"Poor Worms" by Malvina Reynolds (1971)

Being people isn't all that it's cracked up to be,
But soon this problem will be solved for me,
I'll be worms, worms, worms,

Wiggley, woggley,
Googley, goggley worms.

I wonder how the worms will like the D.D.T.
And the bitter flavor in the taste of me,
Poor worms, worms, worms.

Wiggley, woggley,
Googley, goggley worms.

The cement and the bottles that I left behind,
They'll be tough to eat and mighty hard to grind,
Poor worms, worms, worms.

Wiggley, woggley,
Googley, goggley worms.

The birds will eat the worms and then the birds will fly,
And soon you'll hear me singing up there in the sky,
Goodbye, goodbye.

Wiggley, woggley,
Googley, goggley worms.

A sarcastic song that talks about the poisons and non decomposable wastes that are released to nature by humans. We'll be soon end up being eaten by worms in the recycling natural process, but poisons will destroy natural balances and unrecycled litters will be added to the piles of waste of next generations.

You can hear a Malvina's song here

"No Town" by Malvina Reynolds (1965)

This is no town, no town,
This is no town.

Well I don't know the people next door,
Maybe I never saw them before.
No one belongs in this old place,
A lot of houses in empty space.

This is no town, no town,
This is no town.

Town is a place where you lived and grew,
And things around there mean something to you.
But this old place means nothing to me
But a big no job misery.

This is no town, no town,
This is no town.

A town is a place that begins and ends,
You know your friends and your daddy's friends,
And the guy that runs the grocery store
Lives round the corner or right next door, but

This is no town, no town,
This is no town.

A town is a place where you belong,
Somebody cares if you're right or wrong,
Somebody cares if you live or die,
If they can't help you maybe they try, but

This is no town, no town,
This is no town.

A description of the dehumanising and alienating modern urban environment, deprived of real human relations, solidarity, care of our neighbours, control of our lives, and any social value that characterized the lost world of smaller towns and citizenship, as included in the ancient greek term of "polis". We read in wikipedia:

The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived in the ancient Greek times, in small-scale organic communities of the polis. In those days citizenship was not seen as a public matter, separated from the private life of the individual person. The obligations of citizenship were deeply connected into one’s everyday life in the polis. To be truly human, one had to be an active citizen to the community, which Aristotle famously expressed: “To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god!” This form of citizenship was based on obligations of citizens towards the community, rather than rights given to the citizens of the community. This was not a problem because they all had a strong affinity with the polis; their own destiny and the destiny of the community were strongly linked. Also, citizens of the polis saw obligations to the community as an opportunity to be virtuous, it was a source of honour and respect. In Athens, citizens were both ruler and ruled, important political and judicial offices were rotated and all citizens had the right to speak and vote in the political assembly.

Big cities of today are constructed and organized not to fulfill the true natural human needs and quality of life, but the needs of of market and economy for quick and effective transportation of products and robot-like clockwork and alienated workers.

You can hear a related song by Malvina "Little Boxes" in youtube

Photo was taken from www.reconnaissanceart.com

Malvina Reynolds' songs against water pollution (1970, 1973)

Clean Water (1970)

Clean water, clean water, clean water.
Mister and Mrs. me and you,
What makes you think our gunk should go,
Out where the sparkling rivers flow,
Down from the mountain heads of snow,
Out to the rolling sea?

Rivers where fish are dancing round
Where ferns and willow trees abound,
And sunny water bugs are found.
Rivers that once were food and home
For fish and ferns and sunny bugs and me.

Clean water, clean water, clean water.
Clean water, clean water, clean water. I cry.
Get that junk and that gunk
Out of my clean water
Before the fish and the sunny bugs all die,
And you and I.



The Fragile Sea (1973)

Our fathers knew the ocean as a friendly enemy,
They took their equal chances in the storm.
They trusted in the sail, they fought the mighty whale,
They played like sunny children on the shore.

Chorus:
The sea, the sea, the fragile sea.
Our source, our provider and our road to liberty.
Now we use it as a dump hole in this mad economy,
And we never will survive a dying sea.

