The first
three of the songs lament what was being lost, and the other two rejoiced in
the pleasures that nature still had to offer us.
After
The Gold Rush – Neil Young (1970)
Neil Young’s
song encompassed a number of themes, although Young himself called it
essentially an environmental song. The lyric ‘Look at Mother Nature on the
run, in the 1970s’ was a particularly poignant observation on how nature
was being exploited, ravaged, and abused by humans. After the turn of the
century, whenever Neil Young played this song in concert he amended the lyric
to, ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 21st century.’
Nothing
had changed in the 30 years following the original recording. Mother Nature is
still on the run in late 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Zf4D1tHdw
Where
Do The Children Play? – Cat Stevens (1970)
When Cat
Stevens was growing up he and his family were living in the midst of some of
the bombed out areas of London following WW2. He recalled how the playground at
his school was in the basement of the school building, because there were no
playgrounds.
By the
time he wrote and recorded his fourth studio album, Tea for the Tillerman, Stevens
noted that there were still few areas for the children to play, and that nature
was being encroached on so much that the question, Where do the children
play? was begging to be asked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBCJhNiKhFE
Big
Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell (1971)
In the
late 1960s Joni Mitchell visited Hawai’i for the first time and arrived in the
evening, and booked into her hotel. When she awoke in the morning and pulled
back the curtains she could see beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then
she looked down. She was looking at a huge parking lot, and the adjacent hotel
was building another parking lot just as big. ‘It broke my heart…this blight
on Paradise’ she later stated. The jolting experience was to be the
inspiration for one of her best known songs. ‘They paved Paradise, and put
up a parking lot,’ she sang.
A further
lyric from the song, ‘They took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum’ is
likely to have been stirred by a trip to the Foster Botanical Gardens in Hawai’i
where she had to pay an entrance fee to see the trees.
Nature is
still be paved over and commodified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2595abcvh2M
Mother Nature’s Son – The Beatles (1968)
This song
features on the Beatles untitled double album – often referred to as the White
Album (the cover was entirely white). Credited as being written by Lennon-McCartney,
John Lennon said it was inspired by a lecture the Beatles listened to by
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi whilst they were in India. McCartney says he was
motivated by a Nat King Cole song called Nature Boy.
The simple
lyrics evoke a pleasant day sitting by a stream in the mountains. ‘Sit
beside a mountain stream, See her waters rise, Listen to the pretty sound of
music, As she flies’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMMiXjwhODU
Nature –
The Fourmyula (1969)
The
Fourmyula were a band from New Zealand with several hits during the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The biggest of their hits was undoubtedly Nature. In
2001 the song was voted as the best New Zealand song of the 20th
century by the Australasian Performing Rights Association.
The band’s
guitarist/keyboards player, Wayne Mason, wrote the song, ‘in an hour on the
front porch of my mum’s house, looking out on a beautiful day with trees and
stuff. Bees were buzzing and my heart was fluttering.’ He was just 19 years
old at the time.
The
lyrics, including, ‘Up in a tree a bird sings so sweetly, Nature's own
voice, I hear
Rustling whistling trees turning breeze to speech, Talk to me now, ease my mind’
evoke the ability of nature to soothe us and ease our stress levels.
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