After the coronavirus pandemic brought society to a screeching halt, some people turned to nature for solace. A set of photographs went viral, showing the Venice canals with clear, healthy blue waters after quarantine forced humans to stay inside. Many people celebrated on social media, declaring nature’s triumph over human pollution: “Nature hit the reset button on us,” one person commented. Another was more extreme, saying “Coronavirus is nature’s vaccine against us. We’re the virus.”
In reality, the clear waters of Venice have nothing to do with pollution; the lack of boat traffic allows the sediment at the bottom of the canals to settle. But the idea of coronavirus allowing nature to heal from human pollution stuck, and it’s since become a popular talking point on certain corners of the internet.
It’s a nice sentiment on the surface, but it forgets something important: while humans have caused climate change, they’re also its greatest victim. Climate change wreaks havoc on nature, yes, but that doesn’t happen in a vacuum; consequences like rising sea levels and an increase in powerful hurricanes will also affect humans, particularly those who are poor and marginalized. Even those who are well-off will feel disastrous ripple effects, and nature has proved to be much more adaptable than humans are. To paraphrase George Carlin: the planet’s going to be fine, but we’re gonna be fucked.
“Burial of the Dead”, a new song by the indie outfit Slow Dakota, doesn’t come out and say that it’s a song about the climate crisis (at least, the song doesn’t; the video features ClipArt illustrations of the greenhouse effect), but the implications are clear. “First the leaves die/Then the tree dies,” the vocals harmonize, disarmingly tender, before warning you: “When the trees fall/Dig a fox hole!” It’s some stark imagery, reminding us how small we really are: when the trees fall, they’ll take us down with them unless we make some drastic adjustments to our society.
But this is not an angry, didactic song warning us of Gaia’s righteous revenge. Indeed, as the title suggests, the tone is wistful and elegiac, and there’s a churchlike reverence to its sound. Over the plaintive chime of a piano, strings swell and recede with an almost cosmic majesty; it’s like watching time-lapse footage of the night sky through the years. While the sadness is never completely out of view (“he spends a fortune just to bury a loved one,” the singer laments), there’s always an undercurrent of hope.
Hope for what? Well, the song doesn’t say outright (it rarely says anything outright), but it shows that an ember of mysticism still glows, however faintly, in our society. “Beneath the calm, enlightened foreheads of international men/There burns a remainder of magic instead,” the vocalist sings, and even if he doesn’t sound completely certain that magic will return, he seems to take some comfort in the human element that lies at the heart of our burning world.
