‘Woodman, oh woodman, you must spare that tree,’ sings the folk musician Robin Grey on his album From the Ground Up (2017). ‘Touch not a single bough, for in my youth it sheltered me.’

The song is an old one. The words were written in 1830 by the American poet George Pope Morris, originally under the title ‘The Oak’, and set to music by the English pianist Henry Russell seven years later. It became a hugely popular drawing-room ballad, under its new title ‘Woodman, Spare That Tree’, and represents an early example – or perhaps a foreshadowing – of the environmental protest song. As such, it fits comfortably on Grey’s album, an environmentally minded collection from a songwriter who positions himself squarely in the radical protest tradition: From the Ground Up also includes lyrics about fossil fuels (‘leave it in the ground/I want our world to avoid being drowned’) and living off the land (‘I’ll be good to the land and the land will be good to me’).

Grey works in the folk milieu that sometimes attracts the label ‘eco-folk’, an earnest, acoustic sub-genre of protest and folksong, festivals and woodcuts; it might seem derisive or satirical to say that it’s all bare feet and nettle soup, but both are encouraged at gigs by Sam Lee, one of the leading lights of the eco-folk movement. In recent years, the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane has helped to raise the profile of eco-folk with his plaintive lyrics for musicians including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and Seckou Keita. His protest work ‘Heartwood’ – ‘Would you hew me/to the heartwood, cutter?/Would you leave me open-hearted?’ – is an obvious successor to ‘Woodman, Spare That Tree’.

Robert McFarlane’s ‘Heartwood’ poem made into a linocut poster by Nick Hayes.

This kind of environmentally conscious folk music builds on decades of enduring protest songwriting from postwar musicians such as Malvina Reynolds (‘What Have They Done to the Rain?’), Pete Seeger (God Bless the Grass) and Peter La Farge (‘As Long as the Grass Shall Grow’). In the present day, the enfolkification of rural protest – where demonstrations over climate change and land access are accompanied by folklore theatre and the music of fiddles and ukuleles – reinforces the popular image of folk as ‘green’ music. Protest music is, by its nature, uncompromising and one-eyed; no great protest song ever followed the middle eight with a verse beginning ‘But on the other hand…’ But successful art – like good history – engages with complexity and contradiction, and if the bright-green postwar trim is all we see of the relationship between folk music and the environment, we’re liable to overlook the significant fact that the voice of the folksong has as often been the voice of the cutter as it has the voice of the tree – just as it has more often spoken for the hunter than the hunted, and for the fisherman more often than the ocean.

Folk songs are workers’ songs, and if you look at human history our work has been to chop, dig, scour, subjugate, hunt, harness, seize and plunder. It’s the work of innumerable human hands and, as we’ve gone about this work, in the woods, in the hills, on the open sea, folk music has been our soundtrack.

Writing in 2021, at the height of the TikTok ‘Wellerman’ craze, the literary scholar David Farrier sought to flag up what he called ‘the dark side of the sea shanty’. ‘No one wants to be a killjoy,’ Farrier wrote in Prospect magazine, ‘but it’s worth recalling that the propulsive rhythms of these songs … measured the beat of organised plunder.’

Folksong gives a human voice to centuries of environmental despoliation

‘Wellerman’ – a whaling song from the South Seas that propelled part-time Scottish folksinger Nathan Evans to worldwide fame – is a ‘cutting-in’ song, meant to accompany the rhythmic and bloody butchery of a captured whale. Farrier rightly observed that whaling was a murderous and monstrously harmful trade: the Otago whaling station, where in 1831 the Weller brothers founded the maritime provisions business that gave ‘Wellerman’ its title, could take in as many as 100 whales a year, and, as an ‘inland’ station, disproportionately targeted pregnant females and calves. This is in a sense a ‘dark side’, but it’s one that has always been in plain sight: these are above all human songs, songs of the Anthropocene, and so, as we’ll see, they have for most of their history been songs of human labour, human joy, human suffering, human love. In vanishingly few historic folksongs does the singer pity the whale or the fox. The woodman does not spare the tree.

For me, more than anything, folksong gives a human voice to centuries of environmental despoliation – and it reminds me, for all that the demands of capital, industry and technology turned our planet into a production line, a consumerist conveyor belt, that this was a human process: the stark sum total of centuries of lived experience among men, women and children. The values and priorities of historic folksong might not be our values and priorities, but they are foundational to our story.

The first piece of recorded music I remember hearing was a hunting song: ‘We’ll hunt him down, we’ll hunt him down,/We’ll run old Reynard to the ground.’ I must have been four or five, and my dad had it on an LP, or maybe on a cassette tape recorded from the radio. I’ve known that refrain as long as I’ve known anything. It belongs to a song called ‘The Hunt’, written and recorded in the early 1980s by the New Zealand folk singer Paul Metsers. The thing about it is that it is a protest song, an antihunting song – but it’s a hunting song, too.

In a handful of verses, performed a capella, Metsers deftly skewers the class privilege (‘I am the lord of all around/and me you shall obey’) and bald cowardice of the fox hunt (‘For sport it surely be/To hunt a single red fox down/With twenty men and three’). It’s the give-’em-enough-rope satirical form. Nothing much here is exaggerated or overblown, and there’s a great deal of beauty in the song too – more beauty, you might say, than the song really needs. There’s no mistaking the songwriter’s visceral dislike of hunting, but at the........

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