Did I say that? Hope I did.

By the time I was settling on the song ideas I wanted to pursue for lyric writing, I had been living with the thirty-something instrumental loops I'd created for a few months. This album is the slowest I've ever worked, not in terms of how long I'm taking to do the work but in terms of how long I had to wait in between steps. I had other projects eat up good chunks of my time, notably a high budget record that I made with Good for Grapes (the band I play in), working with producer Howard Redekopp. 

It was interesting doing rehearsals and pre-production with him; his advice mostly concerned song structure and consisted of finding ways to play the nicest-sounding parts of the songs more times. Tracking parts was long and frustrating at times. I played the violin and trombone on the record and my parts came fairly late in the overdubs, so there were times when the pitch of the violin especially would never quite sound perfect because it was being pulled in so many directions by the pitches of instruments already recorded. Not to mention that I was discouraged from using vibrato, which made pitch even more crucial. I had a tuner with me, so I was able to check what I was being asked to do against concert pitch when it got particularly tricky. Specific notes had to be played a quarter-tone sharp or flat. It was tough to remember how to detune myself correctly over the course of a long line, but I tried my best!

The experience was interesting though, and listening to the finished product I really noticed how everything we recorded was more or less there, but volume was really used as a means of highlighting the important parts. The violin was mostly single-tracked, which I guess is true to how it sounds live. I'm used to the sound of ensemble strings on my own stuff, but I could see getting into single-tracking them at some point.

I think the time off between the various steps of making this album was helpful, since it allowed me time to come back to ideas and sounds and be more big-pictures and objective about them. The downside is the enthusiasm that comes with pursuing a new and exciting thing has also cooled, which means getting back into the flow of working on the songs takes a bit of doing. When I came back to my loops to start writing songs over them, I had been listening to them for a while and shown them to some people, so I knew which ones I was most excited to work on.

The first thing I tried to do was imagine the sort of imagery and mood I might use for a specific song idea, and then try to pair it with a loop that I thought complimented that in some way. Some pairings came easier than others. I generally started with the ideas I was most excited by and then got a little more stuck by the end. There were quite a few instrumental loops I thought I could write good songs over, maybe 15 or 16. I wanted to end up with about 10 songs in the end, so I figured that would give me plenty to pare the album down to something with a cohesive sound and theme.

I enlisted the help of a few friends to listen to my loops and tell me which they liked. It was helpful in that I felt validated when they liked ones that I did too, but it was hard for them to tell me which ones really went together as a group. They could give me some adjectives to describe the mood of the loops though, and that helped me. I had angles of attack in my head for some but not all of my song ideas at this point. I knew, for instance, that I wanted my song about the dangers of unilateral decision-making on climate change to be a first person narrative story song with an anxious sense of impending doom. I chose to pair that with the idea I'd based on a song I'd recorded live at the Fox Cabaret, thinking that I could contrast the hedonism of a club night with the sober but equally reckless decision-making of some Catch 22-ish government/military types. I knew I wanted the song about the next evolutionary leap forward being someone we'd consider handicapped today to be a triumphant fanfare of themed, disjointed imagery. So I picked a major chord guitar loop with horns and strings, all swagger and strength. These choices were just hunches that I would try and make work, and when some of them didn't end up clicking, I either ditched both parts or tried a different song idea with the same loop. So the ones that worked out were really just lucky.

Before I started trying to write lyrics, I spent a bit more time mixing the loops and seeing if there was anything else I could add. Then I printed five-minute versions of the loops just repeating over and over so that I could put them on my iPod and walk and bike around with them. They weren't sequenced, so it was just everything going at once, like it would be at the song's most intense parts, but it was a good way of getting myself to listen to them with my song ideas in mind. Since they were just the same 5-20 second chunks over and over, my brain would get hypnotized and bored enough while listening to them that ideas of how to tackle the song subjects or just images would pop into my mind. I found this worked especially well when I paired doing it with repetitive physical activity like riding my bike into Vancouver (while I was going to the studio to record with Good for Grapes, in fact!).

I conceived of the rest of the song ideas on the album this way. Instead of having a pre-made idea and finding an instrumental for it, I just listened to the instrumental until an idea for a song formed out of it. So I worked both ways on this album. Music came first, but was then set aside while research that would lead to song ideas took place. Then these two bodies of work that had been growing separately were forced together, and each informed the other. I like the freedom to do instrumental loops before thinking about lyrics at all, but for my next project I'd like to have some more early interaction between lyrics and music. That might mean starting more of my instrumentals with vocal melodies; I only did that once on this album. But it was that one vocal melody that made me want to do the album in the first place.

