We’re delighted to announce that The Nextmen have been given the go ahead by Universal Music to record a new acoustic version of one of their songs for Tropical Forest Project: Ecuador.

The Nextmen, aka Dom Search and Brad Baloo, have been producing, mixing and DJ-ing all across the world. Influenced by their eclectic DJ sets, their current and third studio album, ‘This Was Supposed To Be The Future’, revels in everything from reggae, dancehall and hip hop to funk, soul and rare groove.

The Nextmen were recommended to me by palaeoclimatologist Professor David Beerling back in June at the Hay-On-Wye Festival of Literature. David, whose book The Emerald Planet examines the role evolving plants had in shaping the atmosphere during the last 3.5 billion years, gave a brilliantly lucid and beautifully illustrated talk entitled Fossil Forests and Climate Crisis, following which I asked him, over a jug of Pimms, who he would like to see on our Ecuador album. The rest, as they say, is history… or soon will be.

Mathematicians have demonstrated that the beat of a butterfly’s wing will alter the timing of a hurricane on the other side of the planet six months later. Songwriters and singers have an advantage in that, under the lens of a melody, the smallest detail can be magnified and reverberate in a listener’s head. The things we think, the things we say and the things we sing make a difference.

As an organisation committed to halting deforestation by creating projects linking music and ecology, one of our goals is to stimulate new music writing that understands, illuminates and transforms our relationship to nature. A growing number of poets are addressing ecological issues - does ecopoetry provide clues for songwriters and lyricists? If you want to explore this idea here are a couple of recent collections:

• The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet, edited by Alice Oswald (Penguin, 2006)
• Earth Shattering, edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe, 2007)

Both of these are available from the Ginkgo Music online shop: www.ginkgomusic.com/shop

We agree with what Bloodaxe write on their website: “As the world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But its power is in the detail, in the force of each individual poem, in every poem’s effect on every reader. And anyone whose resolve is stirred will strengthen the collective call for change.”

Have a read.