How Music Therapy Helps Address The Climate Crisis. Meet The Global Scrub Choir

During the massive heat waves and wildfires in Australia before covid took over our lives, healthcare workers there were struggling to take care of people coming in with what they came to call “thunderstorm asthma,” including people who had never experienced asthma before and did not know what was happening to them. Many died, Dr. Emma O’Brien told me.

Enter the music therapists at The Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), and the Global Scrub Choir, founded and led by Dr. Emma O’Brien, head of music therapy at The RMH.

Why music?

As Dr. O’Brien described it in an exclusive interview on Electric Ladies Podcast, “It (music) puts your brain into a state of flow. I mean, there’s a lot of neuro research around this now. We know that when you are participating in an experience that’s creative, your brain waves change and they’re different and it’s literally good for you. And particularly an act like singing. What we do know, with the research is, if you sing or learn an instrument, you end up having a more connected brain. The corpus cossum in the middle, that bridge becomes stronger.”

Essentially, O’Brien says that as much as she and her team of music therapists use music to help patients recover from strokes, for example, or manage pain, they also focus on helping their fellow healthcare workers and others manage stress. “That’s where Global Scrub work came from. So it was all about wellbeing and also saying, okay, life is hard. Things are really stressful. We all need time out for joy. We all need a moment to say, Hey, it’s okay to take, I mean, it really is like three minutes to sing a song. And the ripple effect of that effect across your life, across your day, across your week is astounding.”

To O’Brien and her team, and their supporters at the World Health Organization (WHO, a UN agency), it’s about well-being. “Health is after all, not just the absence of disease or infirmity, but a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing.” That’s a definition of health from a handout from the Global Scrub Choir and the WHO. It seems to sum up the Choir’s approach to supporting their fellow healthcare professionals and other human beings.

Music as a behavioral science – and we need human behavior to help address climate change

A 2023 study in Sage Journal found that, “While music can and should be enjoyed simply for its own sake, it also makes sense for us to harness the powerful nature of music for the benefits it can bring, and to try to help us solve the world’s problems. One of the most serious threats to global health, wellbeing and security we currently face is climate change (IPCC, 2014).”

Framing music as a behavioral science, and linking it with environmental psychology, Sage references a study by Oskamp (2000) “that the behavioural sciences should be involved in climate research, simply because these problems are ‘all caused by human behaviour… and can be reversed by human behaviour.’ The field of environmental psychology has grown and does now tackle human behaviour in relation to climate change; and the importance of this is recognised by organisations such as the British Psychological Society (BPS News Team, 2019).”

In a similar vein, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts started an educational program called “Music and the Brain,” including a series with opera star Renée Fleming called “Music and Mind Live,” to explore the connection. They describe the way music evokes emotion in the brain this way: “Music has the power to trigger feelings in listeners. Three main areas of the brain are responsible for these emotional responses: nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and the cerebellum.”

Celebrity musicians using their influence to help address climate change

Celebrity musicians are using their music to talk about climate change and motivate their audiences to take steps to address it.

Lizzo, Coldplay, Radiohead, Green Day, Bjork, and the Dave Matthews band are just a few, for example, according to EcoWatch. There’s Paul McCartney (whose daughter Stella McCartney is a renowned sustainable fashion designer) and Billie Eilish too.