Music Summons Us To The Big Task: Saving The Planet

As the climate and environmental crisis grows deeper, the music scene finds a new sense of purpose. With its unique capacity for shaping our identity and making emotions a collective force, music can mobilize the masses and be a catalyst for change.

Looking back to the protest-songs of the 70s, more than fifty years later, activist music is in a very different spot today. The environmental warnings by scientists and the counterculture movement weren’t heeded back then, and now they loom even larger and more urgent. As we try to get our grip on the situation, environmental issues are slowly moving to the center of politics. And as we try to sort our feelings and mobilize for action, environmental music initiatives are rapidly moving to the center of our culture.

Organizations like Music Declares Emergency have built platforms that bring musicians and fans together for the climate cause, and the UK-based movement with the dramatic slogan “NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET” has just launched in the US, set to expand further. At the same time, initiatives like Climate Music Project help eco-music coalesce into a movement. As the fight for the planet has reached epic proportions, songwriters and bands explode the narrow genres of protest and charity songs, opening up a broad range of radical storytelling in music.

American-Mexican rapper Xiuhtezcatl Martinez combines music and activism, with explicitly ecological lyrics, speaking from his Aztec roots and leading the youth movement Earth Guardians focused on climate justice and indigenous rights. The French metal band Gojira has made an epic music video for their song Amazonia about the rainforest peoples fighting to defend their homeland. In her full eco-ethno-pop album Acrotopia and her music video Change, L.A.-based Inanna plays out our situation as a mythical drama, where prophetic and oracular warnings combine with hopeful visions of a green future. The famous Norwegian art-pop icon Aurora is known for her elfin style: she writes songs with an underlying current of ecological concerns, sometimes cropping up in explicit environmentalist tracks like The Seed, with the catchy refrain “When the last trees have fallen and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money”.

The music industry is of course influential enough to have a significant environmental impact, especially through touring and concerts. On Earth Day weekend this year, DJs for Climate Action organized “a global festival geared toward activating the nightlife and electronic music community around planetary environmental issues.” – appropriately called “Earth Night”.

As a confirmation that environmentalism is moving center-stage in music, a six days climate action event has just taken place at The O2 in London, organized by the environmentally-conscious superstars Billie Eilish and her brother-producer Finneas. Planned together with Support+Feed and Reverb, named after one of Eilish’s recent songs, Overheated was dedicated to “bringing together climate activists, musicians, and designers to discuss the climate crisis and their work to make a difference.” This event is just the eye-catching crest of a much bigger wave of environmentalism in music – crucial in a deeper change of culture. Another star-studded climate-themed concert is coming to NYC in September: The Big Climate Thing, a three-day festival with the goal to raise awareness and take direct action on the climate crisis.

The Portland-based initiative Reverb has been working to make concerts and touring greener since 2004, working with artists such as Dave Matthews Band, The Lumineers, Lorde, Tame Impala and, of course, Billie Eilish. In the same vein, LA-based Music Recycle promotes plastic-free and sustainable solutions for music events, while Replant the Forest Festival organizes outdoor concerts where trees are planted on site – with the ambition of  leaving behind “a forest instead of trash”. A massive upshoot of initiatives is exploring ways in which music can take on environmental issues and storytelling for the planet.

The new generation artists, musical events – complete with talks, panels  and even direct action – revives the potential of music, mobilizing collective purpose and emotion for the future of the Earth. As the climate crisis hits everyone from a different angle, the wide range of musical genres and voices can give us just the rich diversity of anthems we need.

As the music industry takes active part in the biggest task of all – saving our planet from ecological disaster – it summons us through a new wave of patriotic events and songs that aren’t made for a group or a nation, but for all the citizens of planet Earth.