Our sister is the sea bird, our brother is the gar,
The smallest plankton creatures as important as we are.
The chain of life's been moving thru a hundred million years,
We cut it at our peril and the pipeline is the shears.
(Chorus)

Do you see the seagull dead in his integument of tar
Who was once a soaring creature of the sky?
It's the oil company that's now the ruler of the sea
That makes ocean and its children fail and die.

(Chorus)
Have you seen the crystal waters of the North Canadian coast?
That's how this planet's oceans used to be.
With our muscle and our brain we must make it so again,
For we never will survive a dying sea.

It's impressive how clear view has an old woman and in early seventies about environmental ploblems and extensive contamination hazards that will become huge the following years in many places in her country. Sewage or dumping of toxic waste near rivers or underground water poisoned residential areas (Woburn, Hinkley, Love Canal, etc), Exxon Valdez disaster eliminated the once "crystal waters of the North Canadian Coasts" and many others.

you can hear her most famous song "little boxes" performed by Pete Seeger in youtube

D. D. T. on My Brain by Malvina Reynolds (1969)

I don't need your LSD,
Head to toe I'm DDT,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

Can't think like I used to do,
Still I know it's not good for you,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

They spray the wheat the chickens eat,
It's in my eggs, it's in my meat,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

It kills the bugs in the apple tree,
I eat the pie and it's killing me,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

All the farms they get that spray,
It washes down into my Bay,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

It kills the crabs, it kills the fish,
It shines up from my supper dish,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

Falcon's flying wild and free,
His babies die of the DDT,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

Chemical stocks are riding high,
Farm field workers spray and die,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

Bring back the bugs in my apple tree,
Don't lay that poison spray on me,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

I don't need your LSD,
DDT is killing me,
DDT on my brain, on my brain.

A song that tells in brief all about the DDT impacts to nature, food chain, human and animal health. Once considered a blessing and salvation for malaria quickly it shows that it was a curse that came to stay. Even today, after the mass production and use in 40s-50s and the banning afterwards, DDT is present even in arctic areas through atmospheric circulation and animal migration. We read in wikipedia:

In 1962, "Silent Spring" by American biologist Rachel Carson was published. The book catalogued the environmental impacts of the indiscriminate spraying of DDT in the US and questioned the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without fully understanding their effects on ecology or human health. The book suggested that DDT and other pesticides may cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Its publication was one of the signature events in the birth of the environmental movement. Silent Spring resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led to most uses of DDT being banned in the US in 1972.
DDT was subsequently banned for agricultural use worldwide under the Stockholm Convention, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day in certain parts of the world and remains controversial. Along with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the US ban on DDT is cited by scientists as a major factor in the comeback of the bald eagle in the contiguous US.

DDT is a persistent organic pollutant that is extremely hydrophobic and strongly absorbed by soils. Depending on conditions, its soil half life can range from 22 days to 30 years. When applied to aquatic ecosystems it is quickly absorbed by organisms and by soil or it evaporates, leaving little DDT dissolved in the water itself. Its breakdown products and metabolites, DDE and DDD, are also highly persistent and have similar chemical and physical properties.These products together are known as "total DDT". DDT and its breakdown products are transported from warmer regions of the world to the Arctic by the phenomenon of global distillation, where they then accumulate in the region's food web.
DDT, DDE, and DDD magnify through the food chain, with apex predators such as raptors having a higher concentration of the chemicals than other animals sharing the same environment. They are stored mainly in body fat. In the United States, human blood and fat tissue samples collected in the early 1970s showed detectable levels in all samples. A study conducted in the late 1970s after the U.S. DDT ban found that blood levels were declining, but DDT or metabolites were still found in a high proportion of samples. Biomonitoring conducted by the Centers for Disease Control as recently as 2002 shows that more than half of subjects tested had detectable levels of DDT or metabolites in their blood,and of the 700+ milk samples tested by the USDA in 2005, 85% had detectable levels of DDE.

DDT was a major reason for the decline of the bald eagle in North America in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the brown pelican and the peregrine falcon. DDT and its breakdown products are toxic to embryos and disrupts calcium absorption, thereby impairing eggshell quality. DDT is also highly toxic to aquatic life, including crayfish, daphnids, sea shrimp and many species of fish.

