Communicating the Beauty of Sustainability and Environmental Stewardship

Reflecting on the pleasant hours I spent last night listening to music with friends, the most gratifying part of the whole moment was exploring some of today’s popular music in an attempt to understand what makes it, in fact, popular. The main takeaway: despite appearances, very little has changed over the years. Today’s top music superstars still have an uncanny way of tapping into the hearts of their audience and the spirit of the day, and interpreting the thrills and dreams of modern-day living, as well as its pressures and heartbreaks. 

Taylor Swift is perhaps the most amazing example of this, exemplified by her song “Style” linked here. She’s young, hip and beautiful, which doesn’t hurt, but more to the point, her music never fails to communicate to its audience (mostly young females) what they would like to experience in their own lives–an active, chic and sexy lifestyle that calls up a certain magic about life as it exists right outside their windows.

Of course, this gets me thinking about my own writing, and how it might be possible to communicate about environmental responsibility on the same magnetically attractive wavelength. And, though I have no answers here, I do like to make an occasional remark on the subject of writing per se; here’s a recent note:

Occasionally, we who write prose for a living are reminded of how greatly limited we are in our mode of expression, in ways that poets are not. Here’s a powerful example, “Black Baldy Stallion” by Robert Earl Keen, a song about a man whose fierce love for a woman compels him to ride his horse through the cold, treacherous dark of night in the canyons near the U.S.-Mexican border, crossing the river and continuing on the other side into the dawn in a desperate attempt to see her after a long and agonizing absence. What makes the lyrics so compelling in this case is not so much the colorful use of the language (though there’s plenty of that), but rather the way each verse is written such that there is a syllable accompanying every beat, mimicking the rhythmic pounding of the horse’s hooves, the thundering intensity of which gives way to the exuberant chorus; it’s a forceful device that carries the listener right into the very scene.

The Spanish guitar helps to set the tone as well. Check out the solo between the second and third verses, a work of art in its own right. I find this stuff breathtakingly beautiful, and I hope you do too.

Back to the matter at hand, how do we articulate the sex appeal of taking care of one another and the planet on which we live? I don’t know, and I may never succeed in answering that question, but it won’t be because I didn’t try.

Hope you enjoy “Black Baldy Stallion.”