Are we making any real progress in our fight against climate change? I find myself returning to that question often — and I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clean answer. Not as a citizen, and not as a composer who has spent years making work about exactly this.
I’ve spent years composing works centered on ecological themes. I’ve watched audiences respond, seen the conversations that follow, received messages from people who say something shifted for them. And still, in quieter moments, the doubt creeps in. The planet continues to warm. The headlines continue to worsen. What does a piece of music do in the face of that?
What I keep coming back to is this: a soundscape can reach someone before an argument can. It bypasses the defences – the fatigue, the overwhelm, the sense that the problem is too large for any one person to touch. When a listener feels something, they become briefly available to it in a way that data and rhetoric rarely manage. Sustainability isn’t only a scientific or political crisis. It’s a human one. And art speaks human.
That doesn’t resolve the doubt entirely. Art alone won’t stabilize the climate. But I’ve come to believe that awakening a sense of responsibility — even quietly, even in one person at a time — is not nothing.
There’s something else I’ve been sitting with. The environmental work I’ve made has received attention over the years, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. But I sometimes wonder whether that attention exists partly because eco-conscious composition is still relatively rare in contemporary music. And if that’s true, it points to a problem larger than my own practice. I would gladly give up that recognition for a world in which this kind of engagement was simply expected — where every composer felt the pull of these questions, and where art made in response to the ecological crisis was not the exception, but the norm.
