Looking back, I probably couldn't have chosen a better person to teach me how to use my voice than Martina McBride.
In July 1994, I first watched McBride's music video for "Independence Day," a song that called attention to the issue of domestic violence. The powerful message of the song and the intensity of the video's images instantly grabbed ahold of me. Even as a kid, I recognized that the singer had done something special: She wasn't just entertaining people for a living; she was trying to make a difference by putting her voice into her work.
From that time on, I was a fan of McBride. She had an exceptional voice and a social conscience, and she continued making music to make a difference.
When it came time for me to find jobs, I made sure to look for ones that mattered. I couldn't sing like McBride, but I could make a difference with what I chose to do. Jobs that communicated about environmental issues were of particular interest because I had always loved animals and the environment.
I have been fortunate enough to find jobs that I think made a difference in society, and many of them have involved some form of environmental communication. Even this blog is a testament to my desire to use my voice for the environment.
McBride's "Independence Day" is an iconic song that has made a major impact on the world, but its less heralded legacy can be found in the way it taught me how to use my voice 30 years ago.
Some voices resonate with you from the first moment you hear them. For example, I still have extremely clear and vivid memories of singing along to Gordon Lightfoot's "Ode to Big Blue" as a child.
However, to me, Lightfoot and his music represent more than simply happy memories from childhood. I think "Ode to Big Blue" touched a tuning fork that had already been developing in me, and in doing so, it left a reverberating effect that's lasted to the present day. Although the song is not one of his most well-known works, it shares with essential Lightfoot hits like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzergerald,""Ghosts of Cape Horn," and "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" themes about human respect for and co-presence with the non-human parts of our environment.
I would even argue that Lightfoot used his music to contemplate his place in the environment. Songs like "Triangle," "River of Light," "The House You Live In," and "Too Many Clues in This Room," while expanding out to address societal and existential questions, maintain a rooting in environmental elements. It's as if, like many artists, including William Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Hardy, and Willa Cather, Lightfoot needed environmental elements to help him process and articulate his ideas. If that was the case, I can certainly relate, and it helps explain why his music spoke to me in such a powerful way.
It wasn't just that Lightfoot sang about the environment though. The way he sang about it also struck a chord with me (probably before I even fully understood why). As a child, I knew I liked "Ode to Big Blue" because it was about whales, which were among my most favorite animals. What I discovered later was that Lightfoot's music emphasized the connectedness and co-presence of humans and non-humans in the environment. In his songs, human action is inextricably tied to environmental causes and effects. If the "lifeblood" of the Canadian wilderness supplied the means for that country's economic development in "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," then the avaricious whaling depicted in "Ode to Big Blue" demonstrated the impacts that such economic development has on the environment in turn. The emphasis on these connections challenges the typical Western understanding of humans being separate from nature.
Just as importantly, Lightfoot never sugarcoated the connection between the human and the non-human, producing a sense that while often beneficial to humans, the environment demands respect. The personification of Big Blue demonstrates Lightfoot's sense that a whale exists on equal standing with a person. Meanwhile, the power of the natural world and its ability to wipe away human life in an instant runs through "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "Triangle," and "Ghosts of Cape Horn," leaving a jarring lesson about taking the environment for granted. In some ways, this point of emphasis might reinforce the traditional Western understanding of nature as something to fear. Yet because Lightfoot also sings about co-presence and connection with the non-human, even the scarier non-human elements garner more respect than fear in his songs. If we are part of the larger environment, we must recognize the threats it can pose, but that doesn't mean we have to wage war on it as an adversary.
As it turned out, in my adulthood, my work as a scholar of environmental communication would explore many of the same themes Lightfoot's music did. I learned that he and I shared a worldview, and I gained an even greater appreciation for what he was saying in "Ode to Big Blue." In fact, an unmistakeable line of thought runs from the first time I heard that song to how I perceive and act within our environment today.
Gordon Lightfoot died on May 1. I am very sad the world lost him, but I expect that his music and his voice will continue to influence the way we think about and interact with the non-human environment for a long time.
We already know Don Henley as a great singer, musician, and entertainer, but as it turns out, he's also a pretty good rhetorician.
For his latest album, Henley effectively uses a rhetorical-narrative device to draw attention to the issue of global warming. The song, "Praying for Rain," employs irony to question our lack of action in responding to the signals of a warming planet. Check out the song here:
Ironic narratives feature main characters overcome by and unable to affect their situations. In "Praying for Rain," the irony becomes apparent when the first-person narrator, a farmer besieged by drought, says, "We hardly had a winter, had about a week of spring. Crops are burned up in the fields. There's a blanket of dust on everything. The weatherman is saying that there ain't no change in sight. Lord, I've never been a praying man, but I'm saying one tonight." Laying out the drought conditions paints the picture of an overwhelming situation for the farmer. He's never seen anything like it--a common reaction to the extreme weather events generated by global warming; and we know he feels powerless because of his admission that the predicament appears endless. Together, these narrative elements suggest we're listening to an irony, a suspicion confirmed when the man who's never prayed is driven to prayer--ironic indeed.
