Still sounds green to me: 10 more top environmental songs

Between the bombastic and scathing protest songs of Neil Young and the poignant poetics of Laurie Anderson, there’s room on the green songs playlist for comedy, pop, rock, blues, soul and the experimental avant garde. So here are 10 of the best songs concerned with the environment.

It’s a curiously overcast, humid Friday in London, with the prospect of a weekend ahead and summer getting into full swing – what better time t0 relax in the park, garden or wherever to another EIA eco-tinged music playlist?

Regular visitors to our website will be familiar with the wide range of issues and campaigns on which we work, some garnering significant attention (such as our tiger and elephant campaigns) while others have to work a little harder to find an audience.

Running various analytical tools on our site’s content to learn how our outputs perform in terms of general interest, one page has come up again and again as an evergreen popular destination – our 2012 blog Sounds green to me – 10 top environmental songs.

With that in mind, we thought it was high time to share another playlist of green listening.

So, with due thanks for suggestions from colleagues and listeners from the first time around, here are 10 more top environmental songs, in no particular order of merit …

• Kyuss – Green Machine


I’m a loadin’, loadin’ my war machine
I’m contributing to the system, the break down scheme
I’m a shuttin’ down, I’m shuttin’ down your greed for green
I am here to gun it down

• Jackson Browne – Before the Deluge


Some of them were angry
At the way the Earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused

• Neil Young & Promise of The Real – A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop


Yeah I want a cup of coffee but I don’t want a GMO
I like to start my day off without helping Monsanto

Monnnnnn-sannnnnn-toooooooo
Let our farmers grow what they want to grow.

• Martha Tilston – Good World


Everybody’s saying that there’s no hope on Earth,
We should build a spaceship and form the next rebirth,
Blast away into the blackness, in search of carbon worth,
One leaf of what we have here, already have here, have here …

• Bruce Cockburn – If a Tree Falls


Rain forest
Mist and mystery
Teeming green
Green brain facing labotomy
Climate control centre for the world
Ancient cord of coexistence
Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam –
From Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills –
Cortege rhythm of falling timber.

What kind of currency grows in these new deserts,
These brand new flood plains?

• Pearl Jam – Do the Evolution


I’m at peace, I’m the man
Buying stocks on the day of the crash
On the loose, I’m a truck
All the rolling hills, I’ll flatten ’em out, yeah

• Kansas – Death of Mother Nature Suite


We’ve strangled all her trees and starved her creatures
There’s poison in the sea and in the air
But worst of all we’ve learned to live without her
We’ve lost the very meaning of our lives

• The Turtles – Earth Anthem


And this is but an island in an ocean.
This is our home, third from the sun.
Let it be evergreen.
Let it be evergreen.

• Slash – Beneath the Savage Sun


How many bleeding and how many die?
All for the greed of an ivory lie
When will they see what they’ve done isn’t right?
The blood that they spill could not be justified.

• Louis Armstrong – What a Wonderful World


I see skies of blue,
And clouds of white.
The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

Enjoy!