Caribbean environmentalists rarely appreciate music for dance in spite of its high communication skills. 1200 Afro-Caribbean songs were studied while checking how many times floristic, faunal, landscape- and climate elements were mentioned. 43% of the mentions were about food items grouped into: 10 animal- and 48 plant species. More mentioned species and their numbers of mentions were: cow (Bos primigenius, 19), fish (12), rice (Oryza sativa, 11), pork (Sus scrofa, 11), coffee (Coffea arabica, 10) and sugar cane (Saccarum officinarum, 10). Food mentions were mainly in the following contexts: every-day life (50), fiction (49), sex (32), celebration (28), and protest (27). Non-food mentions were mainly in the following contexts: love-related pain (30), love (24), protest (24), respect (22), sex (18), and joke (15). Environmentalist jargon needs to be connected to the "nature" elements involved in what people sing and dance about because people associate it to their intimacy and food security.
Conservation; ethno-biology; food security; frequency distributions; land-use