11 AM, time for TRANESTRETCHING

I should rewind, though, because before I did any research for this album at all, I spent a few weeks to record thirty-something song ideas that would form the basis of all of the tracks on the album. The process was a continuation of the way I worked on Little Gwaii and MB-LP, with the key difference that instead of recording demo versions of the songs initially and rerecord once I knew which I was using, I went straight to recording good versions of the loops. I was able to do this because I finally bought a pair of nearfield monitors, so I wasn't stuck trying to judge the sound of the instruments I was tracking through a pair of headphones. The Adam F5 speakers I bought were great, and I felt more confident that I was capturing good sounds on the way in than I have on past album projects.

This no-demo recording process also meant that I cut the Boss RC-300 looper out of the tracking process. Ordinarily, I would record demos onto the looper, using its three tracks as I would when I play the song live. So drums would usually be on track 3, bass on track 2, and guitar/keys/vocals on track 1, depending on the song. Then I would figure out how I wanted to perform the song by muting and un-muting these tracks to create the song structure. But this time, I was recording good versions of my ideas right onto the computer, as I wrote them. I saved the looper for later, when I was trying to arrange the songs, since having the instruments separated into the three tracks as I would play them live made it obvious what moves and mutes would make sense for live performance.

I generally started the loops with a single instrumental idea or conceptual goal. I make a practice of recording any short ideas onto my phone whenever they come to me, so I mined my phone recordings for ideas I'd had that could form the basis of songs. One thing I also tried on this record was recording snippets of existing songs that were on where I happened to be that gave me a specific feeling. One was a classical piece that was on in Good for Grapes' tour bus when we were recording our album, another was a weird electronic jam I witnessed played by musicians dressed as Luchadors at the Fox Cabaret, and another was a song we played in the Delta Concert Band. Specific places and instruments also played roles in loops I included on the record; riffs I wrote on a terrible old bass at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago started a couple songs, and one I wrote and recorded in GarageBand on an iPad while up the Sunshine Coast made the album as well. I also manipulated found sound: one song started with a chopped up loop of the sound of a Vancouver Skytrain leaving the station, and another began with the chirping sound of crosswalks for the visually impaired.

I went for quantity with the loops, knowing the more I made, the more cohesive I could make the sound of the album since then I'd have enough good ones that I could then choose the ones that fit a similar aesthetic. Since I knew I would make a lot, I didn't have to worry about cohesion while I was actually writing them, which was great since I could just follow ideas through wherever they seemed to be leading me. I generally finished 2-3 every time I sat down to work, and considering I was trying to pre-mix and record nice versions of everything as I went it was a pretty good pace.

This was the first album I finally gave up and used drum machine VST sounds instead of recording real drums. I did it because I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have the gear or the ears or the room to make my drums sound professional, but I also did it because I realized that setting up real drums for my live shows is a bridge too far for me right now anyway, so I might as well record the way I'm going to end up playing live, with a drum pad triggering sounds. I still miked up a drum kit and played real drums while recording though, because I didn't want super quantized drum machine timing, just nicely recorded samples. So I converted the audio I recorded on close mics into MIDI and fed that into my soft synth, Session Drummer 3, editing for timing and velocity afterward.

Bass and guitar I recorded much as I have in the past, with both the DIed signal and miked amp and making decisions about which to use or how to blend them later. One thing I did a lot with the guitar was use my Boss DD-2 delay pedal to sync 8^th note delays to the song tempo, and then just hit chords once every couple bars, letting the delays continue almost as loud as the hit. I found that really filled space, when that's what I needed from the guitar.

One thing I noticed in playing the songs from my previous album MB-LP live was that I really underused violin and especially trombone. So I made sure not to do that this time around, incorporating them more often and more centrally, usually at the expense of the guitar. Violin I recorded very normally, with a cheap overhead pencil condenser, but overdubbed many takes onto every part and panned doubles in interesting ways to make a real ensemble sort of sound. I sent the trombone into Guitar Rig 5's talkbox effect, except not with the plugin “talking” but at a static position. The extreme EQ filter effect gave the trombone a nice place in the mix to sit, and I thought made it sound like an old-timey car horn, in a nice way.

I included some other instruments as well; the keyboard sounds all came from presets on my dad's DX7s, and I sent one through the Boss looper for the slicer effect it has. I made more extensive use of shaker, tambourine, and cowbell than I have in the past. Since I wanted this album to be a dancey, beat-driven album, I thought percussion could help propel the songs forward.

