Joni Mitchell once said, “There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.” Mitchell makes this a big point in the song ¨Big Yellow Taxi¨. Joni Mitchell shows the start of the environmental movement. She critiques the struggle to maintain the environment by talking about destructive pesticides and the irony of tree museums.
Joni Mitchell shows the start of the environmental movement. In the song Mitchell states, "They paved paradise and put up the parking lot". In order to understand what and see value in Mitchell’s song,the reader has to understand what was happening in the United States, environmentally, to understand the song. The 1960s in America had lots of problems including segregation with different
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Mitchell states, “Put away that DDT now, give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees.” (Mitchell This refers to the pesticide DDT which stands for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. DDT was used on crops and the effect of this chemical was that it was hiddenly contaminating produce, it affected the food chain, and caused harm to human’s health. One example was that a spotless apple looked nearly perfect but it was unnatural and contained traces of DDT. When she says “leave me the birds,” Mitchell talks about how birds were eating the insects sprayed in DDT and the birds population numbers were going down. In 1972, 2 years after Mitchell wrote this song, DDT was banned in the U.S. Joni Mitchell also describes trees museums by saying, “Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum, charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.” According to songfacts.com, Mitchell wrote this after visiting Foster Gardens, a place in Hawaii which basically can be called a tree museum. The Foster Gardens is a huge garden full of trees and to see the trees an adult has to pay $5 and children have to pay $1. It is land filled with trees and it it supposed to make you feel like you are in Alice of