Songs of the living world, gathered from every tradition.

An early environmentalist pop anthem written after Mitchell watched a parking lot paved over green hills in Hawaii. A direct critique of development and pollution, aimed at a general audience.

One of the first mainstream R&B songs to address pollution, radiation, and ecological collapse directly. Part of the socially conscious 'What's Going On' album.

Written by ecologist-turned-musician Aditi Veena after the forest behind her Goa home was cleared. Splices in her own field recordings of a chainsaw and a falling tree alongside birdsong.

A collaboration among prominent Zambian musicians directly addressing deforestation, charcoal burning, and water conservation. The chorus calls listeners to 'preserve the nature, preserve the animals.'

A collaborative album uniting over 100 musicians from 16 island nations, recorded acoustically in natural settings using traditional languages and instruments. Conceived after the 5th IPCC report, it frames sea-level rise as a shared threat to seafaring Austronesian cultures.

The first Eurovision Song Contest entry to address climate themes, describing how pollution was altering air temperature and water levels. It placed third in the 1971 contest.

A 1988 Eurovision entry in which a woman warns of an approaching environmental catastrophe while those around her ignore her. One of the earliest explicit climate-warning songs in the contest's history.

The bossa nova composer's 1987 title track imagines a small bird watching Amazon deforestation from above. Widely cited as an early, poetic lament for Brazilian rainforest destruction.

Co-founder Leah Song has said the song is 'about Standing Rock… land preservation and indigenous rights.' It's a multi-issue resilience anthem naming several justice movements together, with the land and indigenous-rights thread explicit throughout.

Traces Arivu's grandmother's history as a landless tea-plantation laborer taken to Sri Lanka under colonial rule, framed as a celebration of ancestral coexistence with the land. Blends the traditional Tamil Oppari form with hip-hop.

A work from Japan's kankyō ongaku ('environmental music') movement, composed for a Sanyo air-conditioning unit to be casually absorbed into a physical space rather than actively listened to. Combines synthesized and natural sounds; no verbal message.

An English and Scottish folk ballad personifying barley through the cycle of sowing, harvest, and death to make beer and whisky. The earliest known print is 1624, with continuous oral and recorded versions since.

Title track of a 1990 collaboration between Melbourne band Not Drowning, Waving and Rabaul musicians led by George Telek, blending Tolai vocal harmonies with contemporary studio production. ARIA-nominated for Best Indigenous Release in 1992.

A live flute performance for COLORS by five-time World Champion Hoop Dancer and Native American flutist Tony Duncan, drawing on Eagle Dance tradition and imagery of connection to Mother Earth.

A plea for existential and environmental harmony, using the dandelion — a weed that seeds itself and drifts on the wind — as a metaphor for impermanence and resilience.

An oral epic chant performed mainly by elder Ifugao women during rice sowing, harvest, and funeral wakes, recounting ancestral heroes and reflecting the centrality of rice cultivation to Ifugao life. The year reflects UNESCO's 2008 documentation, not origin — performance is thought to predate the 7th century CE.

An album composed entirely from Sheldrake's own field recordings of endangered British birds — including the bittern, cuckoo, and nightingale — turned into song structures.

The official UNCCD Land Anthem, released for World Soil Day 2019 by UN Land Ambassadors Ricky Kej and Baaba Maal. Written to build public support for the UN's fight against desertification and land degradation.

Closing track of the Grammy-winning album Divine Tides (2021), originally composed by Ricky Kej for David Attenborough's documentary Wild Karnataka as a tribute to the state's biodiversity, then reworked with Copeland.

Grammy-winning Beninese artist Angélique Kidjo's 2021 anthem, built on the refrain 'Mother Nature has a way of warning us.' Kidjo made it to spotlight climate change's disproportionate impact on Africa's children.

Lagos Afrobeat collective BANTU, led by Adé Bantu, teamed with legendary drummer Tony Allen on this 2017 track addressing oil spills and gas flaring in Nigeria's Niger Delta. It continues the Fela Kuti tradition of direct environmental critique.

Kingston-born, Brooklyn-based reggae artist Minna LaFortune's 2024 single names rising seas, wildfires, and record heatwaves as consequences of collective inaction, blending sung verses with a rapped call to action.

