Pete and Mike Seeger

Pete Seeger, 1984. Wikimedia Commons

   

Some time ago I was writing a piece for a conference and, as often happens, some passages fell out of the final presentation that I thought were worth hanging onto for another occasion. That occasion hasn't yet arrived, but certain recent events made me think of Pete Seeger as a cultural icon for the Left. He was a spokesperson for environmental sustainability, and early on he saw how environmental harm was the inevitable by-product of the military-industrial complex and the economic systems of both the Free World and the Communist bloc. He understood the irony in the claim that technology would revolutionize food production and raise living standards in third- and fourth-world counties, when in fact it would be utilizing higher and higher amounts of fossil fuels that would increasingly pollute the environment while heating the planet and changing the climate. It occurred to me that this could be a good place to lodge those passages about the character of Pete Seeger, until another occasion presented itself; and so here they are, with slight changes to adapt themselves to this different context.

The iconic image I have of Pete Seeger is of a tall, lean man in a blue-collar workshirt. With this workshirt he signaled his identification with the Depression-era, progressive myth of an industrial proletariat. I’d gone to one his concerts when I was ten years old and was thrilled to learn to sing along with him and everyone else. He wrote a regular column in the 1950s and 1960s for the folksong magazine, Sing Out, which column he called Johnny Appleseed, Jr. after the “natural man” John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed. The apple, of course, is the iconic American fruit; what is more American than apple pie? John Chapman traveled throughout the United States in the 1800s, planting and giving away apple tree seedlings; Seeger borrowed the Appleseed myth as he traveled and planted seeds of peace and brotherhood. In so doing he sought authentication in yet another cultural myth, the wandering medieval minstrels and actors who told the truth in song and story because they weren’t bound to the soil or to the court or any official culture.

Seeger became authenticated as an icon for the folk music revival and the progressive movement throughout the second half of the 20^th century, advocating for workers' rights, Civil Rights and for world peace. I became acquainted with him in 1981 when for three days we served on a panel together for the National Endowment for the Arts. Seeger also channeled his considerable efforts into the environmental movement. Seeger symbolizes the authority of an alternative narrative fueled by music, a site of resistance to state hegemony. His was a narrative that blended political and cultural democracy. His narrative of brotherhood and sisterhood ultimately extended to include plants, animals, landforms, and geological forces—that is, the entire world of nature.

Nature and nurture among the Seegers produced a family of educators, artists and writers intent on doing good rather than making money. His father, the polymath musicologist Charles Seeger, was a principled scholar-activist. Pete, influenced by Alan Lomax’s commitment to cultural democracy and by Woody Guthrie’s life as a singer-songwriter, found that he could advance his progressive ideals by using his great gift for music and song-leading to enact, by means of his concerts, the feelings of brotherly and sisterly love and solidarity required for the social democracy he envisioned. Of course, his political activism involved more than just music performance.

Yet, interestingly, his brother Mike, an equally accomplished musician, did not use his musical gifts for political activism and social democracy. I knew Mike as a fellow old-time musician, having first met and played music with him in 1967; but he was modest and known to only a relatively small segment of the folk music revival. I found Mike dedicated and driven, like his brother; but Mike’s dedication was to working behind the scenes to help perpetuate acoustic old-time string band music. He worked tirelessly to aid and promote the elder source musicians who had kept it alive in the face of all the 20^th century pressures to modernize and commercialize it. As Mike once quipped, by playing old-time music one could earn tens of dollars.

         While Mike Seeger’s story fed the pre-modern cultural myths of small, face-to-face communities and appropriate technologies for a few thousand of us old-time music aficionados, Pete Seeger became a household name. He not only perpetuated but also helped to promote and delineate, many more cultural narratives: those of the poet-hero of the working classes; of self-reliant antimodernism; of the value of an unpolluted natural environment, and of the cultural myth of universal brotherhood, peace, and justice.

 

 

 

 

Salon April 9: Folk Knowledge, Environment and Sustainability

 On April 9 at 11 a.m. US eastern daylight time, Mary Hufford, Katey Borland and I will co-host an internet "salon" on folk knowledge, environment and sustainability. The salon, sponsored by the American Folklore Society Fellows, is open to those who attended the March 10 Webinar on Heritage, Folklore, and the Public Sphere:

To participate in the April 9 salon, one must pre-register here. Our  salon is a follow-up to my presentation on that topic for the AFS last March 10, which may be viewed here, beginning at 1 hour, six minutes, and thirty seconds in: Mary Hufford introduces me and I speak for ten minutes on this topic. If you prefer a transcript, in my previous blog entry I printed a draft which was identical to what I presented in the Webinar. I feel fortunate to have two outstanding salon co-hosts in Mary and Katey, each bringing their perspectives on the topic to the salon. Nonetheless, the idea for the salon is for us to host a discussion, not to present our ideas only. Several hundred people attended the Webinar; we look forward to hosting many of you on April 9 at 11 a.m. e.d.t. for a stimulating discussion. We want to hear what you think.

Environmental sustainability has been around in one form or another for more than a century but it has taken on a new urgency in our era of climate change. Cultural sustainability is a comparatively new topic. I began speaking about it to the American Folklore Society in 2006, drawing on sustainability discourses in ecology and also in economics (i.e., sustainable development). Modernization and development have taken a toll on the environment. Is sustainable development the answer? The United Nations thinks so. Or is sustainable development, like sustainable growth, an oxymoron? What is the place of culture, especially traditional expressive culture, such as folk and Indigenous knowledges, in public policy that emphasizes sustainable economic development?  Here is the description of the salon:

This salon will consider how public folklore and heritage programs can foster the sustainability of the natural environment and development of society as a whole.  How do cultural and environmental sustainability differ?  What difference does that make for folklore research and practice?  Querying assumptions bundled into sustainability frameworks, we will explore emerging models for culturally-driven sustainability. How do these models bear on the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals? What opportunities does the U.N.’s IPBES program represent for public folklore?  What are the most productive questions that folklorists are exploring with communities to arrive at models for sustainable development?  

