Singer-Songwriters and the Environmental Movement

How did the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 70s address the concerns of the environmental movement?

Know (knowledge):

• The main ideas and historical importance of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which detailed threats to the environment from pollution and the use of pesticides
• The events surrounding the celebration of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970
• The growing attention of Singer-Songwriters in the late 1960s and early 1970s to themes relating to nature and the environment
• The musical contributions of such Singer-Songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, Neil Young, and Jackson Browne

Mastery Objective

• Students will be able to understand how singer-songwriters from the 1960s to today have addressed environmental concerns in their music by analyzing lyrics, newspaper articles, and photographs.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

-- Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock” (1970)

In this lesson, students will analyze a series of songs articulating a connection to nature and the environment—a longing to “get ourselves back to the garden”—and examine the ways in which they reflect a growing attention to environmental issues in American culture.

In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a chilling account of the damage done to the environment by pollution, particularly in the form of chemicals and pesticides. Eight years later, on the first “Earth Day,” Americans joined in protests over the degradation of the country’s air and water, launching an environmental movement that continues today.

Silent Spring introduced environmental concerns to new audiences, leading to a strengthened environmental movement. But well before the publication of Carson's book, many Americans were already intimately familiar with the dangers of pollution and the extraction of resources. Poor Americans, people of color, and immigrants have regularly worked in close proximity to dangerous chemicals or other pollutants. For centuries, indigenous people have witnessed the desecration of the environment, from the eradication of the buffalo to the pollution of waterways to the strip mining of mountains considered sacred. Songs created by these communities that address such experiences and concerns have long been part of the American musical landscape.

In part thanks to the publication of Silent Spring, environmentally-minded songs began to become commercially popular in the 1960s. In 1962, Buffy Sainte-Marie released the song "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," which protested the U.S. Government's treatment of both Native Americans and the environment. While the song did not make the charts, it was widely influential in the Greenwich Village folk music scene which went on to inform the Folk music genre.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of the country's most well-known singer songwriters began following Sainte-Marie's lead. Some made assertive statements about protecting the land from the ravages of corporate greed: as Jackson Browne sang in “Before the Deluge,” “Some of them were angry at the way the earth was abused/By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power.” In “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell lamented that “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” and invoked a world where “They took all the trees / Put 'em in a tree museum / And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em.” Mitchell explicitly called attention to the insecticide DDT, a specific concern at the heart of Silent Spring. Marvin Gaye voiced his sorrow and concern for the polluting of the natural world with his 1971 hit single, "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," singing, "Whoa, mercy, mercy me / Things ain't what they used to be, no, no / Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas / Fish, full of mercury."

At the same time, many Singer-Songwriters expressed a more general unease about America’s increasing urban sprawl and suburbanization, and a longing for a closer connection to the land. “In my mind I’m gone to Carolina / Can’t you see the sunshine / Can’t you just feel the moonshine,” sang James Taylor in “Carolina in My Mind.” In “After the Gold Rush,” Neil Young painted a portrait of “a fanfare blowin' to the sun / That was floating on the breeze / Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”

In this lesson, students will analyze a series of songs articulating a connection to nature and the environment—a longing to “get ourselves back to the garden”—and examine the ways in which they reflect a growing attention to environmental issues in American culture.

This unit made possible in part by the Positive Legacy Foundation

1. Set up four listening stations around the room:
   1. Station 1: Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970)
   2. Station 2: Marvin Gaye, "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)"(1971)
   3. Station 3: Neil Young, "After the Gold Rush" (1970)
   4. Station 4: James Taylor, "Carolina in My Mind" (1968)
   5. Station 5: Jackson Browne, "Before the Deluge" (1974)
2. Make colored pencils, markers, or pens available to students.