Music's Carbon Footprint (2)

        I've been thinking more about music's carbon footprint, and in doing so this month I prepared a short essay for possible publication on the subject. Corrections and suggestions are invited:

Music’s Contribution to Global Warming

            How much does music contribute to global heating? If ethnomusicologists are to contribute our understandings of people making music to discussions surrounding carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, and the climate emergency, it would be useful to know at the outset how much all the activities surrounding music production, delivery, and consumption contribute to the overall emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been heating the Planet.

            In the preindustrial era, of course, musical activities did almost nothing to raise global temperatures. Musical activities made a larger contribution to GHG output and climate change during the industrial, mass consumption era. Musical instrument and sheet music distribution, radio, recordings and television utilized energy resources on a larger scale, as did the shift to electronically amplified instruments. Ironically, in our post-industrial era, the delivery and consumption of music via the internet requires more energy than the manufacture, distribution and consumption of music on vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs did during their years of peak use (Brennan and Devine 2019).

Music GHG statistics are few and far between; much more research needs doing, but on the face of it musical activities contribute a very small proportion of greenhouse gas emissions to the world’s total. We do have reliable GHG estimates for all musical activities in the UK in 2009. We also have them for recorded music in the US from 1977-2016. With US figures adjusted upwards to include live performances, in 2009 the musical activities in the UK and US accounted for about 3 million of the then-total 48 billion tonnes of GHG emissions, or .00625%, a miniscule amount.[1] Extrapolating from the UK and US to the rest of the world, the contribution of the music industry overall in 2009 is unlikely to have exceeded .02% or two-hundredths of one percent; still seemingly insignificant. When only 90 corporations, the vast majority being fossil fuel producers such as Exxon and state entities such as GAZPROM (Russian Federation) and Aramco (Saudi Arabia), contribute more than 70% of GHGs annually (Heede 2014), one wonders whether ethnomusicologists’ time wouldn’t be better spent in convincing our institutions to divest from fossil fuels than in encouraging the music industry to reduce GHGs.  Here’s a more optimistic way to think about it: the US music industry contributes almost as much to the US’ annual gross domestic product (GDP) as the automobile industry.[2] Everyone knows that the auto industry is moving, however slowly, towards more efficient gasoline engines and hybrid and electric vehicles. Few doubt that an all-electric vehicle future would make a significant reduction to GHGs, so long as most of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources. The same could be said if the music industry moved to a carbon-neutral future.

            Let’s look at GHGs more closely (fig. 1).  

Those emitted by human activities consist of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels (76%); methane from agricultural activities, waste management, energy use and biomass (16%); nitrogen oxides from fertilizer use and other agricultural activities (6%); and fluorinated gases from industrial processes, refrigeration and so on (2%). Considered in terms of energy source (fig. 2), global GHGs come from electricity and heat production (25%), industries that burn fossil fuels on site for energy (21%), agriculture, forestry and other land use (24%), fossil fuels burned for transportation (14%), fuel burned to heat and cool buildings (6%), and other (10%) (United States Environmental Protection Agency). 

From 1970 to 2011 global CO2 emissions increased by nearly 100%, with 3/4 of the increase coming from industrial processes and fossil fuel burning. In 2012 the total amount of GHG’s emitted as a result of human activities had risen to 53 billion tonnes from 48 billion in 2009 (The World Bank).

Three studies of the UK and US music industries help in understanding music’s contribution to global warming. First, the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University conducted a report for the environmental organization Julie’s Bicycle on the sources and amount of GHGs generated in 2007 by the UK music market (Bottrill et al. 2007; Bottrill et al. 2010). The report calculated an annual total of 540 million kilograms (kg.) ( = 540,000 tonnes) of GHGs, coming from the following sources: manufacture and distribution of musical instruments, books and sheet music, and recorded music, 138 million kg.; live performances (including audience travel which generated 231,00 million kg.), 402 million kg. This 540,000 tonnes applied only to the UK. Although it included GHGs generated by music’s share of distribution over the internet, in 2007 internet downloads and streaming were fewer than today while correspondingly more music was delivered via CD.

            A second useful study compared the amounts of GHGs required to manufacture and deliver music on plastic (vinyl, cassette, and CD) versus the internet. The study took into consideration that some albums delivered digitally over the internet were subsequently burned to CD-R discs for CD use and kept in jewel cases. The authors concluded that “Despite the increased energy and emissions associated with Internet data flows, purchasing music digitally reduces the energy and CO2 emissions associated with delivering music to customers by between 40 and 80% from the best-case physical CD delivery, depending on whether a customer then burns the files to CD or not” (Weber et al, 2009). Ten years later, consumers are burning many fewer CDs; indeed, most computers today no longer contain optical drives for disc burning.