Folk Knowledge and Environmental Sustainability: AFS Webinar March 10

Upcoming on March 10, 2021, six folklore/folklife specialists will be presenting briefly in a Webinar for the American Folklore Society, followed by open discussion. The topic of the Webinar is "Folklife, Heritage and the Public Sphere." It is free and open to all, but attendees must register by going to the AFS website. I was asked to speak on public folklore, heritage, and environmental sustainability. I've written a draft of my ten-minute presentation, which looks like it will be the last of the six:

“Public Folklore, Heritage, and Environmental Sustainability”

I begin with a story about folklife, heritage, the environment, and traditional, local ecological knowledge. This is the kind of heritage that is expressed in everyday occupational life. Although there’s a tourist product involved, my story is about scientific versus folk knowledges. I will ask you to bear my story in mind as I reference the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Regional Assessment for the Americas report from the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). These collaborative, science-informed documents are major international efforts intended to guide policy and decision-makers towards wise and sustainable use of environmental resources, including cultural resources. I will end with a few discussion prompts for you about my folklife story and how it aligns and does not align with the UN and IPBES policy recommendations. 

         First, the story. In 1979 I bought a summer house on an island off the coast of Maine. In retirement I live here year round. The island where I live contains a working waterfront that is central to the state's lobster fishing industry which today is worth nearly half a billion dollars. More lobster is landed on this island than any other port on the east coast, quite an accomplishment for an island of less than three thousand people. You have all tasted lobster I hope; it is one of the great delights of this world. Lobster fishing on the Maine coast has been integral to the folklife of its inhabitants since the 1840s. The lobster fishery is a classic example of a commons. Until the 1930s it was an unregulated commons; anyone could set their baited traps in the waters near the shore and haul them up hand over hand with a pulley, using a traditional locally built skiff called a peapod on account of its shape. By the end of the 19^th century lobstering was Maine’s most valuable fishery. In the early 20th century the industry grew larger. Live and canned lobster was exported out of state, while boats became motorized, the trap ropes were hauled up with power winches, and productivity increased exponentially to meet the demand. But without a good understanding of how lobsters reproduce, the lobster population went through boom and bust cycles in the 20^th century until conservation measures were introduced. Some of these were science-informed state regulations such as bans on fishing during certain times of the year. This is still the most frequent conservation measure for fisheries, even though it is a blunt instrument. Only this past summer the state of Massachusetts initiated a so-called “pause” in lobster fishing, despite the likelihood that the population decline was not because of overfishing but the result of lobsters migrating northward on account of the warming ocean. Other conservation measures have been introduced by the fishermen and women themselves, such as limitations on the number of boats permitted in a given area; and the catch, release, and v-notching of egg-bearing females. Taken together these measures smoothed the up-and-down population cycles somewhat but did not eliminate them.

In the early 1990s, when the lobster population was in steep decline, the Maine state fish and wildlife scientists diagnosed the cause as overfishing and proposed to the legislature a severe moratorium on lobster fishing. A local lobsterman and citizen scientist, Ted Ames, was skeptical. A moratorium over a period of years might keep the fishery afloat but it surely would sink the fishermen. Like most of the people on the island he was convinced that the lobster population was down because scallop draggers were wreaking havoc with the ocean bottoms where the female lobsters laid their eggs. Ames knew lobsters had favorite spawning grounds but he didn’t know just where they were, so he interviewed the elder island fishermen and in their oral histories he found out where the spawning grounds most likely were to be. So Ames and the local representative to the state legislature proposed an alternative: that instead of imposing a blanket moratorium they prohibit all fishing in a few designated areas. The legislature agreed to give it a try, the lobster population rebounded, and Ted Ames received a MacArthur Genius Grant. With the money he started a lobster research institute.

         Next I discuss the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. These assessments and recommendations impose an economic calculus upon human well-being and the environment. Their framework is economic rationality, which thinks of the environment as a natural resource for human beings; that is, as natural capital. Natural capital provides ecosystem services including materials for food, clothing, shelter, fuel, manufacturing, and recreation. These ecosystem services are quantifiable and valued in market dollars. However, in somewhat of an afterthought, these international, intergovernmental experts acknowledged that ecosystems provide human beings with qualitative cultural services. Some of these so-called cultural services are education, beauty and inspiration; physical and mental health; and what they term “identity support“ through sense of place, purpose, and the sacred. Also among the cultural services that ecosystems provide are Indigenous, traditional and local knowledges. This is one place where folklife culture fits, as for example in the knowledge that the old salts from the island provided about the lobster spawning beds. The IPBES report admits that the value of cultural services is often difficult to quantify, measure, and enter into an economic calculus of cost-benefit equations for policy and decision-making, especially when conflicts arise among stakeholder populations having different worldviews. The IPBES punts here, and I quote:

 

While attempts at monetization of ecosystem services may lead to some insights on the values of nature, broader considerations related to spirituality, cultural identity or social cohesion are not easily characterized in this value system, making them too often underrepresented in decision making and in scientific assessments at subregional and regional levels… (Chap. 2, p. 88). Thus a multiplicity of valuation methodologies will be needed, as well as methods for combining the results in ways that do not selectively favor one worldview over [an]other. Such methodologies and strategies for combining results are not yet fully developed.… (Chap. 1, p. 24).

