Saving the Planet
As Don Henley matured as an artist and as a man, the core values he learned while growing up in Texas in the 1940s and 1950s have become increasingly motivating for him as an artist, as an Eagle, and as a social reformer.
It was probably a tough upbringing for any child in hot, dusty rural Texas in the 1940s. Don worked for his father in an auto-parts store, but those lessons about fan belts and spark plugs haven’t really lasted. His father’s greatest influence was teaching young Don about the land. Henley Sr. was a master gardener who made sure his son understood and appreciated the power and wonder of nature.
“He taught me, sometimes against my will, the magic of sun, dirt, and water,” Henley told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette in November 2008. “He also taught me that my responsibilities didn’t end at our property line. My mother was a schoolteacher, and she made sure that there were always books in the house. Those influences were the foundation of my environmentalism, although no such terminology existed at the time.”
Literature Influence
Henley’s parents also drummed into him the importance of an education. Don immersed himself in English literature at college. Aside from a passion for the usual Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy works, he was drawn to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. They seemed relevant somehow, resonating with the hippie, back-to-the-land ethos of the late 1960s.
Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden: Or, Life in the Woods is an account of the disillusioned author looking for more from life than was available to him in his modern world and describes his attempts to get back to basics. Imagine a reality TV series pitting a man against nature, but with a philosophical twist. Thoreau was a counterculture pioneer. He saw his country changing rapidly during the industrial age, and not for the better. The Industrial Revolution had brought factories, sweatshops, workhouses, poverty, great riches—but only for a few—and frightening destruction of nature.
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, pictured here, inspired Don Henley as a young English major, and he returned the favor by campaigning for the preservation of the Walden Woods in the 1990s.
Benjamin D. Maxham
It was the writings of Thoreau and Emerson that most comforted Don as he faced the slow death of his father while first embarking on life as a musician. Dealing with his father’s heart disease and impending death was traumatic, but Henley was helped by teachers at the University of North Texas, who encouraged him to study the works of the transcendental writers. He told Preservation magazine in 2004, “It helped me cope but also prompted me to think about our relationship to the world around us and guided me toward a lifelong interest in historic preservation and conservation.”
When, in 1989, Henley read about some building projects threatening Walden Woods, he contacted the Thoreau scholars mentioned in the piece who were protesting the destruction. Henley then headed to Boston to discover exactly what was going on. What could he, a rock-and-roll musician, do to fight back? Publicity was the answer, and Henley formed the Walden Woods Project with the support of many other dedicated preservationists in 1990.
Schmit, Frey, and Henley
It was “stick to what you know” time, too, and what Henley knew about was music and awareness. His first move was to organize a benefit concert, for which he called on his friends, rounding up Sheryl Crow, Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Seger, Timothy B. Schmit, and, of course, Glenn Frey.
First Buffett did a set, followed by Raitt and Seger, and then Henley took the stage to perform some of his solo hits, including “Heart of the Matter” and “The Boys of Summer.” After closing with “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” Don then made a short speech before bringing out Frey for “Smuggler’s Blues.” The crowd went crazy as Henley, Frey, and Schmit launched into “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Take It Easy.”
Henley also put together a book of essays on the environment, Heaven Is Under Our Feet, with rock critic Dave Marsh. Contributors included Paula Abdul, Sting, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, James Michener, Garry Trudeau, Jesse Jackson, Bette Midler, Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, and James Earl Jones, along with a foreword by former president Jimmy Carter. Henley was not afraid to use his connections when it mattered.
In 1993, Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles, the Nashville tribute to the Eagles, raised in excess of three million dollars for the Walden Woods Project, enabling it to buy the threatened land from the developers. Today, the Walden Woods house the new Thoreau Institute. “We want to take Thoreau’s teachings as the foundation of our work,” Henley explains, at Walden.org, “but we intend to go much further than that. We want to teach environmental science and environmental philosophy.”
Running on Empty
Never one to stand still, in 1993 Don cofounded the non-profit Caddo Lake Institute with his friend Dwight K. Shellman, an attorney. It all began when Henley, who was still living in California, heard about plans to build a canal in Caddo Lake, Texas—a move that would affect the ecology of the wetlands. It was personal to him. The lake was part of his life. His father loved the lake and fished there regularly.
By the end of 1993, Caddo Lake had been named a wetland of “international importance” under the 1971 Ramsar Treaty that was established to protect wetlands around the world. With that aim achieved, Shellman urged Henley to continue with the project and develop a scientific research center. They also worked on turning an old U.S. Army munitions plant on the lake over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The lobbying and campaigning began all over again.
And there’s still a great deal of work to be done. Alarming levels of mercury have been documented in the lake’s food chain, including the highest level recorded in any snake on the planet. Much of the mercury has been traced to exhaust from nearby coal-burning plants.
Henley is keeping tabs on cutting-edge technology that could help with this kind of pollution. “Sound science may be our saving grace,” he told the Dallas Morning News in April 2011. “But oftentimes in Washington—and certainly in Texas—politics trumps science. What Will Rogers said about land back in 1930 can be applied to water. They aren’t making any more of it.”
Recording Artists Coalition
A little closer to home, Henley teamed up with fellow musicians Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette to form the Recording Artists Coalition in 2000. In a few months, Henley had recruited rock and roll’s biggest hitters: Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, and Bruce Springsteen.
The idea of the organization was to provide a unified group that could work against the powerful lobbying of major labels like Universal and Sony and the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America). California had a piece of music-biz legislation, “the seven-year rule,” that made it clear that labor contracts in California were limited to seven years. However, many artists like Henley and Crow felt it was being abused by the conglomerates, who used a 1987 amendment to the law that allowed them to bypass the seven-year rule when demanding undelivered albums.
“This practice of singling out recording artists is discriminatory and it restricts the basic American philosophy of free-market competition,” Henley told the California State Senate in September 2001. “A recording artist, like any other working person, should be given the ability to seek higher compensation and test his or her value in the open marketplace.” Henley’s RAC was also opposed to a “work for hire” clause in federal copyright law that allows record companies, if they choose, to keep an artist’s recordings forever. In 2011, the Henley-founded RAC teamed up with the Grammys to present an annual award to artists who make a difference to their industry.
Digital Campaigner
More recently, Henley has turned his attention toward copyright protection and the Internet. Noting that record company revenues have fallen by at least half over the past decade, Henley concludes that the Internet and its free-for-all mentality is behind the crash. Disappointed that the younger generation appear to find it “cool” to find ways to not pay for music, Henley has been keen to stress that such action affects the whole music-business food chain—from caterers to makeup artists to instrument manufacturers to booking agents and so on.
“In the future,” he told RGJ.com in June 2012, “there will be no artists—just ‘content providers.’ Empires like Google, AOL, Yahoo, and others have been built on distributing free content—other people’s copyrighted, creative, or journalistic works—on the web, but these huge ISPs take no responsibility whatsoever. They’re just neutral distributors, they say. But, to a great degree, they’re really a ‘fence’ for stolen property. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 needs to be rewritten. It’s obsolete.”
According to Henley, concert footage filmed at gigs and posted on YouTube and other such sites is also a danger to the industry. “That’s illegal. It’s a violation of U.S. Copyright Law, but people seem oblivious to that. They seem to think they are entitled to video or record whatever they want and post it on the web.”