You can hear a Malvina's song (No hole in my hand)in youtube

"The Plutonium Song" by Malvina Reynolds (1975)

Plutonium is a business,
The business people say.
A cupful of Plutonium
Could sweep the world away.
But atom plants are business
With Plutonium on the side,
And business will keep going
Although all the world has died.

Chorus:
Make way for business,
They go where they will go.
If business wants Plutonium,
Who's going to say them no.

The AEC announces
A Pluto-economy,
Plutonium on railroad cars
And on the ships at sea.
Railroad cars they jump the tracks
And freighters they collide,
And business will keep going
Although all the world has died.

There never was Plutonium
Since all the world began,
But now it's a by-product
Of the cleverness of Man.
Half-life twenty thousand years
And there's no place to hide,
And business will keep going
Although all the world has died.

A whiff of that Plutonium
No city can survive,
But P.R. men can make it smell
Like Chanel Number Five.
I sing this song to warn us all
While we still move around,
Cause business goes the way it goes
Unless we cut them down.

Somebody's got to stop them,
Children, that's me and you.
And if some of us go down fighting,
If some of us go down fighting,
If some of us go down fighting,
That's a cleaner way to go.

A song about the consequences of leaving our fates to greedy for power and profits politicians and corporations. They don't hesitate to deal with the most toxic and dangerous elements in the world, like Plutonium in nuclaear plants.

You can hear a song by Malvina in youtube
The little Red Hen

“Tungsten” by Malvina Reynolds, (1968)

Chorus:
Tungsten, wolfram, makes the steel so hard.
It goes thru the side of an army tank as tho it were a paper card.
If you want to rule the world, never mind wrong or right,
All you got to have is tungsten wolframite.

There's only one thing in all this world hard as the tungsten steel,
That's the heart of a financier working on a tungsten deal.
Only one thing in all this world hard as the tungsten kind,
It's a diplomat with tungsten on his mind.
(Chorus)

The air is full of heavy words all about democracy,
And the boys they fight in many lands to keep the free world free,
And the words have a beautiful ringing sound that keeps us all up tight,
But the fact of the matter is tungsten wolframite.
(Chorus)

Tungsten, wolfram, what a happy sound,
Tungsten in stockpiles and underneath the ground,
Tungsten in China, sheelite in Malay,
But there are no tungsten mines in the USA.
(Chorus)

A song about a heavy metal (Tungsten) of great economic and military importance, because of its hardness and high melting point. But the Tungsten-rich minerals are located mainly in Third world so immoral corporations and diplomats not only exploit people under bad working conditions in mines to extract the precious metal, but also destroy sensitive ecosystems by strip mining that have the bad luck to bear a mineral-rich underground and in many cases support local conflicts and civil wars if they are favourable for their business. But such a form of unethical exploitation is timeless, Gold, diamonds, rubins, Uranium, Tungsten and today is Tantalum:
A heavy metal of great importantance in modern electronics, Tantalum, is extracted from the mineral Coltan found in Central Africa in Congo/Rwanda borders, where gorillas’ ecosystem in under great threat, civil wars are supported to facilitate its exploitation and bad working, almost slavery, conditions for the local people and children is going on. We read in wikipedia:

Coltan is the colloquial African name for columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore from which is extracted the elements niobium and tantalum. Tantalum from coltan is used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones, DVD players, and computers. Export of coltan from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to European and American markets has been attributed by experts to helping finance the present-day conflict in the Congo, with one aid agency asserting that “much of the finance sustaining the civil wars in Africa, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is directly connected to Coltan profits”

The Congo is a politically unstable area. The Rwandan occupation in the east of the Congo has meant the DRC has been unable to exploit the resource for its own benefit. A 2003 UN Security Council report[8] charged that a great deal of the ore is mined illegally and smuggled over the country's eastern borders by militias from neighbouring Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.

Coltan smuggling has also been implicated as a major source of income for the military occupation of Congo. An activist website, Toward Freedom, states that the search for coltan has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo; they state that demand for coltan has caused Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to seek hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

The coltan mining area in the DRC is within one of the main ranges of the threatened Eastern Lowland gorilla. It is also alleged that coltan mining could have severe environmental repercussions on the forests and wildlife in the area, in particular the gorilla.