 

The pecuniary value of the old salts’ ecological knowledge is calculable in terms of the dollar equivalent of the catch; but there are cultural aspects of lobstering that are incalculable. My late friend Hap Collins spoke of taking pleasure in the beauty of fishing when you're out in your lobster boat on the ocean alongshore at dawn, the ocean fog is clearing off, the air is warming and the water is calm, you have a cup of coffee in your hands and you're approaching the area where your traps are and you anticipate your catch of the day. I know something of what Hap meant because I went fishing with him and I experienced it for myself. The MA and IPBES reports acknowledge the incalculable value of what we would call an affecting presence, yet they think of it as another aspect of natural capital for the benefit of human beings; and don’t quite know how to factor in its importance. Does it make any sense to speak of an economy of contemplation?

Finally, some prompts. Consider my lobster fishing story in light of the UN and IPBES assessments and recommendations. What are the consequences for public folklorists of thinking of folklife and the environment as natural capital, providing ecosystem services whose pecuniary worth can be measured? Was it a given that the government would agree to give Ted Ames’ proposal a try? Would a different state legislature have sided with the state fish and wildlife scientists, laughing off Ames’ oral history project and the old salts’ superstitions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of thinking of the environment as natural capital that delivers to humans ecosystem services, including cultural services? Should public folklorists concerned with heritage endorse and work within this predominant contemporary policy paradigm that considers the environment to consist primarily of economic assets with measurable market values that enter into cost-benefit analyses during resource allocation planning and decision-making? More generally, how dependent is human well-being on economic success beyond a level of basic comfort? Should the well-being of other living creatures be considered? And is it folly to ignore that thinking of the environment as natural capital is what got us into our current environmental emergency—global warming, extinctions, pandemics—in the first place? Is it wise to think that having failed spectacularly in trying to control nature, the solution is for us to try to control nature more? Are other frames more desirable (e.g., deep ecology; rewilding; commons; environmental justice; etc.) and if so to what ends? You may recall the proverbial expression that the world does not owe you a living. Does it still make sense to think about rights and obligations relationally and interdependently: if the ecosystem owes us, what do we owe the ecosystem?

 

Keeping Track of Writing Projects

Scholar sharpening his quill, by Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 17th c.)

 

    Although I don't have a quill pen, as does the scholar in this painting courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons, I thought I’d offer readers glimpse into some of my scholarly writing projects going along during the second half of this calendar year, and where they stand. Compared to this blog which is aimed at the public, these projects may appear esoteric and begging for translation. That would be a useful future task for this blog. Yet this blog originally was intended as a research blog, a basket of ideas mainly for my own use. But the writerly voice that emerged wanted to write for the public, not mainly for myself. This entry will be a change of pace, then, because it's going to be much more like that basket.

    I want to say also that besides writing projects, like most people in the United States today I’ve been much absorbed this year with activities surrounding the upcoming elections, local, state, and national, to take place in only a few days, although the results may not be known as quickly this year as usual. But this isn’t a blog about elections and politics.

    It seems no week goes by without something needing to be done on an article, a chapter, or a review in progress. I couldn’t possibly have involved myself in these writing projects while I was a professor, because during the academic year I spent almost all my work time in teaching, advising, and administrative work. Now in retirement I have no teaching or advising obligations—at least, no formal ones—and the only administrative work I’ve been doing has been for the academic societies to which I belong. Before I retired, I was able to work on writing projects only during summers (when I had no teaching obligations) and semesters or years on leave with fellowships or grants, often combining those with sabbaticals. Now in retirement I have much more time to read freely, and to write when I wish to. Here, then, is a brief description of some in-progress writing projects.

    1. “Ethical Considerations for Ethnomusicologists in the Midst of Environmental Crisis.” This is my chapter in a book in progress edited by Jonathan Stock and Beverley Diamond called the Routledge Companion to Ethics in Ethnomusicology.  The initial draft of my chapter was due on August 31. I just barely sent it in by the deadline. The abstract: "Ethnomusicologists’ “primary ethical responsibility is to their research participants,” according to the 2018 SEM Statement on Ethical Considerations. The Statement asserts further that in some cases this responsibility must be extended to “natural flora, and fauna, and human relationships to these.” What happens when these two principles are in conflict? I re-examine, from an ethical standpoint, a longitudinal research study among a musical community of coal miners whose industry harms the environment and themselves, rendering them vulnerable to both economic and environmental injustice. Resolution of this ethical conflict is rendered especially difficult because this community has a justifiable and longstanding distrust of outside do-gooders such as union organizers, social workers and environmentalists."

    1a. On October 23 I gave a brief and partial version of this chapter at a roundtable on “complicating the conversation about ethics in ethnomusicology” at the recent Society for Ethnomusicology conference.

    2. “Ethnography in the Study of Congregational Music.” This is a chapter on doing ethnographic fieldwork, with special attention to prospects and problems with ethnography in religious music-cultures. In this chapter I attempt to answer three questions: (1) What is ethnography? (2) What theories and methods offer a foundation for ethnographic research, and does religion present special difficulties? and (3) Why incorporate ethnography into studies of congregational music? The chapter is for a book long in progress that’s edited by Jeffers Engelhardt, Monique Ingalls, and Andrew Mall. It’s entitled Studying Congregational Music, also under contract with Routledge. This book has been in progress since 2015. Jeffers Engelhardt asked me if I’d write a chapter on ethnography for this volume in 2015; I accepted the invitation and submitted the chapter in May, 2016. More than four years went by as the rest of the authors wrote their chapters and the editors wrote their introductory material. Last month the manuscript underwent Routledge’s copyediting. My copyedited chapter was sent to me about two weeks ago, and I was given 7 days to go over the copyedits, answer questions, and make corrections. I managed to squeeze it in while also attending and presenting at the SEM conference, again just returning it before the deadline. Possibly I will see page proofs and have a chance to correct these as well, but it’s just as likely that the editors will take care of that. Most likely the book will be published in 2021, five years after I completed my chapter for it. That is a long time, but it’s not uncommon in an edited volume with a dozen or more contributing authors.