Different things would inspire me to write the loops that I used on Extinct! Sometimes it was an instrumental melody, other times a groove, and other times an interesting length for the loop. There are 3, 7, and 14-bar loops, as well as ones where chord lengths are asymmetrical, as in one 8-bar loop where the first chord goes for 6 bars and the second for the remaining two. Any way I could play with my own expectations for how the loop should go, while also making something genuinely nice-sounding to listen to, that was what I tried for. Harshness crept back in with the vocals, but in writing the instrumentals I really tried to make it a priority that they sound nicer than things I'd done in the past.

I TOLD you I was sneaky

I'd been taking notes, running loads of books out of any library that would have me for weeks. I knew the end result of my research would be songs, but I hadn't done much thinking about what they'd actually be about until now. I knew I wanted them to diverge from my last album, MB-LP, in some important ways, and so I wrote some “album rules” to clarify what I wanted them to be like. I could always break them later! They stated that:

1. The album should be fun/funny (the subject matter shouldn't dictate tone)
2. The songs should deal with the theme (or an aspect of it)
3. The subject of the songs should be relatable enough to stand on its own without the theme
4. The songs should be personal and aim for the heart
5. Flow-wise, the album should keep the beat going and be able to do as well as background, maybe even transition between songs
6. This is a head-nodding to dancing party album. Try to keep it light even when it's heavy lyrically

The rules reflect concerns that writing a set of songs about the biodiversity crisis will result in dry, boring, impersonal songs. Legitimate concerns, I think. Since I was so immersed in the subject matter, I knew that would come through even if I tried to just write personal songs about my life.

In fact I usually decide to pull the trigger on a song idea when those two things intersect in an interesting way. When some pressure or joy or concern that I'm feeling in my life is paralleled by the subject I intend to cover, that's when I feel like I can write about it authentically. I don't have to worry about this not happening; the things I find especially interesting when researching are often things I notice because I can't help looking through the lens of my own life. And I'm always trying to figure out how things relate to other things. So it's a way of working I find natural and more rewarding than just setting out to represent my personal life metaphorically.

The second concern reflected in my album rules is that the songs will be depressing or overly serious. This has to do with the tone I want to take for educational reasons, I guess. I wasn't interested, as some of the environmental education teachers I read had been, or taking my listeners on an emotional ride from despair to hope. I just wanted songs that weren't scary and weren't preachy; I was going for informative and wry, with a hopefully infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter. That's how I wanted to share what I was learning.

So I went back and pored over the dozens of pages of notes I'd made, trying to pull out single ideas or topics that intrigued me enough to think that I could write a whole song about them. Sometimes they were ideas that had come up multiple times in different readings across different disciplines. Other times they were single sources or ideas that I found intriguing enough to explore on their own. This is the list I made, with short explanations:

• Hard to Give Up Comfort:
  • A lot of environmental reading said if only people in the west would sacrifice some comfort, a lot of problems could be solved. But overconsumption is cultural and hard to avoid, even if you're trying to.
• Average Person and Environmental Policy:
  • The idea, from ecological economics, that progress can only go as far as an average person understands, in a democratic system. Much like 'no child left behind', bringing up the average is the most powerful thing so passing on education is most important and no one is hopeless.
• Nuclear Winter:
  • Came from a source that said a medium-scale nuclear war could halt global warming, and scientists had considered it as a scheme to combat climate change. Basically fears about unilateral, secret government action.
• American Exceptionalism:
  • Based on readings about the unique ecological circumstances surrounding Columbian contact and how the culture of America was affected by it. How the American dream is unsustainable and the American financial model shouldn't be copied by other countries under different environmental conditions
• Passenger Pigeon:
  • Drawing parallels between humanity's potential fate and that of the Passenger pigeon. Both are weed species, growing more like automatons as their numbers increase, maybe not autonomous enough to avoid crash.
• Race to the Bottom:
  • I think I scrapped this idea at some point, I don't remember exactly what it was about.
• Disabled Messiah:
  • This was about human evolution, and how increased brain size marked leaps in evolution, combined with the knowledge that autisim is basically unregulated brain growth as a child. The idea that the next leap forward might be strange and unpalatable to us currently, but what is “good” is completely contextual, and in the world of the future there may be advantages we can;t anticipate to things we currently view as disabilities.
• Bracketing:
  • The tension between worrying about environmental crises and living one's life. Its necessity but also the possibility of ignoring important problems because they are distressing.
• Sad Geniuses:
  • About the sacrifice required to make progress happen. Is progress usually the product of obsession and unhappiness, and is that the reason new technology can often be cynically used to make things worse?
• Should be Happier:
  • People in the West are complicit in exploiting the third world whether they like it or not, causing environmental degradation and hardship for those people. But they are statistically less happy. About whether ill-gotten riches can make you truly happy.

