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The byrds hungry planet4/10/2023 However, DDT is still used in some areas of the world.īig Yellow Taxi’s most striking part is its chorus: In 1972, the use of DDT was banned in the US. DDT was largely responsible for the great decrease in the populations of fish-eating birds, such as the bald eagle, brown pelican and osprey. She pleads with farmers to stop using the pesticide DDT, as Americans became aware that their food was being contaminated by its use – those spotless apples looked great but held hidden dangers. Even though Mitchell was specifically referring to the Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu in Big Yellow Taxi, the battle for the redwoods was big news at the time, so it must also be implied in these lyrics – if they get chopped down eventually people will only see them in “tree museums”. In the same year, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire.Ĭloser to Mitchell’s home in Laurel Canyon near Los Angeles, was a battle to save the redwood forests, which were threatened by developers who wanted to chop them down to build shopping centres and other amenities. It spilt over 41 million litres of crude oil along the Pacific coast, and as Morris wrote, “proved formative in the birth of the modern environmental movement”. America had just experienced its worst oil spill caused by an oil platform explosion off Santa Barbara, California. Like now, there was a rising anguish about the environment. Mitchell was in tune with current affairs when she wrote the song in 1969. “The song’s genius lies in the joyful, jaunty rhythm of Mitchell’s acoustic guitar and delightful melody being at odds with the sombre lyrics,” wrote Morris. This is a songwriter who knows how to craft a multi-layered story. The song’s lyrics are cinematic – vivid colours, scenic movements and germane descriptions, all economically fitted into just 197 words. Mitchell herself has recorded it three times. That year alone produced a number of green protest songs including Hungry Planet by The Byrds, The Kinks’ Apeman, After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, Hungry Planet and Cat Stevens’ Where Do the Children Play? But as Charles Morris recently wrote in the Financial Times, Mitchell’s song was “the most renewable of all” and “proved sustainable”.Īt least 456 artists have recorded Big Yellow Taxi, and since 1990 someone has recorded it virtually every year. Released as a single in 1970 and included on her third album Ladies of the Canyon, Big Yellow Taxi has become an environmental anthem. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song.” Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart … this blight on paradise. “I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. “I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii,” Mitchell told the Los Angeles Times in an interview back in 1996. There’s a parking garage near where I used to live, here in Johannesburg, that makes me think of the quirky, green anthem, Big Yellow Taxi, by Canadian-born singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, written 50 years ago in November 1969.
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