Green Living
Green Work
ECO-FRIENDLY SONGS: The Timeline
So you thought Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" was the first mainstream song on the environment? Take a look at some of these. Some use a carrot, others a stick, yet all genres, all eras unite to promote a message like only music can.
| YEAR | ARTIST/SONG | THEME | LYRICS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1961 | Percy Mayfield "Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop that Atomic Bomb on Me" | Cold War lament. | |
| 1965 | Tom Lehrer "Pollution" | Pollution | They got smog and sewage and mud. Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud. |
| 1966 | The Standells "Dirty Water" | A love/hate song for the water in Boston which became an issue in the 1988 presidential race, and the song became a theme for the city's sports teams. | |
| 1966 | The Yardbirds "Shapes of Things" | Plea for action | Please don't destroy these lands; Don't make them desert sands. |
| 1968 | The Turtles "Earth Anthem" | Classic spiritual environmental song | We are but an island in an ocean; This is our home, third from the sun. Let it be evergreen. |
| 1968 | Jimi Hendrix Experience "1983" | Psychedelic rebellion against the oppressor | It's really such a mess: every inch of Earth is a fighting nest. |
| 1968 | The Beatles "Mother Nature's Son" | Paul McCartney's acoustic celebration of nature | |
| 1968 | Louis Armstrong "What a Wonderful World" | Ol' Pops telling us what a wonderful place this world could be if only we gave it a chance | I see trees of green... |
| 1968 | The Kinks "The Village Green Preservation Society" | A parody of preserving the past | Preserving the old ways from being abused. |
| 1969 | Zager & Evans "In The Year 2525" |  Prophecy? | I'm kinda wonderin' if Man is gonna be alive. He's taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain't put back nothing. |
| 1970 | Moody Blues "How Is It?" |  Waste, resource depletion | Men's mighty mine-machines digging in the ground, Stealing rare minerals where they can be found. Concrete caves with iron doors, bury it again. |
| 1970 | Joni Mitchell "Big Yellow Taxi" |  Why does urban development steamroller nature? Go organic too! |
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got 'til its gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot... |
| 1970 | Don McClean "Tapestry" | Beautiful, foreboding message: | if man is allowed to destroy all we need, He will soon have to pay with his life for his greed. |
| 1970 | Tom Paxton "Whose Garden Was This?" | Wastefulness | The forest had trees, the meadows were green, The oceans were blue and birds really flew, Can you swear that was true? |
| 1970 | Cat Stevens "Where Do the Children Play?" | Tea For the Tillerman opens with thought-provoking queries about urban development | Will you keep on building higher till there's no more room up there? |
| 1970 | Spirit "Fresh Garbage" & "Nature's Way" | Environmental | Something's wrong |
| 1970 | The Byrds "Hungry Planet" | Earth complaining of our treatment | I'm a hungry planet I had the bluest seas. Oh the people kept choppin' down all my finest trees, Poisonin' my oxygen, Diggin' into my skin - Takin' more out of my good earth than they'll ever put back in. |
| 1971 | Marvin Gaye "Mercy Mercy Me" | A beautiful lament of pollution, radiation & overcrowding. | This overcrowded land, how much more abuse from man can she stand? |
| 1971 | The Beach Boys "Don't Go Near The Water" | Warning of water pollution! | The poison floatin' out to sea now threatens life on land. |
| 1971 | Bo Diddley "Pollution" | Anti-pollution | We gotta stop pollution |
| 1972 | The Osmonds "Crazy Horses" | Car pollution | |
| 1974 | Kansas "Death of Mother Nature Suite" | Powerful lament for Mother Earth | We've strangled all her trees and starved her creatures; There's poison in the sea and in the air; But worst of all, we've learned to live without her; We've lost the very meaning of our lives . . . And now she's gonna die! |
| 1974 | Jackson Browne "Before the Deluge" | Mistreatment of the environment. Peter Gabriel bridged the same topic on his gem, "Here Comes the Flood", but Browne's tale cuts deeper. | |
| 1976 | Lynyrd Skynyrd "All I Can Do Is Write About It" | I can see the concrete slowly creepin | |
| 1976 | The Eagles "The Last Resort" | Demise of Society | There is no more new frontier: we have to make it here. |
| 1977 | Cerrone "Supernature" | Lene Lovich wrote: | Maybe Nature has a plan to control the ways of man...will there be a happy end? Now that all depends on you. |
| 1977 | Peter Gabriel "Here Comes the Flood" | An image of a society where people can read each other's minds: a mental flood | Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky. And as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain was warm and soaked the crowd. |