            This second study predicted that a shift to internet music delivery would significantly reduce GHGs. However, as its authors acknowledge, it was conducted for two IT corporations (Microsoft and Intel) that had an interest in seeing that kind of result. What is the situation today, when most recorded music is delivered to customers via internet streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Pandora, and so on? The results are not quite so sanguine. In third environmental cost study, Matt Brennan and Kyle Devine chose to sample GHG outputs from certain key years from 1907-2016. Devine terms this shift from plastic to internet delivery the “dematerialization” of music. They reported total GHG outputs for the US only, from vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, versus GHG outputs from internet delivery via mp3 and streaming. They reported (fig. 3) on the years 1977, 1988, 2000, and 2013-2016 (Brennan and Devine 2019; Devine 2019). Figure 3 shows that in 1977 US CO2 emissions from the manufacture of and 

sale of music (chiefly on vinyl records) were 140 million kg. The first CDs appeared in 1982. In 1988 when vinyl records made up roughly 19% of sales revenues, CDs 20%. and cassettes and 8-tracks 60%, the total CO2 figure for the US was slightly lower, 136 million kg. In 2000 when CDs were at their peak revenue (and not many vinyl records and cassettes were sold) that number had increased to 157 million kg., almost all from CDs. And yet by 2016, when the revenue from CDs was 1/8 of what it had been in 2000, and when most music recordings were sold via mp3 downloads or by subscription streaming on the internet, the US energy costs of music delivery had increased to as much as 350 million kg. of GHGs, or 350,000 tonnes (Brennan and Devine 2019; RIAA US Sales Database).

            How could this be? It seems counterintuitive that the environmental costs of making plastic CDs and jewel cases could be about half as much as internet music delivery with little or no plastic product (and waste). It seems inconceivable that a shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy for recorded music could result in double the CO2 emissions. Yet what drove up the cost of internet delivery was “the energy used to power online music listening. Storing and processing music in the cloud depends on vast data centres that use a tremendous amount of resources and energy” (Brennan and Devine 2019, 3).[3]

To be sure, Brennan and Devine did not calculate the environmental cost of distributing LPs, cassettes and CDs to consumers in record stores. Nor did they calculate the environmental costs of making the record, CD and DVD players. Doing so would have increased the GHG figures for 1977, 1988, and 2000. But they also did not calculate the costs of making the smartphones, mp3 players, and computers that consumers rely on today to download and stream their music. Moreover, as the US population grew from 203 million in 1970 to 307 million in 2010, it’s likely that there were proportionately half again as many music consumers in the latter year than the former, consuming 50% more energy, And of course, unlike the Oxford University study of UK music’s carbon footprint, Brennan and Devine did not attempt to calculate the environmental costs of live music which, extrapolating from the UK study (Bottrill et al. 2007), would have been for the US about three times more than for recorded music, or approximately 1.05 million tonnes of GHGs. Add that to the carbon footprint of recorded music and in 2016 the US likely generated around 1.4 million tonnes. If the UK’s footprint was 540,000 million tonnes in 2009, extrapolating to 2016 from that and then adding the US figures would result in a UK plus US annual total somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million tonnes ( = 6.6 billion US pounds) of GHGs for 2016.

            Efforts to reduce the music industry’s contribution to global warming have been underway for more than a decade. The Julie’s Bicycle-sponsored 2007 Oxford Study resulted in a variety of actions to lower music’s carbon footprint, such as the change from plastic CD packaging to cardboard digipacks. In 2013 REVERB was created and dedicated to reducing touring bands’ carbon footprints insofar as possible. On their tours, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Dead and Company, Drake, Walk the Moon, and others reduce carbon use by employing solar energy, distributing reusable water bottles, providing solar charging stations at concerts, and handing out information about environmental issues, green products and tech, and so on. REVERB sponsors a Farm-to-Stage program that works with local farmers to provide artists and their crews with locally sourced food (REVERB). By 2018, Spotify had closed almost all of its data centers and reduced its carbon footprint by 1,500 tons of CO2 while switching to Google cloud services, which like competitor Apple has “gone green.” By converting to solar power and purchasing renewable energy certificates (that work like carbon offsets) they can claim their data centers are carbon neutral. In July, 2019 a group of music industry professionals formed an organization called Music Declares Emergency, calling for “the music industry to acknowledge how its practices impact the environment and to commit to taking urgent action” and to “work toward making our businesses ecologically sustainable and regenerative.” Some of the suggestions include reducing the energy used on tours, greening merchandise, using sustainable materials, and purchasing carbon offsets. Many musicians have signed on as supporters (MUSIC DECLARES EMERGENCY). And because music has the power to raise environmental consciousness and incite environmental activism its impact goes well beyond the boundaries of the music industry to galvanize the environmental movement more broadly, whether targeting fossil fuel corporations, agrochemical producers, or threats to species extinction.[4]

References

Bottrill, Catherine, Geoff Lye, Max Boykoff and Diana Liverman. 2007. First Step: UK Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions for 2007. Executive summary. London: Julie’s Bicycle.