    3. “A Sound Economy.” This article is an expansion of one of the four topics of my “sound ecology” project. It is a chapter in a book in progress entitled Transforming Ethnomusicology, edited by Beverley Diamond and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, under contract with Oxford University Press. I wrote my chapter in 2017, basing it partly on my plenary address for the 2015 “Transforming Ethnomusicology” forum in Limerick, Ireland; and on one of my four public Basler Lectures at East Tennessee State University in March and April, 2016. A sound economy is characteristic of a sound community and arises from the recognition of co-presence and a universal kinship by means of sound experience. These ideas are much elaborated in my sound ecology project, the latest summary of it having appeared in the last chapter of my book Toward a Sound Ecology, published last August by Indiana University Press. Last month the manuscript for Transforming Ethnomusicology underwent Oxford’s copyediting. My copyedited chapter was sent to me about two weeks ago, and I was given three weeks to go over the copyedits, answer questions, and update the citations and references, and make other corrections. I spent a couple of days last week doing this in down time from the SEM conference, and have been working steadily on it this weekend as well. I hope to complete it and send it back to the editors in a few more days. Possibly I will see page proofs and have a chance to correct these as well, but it’s just as likely that the editors will take care of that. Most likely the book will be published in 2021, four years after I completed my chapter for it.

    4. “An Ecological Approach to Folklife Studies, Expressive Culture, and Environment.” This article, like the first three, came as the result of an invitation—in this case from a group based at Indiana University that go by the acronymn DERT, which stands for Diverse Environmental Research Team. DERT consists of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and ecomusicologists. The article will be published in a book under contract to the University of Illinois Press, entitled Diverse Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Environmental Change, edited by John McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Touhy. In this article I attempted once more to advance an ecological approach to folklife and the performance of expressive culture, returning to a topic that I first broached in my 1988 book, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. The abstract: "The performed word, whether spoken, chanted, or sung, offers more than an expression of culture in aesthetic form. From an ecological point of view, it articulates changing historical and contemporary relations among living beings and their environments. Theories from ecosystems ecology, when applied to sociocultural systems as well as biological ones, reveal that the performed word adjusts connections among people, material culture, animals, plants, landforms, and other aspects of the physical environment. Sacred language in particular is imbued with the power to alter relations and, therefore, to change beings, the environment, and the course of future events." The article goes on to illustrate these claims through a case study of environmental affordances, catastrophes, and life story narratives in a community in Virginia’s northern Blue Ridge Mountains, over a time depth of approximately 150 years. The DERT team editor that I worked with was more interested in the performed word than in ecology. In 2018 expanded the my 2017 draft of this chapter by adding a few pages about expressive culture, while I insisted on maintaining what I had written about farming, family, husbandry, and the effects of a changing physical environment, encouraging various adaptations and requiring others. I reviewed the copyedited manuscript two years later (i.e., in late July and early August), sending it back to the editors then. I hope to see page proofs either later this year or early next. We expect that the book will be published in 2021.

    5. “Earth Song: Music and the Environment.” Like the first four, this essay was written on invitation. In 2019 I was approached by Huib Schippers, then director of Folkways Records, about writing a short article for Alexander Street Press for a curriculum accompanying various albums featuring music and environment, in the Folkways Records catalog. It was to be a brief essay, no more than 3000 words (the first four averaged 8,000 words). I said I would do so, as long as I could write about the deep connections between music, sound, and nature. After they agreed, I wrote the essay and completed it shortly after Thanksgiving, 2019, and returned it then. In 2020 I’ve been corresponding all the while with Huib and some others who were hired for the project, advising them as they prepare a list of further readings to go with this essay and the curricular unit that it’s a part of. I’m not sure when it will be published; perhaps next year, perhaps later.

    6. A “response” chapter based on my presentation for an online conference at Dartmouth College, entitled “The Power of Song: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe,” to take place in early December. This, also, came about as a result of an invitation. I’m to respond to three presentations on “musical icons,” that is, people who make music and who have become performers who are more than just famous; they have become cultural symbols, they and their careers embodying beliefs deeply embedded in their societies. So far two of the three papers have arrived, but only one arrived by the deadline. As a result I’ve blocked out my response to that paper and will need to incorporate my response to the second paper shortly while I await the third. After the conference they will revise their conference papers and turn them into articles, and I will revise my conference response for publication in the book.

    7. “Eco-trope or Eco-tripe? Music Ecology as a Complex System.” This is an article in progress for a book edited by Aaron Allen and myself, called Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, under contract with Oxford University Press. The article is an expansion of part of my invited keynote address to the Irish ICTM conference in 2017, and part of the abstract goes like this: “Complex ecosystems analyses, environmental philosophy and ecological knowledges (from both Western science and indigenous populations) of sonic behavior, in both human animals and other-than-human animals, are complementary in ways that hold out the promise of re-centering sound connections and kinships. In this way, music/ecology becomes more than merely a metaphor. Employing ecological principles to understand sonic behavior among organisms and their environment, the music/ecology metaphor offers a path toward sound communities, sound economies, and a sound ecology.” My progress on this article has been gradual as I’ve been attending to the five that I listed above. I’m going to try hard to keep my desk mostly clear for the next couple of months so that I can finish up a draft.
 
 

BLAST: a citizen initiative to stop noise pollution

BLAST

"Ban Leafblowers And Save Our Town"

How can noisy machines help clean the world, when noise itself is a form of filth?--Ashleigh Brilliant, BLAST "leader by default"

On the evening of the Santa Barbara municipal elections, self-described BLAST "leader by default"Ashleigh Brilliant paraded about the election station. Brilliant was armed with a push broom and a victory statement reinforcing Santa Barbara's disgust for "the noise, dirt, and pollution of a device which should never have been permitted in our city in the first place." Finally, three tries at a referendum and fifteen years of work to ban leafblowers won out for Brilliant and his coalition. According to Brilliant, leafblowers are "...the least justifiable and most obnoxious technological monstrosity I can think of. And it's not really a leaf blower, it's a dirt blower. I mean, how many fallen leaves do we have to deal with?"

