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This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Bart Everson presents what may be the program’s most emotionally demanding and philosophically necessary hour: fifteen tracks spanning fifty-five years of human reckoning with ecological catastrophe, from sardonic fury to elegiac grief, from dark humor to something approaching grace.

The program opens with E J Foxie of Chicago, whose “6th Extinction Rock” — recorded live on a 1930s Fischer baby grand during a pandemic year that felt, to many, like a rehearsal for the real thing — catalogues the arithmetic of collapse with the pitiless precision of a scientist and the gallows wit of a comedian. What follows is not a single sustained lament but a remarkable survey of the ways human beings actually respond to doom: the variety of those responses is itself a kind of evidence of life.

Gus Greene of New York City offers folk-tinged elegy with “Purple Sky” (video); Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir bring activist choral urgency with “The Storm”; the late Russ Arlotta — whose passing in 2024 casts his “Beautiful Mistake” in unbearable double light — gives us a devotional meditation on a God who must be love, precisely because the suffering she witnesses would otherwise be unendurable.

Laura McCarthy arrives from County Cork with “Glaisín na Marbh” (video) — the Little Stream of the Dead, in the hills of Killarney National Park — grief for a landscape already lost rather than one merely threatened. Bob Ambrose, Jr., Athens poet and Kelsay Books author, reads “The End-Permian Apocalypse” from his collection Between Birdsong and Boulder, pulling the program’s timeline back two hundred fifty million years to the moment when Gaia herself lay down on a bed of death and slept ten million years — a span that makes our current civilizational anxiety look, in the most clarifying and disturbing way, extremely brief.

Star Guts of Washington bring the cosmic defiance of “Heat Death,” finding in the program’s shared theme a refusal to stop singing precisely because new babies are born every day; Pagan Harvest of England answer with the spare, devastating “Last Cock Crew,” in which the final bird flies and no one is watching. Rachel Curtin‘s piano and cello “The Birds Have Vanished” offers pure wordless mourning, before Brooklyn’s Tim Ellis applies dark humor to the loss of seasons with the dry precision of a man who knows the scientists were right and finds cold comfort in being correct.

There’s also a twenty-eight-second excerpt from a 1971 educational record — Stanley Z. Daniels‘ improbably titled Sex for Teens (Where It’s At) — in which is discussed, with earnest seventies urgency, the insecticides washing into the ocean and killing the plant plankton that produces most of Earth’s oxygen. The excerpt is both quaint and devastating, a document proving that the alarm was being sounded fifty-five years ago with precise ecological accuracy.

Sarina Partridge of Minneapolis, recording at the Sitka Center in Oregon, offers “Tsunami Warning” — a meditation on an actual earthquake warning she missed entirely while walking in the woods, finding in that accidental bliss a kind of philosophy: if today is the day, spend it dancing. Seattle’s Alexandra “Ahlay” Blakely follows with “Wisdom in Collapse,” a live chant recorded on Salt Spring Island that discovers something flowering in the ruins.

And then the hour’s exclusive: Annika Fehling of Gotland, Sweden, shares “Aurora,” an unreleased demo imagined from the perspective of those who must leave a planet grown too toxic to sustain them — an Earth Eclectic premiere of a song the world has not yet heard.

The program closes by reaching back to 1989 and Spacemen 3 of Rugby, England, whose “The World Is Dying” may seem, to the careless listener, like evidence that such warnings are perennially overblown, that the world cried wolf in 1989 and here we still are. We respectfully and firmly decline that reading. From Gaia’s perspective, forty years is as nothing — a single slow exhalation. The doom Spacemen 3 sensed in 1989 is not falsified by the fact that we have continued to exist in its shadow; it is confirmed by every track that precedes it in this hour, from the 1971 educational record to the still-unreleased Swedish folk song.

The perennial apocalypse is not a false alarm repeated. It is the same alarm, still ringing, growing not quieter but louder, and the point of this program is to demonstrate that human beings have been listening — in jazz, in folk, in chant, in spoken word, in shoegaze, in children’s music, in humor and in elegy — for longer than many of us realize, with far greater intelligence and feeling than the culture at large has credited.

Photo: “Gulf Shores Sunset” by Bart Everson