Songs for EE in the News, late May 2008

Pupils make song and dance over green achievements
Aberdeen Press and Journal - Aberdeen,Scotland,UK
YOUNGSTERS at a north-east primary school are making a song and dance about their latest environmental achievement. Rosehearty School has become one of just ...

A sneak peek at Rothbury music festival
Ludington Daily News - Ludington,MI,USA
The creators of Rothbury hope to spread the word about the world’s growing environmental problems. To lower the event’s own carbon footprint, ...
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China's 'Super Girl' Navigates Her Own 'Idol' Fame
NPR - USA
Last year, she recorded a Brit-pop-style tune called "Green," to support the environmental group Greenpeace. In one song on Youth of China, Lee runs down ...
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Raising her voice, taking a stance: Sheryl Crow's new music ...
The Birmingham News - al.com - Birmingham,AL,USA
Not the usual agenda for a singer-songwriter who's coming to town, but Crow, 46, has forged a reputation as an environmental and political activist, ...
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TORONTO BIKE FANS- Let's break
blogTO - Toronto,Ontario,Canada
... a resounding chorus for the environment during the performance of his new song, Walk and Roll (download the song for free at http:www.fiddlefire.com). ...
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From Grist: singer goes green

GRIST COLUMNS AND FEATURES

He's Got the Remedy
Jason Mraz sings the praises of a simpler life

You may know him as the geek in the pink, but these days Jason Mraz is the geek in the green. From co-founding a bamboo T-shirt line to making his latest tour more sustainable, the singer has made a commitment to eco-living at work and at home. He talks with Sarah van Schagen about his musical role models, his converted crew, and why he'll never sing about recycling.

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new in Grist: Jason Mraz sings the praises of a simpler life

Songs for EE in the News (April-May)

Mother Earth is HOT
Arkansas Democrat Gazette - AR,USA
Musicians who have not yet added a green-theme song to their catalogs seemed to apologize for their inability to offer up an Earth Day anthem. ...
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The environmentalist's song; Green-Up's Donald Fraser has fused ...
Peterborough Examiner - Peterborough,Ontario,Canada
Late in the afternoon on Earth Day, Peterborough Green-Up's Donald Fraser rides into Ecology Park on his bicycle, guitar slung on his back, the hair under ...
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Cloud Cult goes green with every note
Chicago Sun-Times - United States
BY ALLISON AUGUSTYN For the band Cloud Cult, every day is Earth Day. It's not unusual to find environmental politics mixed up in modern music, ...

Beauty queens on environment mission
ABS CBN News - Philippines
This tour involves past and present Ms. Earth ambassadors who talk to students about the environment. Their teaching strategies usually begin with a song, ...

How to sing like a planet Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not ...
San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA
The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and ...

Earth Day music to your ears
UNLV The Rebel Yell - Las Vegas,NV,USA
He sings about the pain and suffering of planet Earth as people keep abusing it. Unfortunately, the song isn't very catchy, and I personally think the ...

Students Sing 'Green Song' For Recycling
NBC6.net - Miami,FL,USA
Greening The Earth: Part 3 Glass Of Green? When you are debating whether ... Greening The

Finale to Earth Day Celebration
Newport News Times - Newport,OR,USA
"Who'll Watch the Homeplace" - an IBMA Song of the Year - conveys "a down-to-earth, down-home, deeply rooted conversation" that looks at life in unexpected ...

Earth Day growing
Vancouver Courier - BC, Canada
Those who want to commune with nature can kick off Earth Day on April 26 with song. The Hastings Park Conservancy invites residents to join naturalist Al ...

How To Be Greener Than The Trees On Earth Day, April 22, 2008
By Jeff
Grab yourself a free download of our song Greener Than The Trees. No, it's not specific to Earth Day, but it sure is pretty darn green. Email the song to a friend or 3. Check out the green festivities over at www.earthday.net, ...
100 Year Picnic - http://www.100yearpicnic.com/blog/

Planetpals Earth Characters a Brighter Shade of Green
Animation World Network - Los Angeles,CA,USA
The Planetpals theme song "You can be a Planetpal, too," like all of its unique content, teaches kids that by doing their part they can be a Planetpal at ...
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Life’s Short
Anchorage Press - Anchorage,AK,USA
... steady focus on humanitarian and environmental issues. Cockburn (pronounced “co-burn”), has not only made it a point to reflect his convictions in song, ...

Postcard from the past
Jerusalem Post - Israel
Singer Joni Mitchell probably wasn't aware that when she wrote that line in "Big Yellow Taxi" - a song about environmental degradation, irretrievable loss ...
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Firefighters’ band is all fired upInquirer.net - Philippines
Another song on the album, “Pinagpalang Kalikasan (Blessed Environment),” sings of the importance of environmental preservation,

Beauty queens on environment mission
By johnnytalkback
This tour involves past and present Ms. Earth ambassadors who talk to students about the environment. Their teaching strategies usually begin with a song, followed by a short lecture (reason being the short attention span of children). ...
Ilovepinoys - http://ilovepinoys.wordpress.com

Activists protest Tory filibustering of climate change law
Edmonton Journal - Edmonton,Alberta,Canada
... would behave respectfully and after the Raging Grannies, a singing seniors' protest group, belted out a song mocking Environment Minister John Baird. ...

