1970ish Album Music

Note: Songs included in this listing may stray from the stated theme from time to time, reflecting my personal sense of nostalgia, and perhaps what period or genre I feel the song really belonged in. Some or all of the songs listed may cause compulsive spending on CDs or MP3s, unexpected memories, and/or bouts of nostalgia. Forestnatives.com cannot be liable for any of this. Just dig it.

Another Note: This list is a work in progress, and as such, some artists may be under-represented. I welcome your suggestions to round it out, as long as they are in keeping with the theme, as I define it in my own, somewhat twisted mind. Which is to say, all input is great, but I’m the one who ultimately has to pay the $1.29 for a song, so I have to actually like it. If you would like to gift me a song to add, you may do so on iTunes, using my username: leha@forestnatives.com, and I will definitely thank you.

One Final Note: I have deliberately avoided inclusion of several over-played “classic rock” tunes, partly because it’s just not the FM way, and partly because I’m sick of them.

Your comments and reminiscences about the songs on the list, about underground radio of the period (including KSAN), about the San Francisco Bay Area around 1970, or any other related or tangential theme are most welcome. Enjoy!

Bring it on, because
I am a tree in the wind
And you, poor fate,
have no roots at all.

That’s really the only question there is. Industrial civilization is killing the planet. What are you going to do about it? We need to decolonize our minds. We need to wend our way through the lies and obfuscations to recognize that civilization is killing the planet. And don’t take my word for this. Don’t take my word for anything. Do the research yourself. Read contemporary accounts of European explorers, and the fecundity they witnessed, and destroyed, here. Look outside your own windows, and pay attention to the decline of migratory songbirds, the eradication of place after wild place.

Things don’t have to be the way they are. Our way of living is not based on biology, but rather on very bad choices. A lot of people conflate being civilized with being human. They somehow forget that humans shared this continent with salmon, bison, passenger pigeons, huge unbroken forests that they called home. When you remind them of this, they often fall back on arguments such as, “That’s because Indians didn’t have our level of technology.” There are a couple of important and unacknowledged premises in that statement. The first is that the statement is an explicit acknowledgment that the dominant culture’s technologies are destroying the earth.

The other is the implicitly racist argument that Indians were somehow too stupid to invent backhoes. Technology cannot be separated from culture. Backhoes can only emerge from a culture that is attempting to exploit resources in the landscape, as opposed to entering into relationship with those beings that we civilized call resources. In order for us to deplete (or use) resources, they have to have been converted internally from other beings into resources in the first place. In order for a man to exploit a woman, he must already have ceased to perceive her as another being and have begun to perceive her as an object. Before capitalists can exploit or enslave human beings, they must have ceased to perceive them as human beings and have begun to perceive them as a labor force. The same is true for trees, fish, stones, etc.

Another argument is that natural selection is based on competition, and that only the meanest survive. That’s nonsense, as can be shown in one sentence: Those creatures who have survived in the long run have survived in the long run, and the only way to survive in the long run is to make sure that your habitat benefits from your presence. If your presence damages your habitat, your habitat will decline, as we see. And you won’t survive in the long run. As we will see very soon. Natural selection is based not on survival of the fittest, as we’ve absurdly been told, but on how well you can fit into your surroundings. If we can convince ourselves that our way of living is inevitable, well, then, there’s nothing we can do about it, and we may as well make the best of a bad situation. The belief that our way of living is inevitable, however, is not only intellectually indefensible and morally reprehensible, it’s suicidal.

Something else I think we need to do is eliminate false hopes. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities. Does anyone really think that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really think that the US will stop supporting dictators, stop exploiting humans, because we ask nicely? Does anyone really think that our culture will undergo a voluntary transition to a sane and sustainable way of living? How would this understanding–that our culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist–shift our strategy or tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because we never talk about it. I’m writing a book right now about that shift in strategy, and in tactics. It’s about how to take down civilization.

