Similarly, in a moment of global environmental turmoil, the sonic arts might also be made through which to hear about how the legacies of colonialism have affected environments, or how accelerated capitalism has driven many species and ecosystems around the world to the brink of collapse and extinction. Right now both artists and scientists, for example, seem increasingly concerned with listening to ecosystems and their human and nonhuman inhabitants: they suggest that perhaps such sound recordings can offer a window into our collective interdependence. But beyond simply documenting, how can sound meaningfully intervene in environmental crises? And what would a successful intervention look or sound like? As we enter an epoch of unprecedented and rapid ecological, climatic, and social changes, these are urgent questions, and ones that forcefully demand answers from musicians, artists, and listeners alike.

To respond, we first need to think about the relationship between the musical and the natural, as well as reflect on the political valences of music. Listening back through the history of 20th century popular music, it’s possible to trace unfolding trajectories of concern for the plight of wildlife and natural environments. As expansive as the issues and stakes were and still are, these often appeared acutely at particular moments in time. In the early 1970s, songs like Captain Beefheart’s »Petrified Forest« (1970), Joni Mitchell’s »Big Yellow Taxi« (1970), Neil Young’s »After the Gold Rush« (1970), and Marvin Gaye’s »Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)« (1971) were clear examples of a broader shift away from the pastoralism of 1960s psych and folk towards a music that increasingly related to its bucolic spaces as threatened. This aesthetic shift was partly a result of the demise of counter-cultural optimism following the 1960s, but it also coincided with a new loss of confidence in the idea that the developmental path of human society would necessarily be progressive: a shift indexed emphatically by the 1972 publication of the Club Of Rome’s The Limits to Growth report. This became a prevalent theme over the next few decades, audible in works such as Xray Spex’s »The Day the World Turned Day Glo« (1978), Lou Reed’s »The Last Great American Whale« (1989), and more recently Bjork’s »Naturra« (2011), or Anohni’s »4 Degrees« (2016) – all popular musical reflections of widespread anxiety around nuclear war, acid rain, mass extinction, and climate change. Meanwhile their nightmarish, paranoid underbelly was explored through hyped-up visions of an urbanised, ecologically-devastated world, apparent in 1990s rave and jungle cultures or metal’s various figures of annihilation.

Outside the popular music realm, it’s possible to trace a parallel line of experimental sonic approaches to nature and environments. Beginning in the 1960s, the acoustic ecology practices spearheaded by R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues around the World Soundscape Project spawned many attempts to use field recording practices to reflect on ecosystems in crisis. Schafer’s work is notoriously grounded in a questionable aesthetic valorisation of nature, and natural sound, as distinct from human or so-called artificial worlds. But it has nonetheless been influential in taking its sonic material from elements we associate with nature. Current figures in field recording such as Jana Winderen, Peter Cusack, Chris Watson, or David Burraston draw upon Schafer’s sonic tropes, but tone down his romanticism, choosing instead to reflect on the sonic intricacies of the nonhuman world: surfaces and textures produced by different microphones, recording technologies, and other media. These recordings are often stunning, opening intimate windows into unfamiliar lives and temporalities: the ultrasonic chirps of whales and bats, the sigh and slough of melting glacial ice, conversations among marine creatures captured using hydrophone technology. But aesthetically they often feel eerily at a distance from their subjects, offering beautifully-rendered audio insights on other creatures’ lives through a gaze as carefully and artificially constructed as a high-def wildlife documentary. The effect is unabashedly apolitical, and belies the urgency of the stories they tell: as a listener, you’re left with the nagging feeling of a chasm between humans and a pristine, unknowable nature.

The natural world, and relationships between people and rapidly transforming environments, are clearly at the heart of a history of sound and music. Yet so often they appear only as abstractions, and in doing so, reinforce the notion of environmental questions as ultimately external to society and culture. Moving towards meaningful sonic engagement with extinction and climate crisis, then, requires broader acknowledgement of how natural environments are irreducible from social forces. It requires recognising the past and present structural processes – capitalist extraction, colonialism, racism – that link empty forests and bleached coral reefs to communities threatened by sea level rise, poisoned water and land, and urban redevelopment.

Sound has a clear role, then, in exploring and communicating the emotional qualities of living in a rapidly changing and warming world. For example, Andrea Polli’s Heat and the Heartbeat of the City: Central Park Climate Change in Sound uses razor-edged sonifications of projected future climate data to simulate the agitation and sickened affect of life amid rising summertime temperatures and intense heatwaves. Similarly, one of the most sonically and politically forceful sound projects of recent years is Financial Trilogy by Jar Moff, the Athens tape artist whose work renders the affective qualities of living through enforced economic meltdown through seams of dazzling, ruptured noise and fragmented jazz collage. An oblique and moving ecological sensibility is also increasingly tangible around the experimental edges of electronic and club music. Elysia Crampton’s Lake (2016), Egyptrixx’s Pure, Beyond Reproach (2017), Anthony Child’s Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle (2017), or Mica Levi’s Delete Beach (2017) each anchored upon field recordings of »natural« spaces, exemplify an expansive reference to »nature.« Yet their sonic form is idiosyncratic, with the texture of an unspoilt nature – captured in the field recordings that refer back to Schafer’s idealised soundscapes – quickly buried in synth, drums, and drones. Explicitly natural sound quickly falls to the background as mere accessory or disappears altogether: highlighting the presence of the human as agent within these sonic ecosystems, and suggesting that the predilection for field recordings in club music reiterates the very experience of ecological crisis itself in narrative form.