Eco-Rock: Jack Johnson supports Mixed Greens
The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com - Grand Rapids,MI,USA
Next month, one of those booths will feature Grand Rapids' Mixed Greens and Blandford Nature Center. Better yet, Johnson has awarded the groups a $500 grant ...
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Folk singer offers ‘song for a small planet’
Republican Eagle - Red Wing,MN,USA
A native of Minnesota with a background in theology, Mayer frequently delves into science andnature as well as “things spiritual.”

Bob and Sarah Dylan Saving Your Vocal Chords and the Environment
Indymedia Estrecho - Andalucía,Ceuta y Melilla,Spain
You cannot break the law of nature, but if you do it will break your back. It’s like asking, “How can I have unprotected sex with multiple partners and not ...

How to sing like a planet: great article

How to sing like a planet

Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

This is the kind of thing we forget.

This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.

The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird, a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that's not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.

Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can't really fathom it, so low it can't be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, "like dozens of lazy hurricanes," as one writer put it.

It all makes for a very quiet, otherworldly symphony so odd and mysterious, scientists still can't figure out exactly what's causing it or why the hell it's happening. Sure, sensitive instruments are getting better at picking up what's been dubbed "Earth's hum," but no one's any closer to understanding what the hell it all might mean. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be.

Because then, well, then you get to crank up your imagination, your mystical intuition, your poetic sensibility — and if there's one thing we're lacking in modern America, it's ... well, you know.

Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.

Or maybe the planet is more like an enormous wine glass, half full of a heady potion made of horny unicorns and divine lubricant and perky sunshine, around the smooth, gleaming rim of which Dionysus himself circles his wet fingertip, generating a mellifluous tone that makes the wood nymphs dance and the satyrs orgasm and the gods hum along as they all watch 7 billion confused human ants scamper about with their lattes and their war and their perpetually adorable angst, oblivious.

But most of all, I believe the Earth actually (and obviously) resonates, quite literally, with the Hindu belief in the divine sound of OM (or more accurately, AUM), that single, universal syllable that contains and encompasses all: birth and death, creation and destruction, being and nothingness, rock and roll, Christian and pagan, meat and vegetable, spit and swallow. You know?

But here's the best part: This massive wave of sound? The Earth's deep, mysterious OM, it's perpetual hum of song? Totally normal — that is, if by "normal" you mean "unfathomably powerful and speaking to a vast mystical timelessness we can't possibly comprehend."

Indeed, all the spheres do it, all the planets and all the quasars and stars and moons and whirlpool galaxies, all vibrating and humming like a chorus of wayward deities singing sea shanties in a black hole. It's nothing new, really: Mystics and poets and theorists have pondered the "music of the spheres" (or musica universalis) for eons; it is the stuff of cosmic philosophy, linking sacred geometry, mathematics, cosmology, harmonics, astrology and music into one big cosmological poetry slam.

Translation: You don't have to look very far to understand that human beings — hell, all animals, really — adore song and music and tone and rhythm, and then link this everyday source of life straight to the roar of the planet itself, and then back out to the cosmos.

In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That's because somewhere, somehow, deep in your very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source, to the Earth's own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.

At some point we'll probably figure it all out. Science will, with its typical charming, arrogant certainty, sift and measure and quantify this "mystical" Earthly hum, and tell us it merely comes from, say, ocean movements, or solar wind, or 10 billion trees all deciding to grow a quarter millimeter all at once. We will do as we always do: oversimplify, peer through a single lens of understanding, stick this dazzling phenomenon in a narrow category, and forget it.

How dangerously boring. I much prefer, in matters mystical and musical and deeply cosmic, to tell the logical mind to shut up and let the soul take over and say, wait wait wait, maybe most humans have this divine connection thing all wrong. Maybe God really isn't some scowling gay-hating deity raining down guilt and judgment and fear on all humankind after all.

Maybe she's actually, you know, a throb, a pulse, a song, deep, complex, eternal. And us, well, we're just bouncing and swaying along as best we can, trying to figure out the goddamn melody.

Eco Elvis...now here's a spin

Eco Elvis The Environmentally Friendly Elvis
http://www.ecoelvis.com/ "The oceans could start rising, Floods and droughts could come our way, People, plants and animals could start dying From a burnin' globe" - Burnin' Globe
Hello, I'm Eco Elvis. I'm Kansas City's own environmentally friendly Elvis impersonator. My job is to educate people and get them to take action for the environment. I do this by singing recycled versions of the King's songs and speaking to diverse audiences. Song titles include Burnin' Globe (Burning Love), Can't Help Recycling It All (Can't Help Falling In Love), etc. This web site has two main purposes: to let you find out more about me, my shows and music and to give you the best information to take action for the environment in your daily life. So, enjoy it babuh, and...thankyuh, thankyuhverymuch for visiting!