John Denver has had a tremendous impact on my life. He taught me what it is to care about the environment. He is truly missed.....

Excerpted from:

http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/john-denver/

No entertainer has had the impact on ecology and the environment as has New Mexico-born John Denver.

By the early 1970’s Denver’s music began showing a more ecological feeling. He wrote and recorded “Rocky Mountain Suite” in 1972. One of it’s memorable lines, “The life in the mountains is living in danger, with too many people, too many machines,” succinctly summed up one of the main themes of the environmental movement.

Denver continued to search for other ways to express himself. In 1972 he was already thinking “Love the earth as you would love yourself.” He had been attracted to the ideas of the 1960s flower children, especially the idea of loving one another.

Becoming more and more influenced by environmental concerns, Denver became an expert on birds of prey, which led to his writing the song “The Eagle and the Hawk” (1971). On a road trip, Denver and his friends got into a discussion on the threat of nuclear power. This led to the creation of the Windstar Foundation, an institution that combined school, meeting place, and model environment.

Denver’s work with Japanese aikido led him to reexamine his knowledge of nutrition and nutrition questions led to questions about hunger, especially world hunger. Becoming involved in the Hunger Project, he wrote the song “I Want to Live” (1977), which became the group’s anthem. During this time, Windstar continued to grow and evolve.

In 1979 Denver became interested in Alaska and the idea of people working and living with the environment, not against it. With the Alaska pipeline being built, Alaska was being used to meet the energy needs of the rest of the country, a concept that Denver opposed. He firmly believed that we needed the wilderness more than it needed us. This was during a time when environmentalism was considered a dirty word in Washington.

According to Denver’s wishes, Windstar was to be a demonstration of what we know technologically and scientifically that is in harmony with nature. He looked to renewable forms of energy like wind and sun, not nuclear power.

A strong proponent of solar power, this was his influence in writing “Sunshine on My Shoulders” (1971). In 1976 he bought a thousand acres of land in Snowmass, Colorado, for Windstar. Here people would come to learn about the environment and it’s connections between mind, body and spirit.