We are Listen to the Earth, a hub for music and activism.
Mission
Listen to Earth is an all volunteer effort promoting songs with an environmental message and honoring musicians who inspire environmental awareness
How We Can Help
- We manage and share the Earth Song List, a searchable database of more than 5,000 environmental songs spanning more than six decades, many genres and topics.
- See our blogs for environmental song playlists available for listening and sharing.
- See the list of podcasts on a diverse range of environmental topics.
- Please reach out if you would like help curating a playlist or identifying songs for a campaign, topic, audio or film project.
Origins & Collaborators
This environmental music list began 25 years ago with two volunteers, Dennis Hendricks and Traci Hickson, who began as environmental radio broadcasters on a small community radio station on WVMR in Frost, West Virginia and later on WERU in Blue Hill, Maine and Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica. They began collecting songs to share with others through their radio programs and first published the Web of Life Audio – Eco-Audio Inventory in 1993. In 1998, Traci had an opportunity to tour community radio stations and discover new songs in Italy, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the Philippines. And, for two summers, volunteers combed through a huge warehouse of vinyl and lp records to find rare songs from the 60s’ and 70s’.
This song list has grown through the decades through the generosity and collaboration of hundreds of recording artists and friends. In many cases, recording artists donated their songs to this project. We would especially like to thank musician, Stan Slaughter, who donated his entire collection of environmental music to the project.
To prepare this list, several volunteers spent many hours listening to songs and coding each song by environmental topics. Special thanks goes to Traci Hickson, Dennis Hendricks, and Brittany Callaham.