Bottrill, Catherine, Geoff Lye, and Max Boykoff. 2010. “Carbon soundings: greenhouse gas emissions of the UK music industry.” Environmental Research Letters 5, doi 10:1088/1748-9326/5/1/014019.

Brennan, Matt, and Kyle Devine. 2019. “Music streaming has a far worse carbon footprint than the heyday of records and CDs—new findings.” The Conversation, April 7. https://theconversation.com/music-streaming-has-a-far-worse-carbon-footprint-than-the-heyday-of-records-and-cds-new-findings-114944. Accessed 30 August 2019.

Devine, Kyle. 2019. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press.

ECOSONG. N.D. Ecosong.Net. https://www.ecosong.band/. Accessed 30 August, 2019.

Heede, Richard. 2014. “Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854-2010.” Climate Change 122 (1-2): 229-241.

MUSIC DECLARES EMERGENCY. N.D. https://www.musicdeclares.net/. Accessed 30 August, 2019.

REVERB. N.D. Reverb: About Us. https://reverb.org/. Accessed 30 August, 2019.

RIAA U.S. Sales Database. N.D. U.S. Recorded Music Revenues by Format and U.S. Recorded Music Sales Volume by Format, 1977-2018. https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/. Accessed 25 September 2019.

Siwek, Stephen, and Joshua Friedlander. 2018. The US Music Industries: Jobs and Benefits. Prepared for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). http://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/US-Music-Industries-Jobs-Benefits-Siwek-Economists-Inc-April-2018-1-2.pdf. Accessed 19 September 2019.

The World Bank. N.D. “Total greenhouse gas emissions.” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.GHGT.KT.CE. Accessed 18 September 2019.

United States Environmental Protection Agency. N.D. “Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data.” https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data. Accessed 18 September 2019.

Weber, Christopher L., Jonathan O. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews. 2009. “The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods.” Final report to Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252659417_The_Energy_and_Climate_Change_Impacts_Of_Different_Music_Delivery_Methods. Accessed 19 September 2019.

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[1] Calculated by combining and extrapolating from Bottrill et al. 2010 and Brennan and Devine 2019. A (metric) tonne is 1000 kilograms, or 2200 pounds, which is 1.1 times the US ton of 2000 pounds.

[2] Siwek and Friedlander 2018 calculated that in 2015 the music industry contributed $143 billion to the US economy, 4/5 of the auto industry’s contribution.

[3] Their study, “The Cost of Music,” was widely reported in the press in April, 2019. Devine’s book on the subject, Decomposed (2019) offers more detail. Some of these data centers now are powered partly if not fully by solar energy, however.

[4] Ecosong, a collaboration among musicians, media makers, scientists and community organizations, is one of many such efforts (ECOSONG).

Animal sound communication, human language, and perspectivism

          I return to the question of animal sound communication, which I wrote about in January of this year. Animals—humans included—communicate with one another in song, speech, and various in-between modes such as chant. Animals also communicate by manipulating objects to make sounds, whether beavers slapping the water with their tails or humans playing musical instruments. Because animal communication is necessary for survival, it is necessary for sustainability of life as we know it on planet Earth. Sound, of course, is one of the principal ways in which animals communicate with one another.
         Among the questions that interest scientists about nonhuman animal sound communication are, first of all, whether species’ communication in sound is purely functional, or whether it has an aesthetic component. Do animals always make sounds for a practical purpose, in other words, or might they do it for pleasure, as humans do? Might some of their practical sounds, such as birdsong, offer pleasure as well as having functions such as locating oneself to one’s mate? A second question is whether animal sounds constitute language. That is, do they exhibit the structural and functional characteristics of what we know as language, even if in some simple stage? Or are their sounds merely signals? Songbirds, humpback whales, chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins seem to be good test cases for language. All of them communicate with a variety of complex sounds; in terms of their structure, could they constitute a language? Scientists do not agree on the answer. Generally speaking, the evolutionary biologists who study animal behavior and sound communication favor the idea that nonhuman animal sounds, no matter how complex they are in structure, constitute signals, stimuli that result in automatic responses in the listening animal. At the same time, many scientists are conducting experiments to see if that is really true, or if the complex sounds of some species could be said to constitute anything resembling a language, and whether there is any evidence suggesting that it also has an aesthetic component.
         Recently I came upon an educational website that pursued differences between human and animal communication. The linked to a lecture by a professor at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics, and then examined the supposed differences between human and nonhuman animal communication. As I read through these differences, I realized that some of the evidence from birdsong and humpback whale song casts doubt on those claims for difference, or at least for a sharp dividing line between human and nonhuman.