Released in 1982 by Indonesian folk-rock icon Gombloh, this song contrasts a remembered lush countryside with bare hills and silent birds caused by environmental destruction. It's since been named among Rolling Stone Indonesia's greatest Indonesian songs.

Composed in 1913 by Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles, drawing on traditional Andean folk melodies and using the Andean condor as a symbol of freedom and the natural world. The linked recording is a traditional Andean instrumental, distinct from the Simon & Garfunkel adaptation.

A classic Chinese folk song from the Jiangnan region, with lyrics tracing to at least the Qianlong era of the Qing dynasty. It celebrates the jasmine flower and later became one of the first Chinese folk songs to reach international audiences, including Puccini's Turandot.

Released in 2026 by South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela — 'The Voice' of the anti-apartheid movement — this single blends Marabi and Mamelodi rhythms into a meditation on food sovereignty, urging reconnection with the land.

A folk-style track from IU's 2017 EP A Flower Bookmark 2, a remake of a 1991 song by folk singer Yang Hee-eun, painting a sensory scene of birdsong, cool air, and a dragonfly on a crisp autumn morning.

A studio recording of the traditional Nowruz street song associated with Haji Firuz, the soot-faced, red-clad folkloric herald of the Iranian spring new year. The lyrics announce the arrival of spring, a tradition rooted in pre-Islamic Zoroastrian celebrations of renewal.

Native Hawaiian singer Hāwane Rios wrote this after the first 31 protectors of Mauna Kea were arrested in 2015 blocking the Thirty Meter Telescope, calling on kiaʻi (protectors) to stand 'strong and steady, unshakable' for the sacred mountain.

A Maasai-language climate justice song performed at COP29 in Baku in 2024, describing droughts that turned grazing lands to dust and floods that swept away homes. It frames climate change as a reparations issue for a pastoralist community that did not cause the crisis.

A molimo ceremonial song recorded by anthropologist Colin Turnbull among the Mbuti in the late 1950s, sung at night to 'wake up' the forest and honor it as a living, nurturing presence. It reflects the Mbuti belief that the forest is sacred and provides for those who revere it.

A traditional Bulgarian harvest song from Thrace, addressed to a field-worker named Stanka amid open fields at sunset. It reached international audiences through the Grammy-winning choral series Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.

A Hungarian rap protest song released in 2019 ahead of a global climate strike and COP25, in which actor-rapper Molnár Áron confronts denial with the line 'nature doesn't knock before kicking in the door.' The video was filmed during a real forest clean-up he organized.

Turkish Eurovision winner Sertab Erener partnered with UNDP Turkey on this single for the 2021 Glasgow climate summit, with lyrics built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a refrain asking 'Who's gonna end the climate crisis?'

A single from Tunisian-American singer Emel Mathlouthi's album Everywhere We Looked Was Burning, built around field-recorded nature sounds — wind, sea, fire — turned into percussion. The video opens on a windswept Tunisian beach as she sings of coastal loss.

A track from Finnish Sámi joiker Wimme Saari's 2003 album Bárru (Wave), whose songs are named for water phenomena. Saari blends traditional wordless Sámi luohti joik, rooted in reindeer-herding culture, with techno-ambient production.

The title track of Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq's 2016 album frames climate change and resource extraction as violence against the land, linking it to violence against Indigenous women. It pairs experimental Inuit throat singing (katajjaq) with rock instrumentation.

Released by Bomba Estéreo founder Simón Mejía's solo project Monte, this track blends Afro-Colombian and Indigenous vocals with electronics to profile Chocó communities who shifted from illegal logging to sustainable eco-tourism. It accompanied the 2020 documentary Sonic Forest.

Composed in 1966, this danza is a lyrical tribute to Puerto Rico's mountains, rivers, and 'virgin island of coral,' now regarded by many as the island's unofficial second anthem. Beneath its nature imagery the lyrics also carry a political undertone about sovereignty.

Written by Bangladeshi band Chirkutt for the Nodi Rocks initiative, which paired seven bands with seven endangered rivers to build climate awareness through music, this song is dedicated to the Sangu River. Founder Sharmin Sultana Sumi described the aim as 'to save the rivers, to save the climate.'

A traditional Quan Họ folk song from Bắc Ninh in Vietnam's Red River Delta, portraying the ancient banyan tree, village crossroads, and communal house yard that anchor rural life. The Quan Họ tradition was inscribed as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009.