But while the sonic textures of the natural soundscape gain traction in the outer fields of electronic music, there’s also a risk that such approaches aestheticise ecological disasters, and in doing so, exclude from the frame the experiences of those most exposed to them. This is at least partly inevitable, given the ambiguity that results where meaning is embodied in sound rather than language. Peter Cusack’s ambient sound recordings of Chernobyl (from the Sounds from Dangerous Places project, 2012) documents an experience of post-nuclear Ukraine, weaving recordings of a dawn chorus with local poems and the sounds of young children to construct an artfully unsettling narrative. On one level it’s a reminder of life’s sheer capacity for exuberance and resilience in the face of human-induced damage: in the wake of the meltdown, the depopulated area around Chernobyl has become a refuge for wildlife populations, clearly audible in the surging diversity of birds in the recorded chorus. But equally, it does not (or cannot) reflect the grim realities of economic and cultural devastation faced by a region abandoned as a disaster zone. Similarly, Chris Watson’s well-known recordings of vultures feeding on Outside the Circle of Fire (1998), recorded in the Itong Plains of Kenya, powerfully renders birds of prey decimating a zebra carcass, yet does not comment on the species’ extreme vulnerability to poaching practices that have led to alarming declines in African vulture populations and effects on biodiversity.

Field recording practices have also, however, ventured into terrain for soundscape work that is more concerned with the political. Leah Barclay’s Rainforest Listening (2016) addresses itself directly to environmental summits such as the United National Climate Change Conferences; Kate Carr’s Rivers Home (2011) features several artists’ odes to water; Andrea Polli’s work is often directly informed by climate science, such as the stark narratives of Sonic Antarctica. All of these artists are less concerned with acoustic representations of natural environments as pristine spaces, and instead are linked by their attempts to sonically intervene into contemporary thought and practices around ecological crisis. Yet even where these generally instrumental or ambient works comment explicitly on these concerns, the sorts of intervention they imply or call for, and the sorts of institutional and social forces that might be involved, are still ambiguous. Crisis still remains primarily an abstract and distant object.

One of the important critiques of the concept of the Anthropocene – the geological sciences-rooted term for our epoch that acknowledges the profound influence of human activities on the Earth system – is its seeming universality: the term’s implication that a single, undifferentiated humanity bears equal responsibility for global catastrophes such as climate change. Yet the reality is anything but universal. Both the causes and the slow, violent consequences of climate change and environmental degradation are unevenly distributed, with countries in the Global North causing the vast majority of damage, and the impacts felt most immediately in many economically marginalised regions. Similarly, meaningful intervention via sound requires often moving away from abstractions and universals, and looking towards works that are grounded in specific struggles and contexts, something Anja Kanngieser and Polly Stanton’s radio art piece And then the sea came back (2016) sought to do by drawing from lived stories of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami to inform prose and sonic composition.

Works that ground themselves in particular environments may often have a practical purpose. For example, in the field of ecological science, the technologies and tools of field recording and acoustic sensing are increasingly being repurposed by field scientists to monitor wildlife in changing habitats. This kind of approach can be used to study particular species, for example Kate Jones’ London-based bat monitoring projects, which detect the activity of bat species and inform the public. Other researchers in the field of ecoacoustics, such as Jérôme Sueur and colleagues, are concerned with using the information encoded in the recorded soundscape (for example, the species diversity of the dawn chorus) as broader indicators of ecosystem health – an approach that explicitly draws upon the lineage of artist practitioners such as Schafer. Yet here, rather than collecting idealised or carefully curated aesthetic snapshots of pristine nature, audio devices ultimately listen to environments for a functional reason. In a scientific context, sound recordings potentially offer a wealth of data about exactly how species and ecosystems are responding to escalating human pressures, which can then inform mitigating interventions and conservation actions.

In the musical sphere, it is in this highly context-specific arena that lyrical music, attended by the intentionality afforded by language, can be potent. This is especially the case where struggles are articulated by the all-too-often economically precarious, racialised, female, or queer communities who bear the greatest burden of environmental damage and resource extraction as imminent and urgent threats. In one example, on the track »New World Water« (Black on Both Sides, 1999), Mos Def profoundly weaves together the privatisation of water with the ongoing legacies of slavery and the unequal access to natural resources on a global scale. In another, Teresia Teaiwa unfolds the horrifying aftermath of Pacific nuclear testing on the lives and communities of the Marshallese, decades after the last blast was detonated by the US military, through spoken word poetry, song, and haunting melodies on her album Terenesia (2010).