Black-capped chickadee. Photo by Ryan Hodnett

         For example, humans are said to be able to string sounds together in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences, and animals are said not to communicate by arranging sounds in this way. And yet there is scientific evidence that chickadees string together phonemes in a simple manner to indicate, for example, not only that there is a danger from a nearby predator, but also how great is that danger. Humpback whales, also, have been observed to string together sounds in different ways to indicate different meanings. Part of the difficulty here, it would seem, is that humans do not understand animal language. For another example, humans are said to be able to invent new words easily, whereas animals must evolve in order for their signals to change. But the invention of new words and their addition to human language proceeds slowly, whereas animals change their signs before they evolve, and then evolution selects those whose signs are most suitable for survival. A few songbirds, for example, who are permanent residents near highways change the pitch range of their songs to avoid traffic noise, and only then does natural selection favor those birds that have changed their songs, resulting in a higher percentage of birds that have adapted and that can, presumably, survive better. Experiments have shown that this evolution is rapid.
         A couple of other differences turn out to have exceptions, also. It is said that humans acquire language culturally, by learning, whereas animal communication is inborn and cannot be learned. But that isn’t so. Songbirds raised by foster parents of another species learn to sing their foster parents’ songs. Another difference discussed on the website is arbitrariness: human language is symbolic and filled with ideas, whereas animal communication is said not to be symbolic. The jury is still out on that one, but one wonders how we would be able to recognize whether animal communication was symbolic when we don’t understand their sounds in the same way they do. In other words, what we conclude by observation to be no more than stimulus and response may in fact be arbitrary to some extent on account of its complexity, or on account of factors that we ordinarily wouldn’t take into consideration, such as the time of day or night of the utterance, its tempo, how frequently it is repeated, and so on.
         For centuries scientists have claimed that only human beings have language, but it no longer certain that this is true. Instead, it’s possible that language is something best understood to exist on a continuum of development, with humans having a more fully developed language while some other animals exhibit it at an earlier stage of development. If animals exist on an evolutionary continuum, it makes some sense to think of language in this way. Obviously, humans have had the capacity to develop language into a very sophisticated communications tool, and beyond that into an artistic expression with aesthetic qualities. At the same time, we should not be too hasty in assuming that animals communicate only by means of signals that act as stimuli to effect responses. After all, scientists do not know what it is like to communicate as a whale or a dolphin or an elephant.
         On the other hand, many Amerindian indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledges take a very different approach to animals and animal sound communication: perspectivism and multinaturalism. I’ve written about this to some extent in a completed chapter for an as-yet-unpublished book edited by Harris Berger, one that has been in the making for a decade or so: the "Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Ethnomusicology." In it, I discuss evidence for expressive culture among animals. From a perspectivist viewpoint, animals have intentionality, consciousness, reflective thought, experience, aesthetics, language, and expressive culture because what it is like to communicate as a whale or dolphin or elephant from the animal’s point of view is exactly the same as what it is like to communicate as a human because animals think of themselves as humans.

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. 

An Immodest Note: Update on Publications

       After a hiatus of about 20 years, Powerhouse for God is available again, in a 2nd edition, with a new Afterword, and in paperback and eBook. Powerhouse was part of a book, recording and film project I undertook in the last century in an effort to document language in religious practice in Appalachia’s northern Blue Ridge. Beginning in the summer of 1976, with the most concentrated ethnographic fieldwork in 1977 and again 1985, I visited a church in Page Co., Virginia, observing the church community at home and in worship, befriending the pastor and his family, and collaborating with them and also with scholars Ken George, Tom Rankin, and Barry Dornfeld in making a documentary recording (1982) and documentary film (1989), all titled Powerhouse for God. The recording, out of print for decades, was re-issued a half-dozen years ago in CD form by Smithsonian Folkways, while the film has been available for viewing on folkstreams.net for many years. The re-publication of the book makes the complete documentary package available once again. It’s available directly from the Press, and also from the usual on-line book outlets. 

