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This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Laura Dedelow offers something at once patriotic and quietly radical: an hour of music dedicated to national parks and public lands, timed to the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The dedication, she explains, is to “some real national treasures” — and over the course of the episode, the phrase resonates with increasing force, as the music insists that the wilderness is the inheritance, the commons, the thing most worth celebrating and most urgently worth protecting.

The journey begins on the shores of Tobin Harbor at Isle Royale National Park, in a field recording by Alex Braidwood of Iowa — the water present before the first song begins — and proceeds south and east to Shenandoah, for a fine juxtaposition: a spoken word and folk “Wilderness Song: Shenandoah” in the tradition of NPS interpretive performance, performed by Pops Walker and Kypin Martin, followed immediately by Lemons of St. Louis running “Oh Shenandoah” through the full voltage of garage rock on Vole-man Records. The same valley, two centuries of American feeling, no reconciliation necessary.

John Cico of Lafayette, Louisiana follows with “Big Bend,” a singer-songwriter meditation on the Texas borderlands park from his 2025 album The Poison Kind; then the National Park Service contributes a recording of coyotes at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, played originally as part of a Chicago phonography concert at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore — one park listening to another across the distance. Michael Finney‘s ambient soundtrack work visits both Mammoth Cave and Cuyahoga Valley from his Exploring Our National Parks, Volume 2; Nathan Saunders and the Green Leaf Symphony Orchestra bring narration and orchestral longing to the coast of Acadia, Maine. Then the episode arrives in California, where the Marin County Lighthouse Keeper offers a 2025 tour-guide meditation called “January Sun” from an album titled simply Muir Woods National Monument — one of the stranger and more enchanting entries the series has curated — paired immediately with Gregory Griffin of Nashville rendering the same redwood cathedral in indie folk from his Caledonia.

The episode then opens outward: Adam Ross of Randolph’s Leap in Glasgow brings “Cairngorms” — the vast Scottish national park — from Staring at Mountains; John Koozin of New York City offers a jazz Loch Lomond, the loch that gives Scotland’s first national park its name. Back in America, Amber Ikeman of Philadelphia performs a live “Rocky Mountains”; Rozwell Kid, also of Philadelphia, visits the Grand Canyon; Amy Barnhart of San Diego offers a 2026 “Yellowstone”; and Emma Hill of Anchorage takes us all the way to “Denali,” recorded in 2014, the year before the mountain recovered its original name.

The episode closes with Henry Butler — the incomparable New Orleans pianist, who died in 2018 — playing “Regeneration” from The Game Has Just Begun (2002, Basin Street Records), a track linked in the show’s notes to the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, as if to say that the national park idea is large enough to contain not only glaciers and canyons and redwood groves, but the streets of a city and the music born on them. Public land, public music, public inheritance. Two hundred and fifty years in.

Photo: “Grand Canyon South Rim” by Laura Dedelow.