ABSTRACT
My essay is a meditation on Thoreau in the context of climate change, the loss of biodiversity in the nineteenth century no less than in our own time. In thinking about the material that can be brought together for teaching purposes, I would like to begin at some distance from Thoreau, with a recent work by an ecomusicologist, Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra (2012). Krause is something of a cult figure to music fans: the last guitarist recruited by the Weavers to replace Pete Seeger, he teamed up a bit later, with Paul Beaver, to form the legendary synthesizer team, Beaver and Krause, providing electronic music for films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Apocalypse Now. For the past forty years, though, his work has been primarily in bio-acoustics, focusing especially on the sound ecology of endangered habitats. Wild Sanctuary, his natural soundscape collection, now has over 4000 hours of recordings of over 15,000 species.1
