as the movement folksinger of choice, openly supporting radical environmentalists in dozens of songs, including one about Judi Bari. Possibly his most controversial number, “Song for the ELF,” celebrates the international guerrilla group Earth Liberation Front, which uses arson and is responsible for over a hundred million dollars in property damages across the last twenty years. Similarly, “Burn it Down” defends Rod Coronado, a radical environmentalist, arsonist, and unofficial ELF spokesperson. Sung to a calypso rhythm, the lyrics include: “We don’t like the Walmart and we’re going to burn it down, corporate terrorism drive it out of town… Burn it down, burn it down, we’re going to burn it down!”

Rock and popular music

Rock and other popular music has spread environmentalist messages even more broadly than folk has. Beginning in the 1960s, when youth counterculture gravitated to music as protest against perceived conservative values, many rock musicians recorded songs about environmental damage as well as songs celebrating the new ecological consciousness. The Grateful Dead, for some the decade’s most iconic band, didn’t overtly take up environmentalist politics in their music until 1988, when they joined forces with the United Nations and the Rainforest Action Network to raise money for Amazonian conservation. But they started as the house band for the Merry Pranksters’ “Acid Tests,” events that included such people as Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand, who would go on to become leading environmentalist writers.

The Dead were also a headline act (along with the environmentally conscious Jefferson Airplane) at the first of the great countercultural happenings—the Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1967. There, rock, poetry, psychedelics, sexuality, and politics (including environmentalism) came together in a communal entertainment spectacle typical of how music helped organize alternative cultures that could serve as seedbeds of social change. Oncely, the rock of events like Acid Tests and Be-Ins also celebrated anti-environmental values: hedonism, individualism, escapism, and hipsterism, alongside pastoral attitudes and idealist beliefs that social transformation could be achieved through “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” as Timothy Leary’s repeated mantra went.

Not all 1960s musicians saw things so optimistically. The Beach Boys, for instance, did sing paeans to Big Sur and the California coast, but also released songs about ocean pollution (“Don’t Go Near the Water”), air pollution (“A Day in the Life of a Tree”), the ecological destruction of America (“The Trader”), and revolutionary environmental politics of the 1960s (“Student Demonstration Time”). Neil Young’s covered classic “After the Goldrush” (1970) has the words “Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s”; though a closing vision has a “silver seed” leaving on a ship for a new star, Young frames himself “lying in a burned-out basement with the full moon in his eye.” Bands like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention made critically dark, satirical songs about the environment, grappling with the paradox of modern rock’s commercial, industrial ethos alongside artists’ longing for a greener world.

In 1971, Motown star Marvin Gaye scored a hit with “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” bringing environmentalism alongside matters like black power, feminism, and inner-city poverty that R&B and soul artists such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield—and Gaye himself—had also treated. This song has stayed relevant to ecological activists and has been covered by artists like John Legend and Alicia Keys as a demonstration of their own environmental commitments. Its refrain, “Mercy mercy me, things ain’t what they used to be,” provides a lament; Gaye adds observations on overpopulation, mass extinction, toxicity, and oil spills. Without a positive counterpoint, offfering a soulful grief rooted in blues and gospel.

Michael Jackson took an epic approach in 1995 with “Earth Song,” a seven-minute, high-budget music video that graphically showed planetary destruction in many forms, though its end imagery suggests a healed earth and a renewed population of people, animals, and trees after Jackson’s powerful wails testifying to suffering and innocence that climax the song. The song itself, just like the video, emphasizes that not much hope remains beyond recognizing needless harm to the planet. “Earth Song” was nominated for a Grammy and reached number-one in many countries, remaining Jackson’s best-selling record in the UK. Stikingly, it was never released in the United States. Not until a 2010 Grammy tribute performance after his death did many American fans even know it existed.

During the 1990s, Don Henley, a co-founder of The Eagles, made news not only for his music but for his environmental activism. Beyond creating increasingly political songs, he established himself as a dedicated preservationist. Henley founded the Walden Woods Project to prevent development around the forests near Thoreau’s cabin and Walden Pond. In 1993, he also started the Caddo Lake Institute, an organization that provides ecological education about wetlands and has successfully restored the Texas wetlands surrounding Caddo Lake, where Henley spent much of his childhood.

