SweetLightning's Summer Planet Playlist

Here's some of our favourite music about and for the planet.

From Seamus:

• Become Ocean: John Luther Adams
  Sea level rise and climate change wrapped in an emotional score.
• all the good girls go to hell: Billie Eilish
  A dark, apocalyptic, and cheerless personal statement presented with singable style. New musical ideas, even though the ecological wisdom is a bit thin. Ultimately listenable.
• I'm a Stranger Here: Five Man Electrical Band
  "Oh, you crazy fool ... you were living in paradise!" Eco-Karaoke of the first order. Well, OK, maybe second order.
• Rejoice in the Sun: Peter Schickele and Joan Bayez
  Most-popular track from the movie "Silent Running," in which all the Earth's plants, Bruce Dern, and three quite convincing non-verbal robots get shot into space.
• Solar Power: Lorde
  Strictly speaking, not a full-blown ecological piece, but she does throw her cellular device into the water (gratifying and useful if not perfect environmental practice) ... and the chorus is eminently singable.
• Don't Kill the Whale: Yes
  These are some brutal lyrics, but because the song pre-dates the 1986 moratorium on whale hunting, this dire piece becomes in retrospective optimistic, a marker for a challenge met and mastered. Listen to this and know we can do the right thing.
• After the Gold Rush: Neil Young
  This 1970 masterpiece is the only song we know that can evoke "retro-apocalyptic nostalgia" at the same time as it continues to be dire and prophetic. In truth, the Dolly/Linda/Emmylou version does a better job, with a wistful nostalgia and their clean and tender vocals.
• Explorers: Muse
  Powerful and eerie. Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Probably a good idea to listen to this at the top of a manic swing rather than at the bottom.
• Earth Intruders: Bjork
  Not Bjork's most-explicitly-environmental song, but a great symbolic and allegorical piece about our relationship to the planet. Very listenable and accessible with tribal rhythms, it tries to sound dire ... but we suggest you check out the video. Once you see the big grins on the dancers' faces, you'll begin to think of it as fun, too.
• The Lost Birds: Christopher Tin, Voces 8, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
  Focuses on bird species already driven to extinction in the anthropocene. Emotionally heartbreaking and intellectually groundbreaking.
• The Presto movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Summer
  Particularly as it appears in Vanessa Mae's 1997 "Storm" and is sampled from there in Joel J. Richard's "Presto Museum Battle" in the sound track of John Wick 2.
  Listen to all three in order. It's a lot of fun, and we can pretend it's about the environment. (It's not really, but hey, cut yourself a little slack: it's a summer playlist.)
• Think About The People: Osibisa.
  "And think about pollution/ Think about the people/ And think about a revolution/ Think about the people/ And think about a solution." They were way ahead of the curve in 1971 ... although not ahead of Neil Young.
• The Path from "Into the Trees": Zoe Keating
  Meditative, contemplative, looping music filled with Bach-like structure and simplicity. Never gets old. Listen to it while you forest-bathe as you read Richard Powers' The Overstory. But be sure to remember how to find way back.
• Run Salmon Run: Bobs and Lolo
  Clever and upbeat. A description of cyclical salmon-spawning in a playful round ... structure supports meaning. A good song for the end of what otherwise might be a gloomy playlist.

From Adze:

• Big Yellow Taxi: Joni Mitchell.
  Because, well, it's obvious.
• Pollution: Tom Lehrer.
  Brilliant satire.
• We Will All Go Together When We Go: Tom Lehrer.
  More brilliant anti-nuclear weapons satire, which could be considered the ultimate pollution and climate-change agents.
• Woodstock: Joni Mitchell, although I knew the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young version.
  The chorus says it all: “We are stardust, billion-year-old carbon ... we are golden .... and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
• Who’ll Stop the Rain: John Fogerty and Credence Clearwater Revival.
  An anti-war song, but it could just as easily be a plea for environmental sanity.
• Four Seasons: Vivaldi.
  I've always associated it with the environmental movement, perhaps because the first time I heard it I had recently started an environmental job.
• The Pastoral: Sixth Symphony, Beethoven.
  For reasons similar to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
• Symphony No. 9: From the New World, Antonín Dvořák.
  It was the first on my playlist when driving home from all the long, off-the-grid kayak trips I made over the years. It seemed to embody immersion in the elementalism of nature.
• Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers.
  I know, I know, it’s a liberation song, but it has the energy that the environmental movement needs (“We know where we’re goin...”)

Add to the list!

We know we've missed a lot of songs here.

If you can think of music that belongs on this playlist, please add it to the comments below. If we get a lot of changes, we'll revise the article and re-send it.

We hope you have some summer fun with this.