What Are Our Editors Listening to On Earth Day?

A rally in New York. Source: Environmental Action Coalition, NYPL

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On April 22, 1970, over 20 million Canadians and Americans took to the streets in one of the largest political actions in history. Earth Day included marches, teach-ins, and rallies. But Earth Day was not simply a protest. North Americans joined together to celebrate the beauty of the Earth and the life it sustains, as well as to mourn the losses that modernity, industrialization, imperialism, and war had wrought upon it.

On Earth Day, 2026, NiCHE wanted to honor the emotional and deeply human aspects of Earth Day. To do this end, our editors turned to music. Music has long enveloped people’s daily lives. But today, many of us hear it almost constantly. Music is in every store, every restaurant, and every gas station and coffeehouse we walk into. Increasingly, people listen to music while working, and many of us use it as background to block out the noise and anxieties of modern life. Through music we create soundtracks to our lives, so it seemed only natural to create a soundtrack for Earth Day.

Collectively, we (the editors at NiCHE) put together a playlist of some of our favorite environmental songs. Some are celebratory and some are sad. Some are protest songs, while others embrace irreverence as a form of resistance. These songs make up our Earth Day soundtrack. We hope you listen, integrate some into your own playlists, or simply feel the inspiration to make your own.

Each of these songs have a place in our hearts and speaks to our personal relationships to the environment and to environmentalism. We would love to hear on Bluesky, Instagram, and in the comments of the YouTube playlist what your favorites are, and( if you want to share) why they are so important to you.

“Original Composition” – Cheekface, 2021.

Environmentalists are often pessimistic, tying themselves in webs of doom, gloom, and despair. I chafe at the idea that pessimism is inherently counter productive. Sometimes hope feels like too much to ask form. Our emotional responses to a dying planet are real, and we need to process them. But pessimism doesn’t have to be bleak. “Original Composition,” by Cheekface, is both one of my favorite songs and my go-to example for what Nicole Seyemore calls “bad environmentalism.” Through irreverence, Cheekface offers a way to process feelings of hopelessness, frustration with the failures of earlier generations, and disappointment in ourselves for our limited capacity to address the ongoing collapse of earth systems within capitalism. It is through processing these feelings that we might then be able to act. – Jesse Ritner

“Out in the Country” – Three Dog Night 

I spent a lot of time listening to Three Dog Night when I was kid. A favourite band from my parent’s youth, I adopted their fandom and wore out our cassettes. Even as a small child, living in the middle of the woods, “Out in the Country,” hit a note of anxiety, a foreshadowing of growing eco-unrest in my later years; as a result, when people, like my dear co-editors Jesse Ritner and Blair Stein, ask for an environmental song, this one is almost always the one at the top of my mind. “Out in the Country” perpetuates some problematic aspects of white environmentalism. Aside from pulling on some nostalgic heartstrings, it perpetuates individualistic relationships with a nature that exist out there in the “wilderness,” rather than all around us. Yet, this song, which was released in 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day, still hits, and it brings a vibe of joy and hopefulness to a sad topic. Sometimes, oftentimes, I think we need more joy right now. – Jessica DeWitt 

“Amazing Journey” – David Suzuki

I love a themed playlist. I make playlists themed to my courses that I use as lo-fi background noise during group discussions. I even got my group exercise instructor certification so I could teach indoor cycling classes to themed playlists. And so when Jesse suggested this I pounced…and then hit a wall. What should I share? Music about certain environments? “Classic” environmentalist protest songs? In the end I went with nostalgia and settled on “Amazing Journey,” a 1995 charity album narrated by David Suzuki and a team of kid singers called the “Earthworm Band.” It was on constant rotation when I was a kid. On each track, Suzuki describes an aspect of natural history, from how photosynthesis works to the loss of Indigenous ecological knowledge, and then the kids sing a song about it. The ultimate message is, as the final song says, “we are stardust,” a product of billions of years of natural history, and we therefore have a duty to the world we live in now. My childhood favorites: “Dinosaur Dream,” which is about dinosaurs (of course), “Fire,” which is about the human discovery of fire, and “Beluga Tears,” which is about the plight of the St. Lawrence beluga. – Blair Stein

“Escarpment Blues” – Sarah Harmer

Environmental themes run all the way through Sarah Harmer’s 2006 folk album, I’m a Mountain. But my favourite track is “Escarpment Blues,” in which the singer-songwriter and longtime activist muses about the environmental costs of gravel mining in Ontario. Yes, she concedes, we need to fix the roads and build new apartments, but if we don’t do so sustainably, “the wild ones won’t have anywhere to go.” Indeed. – Peter Stevens