You can hear a Malvina’s song in youtube

Two songs by Malvina Reynolds supporting environmental activism of specific issues

"Skagit Valley Forever" by Malvina Reynolds, (1970)

There's a fine green valley not far from Vancouver,
Home of the black bear, the marten and the cougar.
It's the tree rich valley where the Skagit River flows,
A home for God's creatures since Heaven only knows.

Chorus:
Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley,
Ray Williston is selling you away.
Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley,
They would turn you to a mud pond

To run the Coca Cola coolers in Seattle, U.S.A.
Well, the parks are getting fewer, the trees are getting thin,
The cities are all reaching out to take the wildwood in.
The world is getting poorer with every mile they clear,
And they're selling Skagit acres for five dollars fifty cents a year.
(Chorus)

Oh my sisters and my brothers in this shining northern land,
It's time to get together and take each other's hand,
And ring around the wilderness to keep the gangs away
Who would ravage our sweet country for a shameful pocketful of pay.

Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley,
No grabber will get you for a prize.
Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley,
We'll let no vandal drown you,
We'll keep you as we found you,
British Columbia's forest paradise.


When Malvina was a guest on Art Finley’s radio program in Vancouver, B.C., Art told her about a demonstration the next day against the flooding of Skagit Valley. She wrote the song, but because she was on tour and couldn’t stay to sing it, a local singer did instead.


"Alcatraz (Pelican Island)" by Malvina Reynolds (1969)

It was Pelican Island,
When the Bay was clean.
The birds on the flyway
Used to make the scene.
And the Rock was green.

Chorus:
Alcatraz,
We don't need that plastic jazz.
Give us the island the way it was
When the Indians had their day.

Who needs an Astrodome
In San Francisco Bay!
Sad Rock, cruel Rock
To the souls of men,
Must it be a painted rock
From the five and ten,
Miserable again?

(Chorus)

They call it real estate,
That's all they can see,
Wild creatures called it home
That's how it could be,
A joy to you and me.

(Chorus)

Do your stuff in Dallas,
New York and Abilene.
We've got hot shots of our own
Messing up the scene;
Leave our Bay serene.

(Chorus)

Now the Indians claim the Rock
Just a grain of sand
To the wilds we robbed them of
Their ancestral land.
Red Brother, take your stand!

Alcatraz,
We don't need that plastic jazz,
Let's see the Island the way it was.
When the Indians have their day
We'll cheer that Council Fire
In San Francisco Bay!


After the federal prison closed, developers had plans for the island. A group of Native Americans occupied it in 1969 in protest, and Malvina quickly penned an appropriate song of support. It has now been left a historic park.

Comments were taken from the dedicated to Malvina Reynolds site

A song performed by Malvina in youtube:

Turn around

"Free Enterprise" by Malvina Reynolds (1951)

The air you breathe is poison, the food you eat is worse,
The dollars in your pay check are pennies in your purse.
In full page advertisements they praise it to the skies,
They tie it up with fancy bows and dress it up in fancy clothes,
It still offends the gentle nose, free enterprise.

Chorus:
Free enterprise, it's free enough no doubt.
Anything they give away you're better off without.

The bandits of the old days would hide their heads in shame,
Their old-time buccaneering was hardly worth the name.
They used to end on gibbets and dance against the skies,
And now they live on top the town and sport their minks and cars around
And buy up Congress by the pound, free enterprise.

(Chorus)

There's nothing free about it, you pay at every turn,
Except the guys in Wall Street who have the stuff to burn.
They had to make new brain machines to count their profits' rise,
But since there's always room for more they still can make the market soar--
A little war does wonders for free enterprise.

(Chorus)

They gag you if you holler, they kick you if you sneeze,
They throw you in the hoosegow for singing songs like these.
The only way to like it is to close your ears and eyes,
It's good for G. M. Company, Morgan and the A and P,
But it's just no darn good for me, free enterprise.

Chorus)


That is the oldest enviro-song we have found up to now, concerning the genres we present. No matter that is the oldest, it's full of timeless truths about the amoralism of free market: enterprises and multinationals act and work at the expense of environment, public health, working conditions, democracy, human rights, etc in favour of their profits and greed. Today we are witnesses of the devastating impacts of a completely free global market and economy that leads to a global economic totalitarianism controlled by G8, WTO and a handfull of powerful multinational corporations.