Looking back, a lot of these initial ideas were folded together or made into certain sections of songs later in the writing process. They're less about the nuts and bolts of biodiversity than they are about the larger cultural forces that are creating and perpetuating the crisis. Maybe that's because I thought the songs would end up too dry and factual if they were all about Amazonian frogs or something, but I think it was mainly because I realized people already feel like the situation is bad and want to change it. They more needed to be made aware of institutional and systematic reasons things got this way in order to feel like they can change things.

I wanted to include my struggle to process all of this data and come to conclusions about what we ought to do because I think most people have become concerned about environmental problems at some point, so it was relatable, and also because then it could be an example of what people could be doing to try and change things for the better.

That said, I definitely didn't want to come from a place of moral superiority. One of the hardest things I found was realizing that even while trying to be more sustainable in little ways, the mere accident of being born into our society as it is makes us complicit in all of the harm it does. One article I read that I found funny in a book about teaching sustainability was about how a museum had switched the candy bars sold in their vending machines to ones that didn't contain (apparently) over-exploited, environmentally damaging palm oil in their ingredients. The funny part was the self-congratulating tone of the article, as if that was the last unsustainable part of their operation and now they were completely done. Still, it was something. And doing something is better than doing nothing.

There is a tension there, in wanting to be a part of the solution, less complicit in the problems our society causes, and not knowing what the best action is to take. I wanted my songs to express this frustration while also reminding people that any action is good action. Even action that later research proves was ineffective can be a good thing, since it builds frameworks and relationships for subsequent collective action, and makes people feel hopeful and that real change is possible. These are the issues that I wanted to explore as I refined and added to the song ideas I was pulling from my research.

I Return This Respect

Ecological economics is not just a specific branch of the field (or the economics of a specific type of goods), it's a completely new set of priorities, a massive overhaul of the goals and mechanisms of the financial system. It was one of the most in-depth fields of research I pursued for this album. This was partly because I never took a class in economics, so I had to learn something about the traditional models before I could understand how ecological economics changed them.

The most fundamental premise of ecological economics is that we have not correctly valued ecosystem services under the current system. Farmers, for example, know the value of having micro-organisms in the soil break down waste and re-fertilize the ground, but pay nothing for the privilege, and wouldn't be compensated if something kills these organisms. Nestlé can make millions bottling water that they only pay a tiny administration fee for. Ecosystem resources have various barriers to being valued properly in our current monetary system. Some resemble traditional commodities, as the pollination industry does: beekeepers are paid to tour their bees around North American farms to help the plants reproduce. But other resources, like air, are consumed whether we like it or not and people in a region don't have a choice of what quality they get.

Ecological economics classifies and recommends how to incorporate ecosystem products and services into the current system, but there is an even more fundamental problem: economics is currently predicated on growth to drive it forward. This is against biological and physical science that suggests that the Earth can only support so many people. Technology may continue to increase the efficiency with which we use resources, and thus the planet's carrying capacity may continue to grow incrementally, but there are limits on the amount of several key resources on Earth. Metal may continue to be recycled, but there is only so much available on the planet and 100% recycling is physically impossible. So, practically, the world economy will have to shift from one that expects everything to grow perpetually to one that expects things will merely sustain themselves.

Proponents of ecological economics express this like a police investigator might: we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The hard way involves doing nothing to change until we run straight into the carrying capacity, and entails at the very least extreme hardship and privation for most, and more likely war and cultural regression in the struggle for limited resources. The easy way involves preemptive measures to enact the change to a sustainable economy ahead of time, incentivizing positive change with government money and by adapting existing financial institutions.

This is one of the places I had to do some learning about how "our" (I imagine Canada is similar, but the book focused on the U.S.) current system works. One of the major financial changes ecological economics recommends is giving the government back the power to issue currency. I didn't understand that the current U.S. system gives that power to private financial institutions, who can then sometimes lend ten times the money they create because of the fractional reserve system, where banks are only required to have something like 10% of the cash they lend to their clients on hand at any given time. So, for every dollar created, they can lend it to tend different people at once and collect interest from all of them. Ecological economics advocates changing this system so that governments control the issue of currency, as a means of paying for the transition to a sustainable economy: offering financial incentives to conduct research and change environmental practices.