"A ban is a very easy law to understand," he says. "You just can't do it at all with that machine." Before the ban was in effect, Brilliant resorted to self-help measures, once physically removing the leafblower from a nearby gardener's back. One year later, Brilliant grabbed the leafblower from the gardener and repeatedly smashed it to the ground, but only after begging the gardener on bended knee to stop using the blower.

Leaf blower decibel count. LOUD!

It is no surprise that forty cities in California alone, and over three hundred cities nationwide, have banned leafblowers. There are as many ways to describe the noise that leafblowers emit as there are people who are disturbed by them. From fifty feet, gas-powered leafblowers create up to 70 decibels of noise. Most would identify with the high grinding whine we know so well, not to mention other environmental hazards created by leafblowers such as exhaust fumes and swirling clouds of airborne debris.

Leafblowers grew in popularity since the 1970's. Santa Barbara has "regulated" leafblowers for the past ten years, but the city still suffered with lack of enforcement and regulations that were not restricitve enough. At one time the city tightened existing regulations, but to no avail. BLAST was formed in February 1997, and fifty unpaid volunteers collected more than nine thousand signatures asking to put the issue on the ballot in November of 1997. In early November, 54.5 percent of voters elected to place a total ban on all leafblowers within the Santa Barbara city limits.

Some of the resources that BLAST used to quiet the neighborhoods include an official "ballot argument" stating BLAST's position, bumper sticker, an "initiative measure" containing the ordinance purpose, summary and language; and the "notice of intent" to circulate the initiative petition, containing a statement of the reasons for the ban. To view these items, click on the links from each phrase.

BLAST's pre-election opposition came in the form of the City Parks and Recreation Department, professional gardeners and landscapers, garden supply shops, and one of the nation's leading leafblower manufacturers. They formed a coalition to oppose the ban called CORE: Citizens Opposed To Radical Enactments. These parties claim that irresponsible leafblower users are the problem, and recent market innovations include leafblowers that are half as loud as the former machines. They raised more than $10,000 to further their opposition, while BLAST's campaign was so low-budget that they did not reach the threshold requiring that they report their spending. CORE members claimed that owners of commercial and office buildings will be hit hardest, where leafblowers are used on a grand scale to clean parking lots and walkways.

Money is also a consideration, with leafblower advocates claiming that leafblowers save a great deal of time and labor and contribute to the appearance of the city. Brilliant counters this by stating that if all gardeners have to compete under the same restrictive regulations, nobody will have a competitive advantage. Also, "cleanliness" has gotten out of control-- what about the need for a natural setting? Brilliant believes that it is not a matter of right and wrong: "Our opponents are just as interested in a beautiful city as we are. It's just that they have a more narrow vision of that beauty."

The ban takes effect in February of 1998, although the City Parks and Recreation Department stopped using the machines shortly after the election, beginning a process of major change for the City of Santa Barbara.

From the BLAST web page, archived on the NPC (Noise Pollution Clearinghouse) Quietnet website. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Noise Pollution and the EPA: Celebrating Earth Day

Planet Earth: the "blue marble" photo.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day and Earth Week. The NASA “blue marble” photograph of Earth, taken from space, was published two years later. The photograph gave us a new perspective. It showed once and for all how all Earth’s creatures were bound together on a journey through the solar system, bounded as we were by Earth’s fragile biosphere.

Hazardous chemicals. Wikimedia Commons.

Environmentalism in 1970 was all about curbing pollution of the commons: air, water, soil. The villains included atomic waste, pesticides, toxic metals, automobile exhaust, sewage, factory smokestacks, plastics, and so on. We were intent on making Earth a healthier place for humans primarily, but also for other species, especially endangered species. In response President Nixon set up an environmental council and, following their recommendations, asked Congress to set up a federal agency to monitor the environment, to organize and coordinate federal programs and to assist states, and to issue guidelines and regulations, all to reduce pollution. Seven months after the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency was established.

Industrial noise pollution. Wikimedia Commons.

The EPA soon became concerned with noise pollution as well. Although local governments had long enacted noise ordinances, the 1972 Noise Control Act gave the EPA authority to regulate noise associated with construction and transportation. The EPA began to work with aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and airports to reduce engine noise and re-route takeoffs and landings to avoid the most heavily populated areas. In 1979 the EPA established a new noise label program to give home products like vacuum cleaners, shop tools and chainsaws decibel ratings, indicating those to which prolonged exposure was unhealthy. I recall when I bought my first chainsaw in the early 1980s that I also purchased noise-canceling headphones. Coordinating efforts through the EPA Office of Noise Abatement and Control, the EPA also got Congress to establish the 1978 Quiet Communities Act. 

One of the most important things the EPA did in its early days was to encourage scientific research on the psychological and physiological effects of noise pollution. In 1978 the Noise Abatement Office published a helpful pamphlet, Noise: A Health Problem. It summarized research on the effects of noise on hearing loss, heart disease, special effects on children and the unborn, intrusion at home and work, sleep disruption, and mental and social well-being. Among its conclusions were the following:

*Noise can cause permanent hearing damage, and people with hearing loss suffer discomfort and social isolation.

*Noise produces stress that contributes to heart disease and other illnesses.

*The fetus is not fully protected from noise. Noise may threaten fetal development.

*Noise may hinder language development in children.

*Noise hampers work efficiency.

*When sleep is disturbed by noise, work efficiency, health and well-being may suffer.

*Noise can cause extremes of emotion and behavior.

*Noise can obscure warning signals, causing accidents to occur.

