Music about the environment isn’t sexy. It brings to mind 60s revival folk, dudes with long stringy hair, and a general sense of being out of touch.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop myself from writing songs about mass extinction and climate change. These questions plagued me:

1. Why do people seem to be either disconnected or evangelical about environmental issues?

2. Why is there so much guilt and avoidance in our behaviour and dialogue?

3. I have a degree in environmental studies. Why do I still drive a car and eat red meat??

I’m fascinated with my own squeamishness about environmentalism in music. I know you feel it too. Someone starts singing about old growth logging, personifying trees and pleading with the listener to care, and we immediately tune out.

In his book Being Ecological, Timothy Morton describes the general mode of “ecological information delivery mode” as info-dumping. “This delivery mode seems to be saying Don’t question this, or even You should feel very bad if you question this”, Morton says.

Similarly, environmentalism in music has a mode, or a possibility space, as Morton describes them. Genres are a sort of possibility space: the realm in which things are legible as folk music, for example, is different from the realm of electronic music. You can make all sorts of moves within each of these respective possibility spaces, and as long as you stay within the space, “you are performing something in that generic mode.”"*

Environmentalism is not a genre, per se, but it occupies a possiblity space all the same. The prevailing tone is authoritative, preachy, keening, or all of the above. Even music that is beautiful, sophisticated, cool, can fall victim to the sucking black hole of the environmentalism-in-music mode. Once it teeters too close to the edge, it’s gone. Or more accurately, I’m gone. I can’t take it seriously.

Taking a step closer to my feeling in that moment of retraction, I can see it’s not very pretty. Pride and shame fuse into armour, shielding against vulnerability and earnestness. Oh, how human!

Here are the facts: we all find ourselves firmly in an age of mass extinction. How we feel about that differs from person to person, but the reality of the situation remains universal. Most of us experience some degree of indifference at least some of the time, and that indifference will only harden into resolve in the face of delivery modes like info-dumping, factoids, or keening pleas on behalf of the trees.

Morton advises that we befriend the indifference- even study it. “You might find that its cloudy realms contain a soft, rubbery ball of numbness”, he posits. “Numbness is a feeling of protecting yourself from a shock”.

I will leave you, for now, with a song by The Weather Station that was (without exaggeration, and including my own catalogue) the first song I ever heard about neoliberalism/environmentalism that didn’t make me immediately cringe and turn away. She’s a genius!

xoxo

*One interesting question that naturally follows is: how far can we push something (a song?) until it bursts through one possibility space into another, or is there perhaps a buffer between them? What would it look like to live there, musically?

UPCOMING THINGS

This actually is a past thing, but I forgot to share- I interviewed Charlotte Cornfield and wrote a piece about her new album for Premier Guitar. Read it here!

Mo and I are playing at the Lunenburg Opera House on May 8. Hope to see you there! Tickets here.