I'm in the throes of some kind of very intense, poignant nostalgia tonight. It started when I somehow got thinking about the B-52's first album and how much I love it.
Fall. 1979. It was my first semester of college. I was in Vermont. I was falling in love. It was one of the happiest times of my life. It was also when I first heard this album. One of my friends in my dorm was playing it. "WHAT is that? What IS that?!!!" I was instantly and forever obsessed, mesmerized, and completely captivated. This whole album, in my opinion, is a masterpiece.
I must have listened to this a thousand times, back in my beautiful, magical green mountains of Vermont. Back then, I, and others from my particular mileau, tribe, posse, pack and/or ragtag band of hippie punk new wave flower children were already shouting about climate change, which wasn't even called that yet (it was called "The Greenhouse Effect" at the time). SHOUTING about it, warning about it, but no one was listening. We didn't have social media. Our voices weren't amplified. No one believed us anyway. Bunch of hippie flowerchild punks, they thought.
Tonight, in 2023, the same green mountains that I listened to this song in over and over and over again, in 1979 and beyond, are flooded. Whole towns. Because: climate change.
People--most people, anyway--believe us now. Everyone is starting to understand that human activities really do impact the environment, and while the environment is forgiving, there are limits. And we've reached them. And we've exceeded them. And now Canada is on fire, California is on fire, my beloved Vermont is awash in flood waters, the coral reefs in the Keys are dying, the ocean surrounding Florida has hit unprecedented high temperatures. Our world is on fire. Our house is on fire.
This song that I love so much is exactly the same as it was in 1979, but the world, the world... it's changed. We've changed it. And if there is any hope of putting the genie back in the bottle, we have to behave in harmony with nature, now.
One of my very favorite songs, from the B-52's masterpiece first album, this is "Planet Claire".
