SONG OF THE WEEK – MOTHER EARTH

This is a week in which there are so many possible songs for the week that it is difficult to pick just one.  Monday (the 20th) is my wife’s birthday; Tuesday (the 21st) is my friend Annette’s birthday; Wednesday (the 22nd) is the 45th Earth Day; Thursday (the 23rd) is the anniversary of the release of “We Are the World” (which could be someone’s song of the week); Friday (the 24th) is traditionally recognized was the date of the fall of Troy.

With so many choices, I would like to say, “Happy Birthday, Cathy.  Happy Birthday, Annette.  Happy Earth Day, everyone”  Let us stop there.*  Earth Day seems important enough to focus on for a few minutes.

The first Earth Day, back in 1970, was, as much as anything, a demonstration. The Baby Boomers had recently recognized that the thousands of people losing their lives and homelands in Southeast Asia were victims of a greedy military-industrial complex, and they had become good at organizing mass protests as a step toward changing what was perceived as a flawed social and economic system.

It was also apparent that the same social and economic system was causing tremendous ecological damage to the entire planet – poisoning the water and the air and destroying many irreplaceable natural resources.  Many of the same people who had been protesting the war in Vietnam extended the civil protest model to bring attention to what was an even more serious threat to the lives and homelands of everyone on the planet.

In many ways, the Earth Day movement and consciousness has been successful.  Hundreds of thousands came together across the entire United Stares on that first Earth Day.  Forty-five years later, more than a billion people throughout the world will be participating in activities designed to improve the environment.

Less than a year after the first Earth Day, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency was established and two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973  The percentage of water in the United States that is safe for drinking and swimming has more than doubled and the level of emissions of many major air pollutants has been reduced to less than half of what it was.

On a personal level, most Americans now know the advantages to recycling, reusable shopping bags, fuel efficiency and the “green” lifestyle.

Yes, there have been very clear movement in positive directions since the first Earth Day.  However, it is still necessary to recognize that the darned old greedy military-industrial complex is still there.

Few people do that better than Neil Young, who has been socially conscious throughout his career, with songs such as “Ohio,” about students killed by National Guard troops during an anti-war protest at Kent State University; “After the Gold Rush,” with its dream vision of a future environmental disaster; and “Rockin’ in the Free World,” presenting a harsh look at societal problems.  His Living with War album was one of the strongest artistic protests of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Young focuses again on both social and environmental issues in this week’s Song of the Week, “Mother Earth.”  The video below is a live performance for an “Honour the Treaties” concert meant to bring attention to the plight of some of Canada’s native population.  It includes scenes of land where the devastation of the strip mining by the Canadian tar sands industry is eye-opening and appalling.

I am not sure exactly where the aerial scenes were filmed, but I believe it was near Fort McMurry, Alberta.  Here is a quote from Neil Young:  “The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuels all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”  Al Gore has called these mining sites “an open sewer.”

On the positive side, though, the major oil companies engaged in this mining – like Shell and Sunco and Imperial Oil – do make written materials available for their shareholders in electronic form so that it will not be necessary to kill quite as many trees.**

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