Here’s another thing I think is really important. As you alluded to above, we need to inhabit the places where we live. We need to become residents. This includes not only getting to know and fall in love with your neighbors, but also to defend them to the death when they are threatened. One of the most important things I would like to get across is that the government is a government of occupation, not of inhabitation. The culture is a culture of occupation, not of inhabitation. The government, and the entire culture, is more interested in extracting resources than in helping the lives of those who live here, and who will live here in the future. That is the definition of a government and culture of occupation. You move in and get the resources. You don’t do what’s best for the human and nonhuman inhabitants. If the Soviets had invaded the US, and done the sort of environmental damage that the government that we pledged allegiance to as children has, we would all take to the woods in our camo outfits and fight them to the end. Similarly, if space aliens came down and began to systematically dismantle the ecological infrastructure of the planet, if they began to change the planet’s climate, if they injected dioxin into mother’s milk, if they pumped hormones into rivers, if they turned the sea off San Diego into a dead zone, and did the same with the Gulf of Mexico, if they irradiated the Columbia, we would fight them as fiercely as many of the Indians attempted to fight the civilized.

What should we do? At a talk I gave last fall in Austin, Texas, a man asked a question I’d never heard before: “If 10,000 people lined up ready to do your bidding, what would you say to them?” My answer was immediate: “I’d tell them sure as hell not to listen to me.” His was just as fast: “That’s a copout. How many dams could 10,000 people take down? People know how bad things are, but they don’t know what to do. They want to be told. That’s your responsibility. What’s the purpose of writing if you don’t tell us what to do?” “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow, go to Barton Springs”–Barton Springs are a set of defining, and critically imperiled, springs in Austin, huge and beautiful, dying before the eyes of those who live there and love them–”and sit.” “Then what?”

“Wait until the springs tell you what to do. Barton Springs know this region much better than I. They know what this region needs, know what sustainability looks and feels like here. The springs are much smarter than I am. They’ll tell you exactly what to do.” Somebody else asked, “Is it Barton Springs?” “Yes,” I said, “And no. It’s everywhere. Just listen. Not to me. To yourself. And to the land. If you listen to the land, it will tell you exactly what you need to do.”

–Derrick Jensen, 2004, Utne Cafe Interview with Leha Carpenter

A shadow is like a reflection
that will not succumb to inspection.

Implying a certain complicity
it offers innate synchronicity.

Should you run from the shadow
crouched behind you
then you will find
that it will find you.

But if you acknowledge
your shadow’s plight
in turn it will point you
right into the light.

You
Unfinished Aria
You
Unflyable kite
Powder white
Meant for a
Blue background

Your hematite eyes
Flash appreciation
Like some premonition
Like you knew
Your days to make an impression
Were so few.

You
Virgin wings
You
Never resting
Perpetual nestling
Netted in
A scheme too grand to
Make sense of
To rise above
To comprehend–
We were fast friends
You and I.

Oh, if I could make
Me a sail
Of starkness
So pristine
As your one good wing:
Too perfect to submerge,
And into me
Take the spilling darkness
Then might you rise,
My sweet one, laughing
And hover, one over
The sour grasses
No longer a ghost
No longer in pain
And finally a dream
Once again?

Then writes his shining letters,
Syllables unpronounced
Even by the masked raccoon
Who washes (but watches).
Lacking relief and
Unreflected so far
In colorless air,
Slowly he casts:
Once upon a dampened sidewalk
Magic words, crazy words
Words that glisten only in the dawn,
Soon to vex simple me
In morning’s mix.

Sipping from a cup
Gazing helplessly
I wonder at their formless form.
Now he has parked himself
Just outside my doorstep.
I ask, but he is a monk,
In his eternal brown robes.
I will rise early, I can commit to this,
To trace the transparent ink still wet
Back to his exploring eyes
Back to when they first erect,
Architect
His latest free verse.