Environmentalist Music Lyrics for a Critical Historical Change in North America

Music has always been a repository of the political and ideological beliefs of its composers and singers. For the same reasons, many songs have been used to amplify community pleas for help, to raise awareness on social issues, and to call for government action. So it should come as no surprise that many songwriters have sung about sustainability or denounced the unsustainability of human behavior toward the Planet, because such news has always been the agenda. This dissertation addresses their lives, the lyrics of their songs and the cultural and historical moments from which they emerged, so that we can understand how each songwriter approached such themes, why these have changed over the decades and how this was translated lyrically. Finally, another research question is whether these songs of struggle and love for the environment have had any practical effects on the awareness of people and governments, and whether and how this could be reproducible today. Songs in English by authors from the North American area, and from the 1960s to the 1990s will be discussed. The sample of songs was chosen according to the poetic nature of the images used in the texts, representativeness for each decade, and the popularity of the tracks, which is a major factor if the purpose is to assess how much they have changed the opinion of the general public. In this sense, the last chapter of this dissertation will be dedicated to the work and methodologies of the non-profit organization The ClimateMusic Project, another U.S. example of how environmentalist music can be made today. In this way, I will try to identify trends in environmentalist music of the future and how it could help build the symbiosis between human beings and nature that is so necessary and essential.