You can hear Malvina's classic "Little Boxes" in youtube

Malvina Reynolds in 60's: protest songs about saving forests and trees

Run, Run, the Tree Is Falling by Malvina Reynolds 1965

Run, run, the tree is falling,
Run, run, the chain saw's at his throat!
Once the redwood's gone
It will not come again,
It will not be a giant
In the history of time.

Once the grove is gone,
The living fern and bush,
It will not house the yellow deer,
It will not bear the thrush.

Once the trees are gone
That drank the heavy rain,
The water-maddened rivers
Will tear the land again.

Once the forest's gone
That was the creature's friend,
We'll never have the wilderness
To reach a healing hand.

Stop the iron teeth
That only know to kill,
That turn the mighty forest
Into corpses at the mill.



The Falling of the Tree by Malvina Reynolds, 1965

He thought he owned the tree because he bought it.
But what does money have to do with trees?
She said the tree was hers because she loved it.
She didn't want to own it only let it be.

He thought he owned the land because he bought it.
But what does money have to do with land?
Older than he by many million years,
And here after the generations die.

He cut the tree down and the lady cried.
She called him pig, and wished she had a gun.
In court, her lawyer softly asked for pardon,
That she had been, he said emotional.

She cried and cursed for murder of a tree.
He thought he owned the tree because he bought it,
And like a feudal lord who had the right
To kill his wife if she got in his road,

Since it was his, he had the right to kill it.
The lovely tree, older and wiser,
Living in beauty, dying in awful silence,
Cut into nothing, while a woman cried.



Give a Man a Bulldozer Malvina Reynolds 1967

Give a man a bulldozer,
He'll fill the lake with muck,
A thousand years it was running clear,
But now it's running out of luck.
Give a man a bulldozer,
He'll shove the soil away,
A thousand years of careful loam
He pushes it down into the bay.
Give a man a bulldozer,
He sees a little glen,
It's nice with falls and fern and buds
And bugs and gentle violets, and then--
Give a man a bulldozer,
Made of fire and steel,
He'll make the whole world reel and rock,
He'll end up buried in the muck,
With the bulldozer on top.



Green Shadows by Malvina Reynolds 1969

You walk into this room,
The trees are all around you.
Green shadows kiss your head,
The gentle sounds surround you,
Your soul lies down on the piney bed.
The walls are random walls,
You do not feel them press you,
Green shadows touch your eyes,
Their silent welcomes bless you,
Your dreams come singing from the skies.
You are no longer one
But all that breathes beside you,
You are the craggy bark,
The leaves that move and hide you,
Green shadows and the rising dark.
You walk into this room,
The trees are all around you,
This is a living day,
No hostile sounds will wound you,
The chain saw's cry is far away.


Four songs by Malvina Reynolds where she strongly criticizes how human is ill disposed towards trees, forests and green, not hesitating to eliminate green landscapes immediately using destructive machines like chain saws, bulldozers, etc and replaces them with concrete buildings. We read about the song “The falling of a tree”

In the Notes and Comments to her songbook The Muse of Parker Street Malvina writes of this song: "A subdivider on Harbor Point, at the north end of the Bay, cut down some great old trees near the home of Lois Knill, and she didn't like it."

You can hear a song in myspace

"What Have They Done to the Rain" by Malvina Reynolds 1962

Just a little rain falling all around,
The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound,
Just a little rain, just a little rain,
What have they done to the rain?

Just a little boy standing in the rain,
The gentle rain that falls for years.
And the grass is gone,
The boy disappears,
And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,
And what have they done to the rain?

Just a little breeze out of the sky,
The leaves pat their hands as the breeze blows by,
Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye,
What have they done to the rain?

Just a little boy standing in the rain,
The gentle rain that falls for years.
And the grass is gone,
The boy disappears,
And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,
And what have they done to the rain?


