Was Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ the first environmentalist song?

A key player in the folk rock trend of the late 1960s and early 1970s was Joni Mitchell. In addition to her musical gifts and contributions to the genre, she was a major draw for young people looking for a social conscience during a time of global political unrest.

With songs like “The Fiddle and the Drum” and “Woodstock,” Mitchell did more than just provide the soundtrack for the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. With her first hit record, “Big Yellow Taxi,” she created a lasting legacy that the environmental movement can build upon.

While it might sound slightly tongue-in-cheek, the song is peppered with references to environmental concerns at the time. It uses the conceit of a future world in which a natural paradise has been “paved” over “to put up a parking lot” to warn us against environmental destruction.

In this dystopian place, the only place to find trees is in a “tree museum”, and farmers using “DDT” pesticides had threatened the existence of “the birds and the bees”. Mitchell is giving us an ominous warning before it’s too late: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

These lyrics might seem particularly fitting today as global temperatures skyrocket and weather patterns and ecosystems face constant disruption. But in 1970 they were unheard of, and positively revolutionary. Mitchell was a year ahead of Marvin Gaye’s beautiful lament for the natural world ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, and The Beach Boys’ ode to H2O ‘Don’t Go Near the Water’.

Her foresight when it came to environmental causes is just one of many reasons why she’s such a big influence on music today.

But was she the first?

Mitchell wasn’t actually the first singer to record an environmentalist song, however. A full eight years before year, the folk singer and leading activist in the Women Strike for Peace movement Malvina Reynolds, wrote and recorded the song ‘What Have They Done to the Rain’.

Although ostensibly a protest against the potential nuclear holocaust being brought closer at the time by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the track also makes clear references to the environmental damage being done in the United States by nuclear tests.

It references how “the grass is gone” in areas affected by the fallout from such tests, leaving only “a breeze with some smoke in its eye”. In fact, worse than being eliminated altogether, grass was being contaminated by radioactive substances and entering our food through ingestion by animals.

While Reynolds’ recording of the song wasn’t released until much later, Joan Baez regularly sang the song live at protest marches and concerts, including one recorded for her 1962 album Joan Baez in Concert. And the British invasion band The Searchers later released a cover of it in November 1964, still five and a half years before Mitchell’s own defence of the environment.