       Books, recordings and films aimed primarily at academic audiences don’t usually get much attention in the popular press, but Powerhouse was an exception. Rock music critics Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus somehow noticed the album, even though it was published by a university press, not a commercial record company. They praised it in The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, putting it on their “best albums of the year” list; and this led to interviews on National Public Radio. A half-dozen years later the Powerhouse project somehow came to the attention of a producer for Nightline, who asked me whether he thought the pastor of the church would make a good subject for Ted Koppel, who was looking to film an authentic preacher for The Koppel Report who would act as a counterweight to the televangelists of the day who were being investigated for fraud. I said yes and encouraged them to see for themselves. Not long afterward, in front of a very surprised group of churchmembers, Koppel and his film crew landed their helicopter in a hayfield across from the church, went inside and proceeded to film Brother John for the program on televangelism, eventually using the footage to bookend his special report and as a contrast to the televangelists. This, of course, was nearly 30 years ago; but televangelism and evangelical fundamentalism remain major players in US religion and politics. Brother John died in 2008 and the church is led now by his son, Brother Donnie. I last visited them in 2016, forty years after my original visit.

       A second book is Cultural Sustainabilities, conceived and edited by Tim Cooley, in which several of my colleagues and former students wrote articles in fields such as ethnomusicology, folklore, ecomusicology, and media studies, related in one way or another to the research I’ve done on musical and cultural sustainability. This book was published a couple of months ago by the University of Illinois Press. Tim asked me to write an autobiographical and reflexive foreword, and then in a very generous gesture dedicated the book to me and wrote an introduction in which, among other things, he described the common threads in my ecological approach to understanding expressive culture over what is now a fifty-year period, counting from my earliest publication. This book is available in hardback, paperback, and as an eBook from the University of Illinois Press and also from the usual on-line book websites. 

       A third book, in press now but not to be published for another year, is my Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays. A dozen of my published articles from academic and popular journals, some from fairly obscure places, as well as a new essay on my sound ecology project, will appear in this volume. I wrote an autobiographical and reflexive foreword for this volume also, in which I discuss the power of sound as the connective tissue that forms a pattern in my research interests over the years. It is scheduled for publication in 2020 from Indiana University Press.

       In addition, a special Ecologies issue of the journal MUSICultures, edited by Aaron Allen and me, has just been published by the Canadian Society for Traditional Music. The issue is themed on music, sound, and ecologies, and features a dozen articles from scholars and scientists in areas as diverse as soundscape ecology, ethnomusicology, Western art music, and the history of science. When Aaron and I issued our Call for Papers for this issue, we had no idea how much of a response we’d get. Fifty-five scholars and scientists sent us abstract proposals for the issue, and it was not easy for us to winnow them down to the final dozen. We were, also, quite hands-on in editing, which is something I’ve more or less changed my mind about. When I was editor of Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, I relied on the specialists who evaluated the articles to suggest improvements to the authors. My more recent editorial work has been far more involved, either because I have more knowledge about the subjects or stronger views, or both. Yet, paradoxically, I seldom enjoy being edited by someone with strong opinions--unless of course they coincide with my own. For this special issue, Aaron wrote an Introduction, and I wrote an Afterword. MUSICultures’ publication policy makes the journal available for the first 3 years after publication only to members of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music; after that period, it is freely available to the public on its website. This protective policy means that it’s not freely available through the electronic portals of college and university libraries, either—which is unusual, for most academic journals are freely available to students, faculty, staff and in some cases, alumni this way. 

       I also have a few articles completed and in press at the moment. One is on ecojustice and a sound ecology, to appear in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion; another is on ethnography in the study of congregational music, to be published by Routledge in an edited book; a third is on a phenomenological approach to animal sound communication, to be published in the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Ethnomusicology, and a fourth is entitled “A Sound Economy,” from my keynote presentation at the 2015 joint SEM-ICTM forum in Limerick, Ireland, to appear in a book of articles based on that forum. I finished writing these in 2016, 2017, and 2018, but it almost always takes edited academic volumes several years of production before publication unless they are conference proceedings, in which case the conference papers are published quickly and more or less verbatim.