In 1981 the Noise Abatement Office published a lengthy and still very useful Noise Effects Handbook: A Desk Reference to Health and Welfare Effects of Noise. Whereas Noise: A Health Problem was aimed at a popular audience, the Noise Effects Handbook included data from scientific research and made a convincing case for the harmful physiological and psychological impacts of noise pollution.

Pittsfield, Maine. Photo by Jeff Titon

Although funding for the Noise Abatement Office was stopped by the Reagan Administration in 1982, as the federal government gave over noise abatement responsibilities to state and local governments, the Noise Control and Quiet Communities Acts were never rescinded. They remain in effect today, although they are unfunded and unenforced. Meanwhile, a great many state and local citizens groups and NGOs organized in opposition to noise pollution. Among them were HORN (Halt Outrageous Railroad Noise), and BLAST (Ban Leafblowers and Save our Town), a Santa Barbara, CA organization. The next blog entry shows how BLAST became a model for citizen activism through the ballot with petitions, bumper stickers, and other measures. When a majority of the citizens of Santa Barbara voted in favor of the ban in the November, 1997 election, it took effect the following February.

Musical Sustainability and the Novel Coronavirus

Coal miner, West Virginia. Wikimedia Commons.

While musicians throughout the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with new songs and virtual performances and concerts meant to express solidarity and hope, musical and cultural sustainability is yet at great risk from the novel coronavirus. As I’ve written here before, as the last century drew to a close, arts policy had settled on a strategy of marking outstanding musical traditions as cultural heritage worthy of preservation and encouragement, and marketing these traditions so that they would become economic engines, wittingly or unwittingly transforming them into commodities in the process. International arts policy emanating from UNESCO considered the greatest threats to musical traditions to be modernization and development that would cause cultural drift and the abandonment of traditions by succeeding generations. Alan Lomax warned in the 1970s of what he foresaw as “cultural greyout” as a result of Western media dominance throughout the world. I became aware of environmental threats as well, such as those from floods, mine cave-ins, and earthquakes, after working with communities in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky. When I began thinking about sustainability it occurred to me that economic threats, such as regional overdependence on single industries such as fishing, or coal mining, to the communities that sustained musical traditions, could put a population out of business in short order, causing out-migration, cultural dispersal, and disruption of musical as well as cultural traditions. I don’t know that any of us in the world of public folklore and applied ethnomusicology in the US envisioned a threat to musical sustainability from a pandemic.

Now we know. And we know, also, that the most experienced and wisest tradition-bearers in those communities are the elders and by virtue of age and health conditions, therefore among the most vulnerable in those communities. A recent newspaper article highlights the risk faced by Kentucky coal miners, where black lung disease, on the decline until a resurgence in the 1990s, compounds the likelihood of death from COVID-19. Although mining now employs less than ten percent of the population of Appalachia, in some areas such as southeastern Kentucky a majority of the elder population were coal miners earlier in their lives and one in ten now suffer from black lung, while the area has a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—all conditions of comorbidity with the virus. A retired coal miner, Jerry Coleman, said “A lot of people don’t understand coal mining and the damage it’s done to our lungs. Now that everyone is phasing out coal, they’re all forgetting about the poor old coal miner.” Making things worse, rural hospitals in the coal mining region of Appalachia, like rural hospitals all over, have been closing due to lack of funding, and in some areas the nearest hospital is an hour or more distant. “Nobody knows what this virus is going to do when it gets to this area,” said Jimmy Moore, a 74-year-old black lung patient in Shelby Gap, Kentucky, who spent 22 years in the mines before retiring in 2000. His 51-year-old son, he said, has an even more serious case of black lung. “It’s probably just going to wipe us out.”

Sustaining Music by Sustaining Insects?

Rhinoceros beetle, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sustaining music means sustaining not only the cultural soil but also the physical soil; that is, the environment upon which we all depend. That's why it's important to conserve not only music, culture, and the people that make and carry it, but also the physical environment that sustains it all.

This may seem a little counter-intuitive at first. Asked what species were abundant in nature, Darwin is said to have replied that God must have been inordinately fond of beetles. In fact, there are so many different species of beetles that many are still being identified and scientists estimate that there are a great many more still unknown. In the face of all this, one might legitimately ask what difference does it make if a thousand unknown species of beetles go extinct? And for good measure, how about black flies, mosquitoes and poisonous snakes, not to mention deer ticks?

The answer, of course, is that we're all connected. Everyone knows about food chains and food webs, but a point that’s sometimes overlooked is that if you break too many strands in the webs or links in the chain, the ill effects are felt all the way along them. We hear about significant losses in bee populations and we might be tempted to think, well that’s good, now I don’t have to worry as much about being stung. But of course bees are among the greatest of plant pollinators, and a major bee die-off means fewer wild and domestic fruits and flowers, fewer vegetables, and less food for all the creatures that feed on them, including us. Humans are dependent on insects, and worms (in the soil), and so on all the way along the chain. And we’re also likely dependent in ways we don’t yet fully comprehend. And so, it’s not an either/or proposition, either we try to improve the lot of humans or we try to improve the lot of plants and animals. It’s both/and because we’re all connected. 

A study published this month in the journal Biological Conservation warns about insect extinctions and makes the same point, more forcefully and eloquently than I ever could. The study reviews what is known about “the drivers of insect extinctions, their consequences, and how extinctions can negatively impact humanity.” The abstract continues:

"We are causing insect extinctions by driving habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, use of polluting and harmful substances, the spread of invasive species, global climate change, direct overexploitation, and co-extinction of species dependent on other species.