Across Oceania, Indigenous, Pasifika, and Black hip hop and electronic music including King Kapisi’s classic single »Sub Cranium Feeling« (1999), A.B Original’s »Reclaim Australia« (2016), Divide and Dissolve’s »Basic« (2017), and Kardajala Kirridarr’s »Ngurra (Rain Song)« (2017) actively promote Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. At the same time as playing across a breadth of musical genres and compositional forms, these artists articulate insightful criticism of the destruction of land and culture through genocide, incarceration, and environmental racism. In Canada and the USA, albums and songs produced by Indigenous artists, such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s F(l)ight (2016) and Stuart James’ »#NoDAPL« (2016), share a focus on supporting Indigenous knowledges, lands, and resources, and have been connected to the No DAPL (Dakota Access Pipe Line) and Idle No More movements to varying degrees. Similarly, Def-I’s »The Land of Enfrackment« (2016) challenges the oil industry, starkly iterating the economic and environmental destruction caused by fracking on Indigenous communities. New labels such as Revolutions Per Minute (Canada), are seeking to build platforms to gather and amplify the voices of Indigenous and First Nations artists such as these, promoting a wave of socially, politically, and ecologically incisive music that is as timely as it is acutely necessary.

The point here is partly to emphasise that crisis is not a universal experience, nor are its effects equally distributed. But it bears remarking that in many of these contexts music also serves a practical purpose, such as direct organising or galvanising functions; this is nowhere more clear than in the case of the musicians who met during their participation in the No DAPL protests at Standing Rock and later toured as The Voice of Water: Wake Up the World. Furthermore, once we begin to view ecological crisis as not merely an abstract object, but as a complex set of processes affected by capitalist exploitation of natural resources, then we can start to hear its sonic refractions in works as varied as the experience of crisis itself. This is evident if we look to New Orleans bounce (a local form of hip hop) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Mostly framed around first-person tropes, it was common for tracks to express the frustrations and humiliations that residents in the city’s poorest and most affected neighbourhoods endured in the wake of mass flooding. In the most caustic instance, 5th Ward Weebie’s »Fuck Katrina« (2006) begins with the pre-recorded FEMA message that would be frustratingly familiar to a local audience who had experienced abandonment along with the travails of surviving on aid payments. But what’s also striking in a lot of post-Katrina bounce is the way in which the crisis is continuously lived as a matter of fact: in the eulogies and images of destroyed housing projects, the experience of trauma and exile, or the ruthlessness of »regeneration.«

This breadth of engagement with environmental crisis through sound suggests manifold opportunities for music to critique underlying social and economic processes. Yet faced with the complexity and multiplicity of these driving forces and their effects, it’s difficult to determine what sonic works should be doing to achieve this. Music often forms a crucial part of political mobilisation, a means through which to consolidate communities and articulate struggles and demands. But evaluating music entirely through such a functional lens – for example, on its expression of specific demands or its use in protest contexts – is questionable, not least given the dubious aesthetics that can result, but also insofar as it overlooks the diverse strategies and organisational collaborations necessary for political and social change. What is clear, given the massively unequal ways in which climate change affects communities, is that sound and music can provide not only a platform but a catalyst for articulation and communication, and sometimes even action, around the complex realities of life under contemporary capitalism.

However, the effectiveness of this platform is intrinsically linked to the question of whose voices are amplified and how. For example, in the context of experimental sound and music, it’s been possible to hear such ideas emerging in the work of individual sonic artists, as well as in recent festival themes and programmes drawing on motifs of societal and environmental turmoil. Yet labels, press, and venues are still dominated by white European or North American artists, and the engagement with environmental questions – as, indeed, with the broader question of intervention through art – is largely confined to an abstracted aesthetic dimension (after all, it’s hard to deny that dystopian sonics can make for viscerally thrilling music). For sonic art to be more than mere aestheticisation or self-congratulatory, consciousness-raising requires a serious reassessment of what role the arts, particularly the sonic arts, can play in shifting perspectives on the exploitation of nature and our relation to non-human ecosystems. It also requires an honest appraisal of the motivations and capacities of the arts in addressing local and global inequality.

One route, following the work of pioneering feminist composers such as Pauline Oliveros, might be to identify practices of listening and silence that make space for subaltern narratives to be heard and also amplified: when we view ecological crises from the position of those whose existence they directly affect in daily life, we acquire a different and more situated perspective, one that doesn’t defer confrontation because it simply can’t afford to. We might also find direction in sonic practices that reject the pretense to nature as detached and abstract, and don’t overlook the complexities of human dependencies on resources and ecosystems. Paying acute attention to the specificities of context and to the sociological questions of climate change can inform how we understand and negotiate the intersections of aesthetics and politics. Irrespective of the form through which one confronts these issues, it is clear that neither decontextualised representations of »nature« nor ambiguous calls to action are of much use, especially to those people who are most vulnerable to the effects of capital’s ravenous consumption of non-human nature. We’d be better served listening to them.