Environmental music

27/02/1995

Environmental music ENVIRONMENTAL issues seem to be fetching considerable mileage for television programmers who flood us from abroad. Even Baywatch last week featured an environmental issue: when one of the shapely lifeguards put up a personal protest over an offshore oil company, sardonically named ECO (Environmentaly Correct Oil).

But the other new programme from Channel V, similarly called The Eco, came as a pleasant surprise. After the sad cashiering of MTV from the satellite menu, Channel V was widely seen as a retarded copy of the former. The political understanding behind The Eco chastises this notion.

The simple programme format has video jockey Angela Chow introducing issues like global warming and the ozone hole, and her incessant chatter is speed-broken with music. Delightfully, the selection goes beyond environmental themes. It does seem as if the producer has taken the cue from Sting's biting interview in Eco's first episode: "...don't take it (environment) in isolation, it is a part of larger political opportunism."

What came across is that the most important politically correct numbers were done by the groups that came up during the shakin' '60s and the early '70s. Pink Floyd's Take it back, from their latest album, The Division Bell, which calls for a romantic "back to the pastorals", features regularly in the programme. Among the older stuff, the most stolid number, which came up in Eco's 2nd episode, was Van Halen's Right Now ("Right now, somebody is working too hard for a minimum wage..."). The other groups that feature in the programme are the alternative bands of the '90s, REM.

Strangely missing are numbers by Bob Dylan (in fact, one gets to watch only Subterranean Homesick Blues), environmental songs written in the early '70s by Lou Reed, Sick of You and the Australian rock group Midnight Oil, who put up a subversive protest concert on a flatbed truck in front of the World Bank during the lunch break.

Angela Chow doesn't say much about the numbers or their composers. But while VJ Ruby motormouths, Angela talks to the audience. She tries to syncretise the programme's topics from various locations. In the first episode, she introduced general issues related to land, water, forest and biodiversity, peeling off layers of environmental argot to arrive, simply, at humanity's ever increasing greed.

A large section was devoted to the problems of disappearing mangroves. "Man...what?" she asks, and then goes on to define mangroves and their special role in the environment and how many species of fish it can support. She goes on to explain the disaster created by prawn farming in the Philippines.

But the flickering data presented in the now-famous fragmented, fractal style does not let you retain anything, apart from delineating the enormity of the problem. The featherlight camera movements give the viewer a sense of immediacy. The programme also hints at possible corrective measures we all can take in terms of paper recycling and reducing plastic baggage.

The programme, created in association with the Worldwide Fund for Nature, will work more effectively than academic preaching. And it shows that politics can be introduced in a popular fashion. The second episode introduced the issues of global warming, chloroflurocarbons, greenhouse effects, and the Montreal Protocol. The programme shows its political maturity by bringing in the North-South debate on global warming, and points out that it is the USA which refuses to make any commitment on reducing carbon emission. Angela quaintly advised us to take a piece of paper, a pen and dash off a letter to the American president asking him to "do something".

And I am going to write a letter to Bill Clinton because I like Angela Chow.

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- Environment

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