For so many artists both "then" and "now," the natural world was/is their source of power and poetry, their collective Muse, the entity which shaped their art, their lives, their contributions to society. It was not just a place in which to live. It was their spiritual home, their religion, their life-breath and their heartbeat. Plenty of artists, visual and auditory, draw on the artistic power of the Earth. You and I could name hundreds of such artists.

This page is not about them.

This page is about the select few individuals who have pushed the limits of musical art to include not only homage to the Earth, but also awareness of what humans are doing to it. This is about musical genres that have taken steps to improve humanity's treatment of our natural environment. This site is about artists who refuse to take our race's treatment of our home sitting down.

I would like to acknowledge Patricia DeMars in the Randolph-Macon Woman's College library for being a wellspring of information on documentation and printed materials. I would like to thank Melissa Burnham for her endless patience in being my sounding board through the entire process of this project. I would like to thank the Sweet Briar and Lynchburg College libraries for use of their recorded materials, R-MWC Information Technology for the web space, my roommate for putting up with the continual "noise pollution" from this project, and the lovely people at Microsoft for dominating the computer industry with technology I actually understand.

--Crystal Root, 9 November 2002