The Beauty Lost Project

Eliot album cover 2
Image credit: Eliot Hester, The 5th Records

On Earth Day, 2018, new age instrumentalist and composer, Eliot Hester, launched The Beauty Lost album. (Get it on iTunes or wherever you go for digital music. Eliot is donating 20% of the proceeds to climate change research and political action.)

Eliot conceived The Beauty Lost to bring attention and contemplation to beauty in the process or in danger of being lost from our Earth due to climate change. Each original composition incorporates, interwoven with contemplative melodies produced by a unique blend of instrumentation (cello, bassoon, clarinet, guitar, keyboards) natural sounds of an environment in peril.

On this page, I am posting science articles related to each of the Earth’s ongoing beauties and losses Eliot so harmoniously captures. Click the links below to read a short interview with Eliot and other information and resources to learn more about the subject of each of his pieces.

The Beauty Lost
Play List

  1. Waves (The Beaches of Kiribati)
  2. Cracks in the Ice (The Arctic Glaciers)
  3. Tranquility (The Amazon Rainforest)
  4. Dangerous Light (The California Forest Fires)
  5. Depths (The Great Barrier Reef)
  6. The Beauty Lost
  7. Renew (feat. Nick Megard)
  8. Time After Time (feat. Cash Lane Slim)
  9. Cracks in the Ice (Live on Loop Pedal)
  10. Waves (Live) [Acoustic]

With his haunting and meditative music, Eliot reminds us that climate change is not simply a matter of dry science, political debate, economic calculation, and technology deployment. It is all those things, of course. But it’s also a deeply emotional and profoundly moral issue, one that fundamentally challenges our love for one another, our nurturing of children born and unborn, and our stewardship of our Earth, the provider of all the beauty that cradles us.

It’s something that will require all our brains to fix, but we feel it viscerally, in our hearts and in our guts.

Other stuff to read and do

800px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17
The Blue Marble, an image of Earth made on Dec 7, 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, travelling toward the moon at a distance of 18,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. All of humanity (with the exception of Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans of the Apollo 17 crew) was in this image. (Having been born in 1971, I just made the cut.) In the year of this image, the atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged 326 ppm, 17% higher than the pre-industrial average. Last year, the CO2 concentration measured 406 ppm, 46% higher than the pre-industrial average. Also last year, we experienced the 2nd or 3rd hottest year on record globally, a hyperactive hurricane season featuring $125 billion of damage to Houston alone due primarily to storm surge flooding accentuated by a higher sea level, and the most destructive and deadly California wildfire season on record. At the same time, we declared our intention to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, cleansed government websites and documents of scientific information about climate change, fired scientists from EPA policy advisory boards and replaced them with fossil fuel industry insiders, and argued idiotically throughout the year about whether climate change is even real or concerning. We engaged in these activities despite decades of accumulated scientific data and readily observable evidence that climate change is real and is concerning, and despite our possession of solutions to the problem.

#rescuethatfrog

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.