Folk Rock on the Way to Earth Day: An Introduction
Songs of the Sixties and the Rise of the Modern Environmental Movement
Some random things in nature:
Animals. Birds. And Yardbirds.
Crickets. And of course Holly.
Buffalo. Spring fields.
Turtles. Eagles.
Stones. Some of which roll.
Rock.
Beetles. About which biologist J.B.S. Haldane once commented, when asked what he could conclude about the Creator from a study of the creation, “He seems to have had an inordinate fondness for beetles.” Put a “The” in front of it, spell it with an “a,” and the same is true of my whole (boomer) generation: we have an inordinate fondness for The Beatles.
You likely get already what I am hinting at with my list above: that the names of a lot of rock ‘n roll bands, especially from the early days, bespeak a connection to the natural world. That might seem surprising since we may think of rock as an urban genre, full of electricity, synthesized sound, and the driving beat of fast-paced modern civilization. On the other hand, maybe it is not so surprising when we think of rock as a particularly socially engaged kind of music, very much involved in issues of the day, perhaps most strikingly in the 1960s, in its prominent role in protesting the Viet Nam War.
What I’m interested in exploring here in this seventeen-part series is the role that folk and rock — and their legitimate offspring folk rock, then in full flower — may have played in the rise of the modern environmental movement. Environmental historians typically see that movement as beginning with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and becoming an established force with the celebration of the first Earth Day in April of 1970. We’re talking, then, about the Sixties, heyday of hippies, protest music, the “folk scare” of the early Sixties (as Martin Mull famously had it, “that shit almost caught on”), and early rock — the era of The Beatles and the first iteration of The Rolling Stones, the flourishing of folk rock in bands like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, and the ascent of singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen.
This was also the era when a tremendous amount of environmental legislation was passed in the United States: The Wilderness Act (1964), the Clean Air Act (1963, then strengthened in 1970), the Water Quality Act (1965, predecessor of the Clean Water Act of 1972), the first federal legislation in defense of endangered species (1966), the Wild and Scenic River Act and the National Trail Systems Act (1968), and the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), mandating an environmental impact statement for any federal legislation. Later in 1970, after the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were established.
Beyond the legislative halls of Washington, DC, environmental issues loomed large throughout the culture. The Sierra Club’s membership rolls grew from seven thousand in 1950 to over a hundred thousand in 1970 (Rome 47). It was the era when, according to Jedediah Purdy in After Nature, the very “concept of the environment” was invented (197). In fact, the “environment” was named Time magazine’s “person” of the year for 1970. Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb and the first Whole Earth Catalogue came out in 1968, and in 1969 the Cuyahoga River was in the national news when it caught fire. (Yes, a river caught fire — but it was a river full of spilled oil and gas and flammable trash.) In short, environmentalism was in the air of American culture at the same time folk rock was dominating the air waves.
Is there a link between the music of the day and rise of the modern environmental movement? That’s the sort of thing I intend to explore in this series. Along the way we’ll entertain such questions as whether folk rock was shaping the culture’s values or reflecting them back at the culture. It could be that folk rock was a way of spreading the environmental message, all the way from the dorm room to the legislative halls. If that is the case, then that would mean that folk rock was a powerfully and uniquely effective rhetoric. Or it could be that environmentalism was simply pervasive in the culture, such that neither legislator nor guitar-strumming crooner was immune. But in that case folk rock would still deserve our attention, as an indicator of just what the environmental concerns of the era were.
In terms of Marxist literary theory, this question of whether the music was influencing the culture or simply reflecting its concerns is the difference between “production theory” and “reflection theory.” Production theory suggests that “anti-hegemonic” art — or art that challenges the “system” — can produce change in the culture and produce an alternate hegemony, or a new way of being and a new set of cultural values. Reflection theory says that art can do no more than reflect the power structure of the status quo, since the people in control of the society and its economic systems decide which art gets seen or heard. In the case of Sixties folk rock, it may be a little bit of both: folk rock songwriters picked up on what was in the air and then helped spread the word far and wide via the earworm hooks of catchy tunes. Some songs did so in cautious ways that would shy away from any serious challenge to the political, economic, and cultural status quo, while others ventured a more radical and society-shaking (if not earth-shaking) critique.
In future posts I’ll be exploring the pre-Sixties context for the green songs of the era, reviewing the key themes of the era’s environmental songs, all leading up to a countdown of the “Top 40” environmentally-themed songs from 1962–1970. We’ll be delving into songs that can tell us a lot about the environmental concerns of the time and about the way the issues were being framed. And we’ll explore the extent to which songs may have been formative not only in helping create the first Earth Day but also in shaping the modern environmental movement. So, sit back, listen, read, and enjoy.
Works Cited
Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Rome, Adam. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.
