Maine
Folk songs about climate change? Yup, people in Maine are listening. – The Boston Globe
To be sure, singing about climate change can be a tough sell.
“It was scary at first,” Zak said. “When you write love songs or other popular music, there are set maps to follow. Trying to incorporate climate change into music isn’t something a lot of people do.”
But it seems to be working. The band, GoldenOak, has around 20,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and counting, and their top song has more than 300,000 listens. A previous project from the band won EP of the year by the Portland Music Awards.
GoldenOak, made up of siblings Zak and Lena Kendall, bassist Mike Knowles, and drummer Jackson Cromwell, formed around 2016. As the band’s main lyricist, Zak draws on his background in ecology and his close attention to how climate change is reshaping daily life in Maine.
At the College of the Atlantic, he studied human ecology, immersing himself in climate science and environmental issues while sneaking in song writing between classes. After graduating, he dove into climate activism as executive director of Maine Youth for Climate Justice.
Then he began to notice something: tropes of displacement, violent storms, and dying forests were bleeding into his lyrics. He saw a way to combine his passions of climate activism and folk music, and that convergence has defined his songwriting ever since.
Bands like AJR and Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste have also sung about climate change. “As an artist, you have to make a statement,” Batiste said in an interview with Covering Climate Now. “You got to bring people together. People’s power is the way that you can change things in the world.”
Batiste called “Petrichor,” his recent song, “a warning set to a dance beat.” GoldenOak’s discography has taken it a step further, featuring multiple conceptual albums bringing climate urgency into the folk tradition.
The band’s first climate-focused album, Room to Grow, is a ten-song invitation to climate action, laying out what’s at stake and why the natural world is worth protecting.
In “Ash,” for instance, Kendall frames the loss of ash trees as a kind of breakup song — a farewell to a species that once filled the forests where he grew up. This was the wood he carved into canoe paddles, and that Wabanaki basket makers relied on for generations, a tree species now disappearing under the spread of the emerald ash borer.
Most of the album leans somber, with nine tracks moving between poetic depictions of ecological loss, frontline activist anthems, and moments of climate hopelessness. But its most popular song, “little light,” reaches in the opposite direction: a hopeful ode to renewable energy and indigenous knowledge.
“Music can be a powerful form of activism,” Zak said. “Over time I found a way to incorporate my lived experience, academic research and frontline stories to tell these stories.”
It’s a hard balance, Zak explains. Push the climate narrative too far and suddenly you’re just singing statistics; lean too much on personal experience and it becomes just another introspective track.
With All the Light in Autumn, released December 5, Zak keeps testing that balance. Ten birds on the album cover represent its ten songs. Some, like “The Flood” and “All the Birds,” return to themes of ecological loss, while others pull back to connect climate change to the political forces shaping it.
Written in the weeks after the presidential election, the song “Always Coming, Always Going” confronts the environmental protections dismantled under the Trump administration. Other tracks take aim at resource extraction under capitalism, environmental inequity, and the hollow myth of the American dream.
“Before this album came out people kept asking me if this one would be about climate change too,” Zak said. “And I think the answer is always going to be yes because climate change touches every aspect of our lives.”
Folk music grappled with environmental themes long before the genre’s famed artists recognized them — ballads about coal country, songs about scarred landscapes. Now, the relentless cycle of climate impacts may push more artists to write about it, extending even into mainstream pop.
“Music can help people process their emotions about climate change,” said Fabian Holt, a former music sociologist at Roskilde University in Denmark who now studies climate and culture. “But it can also serve as a medium for mobilization.”
“Just writing these songs about climate change doesn’t always feel like enough,” Zak said. “We try to lean into our role as activists, creating spaces for people to gather and share their own stories.” GoldenOak uses its platform to promote voting initiatives, amplify protests, and sometimes even perform at them.
Back onstage, Zak and Lena lean into the microphone to dedicate their most beloved song to climate activists and people living on the frontlines. Its lyrics insist on hope, even when climate progress falters. As the crowd joins in, humming, singing or whispering the words to themselves, it becomes clear how music can turn shared climate grief into collective resolve.
This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
Many Maine municipalities will open cooling centers this week with the National Weather Service issuing a variety of heat advisories covering the next few days.
The Maine DEP also issued an air quality alert for Wednesday with ground-level ozone expected to reach levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups.
All of York County, interior Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, and the southern half of Oxford County will fall under an extreme heat warning from 11 a.m. Wednesday to 8 p.m. Friday.
The warning calls for “dangerously hot conditions” that could feature heat index values of up to 110 degrees, with overnight lows only expected to fall into the 70s, according to the weather service’s office in Gray.