The problem is a lot of people benefit from the current system, and are wilfully ignorant or cynically selfish about their role in perpetuating an unsustainable growth-based economy. They either don't believe we'll ever need to control growth, or think that when the crash comes the wealth that they've accrued will put them in a better position to survive it comfortably. And the people that will be hit hardest by unsustainability and environmental degradation aren't just determined by wealth, but by geography as well. It's apparently a fact that both 80% of the world's population and its biodiversity are located in the tropics, but global wealth is massively concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, in Europe and North America. In studies that try to estimate the effects of global warming in economies and productivity, most admit that it will either have little impact or a moderately positive effect above the 49^th parallel. The growing waves of immigration into northern countries from those feeling the most detrimental effects seems like the only logical step for those people to take, and considering much of the environmental degradation in the tropics is driven by the need for raw materials and cheap labour from northern countries, immigration quotas and restrictions seem massively unfair.

This is all really big picture stuff I'm not sure I've fully understood, but my readings in ecological economics were very eye opening. Seeing such scary data presented so matter-of-factually, realizing how decentralized power is in our system and how little influence governments have to change things compared to private companies that are benefiting from the status quo; now I began to understand why one of the biologists I had read earlier on blamed environmental degradation on “a lack of democracy in the economic sphere.” The situation seemed dispiriting, but not completely hopeless, since people's individual behaviours and spending habits still have tremendous power to affect everything, including the massive private companies.

I knew I wanted my songs to contain some of the things I'd learned about biodiversity over the course of my research and inspire people to care more about it. But I didn't want to scare people needlessly or recommend specific courses of action since new research often changes what we think the best thing is to do. So I read some books on teaching environmental education as my last field of research before starting to pull some song ideas out. I read some lesson plans and course outlines from teachers, and several took pride in “creating a narrative arc” that would inspire student engagement. It seemed more like emotional manipulation to me. They talked about purposely depressing their students in the beginning of the course, only to inspire them at the end with hopeful reading, trying to create students with an appreciation for the seriousness of environmental problems and the belief that they can personally go out and change things.

It seemed like my instincts matched up more with the educational theorists than with these narrative-creating environmental teachers. The theorists I read emphasized critical discussion which retained student agency, the right to choose what behaviour individual students thought was best. The goal of environmental education, according to them, was to create students that are able to solve environmental problems, that have the capacities to think critically, discuss with others, and act politically and collectively to find an implement solutions.

So environmental education shouldn't be about telling you to recycle, or else. It should be about explaining the problem recycling attempts to solve, the potential consequences of not acting, the ways we've though about solving the problem. As the student, you should understand why recycling is a good thing to do, and then you will choose to do it. But what did this mean for writing songs? Maybe I could write songs that demonstrated the challenges of considering environmental issues, and focus on building a capacity for critical thought in my listeners through example? After such extensive research, I sure was acutely feeling the challenges of thinking about solutions to environmental issues, so I decided to try that.

This World Is Not Real

Like I said in my last post, the paleontologists came to the same conclusion the biologists did: it is essential that we care about biodiversity, and doing so requires a moral discussion on the order of ending slavery, declaring free speech, or striving for gender equality. All things that aren't really in their field! But they are in the field of moral philosophy, which is what I read next.

The moral philosophers I read sounded a lot like the environmentalists, except they hadn't concluded anything yet. They lamented humanity's lost connection to nature, but said the role of philosophy is in getting people to choose how much culture and nature they want, based on what science and economics tell them will happen. The thing is, science tells us environmental degradation, left unchecked, will ruin all of the cultural advancements we've made. Political theory says that in crowded environments where resources must be tightly controlled, democracy is unlikely: submarines, spaceships and the like are all military dictatorships. So we need to take this into account. But it seems like ethicists are more around to help people figure out what they want than to tell them what they should do. Which makes sense, but it's somewhat disappointing; one discomfiting thing about growing from a child to an adult is becoming your own moral authority, then realizing all our rules were just made up by other adults.

Ethical dilemmas in environmentalism are still possible, like when an elk was stuck in a tar pit in a US national park, and calling out for help before it was ripped to pieces by wolves. The consensus seems to be that humans should alleviate as much suffering that they are responsible for as possible, while respecting the wildness of animals. But what if the elk is from a locally threatened population, reduced by hunting, pushed to this dangerous habitat by encroaching settlement? What about the wolf's right to eat? He may be endangered as well. Merely extending human ethics to wild animals belittles or sabotages the harsh Darwinian realities of wild life, but the suffering that humans cause other animals is complicated and requires consensus built through discussion and moral prioritizing.

