The Hard Rain Project: Bob Dylan's Classic Song and the Struggle to Stop Climate Change

Back in December 2009, the United Nations adopted one of Bob Dylan's songs, "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall," as its unofficial anthem for the Copenhagen climate change talks. This was reported by BBC. When I listed the same tune as one of the "Top 20 Eco-Songs of All-Time" two months earlier, the BBC didn't even mention it. Oh well...

Written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" was described by Dylan as "a desperate kind of song, every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."

One of those lines: "Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters."

WATCH VIDEO: Harvesting Rain

What Does All this Have to Do With Climate Change?

Fast-forward a half-century and Mr. Zimmerman is looking more and more like a prophet. Dig this from "Hard Rain":

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests; I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans; I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.

It should then come as no surprise that this Dylan song has inspired something called The Hard Rain Project, which was "established as a charity in 2009 to support educational programs for schools, universities and colleges, and public exhibitions that campaign for realistic solutions to the interlinked problems of climate change, poverty, the wasteful use of resources, population expansion, habitat destruction, and species loss."

"This world traveling exhibition of photos shows the growing extent of the global environmental crisis," explains Cathy Fitzgerald at EcoArtNotebook.com. "It's hard to look at but stunning photographs of the many social and ecological consequences across the world are accompanied by the text of the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song. It's a unique coming together of some of Bob's most hard-hitting lyrics and the work of many leading photographers, led by the inspiration of Mark Edwards."

There's also a book and a film, both under the name: Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision With Nature. Find out more about how you can get involved or perhaps start your own project. Just imagine how much fun you could have with Metallica's "Blackened" as your theme song.

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