Action, not prayer, however, is the objective of Henley's irony. The farmer might turn to prayer, but that doesn't end the ironic narrative. In desperate circumstances, all he has is prayer, and the desperation only grows as he repeats that prayer over and over again without receiving any response. That's what we're left with: a powerless man and an unheard echo that remain completely at the mercy of their circumstances. In this way, Henley uses the ironic narrative theme of powerlessness as a call for action. The repeated chorus holds us in the frustration of failing to take action, calling into question all those times when people have actually tried to pray drought away.
We can't choose not to act while action is still possible and then expect that we'll be able to act in desperate circumstances, and Henley has given us the right rhetorical device to hit that realization home.
The saying holds that people who keep their heads while everyone else loses theirs don't understand the situation. My experiences this summer taught me that the people who don't lose their heads might just understand the situation as fully as possible.
I spent the summer amid the sound of First Aid Kit, a Swedish folk band with a flair for Americana, and the fury of a Pacific Northwest burning in the face of global warming. We typically overcome the kind of sadness and fear associated with watching a beloved place shrivel up and incinerate by turning away from the most terrifying details. As much as I might have liked to do that at the beginning of the summer, by the end, I realized that this time (and from now on), I would, as First Aid Kit's song says, "Walk unafraid."
I bought the song, which comes from the soundtrack of Wild, along with the band's Stay Gold album in early May before I returned home for summer vacation. The music became the soundtrack of a summer that contained equal parts devastation and empowerment. I listened to very little else, but the songs never faded. They played in my head through adventures that filled my heart and events that broke it.
I saw Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Olympic National Park with lyrics like those from My Silver Lining echoing in the vastness of the extraordinary scenery. I watched the overwhelming heat of July bring a usually vibrant ecosystem to its knees and August's wildfires and their accompanying smoke finish the job with merciless suffocation. By that time, Fleeting One, the eighth track on Stay Gold seemed all too appropriate.
Still, I never turned away or tuned out. I took it all in. I reached a point where I knew and could feel everything that was happening. I could tell how close the land and plants were to breaking. Several times, I just had to cry. Then, a strange thing happened: Out of the chaos came the confidence of clarity. I'd played Walk Unafraid so many times in those three months, but suddenly, I was doing what the song said. I understood the situation fully, and I met it head on.
Trees had already started dying on my parents' property by August 2 when I turned on the sprinkler for the first time. We haven't watered our yard for years, but we still have a good sprinkler and some long hoses. During the next two weeks, I used them to get water to the native trees and plants on the property. At first, I wasn't sure if I was having any positive effect or merely tilting at windmills. I didn't even know how to feel when I read that Olympic National Park was also using sprinklers on its forests. Suddenly and unexpectedly though, the weather shifted in the slightest of ways. A bit of rain fell, and the temperatures cooled a little. Combined with my efforts, these changes helped the local plants revive. I felt the satisfaction of knowing a situation, responding to it, and making a contribution.
Although the last images I saw of the Pacific Northwest as I drove east for the school year were shrouded in smoke, I looked upon them without flinching. Those scenes would have torn me apart before. This time, they hurt, but I also knew nothing could break my connection to that place or my commitment to helping it as we face global warming together.
It's the same effect that occurs when music puts people in sync, and it's only possible when everything (joy, sadness, fear) is fully experienced.
We've heard a lot about global warming, but we don't often get to hear it.
Daniel Crawford, a student at the University of Minnesota, is changing that by putting rising global temperatures to music and playing it on a cello. Watch and listen to his performance below:
Each note in the piece represents the average worldwide temperature for a given year between 1880 and 2012. The higher notes stand for warmer years, and the lower notes stand for colder ones (there aren't many as the piece passes its halfway point). Alarmingly, the temperature increases predicted for the end of the 21st century would produce notes so high that humans could not hear them.
I've always liked the sound of cellos, but what I really like about them are the low notes. Unfortunately, we've got a lot of work to do before we'll get to hear more of them in this piece of music.
I've been in a music-buying mood for the last few weeks, but I was having a hard time figuring out what I wanted to buy.
I thought about getting something from an old favorite but decided I was in the mood for something new. I had my eye on some new albums, but couldn't pull the trigger for some reason. After a while, I realized I wanted to find some music from an artist who supports environmental issues. However, I couldn't find anything that I really liked.
Everything changed on Tuesday night. I went to iTunes looking for a movie but got sidetracked when I saw a promotion for something called A Fine Frenzy. For some reason, the name intrigued me, so I clicked on the information and discovered what I had been looking for all along.
A Fine Frenzy is actually the stage name of musician Alison Sudol, who just happens to be from Seattle. I listened to some of her songs and liked what I heard, so I bought one of her albums. Then, I bought another last night.
Sudol produces some awesome music, and one of the best parts about it is its references to nature. Those references give it a rooted quality. In addition, they represent more than just a portion of Sudol's lyrics. The environment is a key issue for her, and she serves as a goodwill ambassador for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
You can check out the Web site for A Fine Frenzy by clicking here.