How do we make these decisions, though? It has to do with how we see ourselves as a species. I read some more philosophy that dealt with humans specifically, asking questions about whether or not we're special and if so, what we should do about it. From a certain perspective, we have escaped the Darwinian trap. Changes in our own behaviour are dictated by cultural, not biological evolution. We have self-reflective capacities we have yet to ascribe to any other species. And we have the power to affect the planet to an extent not shared by any other macro-organism.

Philosophers of human life generally agree that we have the choice not to follow natural selection in the same way that an amoeba does. We can choose to self-impose limits on the effect we have on the planet. If overpopulation would have disastrous socio-political consequences, it's in our best interests to do so. The most optimistic of them said that we are the only species that can prolong the Earth's window for supporting life, beyond what would naturally occur, because our science can help us engineer the climate. So we have the capacity to be the most positive species on the planet!

Offsetting this optimism was a strange and fascinating argument from astrophysicist J. Richard Gott. He attempted to determine whether humans would continue to increase in number and sophistication; whether we were a true exception. Dealing as astrophysicists do in competing theoretical explanations where scientific tests are impossible, all he could conclude was whether or not we should believe that we are exceptions, whether it was likely or not. He found that it was very unlikely, given the current population explosion, that it would continue. He made it clear that he didn't think humans would necessarily go extinct soon, but that they were unlikely to keep increasing.

The way he did this was argue that if the life we are living was picked at random from all of the human lives that have happened and will happen in the future, ours is most likely to be chronologically somewhere in the middle. Assuming we were thrown into one of the lives, it would be unlikely to be one of the first 5% of human lives, or one of the last 5%. And yet humans have existed in relatively modest numbers until the last few hundred years. So Gott argues that we should be sceptical of any potential future that imagines the population will continue to grow or even stay this high for a long period of time, since a significant percentage (10%?) of the human lives ever estimated to have existed are being lived right now.

This is a weird type of argument I was not familiar with, and one that seems likely to be wrong at first glance. After all, you could have made the same argument at any point in human history, and with hindsight you'd always be wrong. But it isn't claiming to predict anything, it's just saying that we shouldn't base our decisions on the theoretically unlikely event that the human population will continue to increase or stay at current levels for a long time. That conclusion actually seems pretty reasonable, despite the fact that humans continue to seem like an exception. We may well be, but we seem to be approaching the carrying capacity of an increasingly fragile Earth. And we are not yet close to colonizing other worlds, so this is a hard limit (technology-dependent) for now.

So far I'd seen environmentalists, biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers weigh on the problem of the loss of biodiversity. One thing they all had in common was they recommend immediate action, and the second thing they had in common was passing the buck of actually enacting the necessary change to the political and economic spheres. So I knew I needed to learn more about that; not only what we need to change, but the ways the current system makes change difficult.

A Summer Reading List

I just turned 26. When I was in high school our environmental education was very good, compared to what has been taught for most of human history. Silent Spring had been out for decades, and most people had seen An Inconvenient Truth. We knew a lot more about the science of the environment, and as students we were painted a bleak future of doom-soon extrapolating graphs. The urgency of the material and environmentalist exhortations of individual action was undercut by our teachers' (sometimes unconcealed) feeling of powerlessness. Scaring people in environmentalism is a double-edged sword; you push some people into action, but for many others it becomes easier to detach emotionally: “we're all screwed, so what do I care?” And the more dire predictions you use, the more like a millenarian cult leader you sound. We're running out of tungsten! No more lightbulbs! Then it turns out LED lights are more energy efficient anyway. People stop listening when you're constantly predicting a rapture that never comes.

And yet this was the tone of much of the environmental and biological literature I read for this project. Even when dispelling myths like the 50,000 species some say are going extinct a year (which is based on a completely made up number), one of their primary concerns is inspiring donations and grants for their research. Not that this is a bad thing; research on current extinctions is very important, and the true number that occur per year is undoubtedly still a scary one. But knowing that the articles in a lot of the books were recommending very specific courses of action made me warier of them. If not the numbers themselves, but the picture they were painting with them. I hate being sold, even on a good cause. I'd much rather come to the same conclusion on my own.

