Climate change is going to transform everything we know. There are plenty of things we modern humans think of as “traditional” which are, from a deep-time perspective, just the merest blip of fashion. While coffee consumption is usually thought to have begun in Ethiopia less than a thousand years ago, tea is a little older: […]
The Aral Sea is one of the largest saline lakes in the world, and a fascinating part of the geography of Central Asia. Because the USSR diverted the rivers that feed it in order to support massive desert irrigation projects, the Sea has been drying up. It’s pretty ugly: T The primary effect of the […]
The world’s largest solar array is in progress in India: Four gigawatts of generating capacity, set up in Sambhar district in the desert state Rajasthan. In a first of its kind venture, six public sector undertakings (PSUs) including state-run Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) and Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) on Wednesday announced […]
In the heart of the Amazon rainforest is the Tapajos River basin, home to the Munduruku people. This indigenous tribe has around 11,000 members, and is a source of inspiration for their fortitude in standing up to hydroelectric dam construction and illegal mining. Because there’s gold under the surface of the Amazon soil, unscrupulous operators […]
Any survey of the Canary Islands’ soundscape must begin, not with the Islands’ wonderful musical traditions, but with the Silbo Gomero, the world’s only whistled language, which is structurally identical with Castilian Spanish, but replaces the spoken language’s vowels and consonants with whistled sounds. These sounds are differentiated by their pitch and continuity, and there […]
Australia is getting hot. Really, really hot. Hot enough that the Australian Open tennis tournament has been suspended; it was hot enough that water bottles were melting on the tennis court. The risks of bush fires and infrastructural breakdowns are increasing. All this hot air begs a question: is global warming at fault? “There are […]
I began studying Ghanaian music with David Locke in 1979, and even though I never went as deeply into the music as some of my colleagues, the kinetic rhythms of Ewe drumming were integral to my musical imagination. So when I heard about the impact of our transforming climate on Ghana, it felt somehow more […]
Africa is an entire musical universe, and I could show you stuff for hours. But some of the most beautiful and emotionally affecting singing I know of comes fro the B’aka Pygmies of Cameroon, who yodel polyrhythmic songs of love and respect for the forest that gives them life: DAKAR (AlertNet) – An increase in […]
In the 1970s, I lived in group houses with a lot of interesting people. One of them had inherited an assortment of reel-to-reel tapes from his father. Eventually we acquired a reel-to-reel machine and began dubbing everything onto cassette. The reels were in poor condition, so this amounted to a rescue operation. Some of the […]
Over the four years of the Climate Letter Project, I had relatively few opportunities to link climate and music, despite the many obvious connections. This was one. The NOLA Defender (New Orleans, LA) gives the Big Easy’s perspective on climate: Global warming often conjures images of melting ice caps and smokestacks spewing soot. On Friday, […]