With the sing-along of 25,000 fans in Washington D. C. Saturday night May 5, Neil Young ushered in a new era In environmental activism. His song ‘Love Earth’, with the repetition of that sweet but radical phrase, filled the amphitheater in Bristow, Virginia – a suburb of the nation’s capital.
I say ‘radical’ partly because I want the meaning of the phrase to change my own life. ‘Love Earth’ could be received as a fuzzy romantic thing. Neil introduced the song with the a crucial comment: “If you all sing ‘Love Earth’ at once, it makes all the difference.” What he seemed to say was “…you can make the difference if you make a Movement. ” You have to hope that his message was understood as the name of the tour filled the amphitheater. At this time of the Earth’s crisis – we have got to sing ‘Love Earth’ as we march toward the poisoners.
Let’s hope that many great songs sweep the culture with a message defending the Earth. Now would be the right moment, just as the carbon and methane in the atmosphere take the world’s heat into the danger zone, past 1.5 Celsius. It is likely that on this warm, wet Saturday night, that there were thousands of Washington area professional environmentalists in the audience, ready for the thing that the Environmental Movement has not seemed to notice – the need for artistic entertainment that can excite the resistance to fossil energy, consumer waste and polluting agriculture.
All impactful social change movements, from Labor to Civil Rights to Peace to Women to ACT UP, have featured passionate music and theater, controversial comedians and writers…. These justice struggles were dramatic in their own right, heroes and villains in action, and there was always a rousing soundtrack.
This absence of music in environmentalism is now confronted by the tour named by Young and life-partner Daryl Hannah, the ‘Love Earth Tour’, hitting 30 cities throughout North America this summer. (Disclosure: RevBilly & the StopShopping Choir is the opener.).
Local eco-warriors are invited to present and talk about their activism at each of the tour’s 30 stops. Tables under tents are erected for them creating a ‘Village’ with the old-time festival feel. The Village is situated in a place the audience walks through to get to their seats, inevitably engaging the enthused Earth workers. So the activists for endangered species protection meet perma-culture farmers who meet opposers of natural gas drilling, on and on in a righteous mix. The Center for Biological Diversity’s polar bear roams the Village at each stop.
Neil Young and Daryl Hannah are serious earth-lovers, supporting a range of causes, including recently the struggle against the carcinogenic herbicide RoundUp, a product of the Monsanto/Bayer company. And part of their activism is how they tour, taking great pains to minimize detrimental impact on the Earth as they travel. They choose biodiesel fuel for the truck and buses. The food that is served to the large support crew as well as “front of house” food for sale – is nutritious and organic, with careful tracking of the growing of the food from the farm to the public.
And the supporting dream-structure for all this is Neil’s songs, the Earth in them, back to the ‘Natural Anthem’ – 1990’s Mother Earth. And back farther to his sci fi parable After the Gold Rush…’look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970’s’. The song is like a collision of an apocalypse and a medieval picnic. Now all these years later that song is so prophetic it’s scary. ‘…flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.’
‘Love Earth’ is at the heart of the tour, the name of the tour and the one song that says it all.
Rev. Billy