Even so, biologists talking about the current human-led biodiversity loss basically agreed that convincing people of the importance of biodiversity loss is the foremost challenge of the 21^st century. If I'd originally been asked to say why biodiversity is important, I wouldn't have had a ready answer but I could have reasoned my way into a few. Now I had several: biologists, eager to convince readers of the importance of biodiversity, have long lists of reasons why it's important. They all made sense and yet, I kept thinking, the species we have lost in recorded history have mostly been localized, fragile ones. Island species, ones with very specific eating habits or habitats, ones without much competition. It's easy to romanticize the loss of the dodo, but hard to see what the extinction of a strange flightless bird on a single island means for the future of our planet. As did more practical concerns like cures for diseases that have yet to be discovered, compounds for industry that have yet to be extracted from endangered Amazonian beetles. And more abstract ones, like the existence of a tipping point which once passed will cause massive chains of extinction. Mourning the loss of things we don't have yet and theoretical problems we may face; I could see why getting people to care about these things would be a challenge!

Ironically, it took me reading less alarmist paleontological sources to start to get worried. Especially when they came to the same conclusions as the biologists had. The history of mass extinctions is interesting; we know of at least five that meet the threshold we created, but large extinction events have been happening almost continuously since there has been life on Earth. Paleontologists are generally divided on their causes, but I read good summaries of their consensus opinions.


Two things that I learned stuck out to me. One was just how variable the Earth's climate has been over both the short term and long term. The gas composition of the atmosphere, the temperature, the sea level and its chemical composition, all of these things fluctuate massively all the time. The current sea level is almost the lowest it's ever been in the Earth's history, as is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It surprised me that even though the short term increase in CO2 that we worry so much about may have dire implications for our planet, in terms of hundreds of millions of years, a lack of CO2 is predicted to be a bigger problem, as trees gradually convert virtually all of it into oxygen. It was also fascinating how much life determines its own conditions. Changes in microorganisms can completely shift chemical conditions in the oceans, for example. Runaway reproductive success for one type of organisms was always a key component in theories of mass extinction.

Paleontology is all about time scale, and the long one is often counter-intuitive. Paleontologists generally agree that a large meteorite only had a hand in one of the mass extinctions, the C-T one that killed the dinosaurs. Except the fossil record seems to show that most dinosaurs were already extinct by then, and only two groups were wiped out. Like when I researched the near-extinction of the bison and found evidence that their numbers had already been falling for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, extinction seems to not usually be that dramatic. More often, it's a gradual fading away of an old species in its sleep rather than a young species in its prime.

That said, cascading chains of extinction can and have taken out otherwise successful species. The second thing I found striking was that in mass extinctions, there was always an accompanying drop in biomass, the amount (not diversity) of life on Earth. Maybe this is obvious, but I didn't see why having lots of types of organisms go extinct would necessarily mean there would be less tons of living stuff, worldwide. If some things were out-competed by others, aren't successful species then more numerous to make up for it? Apparently yes, but not in the long term, because of the extreme variability of the Earth's climate. So if Australia gets a couple degrees cooler, the cane toads, a newly introduced species, might all die because they can't take it, whereas the older established species that they wiped out would have survived (because the very fact that they're old species means they've probably survived a similar cooling period in the past).

This fact, that species exist places because they are best suited to live there in the long term, and that allowing them to be extirpated can create lifeless wastelands in the relatively short term, really convinced me. Life is just something that's managed to make solar energy useful to itself, hung on through severe climactic variations, and even had a hand in dictating its own conditions on Earth: creating an atmosphere, making the planet able to better sustain life. It's totally possible for the efficiency at which life converts solar energy into a variety of living things to fall apart until, like Mars, it's just sunlight hitting bare rock. The less biodiversity we have, the more delicate our balance, the more dependent we are on current climactic conditions staying the same. And they're always changing, that has never happened! We need as many players as possible ready to step up when their time comes, and then fade into the background when others are better suited, slowly changing and branching out to be ready for when they're needed again.

Solid New Intro

If my last album MB-LP was an album as a writing project, trying to think myself into the heads of people who saw the world very differently from me, then my next album Extinct! is an album as a research project. An omnivorous, note-taking binge on the way different academic disciplines deal with environmentalism and the way we think about the impact humans are having.

I started with a question my brother made fun of me for even asking: “why is extinction a bad thing? Why is biodiversity good?” Intuitively, it seems obvious, but I didn't feel like I could explain it to people with evidence, off the top of my head. I felt some urgency to be able to do that, especially because I'd taken a few classes in Environmental History while studying at McGill University, and that wasn't that long ago.

