I would like to open this post with a quote from a song ("The landscape is changing") by Depeche Mode: "I don't care if you're going anywhere, just take care of the world."
Actually I do care, but I like the quote because it helps us get our priorities straight.
I don't usually use a post to feature someone else's work but in this case I want to make an exception. I have been researching environmental songs over the last week to try to find a song that my wife, Shirley, and I can sing at open mikes. My bar is set high. When we were in Florida last winter, we heard a local group sing John Anderson's "Seminole Wind". In this song Anderson is evoking the history of the Everglades that, compared to the original Everglades, are "drying up". In one verse he is "sitting on a cyprus stump. He is "listening close" and he "hears the ghost / of Oseola cry". What is so inspiring about this song (which is only two verses long) is that it takes us on a little journey, a little dark-night-of-the-soul journey, and brings us out again. In other words, it invites us to experience some of the trauma of the loss of a kind of paradise, and leaves us feeling that we too have heard Oseola's cry, which is both sad and empowering. So I was looking for other songs that do this kind of deep healing on a soul level and I only found one. It is Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" and the video. I recommend listening to this with ear phones or ear buds. And brace yourself! If there was such a thing as an environmental anthem, I would nominate this one.
Michael Jackson: "Earth song":
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