Listen: on our site, PRX, Mixcloud — full track list

This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Laura Dedelow dedicates the hour to the inaugural Earth Eclectic Music Award — presenting a program of honorable mentions, tracks nominated by listeners that fall outside the award’s 2024–2026 eligibility window, but whose ecological and spiritual power demands recognition. The award itself, she notes, carries a $1,000 prize courtesy of the Gaian Way, with the recipient to be announced on World Environment Day, the fifth of June.

Oakland’s Wildchoir opens the program with the gospel-and-soul warmth of “Remember Me,” before Ken Ingham offers the wryly titled “Normal D’Ranged” — a singer-songwriter’s diagnosis of our collective condition. The collaboration of Jessica Radcliffe, Lisa Ekstrom, and the celebrated British guitarist Martin Simpson brings a Celtic-inflected “We’ll All Be Gone Tomorrow,” recorded across the Indiana-Louisiana axis, before Bruce Cockburn — one of Canada’s most enduring ecological voices — delivers Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” with the gravity of a man who has been singing about the Earth’s turning for half a century. James Taylor’s “Gaia,” from his 1997 Hourglass album, arrives next — a quiet declaration of devotion to the living planet — followed by Vito Di Bona of Durham, North Carolina, with the eco-rock gentleness of “Gaia’s Green Umbrella.” Shannon Linton of Cobourg, Ontario follows with “Endling” — a word that designates the last known individual of a species — making two minutes and fifty-nine seconds feel like an entire extinction event held in the hands.

England’s Seize the Day bring a folk reckoning with “Only Doing My Job,” before Daniel Lanois offers the tender Acadian grace of “Fisherman’s Daughter,” from his landmark 1989 debut Acadie. The Southern University Jazz Ensemble, recorded with the late, great New Orleans clarinetist Alvin Batiste, deliver “Clean Air” from a 2023 archival release — Batiste, who died in 2007 and spent decades teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, speaking across time about the simplest of ecological necessities. New Zealand’s Ravensdaughter offers “Forest” from the Taranaki region of the North Island, before New Orleans’ own Chris Thomas King brings his blues-folk reading of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” Bonnie Dobson of Toronto closes the historical arc with her 1969 recording of “Morning Dew” — the post-nuclear lullaby she wrote in 1961, a song that has haunted the ecological imagination for more than sixty years. Perth’s Eco Faeries send the hour out with a children’s folk invitation to simply tell the truth: “Tell me simply.”

Photo: Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve (Fort Myers, Florida) by Laura Chamberlain Dedelow