“But What Does it Do?”: Music and Environmentalism

Evaluating Music’s Place in Environmental Activism by Jameson Foster, Ethnomusicologist (CU Boulder)

Criticism of music’s effectiveness as a mode of environmental activism with real tangible results has been questioned by many throughout the past few decades of environmental philosophy and musicology discourse alike. While the critiques of music as environmental activism are diverse and varied, I will be evaluating music’s place in the environmental activism against the critiques posed in Mark Pedelty’s book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Pedelty explores various critiques of live music performance, especially when at the scale of popular music such as U2’s 360º Tour in 2009 — the contradictory preaching for environmental sensitization while being a blatant part of the problem, as U2 was criticized for the massive carbon footprint left by the tour. While Pedelty makes valid and compelling criticisms of music’s place in the environmental crisis today, I believe these critiques hyper-focus on only one medium of music performance — transregional, mid-to-large scale music performances — at the expense of considering other modes of music performance and music making as a social practice.

It is my hope that by considering other diverse ways of local musicking as a social practice, music as performance, and music consumption, as well as meaning-making through music, rather than just music as a transnational commercial venture, we can better evaluate music’s place and role in the environmental activism movement today. To this end, this essay will primarily serve as a “survey” of sorts into the current state of music in environmental and ecomusicological discourse using the aforementioned text by Pedelty, as well as the arguments provided in favor of music as integral to environmental activism by musicologist Andrew Mark in his article “Don’t Organize, Mourn: Environmental Loss and Musicking” found in Ethics and Environment. One of my guiding questions is to investigate why environmentalist music is being judged by its capacity to enact real tangible changes in the world, while music’s purpose and meaning has never been about tangible utility. It would seem that it may be a case of misunderstanding music as one would misunderstand a tool — expecting a wrench to hammer a nail. If we instead judge music on its own merits and purposes of enculturation, social conditioning, aesthetic value — its ineffable power to move, in other words — we may better learn how to use music making and music experience to our advantage as environmental activists.

The Environmental Concerns with Commercial Music

Mark Pedelty opens his book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment with a summary of the environmentalist drama surrounding U2’s “360º Tour” and its egregious example of capitalism and overconsumption at its most blatant in the pop music sphere and how it can show music actively working against environmentalism while also claiming to be in support of it. He writes:

Pop spectacle is clearly at odds with environment. As in the case of U2, many musicians are just beginning to reconcile the obvious contradictions between their environmental intentions and the actual material effects of their tours, increasingly calling in specialists like Martin’s Effect Partners and his subsidiary group, MusicMatters. Rock may not be ruining the planet, but it’s certainly not helping. At least not yet.[1]

For his own research on the matter, and to get a more localized perspective closer to the ground than a transnational U2 concert tour, Pedelty recounts his experience performing for an environmentalist music event in the rural united states. He notices that, on the surface, the event seems to have figured out how to reduce much of the carbon footprint of the event. But, when prodded a little deeper, there are still some glaring issues surrounding events such as this which continue to actively work against environmentalism and continue to foster consumption:

What I learned is that rock and roll is energy-intensive, even for “acoustic” setups like ours. Compared with most bands, we were not particularly tech-heavy on that unusually hot September day, but we still needed a public address (PA) system to properly mix and project our instruments and voices, especially outdoors. Cables ran in all directions from the mixing board across the newly mown grass. We drove a van and two cars to get there as well, hardly equivalent to U2’s massive fleet of trucks, jets, and ferries, but a fairly impressive amount of energy use for 45 minutes of live music. We plugged into a solar generator, which greatly lessened the band’s impact and carbon footprint, but the obvious disjuncture between a human-powered, zero-waste event and the band’s energy-intensive performance raised a few troubling questions. […] First, did our musical performance add enough to any participant’s environmental awareness, action, or enthusiasm to justify our environmental impact? The cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Our contribution to the low-energy event was either a wash or an example of greenwashing on a pathetically small scale. Either way, it is worth thinking about, and perhaps doing differently.[2]

Pedelty’s observation that rock and roll (and similar music performance contexts) is energy intensive even at a small-scale music event does a lot of leg work in encouraging musicians to rethink how we can use music to foster an environmentally conscious society without the excess and energy usage of festival and pop spectacle. While Pedelty does address these issues and their possible remedies throughout the rest of his book, I will be using his concerns as a “jumping-off” point for exploring the possibilities and capacities for music making in environmental activism in ways that might circumvent Pedelty’s critiques.

