One For The Pot

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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: […]

India Breaks New Ground!

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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 […]

These People Will Survive

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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 […]

Saturday’s Endangered Music: The Canary Islands

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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 […]

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’till It’s Gone — The Tony Schwartz Exchange Tape

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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 […]

In New Orleans, Music Is A Climate Issue — And Climate Is A Music Issue!

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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, […]