       Two final observations: one, in retirement since 2013 I’ve been able to focus a lot more on research, writing, public lectures, and publication; two, all of the publications I’ve mentioned in this blog entry, with the exception of the Powerhouse film and the special issue of MUSICultures, were written in response to invitations. Before retirement, of course, I spent a great deal of my working hours preparing and teaching classes, advising students, supervising PhD dissertations and directing the PhD program in my university department, and in other administrative and committee work for my universities. Now I don’t do any of that, unless I decide to accept a visiting professorship for a term or two—which I’ve done only once since retirement; and so I have far more time to devote to research and writing. In truth, most of my publications have come as a result of invitations from editors of journals or university presses who became familiar with my research in one way or another. Even the publication of my first book, Early Downhome Blues, was the result of an invitation from the director of the University of Illinois Press, who in 1970 heard me speak up in response to a paper delivered at a conference, and then buttonholed me, asked me if I was working on anything related to my response and said if so, he’d like to see it. Powerhouse for God was solicited by an editor at the University of Texas Press in 1977 after he saw my name announced on a list of fellowship recipients from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and wrote to ask if I had a book in the works. The Powerhouse recording also was an invited publication, from the University of North Carolina Press originally, and then decades after it went out print, another invitation, this time from Folkways. Of course, today’s job and publication situation for graduate students and young professors is different, and that is a different story. 

 

Sound and Sustainability among the Whales

         How is sound related to sustainability among whales, and how is whale sustainability related to the sound commons?

         By now most people have heard, or heard about, the songs of the humpback whales. Baleen whales such as the humpback and right whales “sing” to communicate their whereabouts in the ocean, just as birds do in the air and on land. That is, like many other animals and insects they use sound for a variety of purposes including giving warning, attracting mates, and keeping the social group together. Public interest in whale “song” focuses on two other aspects of whale song: whether these utterances are signals like alarm bells or if they make up a language; and whether they offer any kind of aesthetic experience to whales, as music does to humans. While those are very interesting questions, there is not enough reliable evidence to answer them; whereas there is good evidence for their use as functional signals.

        When other sounds interfere with the sounds animals make, it becomes hard for animals to communicate with each other. When sound interference is frequent, or even constant, the habitat becomes unforgiving and animals cannot survive in it very well if at all. They must either adapt, as birds raise the pitch range of their songs in the presence of vehicular traffic noise, or move into a different habitat. Shipping noise, from powerful engines and turbines, and from naval sonar, travels long distances through the ocean water—much farther than it would on land—and interferes with baleen whale sonic communication. It's not the only way whale sustainability is compromised by human activity; hunting whales, now banned by most but not all nations, and inadvertent entanglements in fish netting, are two prominent examples. More subtle, perhaps, is the effect of shipping noise; but it is no less harmful for that. Shipping noise also interferes with sound communication among toothed whales, such as orcas (killer whales), that use sonic echolocation in hunting for their prey.  

Orca (killer whale), courtesy Wikimedia Commons

    Orcas, for example, emit sound signals that bounce back from fish such as salmon. When an orca locates its prey it continues to give off these signals, the sound indicating where and how close the prey is as the orca closes in on it. Shipping noise drastically limits the distance over which these signals can operate effectively. It causes orcas and other toothed whales to alter their migration routes but it may also confuse them and cause them stress, resulting in illness and unusual behavior resulting in death. The same is true of shipping noise and baleen whales.

Right whales are in the news where I live because lobster lines (ropes) are a hazard that entangles them and kills them; estimates indicate that only 450 of the North Atlantic Right Whale species still exist. Eliminating the lobster fishery in New England, a multimillion dollar business, would have a catastrophic impact on the economies of many coastal towns and surrounding areas that are overly dependent on lobster fishing. The fish and game management regulators that would limit the lobster catch must weigh the interests of the human populations versus the interests of biodiversity, ecosystem services and the survival of a whale species. There is no similar balance of interests when it comes to shipping noise, however. Ships traveling in known whale habitat are asked to slow down and limit their noise, while activists campaign, with some success, against the indiscriminate use of naval sonar exercises. 

        The sound commons, in this case the ocean, is a soundscape freely accessed and open to all with as little sound interference as possible. At certain times and places, on account of limited access, or competition among those who would access it, the soundscape must be managed. Sometimes this can be done chiefly or entirely by those who do access it. Many medieval agricultural commons were managed in this way. The soundscape of one’s own living quarters usually is managed this way, as family members agree to limit each other’s access. But sometimes self-management fails, and outside management is the only possible solution. Noise ordinances are one example, but these are not always effective and they may also be unjust. Usually the best management involves input both from the outside experts and those who compete for access to the sound commons. In the case of whales, of course, their input is implicit rather than explicit. Yet they occupy a sound commons, and humans would be wise to manage it for everyone’s benefit, rather than damaging it in exchange for short-term human economic gains. In the end, damaging the biodiversity of the Planet compromises human survival as well. 

