Fade Out: The Environmental Movement and Environmental Song after the Folk Rock Era
Or, After the Musical Aftermath of Earth Day: Featuring Earth Songs by Johnny Cash, Loudon Wainwright, Bruce Cockburn, Dar Williams, Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, Jack Johnson
This is now the eighteenth (and final) entry of my series tracing the greening of folk rock from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 to that first Earth Day in April of 1970. My point has been that folk rock, whether it was leading the way or following the crowd, played a key part in building the environmental movement’s energy and enthusiasm. That energy led not just to the first Earth Day but to important environmental legislation that protected lands and waters and living things, improving the quality of our lives as it improved the quality of our environment. That energy and enthusiasm continued unabated for the next year or two after that first Earth Day, and that’s what I focused on in my last post on the “musical aftermath” of Earth Day. But alas, things were about to change — in both the music and in the environmental consciousness of American culture.
Let’s attend to the music first. While the folk and rock categories were never very distinct, or clearly separable, through the 1960s, by the seventies nobody was still talking about “folk rock” as the new thing or even the dominant thing in popular music. The folk influence in the Sixties had undoubtedly changed rock forevermore, by showing what could be done with a bit of social conscience put to music and with due attention paid to the lyrics. By 1970 the adventurous spirit that led to the blending of acoustic and electric instrumentation, well, it was a fait accompli. As for the rest of the ’70s, that blend no longer seemed new or particularly adventurous. And maybe — especially once the US withdrew from the Viet Nam War — the spirit of protest was on the wane as well.
Whatever the cause, it is clear that the pace of environmental song slows throughout the rest of the 1970s. True, in 1973 Stevie Wonder can say of his urban hero in “Living for the City” that “He’s almost dead from breathing in pollution.” In 1974 Johnny Cash warned us, “Don’t Go Near the Water” — not the same song as the Beach Boys 1971 song of the same title, but with some of the same sentiments. In 1977, John Martyn’s “One World” hints at the interconnection of everything linked to everything else in our one world. And that’s really about it. It’s a pretty remarkable drop-off considering how much musical energy was devoted to environmental preservation in the previous decade. It’s almost like the enthusiasm built to the crescendo of Earth Day, and while that chord resonated in the cultural air for another year or two (like the long-drawn sustain of the final E chord of The Beatles’ “Day in the Life”), eventually it faded away.
Perhaps the decrease in musicians tuning-in to the environment was due to changes in musical trends. By the end of the 1970s, there was no longer much folk blending in with the rock, and the sounds of rock and other popular music were becoming distinctly incompatible with the earthy acoustic sounds of folk and folk rock. Instead we got increasingly heavy metal (though in my view the metal in question was not gold) and then, Lord help us, disco (as in “disco sucks”).
If the environmental impulse in popular music had begun to wane after 1972, it is also true that environmental song has hardly disappeared. In the decades since the heyday of folk rock, there have been plenty of environmentally-themed songs, and they run the gamut of musical styles. In the 1980s we heard enviro songs from R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs. In the ’90s Julian Lennon (“Saltwater”), Michael Jackson (“Earth Song”), Metallica (“Blackened”), and Dave Matthews (“Don’t Drink the Water”) got in on the act. In the 2000s we’ve heard from The Cranberries (“Time Is Ticking Out”), Will.i.am (“S.O.S. Mother Earth”), Beck (“Gamma Ray”), U2 (“Indian Summer Sky”), Disturbed (“Another Way to Die”), Imagine Dragons (“Radioactive”), Enya (“Listen to the River”), Lil Dicky (“Earth”). It’s quite a varied list — from heavy metal to rap to new age to indie rock and hard rock — and it would seem that the inclusion of an acoustic guitar is no longer a prerequisite for caring about our home planet. It might help, though, as some of the best environmental songs of the past few decades come from songwriters whose folk roots still show. I’m thinking here of excellent songs like Loudon Wainwright’s “Hard Day on the Planet” (1986):
Or Bruce Cockburn’s “If a Tree Falls” (1991):
Or Dar Williams’s “Go To the Woods” (2012):
There have also been notable careers from environmentalist musicians who foregrounded their commitment to the planet in almost everything they did, album after album. I’m thinking here of folks like Walkin’ Jim Stoltz and Jack Johnson.