Today, pop and rock figures including Sheryl Crow, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Moby, Perry Farrell, and groups like Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., Bon Jovi, and Linkin Park represent an intense surge of environmental consciousness within rock and popular music. Contemporary artists not only write activist songs but have increasingly sought to “green” their careers by addressing packaging, touring, stage electricity, food, concessions, and other professional practices. Coalitions like Reverb’s Green Music Group have emerged as nonprofits, demonstrating artists’ commitments to making the industry carbon-neutral, organic, resource-efficient, and renewable. Nonprofits such as Heal the Bay and Natural Resources Defense Council have also formed regular partnerships with musicians and received donations from them. Yet, some environmentalists argue that many of these efforts amount to industry reforms and green consumerism, constituting a greenwash because of the massive environmental toll that concerts and the recording industry exact on the global economy.

High-profile festivals and benefit concerts continue to attract musicians who consider themselves environmental activists. Live Earth events launched in July 2007, billed as the largest global entertainment event in history, drew roughly 30 million online streams on MSN from 8 million users worldwide. The first concert featured over 150 musical acts across 11 locations, aiming to raise awareness and encourage personal pledges to combat climate change. However, Live Earth faced heavy criticism for its parent company’s for-profit status, unsustainable resource use, and lack of tangible, enforceable goals. In 2010, Live Earth partnered with Dow Chemical to sponsor The Run for Water, a 200-city event mixing benefit races with concerts by Melissa Etheridge, Collective Soul, and the hip-hop group The Roots. This partnership proved scandalous, as Dow was responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster, often called the worst corporate environmental catastrophe in history, and its industrial plants are known polluters of global drinking water sources. Some cities, including London and Milan, withdrew their sponsorship, and Amnesty International supported an international protest.

Other musical environmentalism emerges in metal, hip-hop, and children’s music.

Heavy metal has carried environmentalist messages since the genre’s early days with bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. During the 1980s and 1990s, major metal groups such as Metallica and Megadeth released notable songs about nuclear destruction and other ecological concerns. A currently popular French death metal band, Gojira, writes lyrics about subjects like learning from trees and has donated song royalties to benefit the group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. A drone-heavy and distorted style known as black metal emerged in Norway during the 1990s, often associated with eco-fascism and satanic ideology; in the United States, activist bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Velvet Cacoon have recently adopted the style.

Since 1978, hardcore punk founders D.O.A. have linked anarchism to various political issues, including environmentalism. The band’s slogan is “Talk minus action equals zero.” A decade later, in 1989, the metalcore band Earth Crisis began forging a connection with animal and earth liberation activists, becoming a movement favorite. Many Earth Crisis songs promote violence against oppressors of the innocent, and the band openly identifies as straight-edge vegan, offering direct-action and animal-advocacy literature at their shows. Other punk and hardcore bands notable for espousing environmental and animal rights politics include Goldfinger, Propagandhi, Rise Against, and Oi Polloi.

Rap and hip-hop are not typically viewed as environmentalist in style, but early rap music originated partly to comment on and transform the urban environment its singers inhabited. The genre has a long history of addressing environmental justice issues affecting the urban poor and people of color worldwide. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 song “The Message” can be heard as a place-based lament about how institutionalized racism blights the urban jungle and limits residents’ chances at long, healthy lives. In the 1990s, the confrontational duo Dead Prez, who espouse Pan African socialism, began taking up environmental issues. Their 2009 album, Pulse of the People, claims to be among the first to recognize the necessity for the “hood” to go green, and the group’s website hosts an online lecture series examining the green movement from a holistic perspective of environmental justice. Another prominent hip-hop artist with environmental street credibility is Mos Def; his 2002 song “New World Water” is considered a classic that blends commentary on racism, commoditization of the commons, global warming, and toxic pollutants. Yet rap sometimes takes up more traditional conservationist themes. For instance, Dr. Octagon’s 2007 song “Trees” was used by MTV’s Think Campaign, with $1 from each single download donated to Friends of the Earth.

Finally, it is worth considering the role of environmentalism in children’s music. Educators have long espoused the power of music to help children understand complex issues like environmental activism. Many great folk singers and songwriters recorded versions of their environmentalist music specifically for young audiences. Today, various artists focus exclusively on children’s music, with Raffi and the Laurie Berkner Band standing out as notable representatives. In 2011, the Laurie Berkner Band partnered with Seventh Generation, the leading supplier of socially conscious household and personal care products, to freely release her environmentalist song “One Seed.” Raffi Cavoukian, known simply as Raffi, epitomizes what environmental activism in music can be. An award-winning best-selling singer, he became engaged in environmentalism in 1988 when he learned of the endangered beluga whale population. He began recording music dedicated to fostering a compassionate cultural shift, including an album specifically teaching children about sustainability, Evergreen Everblue (1996), and a 2007 song composed both with and in support of the David Suzuki Foundation, “Cool It: The Global Cooling Song.” His website offers many resources for understanding his environmentalist philosophy—called Child Honouring—including free music downloads.