Planet Blah

Photo credit: Reuters

 

Appearances aside, most tree huggers are actually rearwards-looking reactionaries. Don’t let our limited edition Subarus and Patagonia vests fool you. We’re not aiming for a utopian future. Despite the impracticality, we’re trying to recreate the past with an intensity that would make the most committed alt-righter blush – “I just want my kids to breathe the same clean air my daddy and granddaddy did, gosh darn it! Where do I sign up?”

But the mischief made by environmentalism’s early amateurs – the cheery stoners of Greenpeace, the careening firebrands of Earth First! – has now dissipated. Over time, hard-won regulations have been hobbled by lobbyists expert in the dark arts of policy implementation (a political plant that grows best in the shade) or even reversed by elected milksops. Most disconcertingly, the rhetoric of green politics has lost its innocence and force; when everybody’s an environmentalist, nobody’s an environmentalist. 

As Greta Thunberg, the movement’s de facto lyricist, put it so damned perfectly:

There is no Planet B. There is no planet blah…

blah, blah, blah – blah, blah, blah.

 Someone, please put that to music.  

 

*** Update: Not terribly creative or musical, but there's this piece of aural pablum.  Thunberg deserves far better. Are you reading this, Childish Gambino?

*** Another update: I'm working through some ideas on music and place, and what's been lost since the former became amplified. Birds often sing about place (in the form of an individual's territory). So did Americans, especially in folk music: think the late John Prine's "Paradise" and innumerable old-time fiddle tunes. But we rarely do anymore except in rather bland, often insincere generalities (like Jason Aldean's controversial hit "Try That in a Small Town," which describes life in a place he's apparently never lived in). Stay tuned.  

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