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. 

The wind song of the Earth in ancient Chinese thought

Recently I took part in a roundtable on Music, Sound, and Nature in an Age of Environmental Degradation, at the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston. I gave a short illustrated talk on the sound of climate change. I’d meant to offer the roundtable in the discussion that followed a quotation from the Tao, by Zhuangzi, which reveals the concept of earth song (as Thoreau called it), or the sounds of nature, as understood in early Chinese thought. I'd quoted this passage before, in a talk on "Thoreau and the Music of the Natural World" that was published in 2015 by Northeastern University. Thoreau was familiar with ancient Asian thought and may well have absorbed some of his ideas about the soundscape and the earth song from the Tao. Zhuangzi wrote, there, about the sounds of wind, the sounds of air, and of the breath; Thoreau was concerned with wind, echo, and the sounds of insects and animals, particularly birds, crickets, and amphibians. As some of the roundtable participants are following this blog, let me give the quotation here:

“Zi-Qi said, ‘. . . You may have heard the notes of Man, but have not heard those of Earth; you may have heard the notes of Earth, but have not heard those of Heaven.' Zi-You said, 'I venture to ask from you a description of all these.' The reply was, 'When the breath of the Great Mass [of nature] comes strongly, it is called Wind. Sometimes it does not come so; but when it does, then from a myriad apertures there issues its excited noise; —have you not heard it in a prolonged gale? Take the projecting bluff of a mountain forest; —in the great trees, a hundred spans round, the apertures and cavities are like the nostrils, or the mouth, or the ears; now square, now round like a cup or a mortar; here like a wet footprint, and there like a large puddle. (The sounds issuing from them are like) those of fretted water, of the arrowy whizz, of the stern command, of the inhaling of the breath, of the shout, of the gruff note, of the deep wail, of the sad and piping note. The first notes are slight, and those that follow deeper, but in harmony with them. Gentle winds produce a small response; violent winds a great one. When the fierce gusts have passed away, all the apertures are empty (and still); — have you not seen this in the bending and quivering of the branches and leaves?' Zi-You said, 'The notes of Earth then are simply those which come from its myriad apertures; and the notes of Man may just be compared to those which (are brought from the tubes of) bamboo; —allow me to ask about the notes of Heaven.' Zi-Qi replied, 'When (the wind) blows, (the sounds from) the myriad apertures are different, and (its cessation) makes them stop of themselves. Both of these things arise from (the wind and the apertures) themselves: —should there be any other agency that excites them?’" —Zhuangzi, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Taoism, trans. James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), pp. 177-8.

Are Progressive Colleges Unsustainable?