Fun fact: I'm writing this while on tour, on a bus rolling through Penetanguishene, ON. That's where, in 1904, someone saw the very last passenger pigeon in the wild. Passenger pigeons, along with the bison, are a classic example of how the mighty can fall. They were, for a time, the most common bird in the world—ten billion, maybe, in their North American Habitat—and now there are none. A little longer and sleeker than the rock doves that are our common pigeons today, they got together in flocks of staggering numbers. A continuous sky-river of birds a mile wide could take three days and nights to pass over. To exist in such close quarters and large numbers, they basically acted as automatons: throw a rock at the birds flying over, and they would swerve to avoid it, but for the next three days the birds following would mindlessly deviate in the same way.

So is it a bad thing there are no Passenger Pigeons anymore? If you're a passenger pigeon, then unquestionably. If you're a human, it gets more complicated. The birds had been around in modest numbers since the Pleistocene, that is, thousands of years, before exploding into the most numerous birds on earth. Their biggest competition for food and habitat was humans. They fed on the same tree products, seeds, and nuts as the indigenous people of North America did, and flocked together to communicate where this irregularly occurring food could be found. Finding this food required large, unbroken areas of forest which were surprisingly hard to come by in pre-Colombian North America, since native people were constantly burning the forests to create lots of boundaries between ecosystems where a variety of types of food can be found.

The arrival of Europeans changed the balance between humans and pigeons drastically. The diseases that spread across North American trade routes travelled faster than the newcomers themselves, killing a huge number of natives and removing the passenger pigeon's largest competitor for food and habitat. The forests, left unchecked, grew into huge expanses across which larger flocks of passenger pigeons could range. Their numbers exploded, and European settlers regarded them as both a nuisance (the Jesuits in New France got the pope to excommunicate the birds from the Catholic Church because of the damage they caused to crops) and a boon (pigeon meat was a major source of food and the original ingredient in Quebec's national dish, tourtière), but the birds were always recognized as a force to be reckoned with.

The rise of the passenger pigeon is a classic example of what ecologists call a “weed species”, an organism that takes a niche and runs with it in a short period of time. That should sound familiar. Humans are the ultimate weed species, and the speed at which European settlement in North America began to put pressure on the newly abundant passenger pigeon again, after the demographic collapse of the natives gave them a niche, is what doomed the bird to extinction. The passenger pigeon's extreme social/behavioral adaptation was necessary, since they lived in such dense flocks that absolute conformity was the only way to function. But their rigid patterns of behaviour also meant they weren't able to adjust to smaller flock sizes and sections of forest fast enough to save their species from going utterly extinct. Captive flocks kept in pens would quickly stop reproducing, and the re-settlement of North America necessitated the breakup of the massive forests and the control of species that would threaten the settlers' food supplies.

This year, in a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, I saw my first passenger pigeon. It was stuffed. Should I be sad that that's the only way I'll get to see them? There are still other types of pigeon around, and some people even hate those. Was passenger pigeon vs. human a fair fight, weed specie against weed specie, that we happened to win? Humanity's biggest competition for food these days is the carrying capacity of the planet. We're exhausting not just short-term, opportunistic species like the passenger pigeon, but long-established ones too. In isolation, losing the passenger pigeon might be a small thing, but is it symptomatic of a problem we have as a species? Are wee too good of a weed species? Are we just as mindless in throwing the rocks as the birds are in swerving to avoid them?

These are the sorts of questions I had when I started researching this album, as well as more ethical questions. How bad is it to make something extinct? At what point is it an acceptable trade-off? It seems natural to be rooting for humans, but how do you balance long-range concerns about the quality of life of future generations and the health of the planet with the needs of people living right now? Harder still, how do you convince other people to think about these things when they act?

I got a bunch of books out of various libraries and started making notes. I wasn't concerned with song ideas, just gathering information, collecting theses, and remembering the most interesting examples. I knew the project would be multi-disciplinary because I was asking all kinds of questions, coming at extinction and environmentalism with many different sets of concerns. So I decided to focus on specific aspects of extinction in turn. I would first read current biology and environmentalism to see what scientists studying biodiversity right now were saying about its importance. Then I would study paleontology and the history of earth's mass extinctions, to see what had already happened and what longer-term processes were at work. Then I would read philosophy and anthropology. Why do humans drive things to extinction, how bad is it ethically, and do we have the capacity to act differently? I then wanted to incorporate economics, as a way of looking at how we choose to act and value our environment. And throughout, I would be paying attention to the educational aspect; how the different disciplines were presenting their material, whether they were trying to inspire change or action, and how. I figured this would be important if I wanted to present some of what I learned in my songs.