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My decision to do the playlist format came from the fact that I really like listening to music, and it would be a fun way to analyze the core concepts of sustainability. Additionally, once getting the instructions for the assignment, I already had a few songs in mind that I wanted to talk about in connection to the core concepts of sustainability. My process started by picking the songs I knew had aspects to them that I felt were related to core concepts from the course. Once doing that, I went and reviewed class material to find the specific material that I felt fit what was being talked about in the song, and analyzed and compared the song and material in addition to making connections with other core concepts, also adding my questions at the end of each question. I repeated this process for the remaining three songs until I was done, thus, concluding my process for completing the assignment

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Link to Spotify playlist with the songs I used

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Link to Spotify playlist with the songs I used

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Lecture on Systems Thinking

The movie on Environmental Justice ("There's Something in the Water")

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I feel the song Big Yellow Taxi is very closely related to the concept of environmental justice, specifically one of the situations discussed in the film There's Something in the Water. The film talks about a town in Nova Scotia where a group of formerly enslaved people had moved in and started to build themselves a new life. They soon were met with their government placing a dump in their community. I feel the song perfectly represents this exact scenario by talking about "they paved paradise, put up a parking lot," where the formerly enslaved people building themselves a new life represents paving their "paradise," and the government putting up a dump in this down represents the "put up a parking lot." Overall, I think the song does an excellent job of examining how people, especially those in communities of color, can have a well-functioning environment and lose all of it because the government decides to view them as inferior, so all the toxic landfills and power plants get put in these communities, effectively harming the health and well being of not only the environment but also the health of the people in these communities. There is a lyric in this song that I feel describes this quite well, which is, "that you don't know what you've got 'till its gone" expressing that these communities of color do not always foresee the government damaging public health and the environment in their communities with government projects until they happen. Then, the lives they knew before the horrible side effects from things like dumps are gone. I feel this also connects systems thinking to environmental justice in the sense that not knowing what you have until you have lost it can show how when it comes to communities of color may not know the effects of certain environmentally destructive projects until they are moved into their communities and they begin to affect and cause the loss of parts of the environment they may not have even known would be affected by the implementation of things like landfills. This would lead me to ask the question: when governments put up things like dumps in these communities with people who are predominantly nonwhite, do they consider the systematic effects the implementation can have on not only the people living there but also the vast areas of the environment?

Nonetheless, I picked this song because a few years back, I was listening to Christmas music with my parents, and one of Joni Mitchell's songs came up. My parents dug deeper into other songs she had sung, and this one came up. I felt it embodied how we tare down our environment and the people inhabiting it to put up things that benefit a select few. After learning about environmental justice and the racism around harmful environmental decisions, I knew I had to pick this song because I felt it fit perfectly.

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I feel the song What A Wonderful World also represents the concept of environmental justice discussed in the movie There's Something in the Water. To me, the song represents a longing for a perfect world that brings together the beauty of a sustainable environment and peace among people. However, it is well known that our world is not actually like this. A lyric in the song states, "I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, " which I feel represents a contrast to the devastating topic of environmental justice mentioned in the film. There is a scene where the members of the community where the mill and treatment facility are located had experienced deaths by cancer and suicide from the generational guilt and pressure that had been placed upon those affected by the implementation of this facility into their community. This represents the harsh reality that due to environmental racism, you do not always "watch them grow" when it comes to the people of these communities because of the inherent destruction that facilities like these do to the community, polluting things like their waterways and causing issues like cancer that can lead to early death.

Nonetheless, I feel this idea of environmental racism, in relation to the song, can connect to the concept of system thinking we have also talked about in class. In typical environmental justice situations, lower-income, nonwhite communities tend not to have people "watch them grow" compared to white upper-class communities, showing how choosing not to put a mill in a white community is not just a decision causing one outcome. By putting it in the lower-income, nonwhite community, you create a whole system of issues, such as distance between communities, low water quality, increased rates of death, and lower mental health rates, which connect to and create many other issues. This leads me to ask the question: when lower-income, nonwhite communities are put under the pressure of a non-environmentally-friendly decision, are the people making the decisions aware of the trauma and death they cause to both the environment and these communities? How do we implement necessary things, like landfills, into areas around our globe without causing large-scale destruction and death to the areas where they are located, both to the plants and animals and the people who live there, who in many cases are not white or rich?

I picked this song because I always knew it had a good message about what our world would look like if there was peace amongst humans and we treated the environment with care and let it flourish. On top of this, when looking for songs for the assignment, it was a good choice to use this song, in my opinion, to show the environmental goal that we should strive for while taking care of environmental justice issues.

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For the song The Circle of Life, I feel the concept it relates most closely to is the systems thinking that we talked about in our lecture on systems thinking. The song talks about "It's the circle of life" "and it moves us all," implying that we are all connected in multiple ways, whether between us and our animals or the environment. We are all in many feedback loops that make up the good and bad things that are the circle of life. I also picked this song because of the importance it has in the movie in which it is set. This is implied through the song based on what happens in the movie, where balance is a keytopic of conversation. In order to have balance, everything needs to be taken into account, from things like the trees and grass to the animals that feed off and use the vegetation. This is important because it disproves the idea that issues that aredue to our environment can be solved with a single fix to one facet of the issue. This leads me to believe that it connects to another concept, which is environmental racism. I feel it connects in the sense that the song talks about interconnectedness and how, when it comes to environmental racism, most cases are due to systematic causes, meaning that it can connect to the ideas of system thinking where simply trying to fix environmental racism cannot be done by taking a linear approach, there has to be a systematic approach. The song encompasses all of this. This also leads me to ponder a question related to the system thinking implied by the song and how it can connect to environmental racism. Have we always thought of environmental racism in a systematic sense, acknowledging the systems it's rooted in? Or was there a period in which we thought it could simply be "fixed" on a case-by-case basis?

Either way, the majority of the reason I picked this song was because I have always thought it does a good job of talking about the interconnectedness of all living things and the processes that they go through on our planet, and when having the lecture on systematic thinking, this is one of the songs that I felt was very important to talk about.