The rest of the state — save northern Aroostook, Piscataquis and Somerset counties — falls under a heat advisory from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday. However, the weather service has also placed much of the state under an extreme heat watch for Thursday.
Heat index values, which measure how hot it feels to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature, are expected to reach up to 104 degrees during the heat advisory period, the weather service warns. They could reach 110 degrees Thursday, when the extreme heat watch is in effect.
Northern Oxford and Franklin counties, and central Somerset County, can expect a heat index value of up to 99 degrees Wednesday, according to the weather service.
The weather service advises people to drink plenty of fluids, stay in air-conditioned rooms when possible, avoid extended periods in the sun and check up on relatives and neighbors. It also warns not to leave young children and pets in unattended vehicles, as “car interiors will reach lethal temperatures in a matter of minutes.”
Cooling Centers
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has also issued an air quality alert from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Wednesday along the coast from Kittery to Acadia National Park. The agency warns that ground-level ozone concentrations are expected to reach levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups.
Ozone levels may reach “moderate levels” further inland, according to the Maine DEP, including in all of Androscoggin and Kennebec counties, as well as parts of Cumberland, Knox, Lincoln, Penobscot, Sagadahoc, Waldo, Washington and York counties.
Elevated ozone levels can pose a risk to children, older adults and people suffering from respiratory or heart diseases, according to the Maine DEP. Anyone exerting themselves outdoors may also experience health effects, which could include coughing, shortness of breath, throat irritation and mild chest pain.
Ozone levels were already climbing in southern New England on Tuesday, according to the Maine DEP, and winds are expected to bring those conditions to Maine on Wednesday.
The Maine DEP recommends that vulnerable populations avoid strenuous outdoor activities, keep windows closed, and circulate indoor air with fans or air conditioners. Those with asthma are also advised to keep quick-relief medication handy.
Particle pollution levels are also expected to be moderate across the state on Wednesday due to wildfire smoke, the Maine DEP said in its announcement Tuesday. Wildfires in Colorado, which have claimed the lives of three firefighters, had burned nearly 90,000 acres as of Tuesday, according to the Denver Post.
Maine could face up to $50 million in penalties next year due to errors in its payments for federal food benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Newly released data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture find that Maine’s error rate last year was nearly 11%, the bulk of which were overpayments. That’s in line with the U.S. average. But starting in October of next year, states with error rates above 6% must cover a portion of the SNAP benefits.
Anna Korsen, executive director of Full Plates, Full Potential, said the overpayments aren’t fraud — they’re human error. She said this new cost-shifting policy enacted last year under the Trump administration further complicates the SNAP application process.
“Instead, we could make this program more accessible and more efficient,” Korsen said. “And that would reduce the number of errors and also ensure that Mainers who are eligible for SNAP have access to it.”
She’s urging Congress to delay or reverse the policy under the farm bill that’s currently under consideration.
Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services said it’s taking steps to reduce the error rate, including modernizing its systems and hiring an additional 40 eligibility specialists.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
PORTLAND (WGME) — The third annual Celebration of America 300 is set for Thursday night at Oxford Plains Speedway.
This race was a favorite of NASCAR star Kyle Busch, who tragically passed away back in May. He was just 41.
Now, a Maine-born driver who worked on Busch’s team is ready to take the 8 car into victory lane.
For the past five years, Windham native Derek Kneeland was Busch’s eye in the sky, working as a spotter for the cup star. Kneeland says his relationship with Busch was like a brotherhood.
“I was fortunate enough where I got to have a personal relationship with him,” Kneeland said. “He came up, and he ran several races with me in late models and stuff at Oxford and Lee Speedway, and we got to do a lot of cool things together.”
Kneeland says dealing with the sudden loss has been both painful and difficult.
“It’s still hard,” Kneeland said. “I’m having a hard time with it. The weekdays are the hardest. At the track is where I’m most comfortable.”
Kneeland will be at the track and behind the wheel Thursday night, competing in the Celebration of America 300, driving the number 8 car.
“You know, a few days after everything went down, his dad called me, and his dad is a man of very few words, and I said, ‘You know, I’m thinking about running the 8 or 51 as long as I have your guys’ blessing, I would like to do that.’ And he said, ‘Short track world knows him as 51, but the world knows him as 8,’” Kneeland said.
Kneeland says it will be an emotional race, but he’s confident he’ll have a special co-pilot leading the way.
“Hoping he’s going to be on my shoulder and give me the guiding way and but to win it for Kyle, I think that would put the stamp on it,” Kneeland said.
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