“Big Yellow Taxi” – Joni Mitchell

How could I resist? This is one of the 20th century’s first mainstream environmentalist tracks, and it rings true just as much today as it did when Joni first released it in 1969. To me, this is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in song, and somehow manages to make “DDT” something worth singing about, still decades after the toxic insecticide was banned. Written during a trip to Hawaii, where the pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel overlooks what some would call “paradise,” Joni rightly highlighted the jarring juxtaposition of the large parking lot at the forefront of the view from her window, and the cost of going to the Foster Botanical Garden to see trees as though they were an art-fact from a civilization that thrived long ago. This song hit a moment in time, as the environmentalist movement was growing alongside the mainstream-ification of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. On a personal note, seeing Joni perform this song at the Juno’s in Hamilton this past March, hearing the crowd go wild as I wept, completely overcome with the emotion of it all, I couldn’t help but feel this remains as important and resonant now as it did then. -Jessica van Horssen

“Ship of Fools” – The Doors

Morrison Hotel is one of my favorite albums, and it was released just a couple of months before the first Earth Day in 1970. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I paid attention to the lyrics of one song called “Ship of Fools”. The first lines really capture some of the environmental awakening and emergent consciousness of the times: “The human race was dyin’ out / No one left to scream and shout / People walkin’ on the moon / Smog will get you pretty soon.” Concerns about overpopulation and pollution combined with the tacit acknowledgement that technology made it possible to view the fragile Earth in its entirety from space. The Earth is the ship in this reading, and clearly humanity – or at least many of those in power – constitute its fools. As music critic Jordan Potter has pointed out, the song “illuminates the battle against capitalism and environmental dominion.” Yet, these pessimistic sentiments are complemented with a somewhat subtle reminder that we all “Gotta climb on board” to solve the problems. – Andrew Watson

“This Is My Prairie, This Is My Home” – Corb Lund

Currently, canvassers in Alberta are collecting signatures on a petition intended to prompt a referendum on coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. The hope is that a referendum might forestall further harmful mining activity. A leader in this effort is Corb Lund, Alberta musician. A few years ago, in collaboration with other musicians, Lund released “This Is My Prairie, This Is My Home” as an articulation of some of the sentiments inspiring these advocacy efforts. To learn more about the long history of concern over mining in Alberta’s mountains, check out a recent article by Heather Green and Liza Piper in the Canadian Historical Review. – Shannon Stunden Bower 

“Paradise” by John Prine

On Earth Day, I just need a song or two that can enrage big energy. This year I’m going for one of my dad’s favorites. In 1971, country artist John Prine wrote a song about his father’s childhood home. Prine sings about how he spent his summers playing by the Green River and shooting soda cans with pistols in Paradise, Kentucky. But those childhood days had become a distant memory. In the song, Prine asks his father to take him “back to Muelenberg County / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay.” But neither the town of Paradise nor the Edenic vision Prine shares in the song existed. In 1963, Peabody Coal had opened a power plant outside of town. Four years later, the Paradise was raised by the Tennessee Valley Authority due to the toxic ash falling from the plant’s smoke towers. Prine takes aim at the company. In the song, his father tells him that they cannot go back because  “Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled [Paradise] away.” Enraged by the song, Peabody Coal released a response titled “Facts v. Prine,” writing that “We probably helped supply the energy to make that recording that falsely names us as ‘hauling away’ Paradise, Kentucky.” That’s right, one of North America’s oldest mining companies pettily attacked a largely unknown country musician. I find a simple and hopeful pleasure in that. 

“Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead

I was late to the Radiohead train, but after seeing their 2017 Glastonbury set, where Thom Yorke introduced this song as “another cheery fucker,” I got on board. I listen to music as I write, and each of my publications has its own soundtrack. For my new project on Augmented Natures, that playlist is dominated by one song: Fake Plastic Trees. From the polymer trees many put up in their homes each Christmas to the Supertrees of Singapore (admittedly, not plastic), synthetic trees are a key example of how society has attempted to make a more perfect natural world. This song extends this in a way that’s so up my street: connecting the plastification of nature to the plastification of our bodies, with cracked polystyrene men and women who look and taste like “the real thing.” Radiohead poeticizes our collective uneasy, anxious concerns about the world in many of their songs, but this one in particular makes me think of the importance of collective environmental action that the first Earth Day was rooted in, and the successive, sometimes successful recycling, education, and emissions-based campaigns that followed. It also reminds us all that there is still major work to be done, particularly by reducing our dependence on fossil fuel-based products that trick us into thinking the world around us, and indeed ourselves, can be more perfect than they already are. 

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Jesse Ritner

Jesse Ritner is a an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia College & State University. He is currently working on a book titled "Snowguns: How Snowmaking, Climate Adaptation, and Cheap Labor Built the U.S. Ski Industry." Jesse also writes historically-informed commentary about the outdoor world. He is a member of the Science Alliance at Protect Our Winters, a former ski instructor at Snowmass Ski Resort, and an avid skier.

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