With insect extinctions, we lose much more than species. We lose abundance and biomass of insects, diversity across space and time with consequent homogenization, large parts of the tree of life, unique ecological functions and traits, and fundamental parts of extensive networks of biotic interactions. Such losses lead to the decline of key ecosystem services on which humanity depends. From pollination and decomposition, to being resources for new medicines, habitat quality indication and many others, insects provide essential and irreplaceable services. We appeal for urgent action to close key knowledge gaps and curb insect extinctions. An investment in research programs that generate local, regional and global strategies that counter this trend is essential. Solutions are available and implementable, but urgent action is needed now to match our intentions."

A progressive, small college that is sustainable--so far

     In a recent entry I wrote about Hampshire College, a small, progressive institution located in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, one that is in deep financial trouble. It’s no secret that many other small colleges face similar problems today; some such as Green Mountain College (Vermont) have already closed, others like Castleton have laid off many employees, and many others are in danger of going into a death spiral. For its part, since I wrote that entry two months ago, Hampshire’s president and some members of its Board have resigned, and the college has dropped its attempt to partner with another institution. It’s now desperately trying to raise enough money to stay afloat.

     Vermont seems to be especially hard hit. Besides Green Mountain and Castleton, Goddard College (another Vermont progressive liberal arts college) was placed on accreditation probation in November for failing to meet requirements on finance and governance, and the College of St. Joseph also is in financial trouble. It’s not only the progressive schools that are in trouble; so are the many liberal arts colleges and the smaller branches of the state universities. For now, the top- tier colleges and universities appear safe, but second-tier schools also are facing higher costs and lower numbers of applicants, reflecting downward college-age population trends coupled with over-expansion in the previous century, while ballooning student loans pressure students (and their parents) into making financial cost-benefit decisions about colleges, majors, and careers. No wonder the liberal arts are suffering. 

     Sterling College in Vermont seems to be an exception to this rule. I’ve blogged about Sterling before. It’s not only got a progressive curriculum, but it specializes in agriculture and environmental studies (including science), and the campus is coupled to a farm raising livestock and produce. Under supervision, students operate this farm and supply food for the college population and others. Although it has a liberal arts curriculum, it has relatively little depth outside of environmental studies, partly because it is so small—only 18 faculty members and 110 students, and compared with other colleges and universities, a much smaller proportion of administrators. Students are required do a lot of the work that staff does at other colleges--like Berea College in Kentucky, it is a work college. Also unlike Hampshire and some of the other small liberal arts colleges, Sterling has been very successful at fund-raising, and relies on tuition for only about 75% of its income, rather than the 90% typical of the others. Also atypical, they maintain almost no long-term debt. And although the food the students eat is fresh, wholesome and plentiful, it is without the upscale attributes of the food at some of the expensive colleges competing for students partly on the basis of the creature comforts they can offer them. And speaking of creature comforts, I can testify on personal experience that dorm living at Sterling is very spartan—bunk beds, small bedrooms, nails in the wall to hand your clothes on, shared bathrooms, and so forth. Their niche appeals to philanthropists and granting agencies. Recently they received a $2.5 million grant to launch the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, not in Vermont but in Henry County, Kentucky, where Berry lives. Students spend two years in Henry County and graduate with a degree in sustainable agriculture. 

     Sterling's appeal is to a very small and idealistic segment of the student population, one that wants to combine hands-on farm work with environmental studies in a small, intense community of like-minded people. So small and concentrated is this group that the College admits 94% of those who apply. Only about 60% of those who start the program graduate, compared with 75% at Hampshire, 55% at Goddard, and 75% at the University of Vermont. Sterling offers majors in only a few areas: ecology, environmental humanities, outdoor education, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable food systems, along with self-designed majors. Careers that make sense for Sterling graduates often involve work for government, scientific, or non-profit organizations, many with a global footprint; but as major international corporations expand their commitment to environmental stewardship, Sterling graduates are in demand there as well. Unlike Hampshire, which offers a liberal arts curriculum with depth in many subjects, Sterling College serves to prepare a small group for a comparatively few kinds of careers.  

     Many of the smaller universities—regional branches of state universities, mainly—are beginning to shrink their liberal arts offerings in exchange for program development that more directly prepares students for careers in areas where there is strong demand, such as information technology, or nursing. Advocates of the liberal arts are crying foul, charging that these institutions are giving up on education and becoming vocational schools instead. But that is a subject for another blog entry. 

Whole Terrain and the Sound of Climate Change

Whole Terrain, a journal of reflective environmental practice, last month published an author interview in which I discussed my essay, “The Sound of Climate Change.”  The essay may be read on my academia.edu page. The author interview may be read on the Whole Terrain website. 

     I’ve written in an earlier blog entry about how the essay was generated from a question by musicologist Denise Von Glahn. She and Aaron Allen and Mark Pedelty and I were chatting just before the Ecomusicologies conference in September, 2014. We were talking about our upcoming event in the spring of 2015 at the University of Minnesota, on the topic of sustainability and sound. “What is the sound of climate change?” she asked, and immediately we knew we had a theme for the Minnesota event, ultimately titled “Music and Climate Change.” 

     Earlier in 2014, Cherice Bock, editor of Whole Terrain, had invited me to write an essay for their next issue. We discussed my writing on the threats to the environment of mountaintop removal in central Appalachia. I pointed out that blasting off the mountain tops dumps toxic chemicals into the streams that run down the mountain hollows. They poison everything in their path. People, animals, plants, ecosystems are damaged. 

     But a few weeks after I returned from the Ecomusicologies conference, a violent, early-season snowstorm compelled my attention. As I stood outside on my porch taking it all in, I realized I was hearing the sounds of climate change in the great wind and the crashing of toppled spruce and apple trees. I felt I was eavesdropping on nature’s alarm calls. I knew then that I must write about this experience, instead of mountaintop removal, for Whole Terrain. By the end of 2014 I’d finished my essay on the sound of climate change and sent it off to Cherice. In 2015 I spoke on the same subject in Minneapolis. That issue of Whole Terrain was published in the spring of 2016. The following summer Cherice interviewed me, transcribed the interview, and produced the short, edited version that was published on their site in April, 2017.