Music, Grief, Hope, and Connectedness

In “Don’t Organize, Mourn,” Andrew Mark explains that being an environmentalist carries an inherent level of guilt, grief, and an irreconcilable feeling of hopelessness standing against humans as a destructive geological force:

The environmentalist’s condition can be one of loss, the perception of a depleted and polluted environment as a product of modern consumption. Compounding this grief, some environmental losses loom as unrecognizable or beyond our immediate perception. Capitalism responds to this obscure loss by offering consumption and development, perhaps of a green variety, as a panacea for pain.[3]

Later in the article, Mark uses Freudian analysis to explore how deeply capitalism negatively affects not just our environment, but the individual’s relationship with the environment through commodity-fetishism and consumption-as-therapy:

Essentially, capitalist-growth asks us to replace our lost environmental attachments, lost species, lost skills, lost forests, lost futures, and lost ways of life with new consumable and disposable objects and efficiencies. The scope of loss and consumption, which are bound tightly together in such a system, is scalable from the individual to society. For example, everything from new sneakers and microwaves, to dams, to upgraded military weap- ons, to hosting the FIFA World Cup, these can all be imagined as a kind of “retail therapy” (Plastow 2013; Garg and Lerner 2013) — spending to improve our experience of reality by individuals and institutions — in an environmentally diminished and/or threatened world.

[…] Specifically for environmental thought and Freud’s melancholy and mourning, the suggestion and fear is that unchecked and unexamined melancholy can possibly produce an endless spree of commodity replacement/pleasure seeking without resolution. This version of melancholy is also one in which alienation is so rampant and society is so fragmented that fully appreciating what other people are doing with their lives, and why, is impossible, and product consumption and individuality replace the (ideally) less destructive processes of community and belonging. The suggestion is that as a society, if we do not confront our environmental losses together and deal with them, if we do not mourn them properly, we will never slow the melancholic consumption and the production of new product-losses and greater alienation.

[…] This process of purchase and despair is one and the same. This kind of consumption almost requires that people repress acknowledgement of the social and environmental loss that the production and function of such commodities, events, and institutions entail. Knowingly making such cost-benefit purchases requires the distancing, alienation, isolation, and bureaucracy that commodity fetishism enables, “tyranny without a tyrant.”[4]

Where both Andrew Mark and I see an opportunity for music having an effective and important role in the environmentalism movement is through an acknowledgment of the social and therapeutic dimensions of music, rather than the capitalist and consumer-based dimensions which dominate academic and public perceptions of environmentalist music alike. Mark reminds us of Stephen Small’s “musicking” terminology to root us in an understanding of music as a social experience and practice for the purpose of enabling a more effective environmentally-minded “musicking”:

To keep people in music, Small used the phrase musicking — as dance is to dancing, music is to musicking. This framing shifts the emphasis of the value and meaning of music away from musical objects and towards musical processes. This pivot, from music as reified and consumable to musicking as emergent and social, is how I see can see music making as an activity that helps reveal and handle the environmental consequences of objects and their failures.[5]

In understanding music as a social endeavor — an act which people gather for to create meaning, reify social relationships, and to process emotions ranging from ecstasy to trauma, the possibilities music’s place in the environmentalism movement become easier to see. While Andrew Mark spends much of his writing exploring the emotional and Freudian dimensions of music making in coming to terms with grief and loss, he does take a side-route into exploring music as an “anti-activity” which replaces the production-consumption cycle of commodity fetishism with an activity which can exist outside of both production and consumption.

