Where’s Our Climate Anthem?

April 22, 2021·55 min·5 clips

Discover how a civil rights anthem was born from a mashup of a gospel song and a melody rooted in slavery.

Ayanna opens with a fake-out. Kendra is not Alex, so the show gets a little teasing in before the question turns serious. The question is simple. If civil rights had "We Shall Overcome," what song could become tied to the climate movement? Ayanna starts with music history. She plays Mahalia Jackson's version and treats it as one of the United States' most famous social movement anthems. That makes the climate question harder. An anthem cannot just have a climate-ish word in it. It has to work against the criteria laid out by Dr. Shauna Redmond. Alex arrives with comic purpose. He jokes that finding the answer means reviewing every song ever written against Dr. Shauna Redmond's criteria first. Kendra has receipts. A previous story left her with a serious head start: a dataset of possible climate songs. The database was not magic, though. Instead of letting code scrape the internet and call it done, she worked with Genius and ran into the messy problem of lyric keywords. Even the words misbehave. Hot and fire were too broad, while glacier could mean melting ice or a very large diamond in lyrics. That is where the episode clicks. A huge political question gets funny and practical once the hosts test it against actual songs and actual language. The excerpt does not crown a winner. It sends people to the songs in the show notes, most of them on Spotify.

As heard by us

A lively, slightly messy search for the climate movement's missing anthem.

How to Save a Planet takes a simple question and gives it real shape: where is the climate movement's anthem? Ayanna's opening contrast between We Shall Overcome and that missing gap sets the tone, and the hosts keep the search loose, communal, and a little messy in a way that…

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Why you'd press play

You want climate talk that chases a missing anthem instead of preaching.

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