We read in the site dedicated to Malvina’s Reynolds work

People now think of this as a song about acid rain, but it was originally written as part of a campaign to stop aboveground nuclear testing, which was putting strontium-90 in the air, where it was washed down by the rain, got into the soil and thence to the grass, which was eaten by cows. When children drank the cows’ milk the strontium-90, chemically similar to calcium but radioactive, was deposited in their bones. Mothers saved their children’s baby teeth and sent them in to be tested by scientists who indeed found elevated levels of strontium-90 in their teeth. A year after this song was written, President Kennedy signed the treaty against aboveground testing.

You can hear this song in youtube performed by
Joan Baez
The Searchers
The Seekers
Heather Lev

Αlbum: "God Bless The Grass" by Pete Seeger (1966)

Cement Octopus

There's a cement octopus sits in Sacramento, I think,
Gets red tape to eat, gasoline taxes to drin,
And it grows by day and it grows by night
And it rolls over everything in sight.
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.

Who knows how the monster started to grow that way;
Its parents are frightened and wish it would go away.
But the taxes keep coming, they have to be spent
On big bull dozers and tanks of cement,
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.

That octopus grows like a science-fiction blight,
The Bay and the Ferry building are out of sight,
The trees that stood for a thousand years,
We watch them falling through our tears
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.

Dear old MacLaren won't take this lying down,
We can hear his spirit move in the sandy ground,
We built this Eden on the duney plain,
Now they're making it a concrete desert again,
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.

The men on the highways need those jobs, we know
Lets put them to work planting new trees to grow.
Building new parks where kids can play,
Pushing that cement monster away,
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery

A great poetic song, about the unstoppable expansion of cemented cities, real monster which expands its tentacles and eliminating forests, trees, etc and creates a hostile and stressing environment where kids have no place to have fun. It is also refers to economical purposes that leads to such condition. The taxes from traffic must be used not for support of traffic but for more green and recreation areas in the grey cities. The original song was wriiten and sung in 1964 by another old singer-political activist Malvina Reynolds at a rally in Golden Gate Park to save the area from a proposed freeway (which was not built). http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr024.htm


God bless the grass

God bless the grass that grows through the crack.
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the truth that fights toward the sun,
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air,
And after a while it is growing everywhere,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that breaks through cement,
It's green and its tender and it's easily bent,
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead.
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that's gentle and low
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow.
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor,
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door,
And God bless the grass


A song that refers to the strength of the simple and small grass that in the end winns the cement. It can be a metaphor for any kind of silent and non violent revolution that slowly but steadily replaces old repressing institutions and outdated attitudes that seems to be powerful and steady as cement. This song has also been written and sung by Malvina Reynolds


My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)

Sailing down my dirty stream
Still I love it and I'll keep the dream
That some day though maybe not this year
My Hudson River will once again run clear.

It starts high in the mountains of the North
Crystal clear and icy trickles forth
With just a few floating wrappers of chewing gum
Dropped by some hikers to warn of things to come.

At Glens Falls, five thousand honest hands
Work at the Consolidated Paper Plant
Five million gallons of waste a day
Why should we do it any other way?

Down the valley one million toilet chains
Find my Hudson so convenient place to drain
And each little city says, "Who, me?
Do you think that sewage plants come free?"

In the great ocean they say the water's clear
But I live at Beacon pier here
Half way between the mountains and sea
Tacking back and forth, this thought returns to me

Sailing up my dirty stream
Still I love it and I'll dream
That some day though maybe not this year
Yes, my Hudson and my country will run clear.


A wish for a polluted river (Hudson in New York) to become again clean. We read in wikipedia about this political and environmental activist-singer:

Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he co-founded in 1966. This organization has worked since then to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and worked to clean it. As part of that effort, the sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969 with its inaugural sail down from Maine to South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, and thence to the Hudson River.[26] The sloop regularly sails the river with volunteer and professional crew members, primarily conducting environmental education programs for school groups. The Great Hudson River Revival (aka Clearwater Festival) is an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Hudson at Croton Point Park. This festival grew out of early fundraising concerts arranged by Seeger and friends to raise money to pay for Clearwater's construction.
Seeger wrote and performed "That Lonesome Valley" about the then-polluted Hudson River in 1969, and his band members also wrote and performed songs commemorating the Clearwater

You can hear these songs in youtube:

Cement Octopus
God bless the grass
My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)