I recently taught “Climate Songwriting and Leadership” at a music camp that I attend each summer. Like each class at this camp, we met every day for seventy-five minutes for seven days in a row. People could attend on as many or as few days as they liked; there were always many wonderful classes to explore at each time slot of the day.


We started with a few climate basics: (1) It is not too late, but there is no time to waste. (2) To reverse global warming will require each of us and all of us. (3) It helps to break it down into smaller tasks.


I gave each student a two-page list of thirty-eight proven climate solutions (my favorites from the book Drawdown). Then I encouraged them to use brainstorming, listening turns, and research to help them pick a single, tangible goal for the songs they would write. We talked about how the lyrics, rhythm, vocal range, genre, instrumentation, performance venue or medium, and other aspects would grow out of the basic goal.


Let’s say I’m writing a song for six-year-olds. I want to encourage them to plant bamboo in half-barrels on the blacktop near their classroom and cut it down each year and watch it grow back. Bamboo will cool their playground, clean their air, and capture carbon from the atmosphere. (Bamboo is particularly fast at bringing carbon out of the air.) My song for the six-year-olds should use simple clear language and have no sarcasm. It should have a playful chorus in which they use arm gestures or dance moves so they can get up from their desks, enjoy singing together, and use their bodies to help them remember a basic, benign lesson about the carbon cycle. It should use the notes right above middle C because those notes are easiest for six-year-olds to sing without hurting their voices. 


On the other hand, if I want people with jackhammers to be proud to tear up the blacktop and install porous paving, a more complex and aggressive polyrhythm in a hip-hop style might be more motivating. Or, if I want to offer the news that “immigration is a climate issue” to white North American working-class Christian people who have been told that climate change is not real and that immigrants are bad, I might be more likely to be heard and believed if my song tells one person’s story, does not blame or generalize, and sounds in many ways like a song that belongs on a country music radio station.


The following are some things that were challenging about teaching at this music camp:


• People expect to drink a lot of alcohol and play music much of the night as well as during the day, so as the week goes by people have less and less free attention. I went to bed relatively early and did not use alcohol but was often awakened by wonderful outdoor dance parties with live music. My students were increasingly exhausted. I needed to use all my ingenuity—including having them get up and run around in circles during a brainstorm—to keep blood flow going to their creative minds.
• There is no access to telephone service. I loved being “unplugged” from my cell phone, but this meant I could not call anyone for a mini-session when my distresses got restimulated. I had to either get attention from people not trained in RC—some of whom did a great job—or wake up when my spouse/Area Reference Person crawled into the tent and try to get a session with him. As far as I know, he was the only other RCer among the five hundred campers. This worked well enough for me to keep thinking quite well during the camp, but not well enough for me to enjoy handling the various crises that awaited me when I got back to cell service/work life/extended-family life after camp.
• Most of the people who attend this camp are not there to discuss political and environmental issues. Climate change is scary. Two other people, each of whom has made a whole career of performing and recording original music, had already been recruited to teach songwriting at this camp, whereas I have an unreliable singing voice, don’t play any instruments, and have a busy work life in the medical field. It took courage to even ask if I could teach this new class that I had invented.

The following are some things that were successful or enjoyable about teaching this class:


• I did it!
• Many people who were too scared or too busy elsewhere to take the class were not too scared nor too busy to ask me about the class. They would come up to me in the dinner line and ask how the class was going. If I told them it was a complete delight, they would then quickly unburden themselves of a great deal of hopelessness about climate change and end up talking themselves into taking action in the near future.
• It is traditional at this camp to introduce oneself to other people at meals and ask which classes people are taking and/or teaching. This was a very easy way for me to bring up climate change, a topic that is interesting to me all year but that is often hard for me to start talking about. I could simply answer a (usually standard) question and find myself in an important conversation with a new friend.
• I was pleasantly surprised at how many people immediately understood what I meant if I said, “In my class we are working on how to bypass the amygdala.” Lots of people now know that the amygdala is the “fear center” in the brain. They quickly understood that I had ideas about how to convey ideas in songs in such a way as to change minds and inspire action instead of igniting violence or making people turn away. People showed great relief at this.
• Class participants helped each other in many ways. The go-rounds, brainstorms, and games released a lot of initiative.
• One person in my class said, “This process worked for me. I started out with wanting every good thing to happen at once, but then I broke it down. For this one song I set a goal of getting more ranchers to practice managed grazing. I created a story with lots of sensory information to help the listener connect with the character before the character gives any generalizations or advice. Then my friends added good ideas for the bridge and an amazing guitar solo. I love my song!”
• One person said, “I don’t think my song is complete, but I am glad I learned that writing songs can be done with help from a group and not always alone. I learned the importance of listening to each other and of making time to do that.”
• One person said, “I came into this class pretty [quite] hopeless about climate change. I don’t have a song yet, but now I am hopeful.”
• On the second-to-last day I reached out to the two other songwriting teachers. We created an event at which any songwriting-class participant could perform for an audience on the last night of camp. At the performance we showed a variety of styles and instrumentations. The audience was extremely supportive, and some people said that our music moved them deeply.
• I got to combine many things that I care about. I have always loved music and dance, I adore RC, I love learning what is being discovered scientifically about brains and minds (much of which corroborates RC theory), and for the last year or more I have dedicated all my vacations and much of my other “spare time” to climate activism (not only in song form!). This meant that I was “being my whole self” more than usual—a great experience for a mixed-heritage gal!