Music's Carbon Footprint

Photo by Helgi Halldorsson

          Music and sustainability involves both the sustainability of music as it is practiced, and the sustainability of the planet. The first involves the sustainability of traditional music cultures and genres, whether indigenous traditional musics endangered by modernization, or music in developed countries such as blues and classical music. Periodically journalists and scholars ponder the future of these musics. Even though we know that these musics have always been adapting and changing, we wonder whether they will change so much as to lose their integrities and identities, becoming so different that they no longer resemble what they once were. The second involves the relationship between music as practiced and the environment. Anyone concerned with music and environmental sustainability will have wondered about music’s carbon footprint. How much does music contribute to habitat loss, species extinction, and global warming?
         For the first half-dozen or so years of this blog on music and sustainability, the sustainability of music as it is practiced was my main concern. But in applying an ecological approach to this problem, one that borrowed principles from conservation biology to see how they might apply to musical and cultural sustainability, it was inevitable that the topic of music and environment would become a concern. At first it surfaced within the larger topic of sound in the environment, and more specifically in the importance of animal sound communication for survival. This topic brought me to ecomusicology, where I found scholars interested chiefly in musical practice and the environment. Many ecomusicologists wrote about composers whose compositions involved nature and environments in one way or another. Other ecomusicologists were interested in music and musicians who were singing to save the environment; that is, to protest environmental degradation and raise consciousness in order to fuel a mass movement. Yet others explored the impact of musical instrument construction on endangered plant species, especially the woods used in making guitars and violins, within the context of environmentally sound forest management. In the hallways during ecomusicology conferences I sometimes heard people wondering about the impact of musical practice on climate change, but until 2014 I didn’t think about addressing this issue.
         In 2014 Denise von Glahn asked the provocative question, “What is the sound of climate change?” and one result was a symposium on “Music in a Changing Climate,” held at the University of Minnesota in 2015. I’ve written about that symposium elsewhere on this blog. But “music in a changing climate” can evoke traditional subjects for ecomusicologists—attention to composers concerned with nature, musicians protesting global warming, and music’s impact on endangered species. For the symposium I took a different approach, asking what sound in a changing climate sounded like, and what it signaled; and in “The Sound of Climate Change” I described the sounds and ecological significance for climate change of a horrific storm I experienced on the Maine coast in the fall of 2014.
         Recently I’ve been thinking about the differences global warming and climate change have made to sustainability thinking in the 21st century, and what this means for music, sound, and cultural sustainability. Before the new century, sustainability thinking was not directed at music nor was it about climate change; it had to do with the Earth's resources, its carrying capacity, and the future of both the environment and life on the Planet, mainly human life. To be sure, conservation biologists were interested in endangered species and habitat loss, but the bulk of sustainability thinking occurred in connection with developmental economics and human ecology, where the major problem was how to feed an exponentially expanding human population, given that the Earth has finite natural resources. The technological solution offered by developmental economics increased agricultural productivity many times over by introducing modern farming methods including the massive use of chemical fertilizers and large machinery. More food could, and did, support an increasing population. Critics, however, pointed out that this came at a cost of traditional ecological knowledges, and traditional cultures. Also, the increase in farmland devoted to monoculture crops pressured biodiversity as it altered habitat and impacted animals as well as plants. Finally, it became obvious that the technological solution involved an enormous increase in energy use. According to a study published in Science in 1976, researchers at Cornell University found that whereas in nonindustrialized agriculture manual farming produces 5 to 50 calories of food energy for each calorie of energy used in producing it, industrial agriculture requires 5 to 10 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food energy. That is, 5 to 10 calories of energy from fossil fuels and other sources, mainly non-renewable, were used to produce chemical fertilizers, build and run farm machinery, etc. in order to get a single calorie of food energy. This appeared unsustainable on its face, but in the last century even though some were warning about carbon emissions from fossil fuel use and the warming planet, most sustainability thinkers were more concerned with the problem of how to feed an exploding human population and how to raise the living standard in third-world nations where the population increase was greatest.
         But if the major sustainability problem in the last century was the Earth's carrying capacity in the face of increasing human population, today the major sustainability problem is the Earth itself as we know it in the face of global warming and climate change. The link between energy use, carbon emissions, and global warming became well established and accepted in the scientific community in the 21st century, with models showing potentially catastrophic climate change if humans don’t significantly lower our carbon footprint in the near future. The caloric example in the previous paragraph takes on new meaning in this century: not only does it seem outrageous to expend so much more energy to produce a calorie of food, a back-of-the-napkin calculation of energy expenditures related to the production, distribution, delivery and consumption of music today gives cause for alarm. How much does music contribute to our carbon footprint?
         To answer that question we’d need to ask how much energy is expended in the production and consumption of musical instruments, for example, and not just ask about endangered species and habitat loss, important as they are. We’d need to take into account the energy expended in the production and consumption of music’s part of the economy, everything from the food needed to keep people alive and making music, to the energy needed to support music-making (concerts, sound reinforcement, heating large indoor spaces, musicians’ travel, manufacture of music products, etc.), to the energy needed to deliver music on the internet, including the manufacture of computers, smartphones, tablets, the network of cell towers and internet providers, and so on. Insofar as music is a significant part of the economy, it requires a significant expenditure of energy to produce, distribute, and consume. It might be useful in this regard to contrast nonindustrial music-making with industrial (and post-industrial) music-making, just as researchers at Cornell did for agriculture in the last century. How much energy is required for participatory music-making with acoustic instruments, versus presentational or hi-fi music-making as it is delivered in concert tours and over the internet? I suppose that the results will parallel those for nonindustrial versus industrial agriculture.
         We may ask, also, about the social ecology of nonindustrial farming versus industrial, and participatory music-making versus presentational and hi-fi. I’ve written about the latter, contrasting the community-building aspects of participatory music-making with the isolating aspects of presentational music. Wendell Berry has for more than fifty years been making a similar point about farming, contrasting the communal nature of tobacco farming in rural Kentucky with the isolating aspects of so-called family agribusiness industrial corn and soybean farming in the Midwest today. I needn’t go into that here; Berry’s work is widely available and he is much honored in his sphere.
         There is more to say about energy use, fossil fuels, the economy of music and the sustainability of the Planet. I’ve been thinking about this for several years now, and I know other ecomusicologists have been, also. It’s time to channel more of our efforts in this direction.