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz built himself a life where he could spend half of each year wandering wilderness trails — the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, the North Country Trail across the country, the Yellowstone to Yukon Trail (where the trail is only an idea for a trail). His trusty guitar Stella strapped to his backpack, Walkin’ Jim would take magnificent photos and write songs full of love for wild places — songs like “Forever Wild,” “Thinking like a Mountain,” “Wild Wind,” “Wolf Song” (to mention just a few of my favorites). Then the other half of the year he’d go on tour with an award-winning show that combined the songs and his stories backed by a marvelous slideshow. Jack Johnson, in addition to writing songs of sustainability like “The Three R’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle) from 2006 talks the environmental talk as well as sings the songs. He gives downloads of his music, available nowhere else, to fans who volunteer for environmental organizations, and at his concerts he provides table space for environmental non-profits to share information about their work. (For a fuller review of environmental song that carries us closer to the present day, let me recommend to you David Ingram’s Jukebox in the Garden and Mark Pedelty’s Ecomusicology.)
Here is an a capella version of Walkin’ Jim’s “Forever Wild” accompanied by his gorgeous photos:
And here is Jack Johnson’s “Three R’s”:
But if environmental song has remained a thing since the first Earth Day, it is also true that there has been nothing like the groundswell of musical green persuasion that we saw in the late Sixties. Back then, if you were listening to music at all, you were bound to get the environmental message. It was pervasive, reflecting and amplifying the whole culture’s awakened environmental consciousness. And since then, well, you can find environmental songs if you’re looking (or listening) for them, but they’re not all around us in the musical air. Environmentalism in popular song has become a bit of a diminished thing. And that diminishment is just as evident in the fate of environmentalism in the political realm as well.
Though plenty of environmental legislation passed during the Nixon administration — more than we had seen in any Republican administration since Teddy Roosevelt’s — by the end of his Watergate-truncated term, Nixon was already changing his tune regarding environmental protection. Regulated industries began to raise objections, particularly in response to the Endangered Species Act, and thus began the Republican hostility to environmental protection that we have seen in the decades since. In his term, taking over for Nixon, Gerald Ford appointed as Secretary of the Interior Thomas Kleppe, who had been the leader of the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” a coalition of Western ranchers who objected to federal environmental protections on the federal lands they leased (at a bargain price) to graze their cattle.
At the end of the Carter administration, Reagan began his campaign against environmental protection, promising “regulatory relief.” Once in office, he signed an executive order requiring “cost-benefit analyses” to counterbalance environmental concerns that were supposed to be taken into account under the National Environmental Policy Act. What cost-benefit analysis essentially did is pit conservationist impulses against dollar signs. And lo and behold, the dollar signs, then and now, seem to consistently come out ahead — perhaps because most of the interested parties (trees, rivers, lakes, air, endangered species) for some reason failed to make their case on the solid grounds of dollars and cents. Reagan continued a trend started by Ford when he appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch (mother of the current Supreme Court’s Neal) as head of EPA, both openly hostile to the environmental reason-for-being of the agencies they were put in charge of.
Since then, as we all know, environmental concern has become a partisan issue, with the usual roadblocks standing in the way of anything getting done. But the fact that species like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon have been saved from extinction, that most of our lakes and waterways are cleaner now than in the mid-1960s (Lake Erie and the now-swimmable Hudson River being the poster boys for what can be accomplished), that we can trust that the water we drink is safe — well, all that is thanks to the environmental legislation in the decade around the first Earth Day. Those efforts were spurred on by the efforts of environmentalists and the votes of citizens who supported that legislation. And maybe, just maybe, what people were listening to on the radio and on their turntables might have had something to do with creating the climate that made all that possible. Maybe, just maybe — with the right song, the right words, the right riff — maybe, with the right listening — it could do so again.
Works Cited
Ingram, David. The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
