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In the midst of Belém’s COP30 bedlam, environmentalists, economists, lobbyists and diplomats busily haggle at the global climate conference about what we can and cannot get away with in negotiations over Mother Nature.

Meanwhile, 5,000 miles away from northern Brazil at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale presented a novel argument. Rather than encouraging the COP-ers to enforce the right thing, David Lang’s “before and after nature,” in its Los Angeles premiere Sunday night, took humanity out of the equation.

Earth was here before proto-humans ventured onto land from the seas. Earth will outlast us.

A founder in 1987 of Bang on a Can, which presents indispens

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