Disney fans were early to the podcast scene. In middle school, I remember playing WDW Today or the WDW Radio Show as I fell asleep, listening to the hosts talk about new rides, recommended restaurants, and, naturally, the top ten smells of Walt Disney World.
Most of these podcasts were hosted by people in their thirties and forties, which meant many of them remembered a Disney World I’d never been to: a time before the Animal Kingdom, before Disney-MGM Studios, even before the now-defunct Splash Mountain. They waxed especially poetic about early EPCOT: the closest the company ever got to building Walt Disney’s dream of a futuristic city/permanent world’s fair.
Years of listening, therefore, gave me a kind of displaced nostalgia: a collection of stories and trivia about rides and shows and restaurants that I’d never been to. If I was magically transported to the 1982 EPCOT Center, I think I’d know how to get around.
One particular bit of pre-1995 EPCOT lore has become my go-to answer to “what’s your favorite Disney song?” (At least when I don’t want to sound basic, because, let’s be honest, the real answer is [redacted].) In the early 1980s, Disney hired singer-songwriter Bob Moline to write several songs for EPCOT. His contributions included “Golden Dream,” a soaring patriotic colonialist anthem for the American Adventure stage show, and “Canada (You’re a Lifetime Journey”),” a marginally less colonialist theme song for the 360-degree short film O Canada!.
But Moline’s EPCOT masterpiece was “Listen to the Land,” an upbeat, summer-camp folk number complete with a children’s choir on the chorus (and featuring the names of exactly zero modern nation-states).
“Listen to the Land” was written for the attraction of the same name, a slow boat ride through “the future of agriculture” (sounds thrilling, I know). After sailing past stylized dioramas of various ecosystems, the boats enter EPCOT Center’s working experimental greenhouses. Guests (who, remember, are on vacation) learn about cutting-edge agricultural techniques, from hydroponics to genetic engineering to growing in simulated Martian soil. This last section is still part of the current version of the ride, Living with the Land, which sadly lacks Moline’s song.
“As we’ve seen, our future depends on our partnership with nature,” the cast member guide says at the end of the original ride. “The land still has much to teach us, and it’s up to us to listen.”
Moline’s song captures this ecological optimism—a concept so foreign to my young millennial brain that the phrase almost hurts to type:
Let’s listen to the land we all love,
nature’s plan will shine above,
listen to the land, listen to the land.
The seasons come, and the seasons go,
nature knows everything that it must know.
The earth and man, can be good friends,
let’s listen so our harvest time will never end.
Let’s listen to the land we all love,
nature’s plan will shine above,
listen to the land, listen to the land.
If I put my ecocritic hat on, there’s plenty to tear apart here: the romanticization of nature, the conflation of listening with acting, the identification of an eternal “harvest time” with “nature’s plan.” And, surprise surprise, this attraction is guilty of settler-colonialist ideology too: it celebrates the “pioneering achievements of American farmers” in “transforming” the American prairie into productive agricultural land.
But. But. There’s also a charming innocence to this song that I don’t think is completely misguided. There’s an invitation to see ourselves in each “tiny little seed” that grows up to see the sun. There’s a call to wonder at the way sunshine crystallizes into “good melon rinds.” There’s a recognition that knowledge escapes and exceeds us, residing not only in our minds but in the rhythms of the living and dying world. And there’s a demand—even in the campfire catchiness of the tune itself—to sing along with others.
No folk ditty, least of all one owned by a massive corporation, is going to save us. But neither are perfectly articulated politics. Listening won’t save us. Neither will singing.
But not everything is about salvation.
Sing it with me—
Photo courtesy Flickr user Hector A Parayuelos (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