| 1979 | The Clash "London Calling" | From the album London Calling. Popular music's most dramatic/prophetic/apocalyptic wake-up call? Still stunning to this day. | The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in. Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin. A nuclear era, but I have no fear 'cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river. |
| 1982 | The Pretenders "My City Was Gone" | A mournful tale about the destruction of a city (Akron, Ohio) and the creation of soulless suburbs. | |
| 1986 | REM "Fall on Me" | Acid Rain | Bleed the sky. |
| 1986 | Midnight Oil "Dead Heart" | Peter Garrett, now Australian's Environment Minister, sings of Industrialisation and settlements | Collected companies, Got more right than people, Got more say than people. |
| 1988 | Bruce Cockburn "If a Tree Falls" | Canadian songwriter, musician and activist | |
| 1988 | Metallica "Blackened" |  | Death of Mother Earth, Never a rebirth, Evolution's end, Never will it mend, never. |
| 1988 | Talking Heads "Nothing But Flowers" | Do we want the inverse of "Big Yellow Taxi"? | There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers. |
| 1988 | Sting "Fragile" |  From the album Fields of Gold: The Best Of Sting, the most high-profile campaigner for the rainforests decades before it was "trendy". |
On and on the rain will fall like tears from a star, like tears from a star. On and on the rain will say "How fragile we are. How fragile we are". |
| 1989 | The Pixies "Monkey Gone To Heaven" | Retribution for our pollution. | Now there's a hole in the sky, And the ground's not cold, And if the ground's not cold, Everything's gonna burn. |
| 1990 | John Denver "Earth Day Every Day" | Celebrating what we have | Celebrate land and sea, Celebrate you and me, Celebrate Earth Day, every day |
| 1990 | George Michael "Praying For Time" | Ethical stab at those who turn a blind eye to the needy. | The wounded skies above say it's much too late. |
| 1991 | This Mortal Coil "Nature's Way" | It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. | |
| 1991 | Julian Lennon "Saltwater" |  Beautiful, sad eco-anthem | We're so ingenious, We can walk on the moon, But when I hear of how the forests have died, Saltwater wells in my eyes. |
| 1992 | Orbital "Impact (The Earth Is Burning)" | ||
| 1992 | Emerson, Lake & Palmer "Black Moon" | Acid Rain and more | Ain't nobody gonna walk on water when it falls like acid rain. |
| 1992 | Richard Sinclair "Plan it Earth" | Pollution endangering mankind and wildlife | Help all those threatened, endangered creatures to survive; Air, land and sea Should remain poison-free. |
| 1994 | Julian Cope "Autogeddon Blues" | Post apocalyptic world full of gasoline rivers and polluted cities | It's a barbed-wire fence: Which side do you choose? |
| 1995 | Tracy Chapman "The Rape of the World" | On New Beginning, Tracy laments how humankind has... | clear-cut dumped on, poisoned and beaten up Mother Earth. |
| 1995 | Michael Jackson "Earth Song" | Mistreatment of earth and animals | Did you ever stop to notice this crying Earth is weeping sure? |
| 1996 | Steve Forbert "Good Planets are Hard to Find" |  Only one Earth | Good planets are hard to find; Temperate zones and tropic climes; True currents in thriving seas; Winds blowin' through breathing trees; Strong ozone and safe sunshine; Good planets are hard to find. |
| 1998 | Coldcut "Timber" | Deforestation | |
| 2000 | Gojira "Global Warming" | One of many from this green band | We could evolve and get older...now see a new hope is growing inside. |
| 2001 | Radiohead "Sail to the Moon" | Tale to a child | Know right from wrong, or in the flood you'll build an Ark and sail us to the moon. |
| 2001 | The Handsome Family "Peace in the Valley Once Again" | ||
| 2004 | Keane "Somewhere Only We Know" |  Deforestation | I came across a fallen tree; I felt the branches of it looking at me. Is this the place we used to love? |
| 2005 | Blue "Elements" | Encouraging activism | Seems like we've lost our desire, To fight for what we know is right |
| 2006 | John Mayer "Waiting on the World to Change" | Encouraging activism | Now we see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it. |
| 2007 | Jack Johnson "3 Rs" | Great for schools: | Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. |
| 2007 | Seize The Day "Flying" | From the album The Tide Is Turning, truly the modern conundrum by the UK's foremost eco band. | |
| 2007 | Autons "Maybe" | From the album Short Term Manifesto | Which side of the line in the desert/line in the ice are you on? |
| 2007 | Cat Empire "No Longer There" |  Encouraging activism | To deny or to despair: It's really just the same. Everything between. It means we have to change. |
| 2008 | Jack Johnson "All At Once" |  | Around the Sun some say it's going to be the new hell. |
| 2008 | Ian Brown (ex Stone Roses) | Album promoting permaculture. Also cover of "In the Year 2525" | I'm kinda wonderin' if Man is gonna be alive. |
| 2008 | Peter Gabriel "Down To Earth" | from Wall-E | Redefine your priorities. |
| 2009 | Mos Def "New World Water" | Water scarcity and pollution | The type of cats who pollute the whole shoreline have it purified, sell it for a dollar twenty-five. |