     I told Cherice in the interview, “. . . I heard the sound of climate change for myself in this . . . storm, and something compelled me to write about that topic for you instead. Of course, I’d read about climate change. I was very much interested in it. But it’s one thing to give assent to it as a threat or an idea, and it’s another thing to experience it for oneself. I heard it . . . [and] I could no longer walk out in the woods and be in nature the way I had been . . . I felt like . . . the land had been raped. These were very powerful feelings. I wondered how the other animals who lived on that land experienced it. I wanted to write about this. When you experience it for yourself, finding language that might be adequate to express your feelings is difficult but important to do. . . . Telling my personal story of loss also required telling a larger story of sound and climate change. . . We learn to trust our senses, attuned to our habitat, indoors and out. When familiar sounds leave, we become anxious. . . .”
     I was struck once again by the way personal experience compelled me to write about sustainability. A 2004 invitation to play neighborly music at the Common Ground Fair, a celebration of sustainable living, started me thinking about music and sustainability in the first place. Ten years of writing, mostly theory, about music, sound, and sustainability followed, with an environmental turn in 2011. I was prepared to hear the sound of climate change in the violent storm of 2014, compelled to write about it, and to theorize a sound ecology with a new urgency.

Environmental Humanities, Music and Sustainability

Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, E. Penobscot Bay, ME

    Environmental humanities is only six years old, one of a proliferating number of fields prompted by the current environmental crisis. My interests in sustainability and music have taken me, over the years, into a number of environmental areas: conservation biology, human ecology, ecological economics, and ecomusicology, to name a few; and now environmental humanities. Environmental humanities, according to one definition, is meant to integrate humanistic research on the environment from cultural geography, ecocriticism, cultural anthropology, environmental philosophy, and political ecology. The ideology behind it seeks to move beyond a “holistic vision of nature as a privileged place in the history of ecology,” to an understanding of humans and our concerns “within the everyday places in which we live.” It is said to turn away from a conception of an ideal nature constructed as unspoiled (by human culture and corruption) wildness, to an idea of an environment that humans have impacted for millennia, with problems such as climate change and environmental injustice. This conceptual shift turns away from the radical environmentalism of deep ecology, and toward an integration of the human, and humanities, into environmental thinking, at least inside the academic world. Instead of envisioning the restoration or preservation of wilderness ecosystems, “environmentalists are re-envisioning nature as pervasively and enduringly shaped by humans. These concepts are beginning to put pressure on the key concept of ‘sustainability,’ which has organized a good deal of environmentalist thought for the last two decades.”
    One way of looking at the way these developments are “pressuring” sustainability is to consider the critique of the sustainability from within resilience thinking. Advocates of resilience (and I am one) maintain that, first, sustainability is a goal, not a strategy; and second, that insofar as sustainability implies maintaining a climax equilibrium state of natural balance, it is out of step with current thinking in ecological science, which has abandoned the idea of the balance of nature. In chapter 5 of the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, I develop this critique of sustainability and discuss resilience as a better way of thinking about musical and cultural continuity and integrity. My thinking about resilience has, itself, changed over the years, from skepticism to a guarded optimism.
    Fall is conference season for me, and only last week I was asked to present about environmental humanities at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting, in Miami. I spoke about how folklife studies, with its long history of ethnographic documentation of traditional beliefs, customs, and practices, including folk medicine, agricultural adaptations, and beliefs about the place of humans in the natural world, could contribute to the discussion of traditional ecological knowledges in the environmental humanities. I was asked, also, to speak about my own background in the disciplines related to the environmental humanities. I might have said something about studying with Leo Marx, my honors thesis adviser at Amherst College. Marx is surely one of the earliest environmental humanists, an ecocritic whose book, The Machine in the Garden, measures the impact of technology on the American pastoral ideal, as revealed in the literature of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and especially Thoreau.
    But I chose instead to speak about my background in ecology, mentioning my introduction to the subject when I spent the summer after my sophomore year working in a human ecology project, for Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, at the Cornell Medical School, in Manhattan. In the following academic year, I studied with Oscar Schotté, a biologist whose academic pedigree extended back to Ernst Haeckel, the German embryologist who in 1866 coined the term ecology and defined it as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence.’”
    I went on to talk about my sound ecology project, and concluded (again, in response to my assignment) by repeating some of the conclusions I’d come to after decades of research in fields related to environmental humanities. These included the four principles of interdependence, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship. They also included some of the conclusions I’m coming to from my sound ecology project, concerning the implications for communities, economies, and ecologies of a sound ontology and epistemology. I also spoke about these a few weeks ago in a keynote address to the southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society, while an earlier formulation of these ideas on a sound ecology are scheduled for publication in Ethnologies later this year, or early next.
    It was fascinating to see the explosion of the environmental humanities at the AFS conference. There were two days of panels on the subject last week, whereas in previous conferences not much if anything. On the panel with me were several friends and colleagues whose thinking has inspired me for many years, including Rory Turner, founder of the cultural sustainability MA program at Goucher College; and Mary Hufford, whose pioneering work in public ecology and folklife is finally getting the recognition that it has long deserved.
    The conference season is always stimulating, as I feel pulled in two directions: one, I want to be with my colleagues, learning from them and sharing ideas; two, I want to be back at home, developing those ideas, thinking, reading, and writing. I have one more conference this fall, the ethnomusicology meeting in Washington, DC in a week. For that, I was asked to speak about public ethnomusicology 25 years after the publication of the first (and only) issue of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Journal that was devoted to the topic of ethnomusicology in the public interest. This topic falls within another relatively new field, public humanities. And all of this—environmental humanities, public humanities, and so forth—arises in a crisis period when “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” as the saying has it.