Making music is a creative response that can escape the creation of a commodity. It can be seen as a refusal to consume, and in this sense, making music can be un-productive. Intangible art can be a radical response to commodity fetishism. Musicking can also be a slow community-building process.[6]

In other words, social music making leads a two-pronged attack on capitalism and commodity-fetishism by a) replacing consumptive behaviors with meaningful social behaviors, which results in b) a stronger sense of community through music as a community-building process which can help create a community of peoples who actively search for ways to escape the production-consumption cycle for the good of their neighbors both human and nonhuman. This aspect of enculturation and community building is, in many ways, central to creating communities which reimagine their place in the world outside of the capitalist cycle, with music at the heart of this collective imagining.

In his essay “Prospects and Problems for Ecomusicology in Confronting a Crisis of Culture” published in the Journal for the American Musicological Society, musicologist and UNC environmental studies director Aaron S. Allen writes:

The environmental crisis is not only the fault of failed engineering, bad science, ecological misunderstanding, poor accounting, and bitter politics. It is also a failure of holistic problem solving, interpersonal relations, ethics, imagination, and creativity. In short, the environmental crisis is a failure of culture.[7] (My emphasis)

If one does subscribe to this view that the environmental crisis is a failure of culture, then music — one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of the very idea of “culture” — must certainly be included in any conversation regarding both the problems and solutions to the climate crisis in culture. However, in ecomusicological discourse, it seems to be the negative effects of music on the environment seems to dominate the conversation while discussion around the good music can do for the climate crisis has only recently been scratched, and just barely so, thanks to the work done by interdisciplinary scholars broadening the tools at an ecomusicologist’s disposal.

The ways in which an individual and the society that individual is a part of view the natural world is dependent upon that society’s culture — their language, their spirituality, their eating habits, their pastimes, etc. A culture is reified through various modes of enculturation, which can in turn include religion, oral traditions, and of course, music. So, in essence, if the environmental crisis is indeed a failure of culture, and if music is (a part of) culture, then the environmental crisis is a failure of music. The bright side, however, is that if a music can fail (or work against) the environment, then the inverse is possible as well — a music which can work for the environment by proxy of enculturating individuals within that culture to think more closely, deliberately, and sincerely about their relationship with the environment they are damaging.

Beyond mere ethnomusicological rhetoric, this dynamic between music, culture, and environmental change is also discussed as well as charted in the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “Ecosystems and Human Well-Being” report published by the World Resources Institute:[8]

In this graph we find music mentioned implicitly by proxy of culture as an indirect driver of change. This relationship is further elaborated on in the graph’s caption: “changes in drivers that indirectly affect biodiversity, such as population, technology, and lifestyle (upper right corner of Figure), can lead to changes in drivers directly affecting biodiversity (lower right corner).” Even underscoring the capacity for music to replace consumptive behaviors with socially meaningful behaviors outside of the capitalistic cycle of production and consumption is the subtext for culture in the indirect drivers box: “Cultural and Religious (e.g. beliefs, consumption choices). Thus, in the context of music as an anti-activity and anti-consumptive social practice as discussed with Andrew Mark, we can better understand a real place and opportunity for music-as-culture within the environmentalism movement, and in better understanding its use as a tool, we can use it more effectively without perpetuating the same mistakes and hypocrisies as pop music titans — a contrasting example of music-as-capitalism — such as U2, and use both local and digital means of music making to encourage a “therapy” of sorts as well as opportunities for social mourning and reconnecting among environmentalists through music.

This essay is a fragment of an ongoing ethnomusicological research project as part of my work at CU Boulder. Any and all feedback, criticism, and discussion is greatly valued and appreciated, as it should be with any scholarship.

Bibliography

Allen, Aaron S. “Prospects and Problems for Ecomusicology in Confronting a Crisis of Culture.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 414–24.

Mark, Andrew. “Don’t Organize, Mourn: Environmental Loss and Musicking.” Ethics and the Environment 21, no. 2 (2016): 51–77.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Program), ed. Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005.

Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, UNITED STATES: Temple University Press, 2012.

[1] Pedelty, Ecomusicology, 2.

[2] Pedelty, 3–4.

[3] Mark, “Don’t Organize, Mourn,” 52.

[4] Mark, 53–54.

[5] Mark, 55.

[6] Mark, 58.

[7] Allen, “Prospects and Problems for Ecomusicology in Confronting a Crisis of Culture,” 414.

[8] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Program), Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, 7.