       One of my recurring topics has been the cultural sustainability of the liberal arts at colleges and universities in the US. I’ve written about their transformation over the past 50 years from the collegial to corporate values and governance, how and why this occurred, and the dangers it poses to liberal arts education that nourishes intellectual curiosity and the free play of ideas at the expense, perhaps, of career goals. The head of the Board of Regents at my graduate alma mater, the University of Minnesota, once asked me why education in the humanities was so inefficient. I'd replied that intellectual curiosity requires time to explore and ponder ideas. A curious mind is going to follow them here, and there, into barren ground and back to fertile fields where they can grow. Ideas don't live well when they're gulped down and regurgitated back up, and out, on tests. Now comes news that one of the few colleges that’s retained collegial, horizontal governance and an exploratory atmosphere, Hampshire College, is in serious financial trouble. They’re looking either to close the college or to partner with another, more financially stable institution—although how that partnership would work is uncertain.
       Hampshire is of special interest to me because it’s one of the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts: Amherst (my undergraduate alma mater), Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts are the other four. Hampshire was founded in the middle of the 1960s, the year I graduated from Amherst; it opened in 1970 as an experimental, progressive college: no tenure for the faculty, an open curriculum, no grades for the students, and decisions made with input from all stakeholders—including students. Students and faculty worked together to design individual curricula for each student, suited to their intellectual interests and the faculty’s capabilities. Instead of grades, students received from their professors detailed evaluations of their demonstrated strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance in each class.
        A college like Hampshire—and there were others, many founded around the same time—appealed to students looking for something more participatory and less authoritarian, more experimental and less prescribed, while they spent four years immersed in a world of ideas and a close intensely social atmosphere. The lack of prescribed structure meant that some students floundered about for a while, looking to find out what truly interested them. Some knew they wanted a broad education that encompassed the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences; most tended to concentrate within only one of those four areas. Having followed where their curiosities led them, along the way developing their abilities to think, write, and converse critically, they were able to gain entrance to the best graduate and professional schools and to become lawyers, doctors, and professors; and they were able to succeed in the business world, if they wanted to, because in the highly participatory college atmosphere they’d developed superior social, communication, and thinking skills.
       In the 21st century Hampshire and similar colleges—one, for example, is in Maine, the College of the Atlantic, and several are in Vermont, Goddard College being the best known—have fallen victim to a dwindling pool of qualified applicants interested in this sort of education. Changes in the US economy, the shrinking of the middle class, the growth of income inequality, and a new instrumentalism that values career preparation at the college level, are some of the most important reasons. Financial mis-calculations by some of these colleges also have contributed to their plight.
       It's important to me that Hampshire be able to sustain itself. I admire their values and form of governance. I agree with the progressive ideals they embody in their curriculum. I wouldn’t want to teach there, for reasons that have to do with me, not them. Nonetheless I've felt close to Hampshire over the years. For one thing, it's in the town next to Amherst, where I spent my own undergraduate years; and I should add that some of the people I knew at Amherst College helped to found Hampshire and participated in its operation during its first decades. For another, the two children of a couple I've been friends with for more than 30 years went there and had the benefit of a good experimental education. For yet another, one of the students in the Brown doctoral program I led for 27 years has been teaching at Hampshire ever since she got her Brown PhD. And another reason is that when I was a visiting professor at Amherst some 25 years ago, some of the most interesting students in my classes were from Hampshire. The “five college” arrangement encouraged students to take courses at any of the five colleges, especially those that weren’t offered at their home college. Many more students signed up for my classes than Amherst would officially permit, but along with a few from Smith and Holyoke and a majority from Amherst I admitted several from Hampshire officially, and several more unofficially.
       The occasion for this blog entry—I’ve gotten around to it at last—was an article that appeared in the March 4 New York Times, by one of its education reporters, Anemona Hartocolis, whose name suggests a flower. Students, she reported, have been occupying the office of Hampshire’s president for the past five weeks. That is a long time for a student sit-in. They're of a mind that the college administration hasn't done enough to prevent the looming financial disaster. The college doesn't have much of an endowment to carry it through hard times, and it's dependent chiefly on tuition income. Evidently only 75 of their applicants for next year's freshman class were able to meet the admission standards; normal class size is around 300. Given the current turmoil, it's hard to see how they'd be able in good conscience to admit anyone. 
        Hartocolis contextualizes Hampshire’s problems by looking at the difficulties other “alternative” colleges are facing, and offers a few reasons of her own for those problems: high tuition (although many students are on scholarship); a dwindling college-age population; competition among too many progressive colleges for too few interested students; small endowments because the graduates of these colleges tend not to be attracted to high-paying jobs; and so on. Some colleges that were progressive in the 1970s, like Sarah Lawrence in the Bronx, have become conventional today, emphasizing STEM courses, and where once they were like Hampshire in not giving letter grades, today they most certainly do. Not being able to admit a full class to Hampshire would, I think, result in a death spiral unless they can find a partner school—but on what terms? How could they keep their residential arrangements, their faculty, their participatory government, their democratic curricula, and the close, in-person nature of their daily education if they partnered with another school? And how could they find enough money to keep going without changing their nature beyond recognition?
        It seems, in other words, as if this particular progressive model for liberal arts education is unsustainable in the US in the 21st century. And yet what the current moment needs more than anything is a well-educated citizenry to become high-information voters and to choose our leaders and policies rationally based on facts and truths, not propaganda and lies. And this is precisely what liberal arts education encourages, and what experimental colleges like Hampshire, when they succeed, are able to accomplish. Hampshire’s horizontal governance shows what democracy can be like at its best (and also, be it said, at its most demanding, and annoying).

Some students and faculty at Sterling College, Vermont, 2018

        
     Are there other models that might succeed where Hampshire is having such difficulty? I've mentioned the College of the Atlantic, which has a curricular focus and strengths in environmental science and the environmental humanities. On a much smaller scale, the environmental college in Vermont that I wrote about, Sterling College, appears to be succeeding, with a similar focus. Possibly a focus such as the environment, which of course is timely and could be viewed as career preparation for a life as a scientist, or for working in an environmental organization, will enable an experimental college to be resilient. At the same time, though, it's impossible for these colleges to offer the depth in the liberal arts curriculum that Hampshire has offered. Yet for now this may be the only kind of adaptive management that maintains resilience and the sustainability of the progressive educational model among small US colleges.