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.