Episode 5: Artists on a Burning Planet

Episode 5: Artists on a burning planet

KURN: Welcome back to Against the Grain. This is episode five of our series on artists and activism. I’m Jessica Ilyse Kurn.

FOLEY: And I’m Michael Stewart Foley. If you’ve been paying attention to Farm Aid’s work over the last several years, you know that we’ve been working hard to get the public to understand that farmers are out there every day working on the front lines of climate change through a number of regenerative agricultural practices. Farmers are also finding ways to rehabilitate the soil and draw down carbon out of the atmosphere. These practices range from cover cropping to rotational grazing to agroforestry.

KURN: At Farm Aid’s annual festival, we hear from artists about the importance of supporting farmers in this work.

FOLEY: Good call. I can think of many examples of artists speaking about the environment. One that comes to mind is Neil Young’s introduction of his song “Love Earth,” last year at the festival.

YOUNG: What’s your favorite planet? What was that? Your favorite planet?

KURN: That was Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, his new band, at their very first public performance at Farm Aid 2024 in Saratoga Springs, New York. Try and catch Neil in his aptly named Love Earth tour this summer, and of course at Farm Aid in Minnesota in September. On stage, he not only talks about taking care of the planet, but he also practices what he preaches.

FOLEY: Yeah, he’s brought Farm Aid’s HOMEGROWN Concessions from our festival grounds out on his Love Earth tour, swapping the usual food served at venues for local farm fresh food. Neil and Farm Aid work closely with our venue food partners to review all ingredients and make sure they meet Farm Aid’s high standards, which are food grown with ecological practices from family farmers who get paid a fair price. It’s a large undertaking, but one that’s important to Farm Aid and to Neil.

KURN: For a deep dive into the logistics on what it takes to get this amazing food to festival goers each year, you can listen to episode six from last season, “Connecting Farmers and Eaters.” When we come back, we’ll talk to another Farm Aid artist about taking a stand on climate change. Stay tuned for Lukas Nelson.

FOLEY: If you’re a farmer, Farm Aid is here for you. With 40 years of experience working with farmers, we strive to connect you with helpful services, resources, and opportunities specific to your individual needs. Our farmer resource network offers many ways for you to connect. If you want to talk with one of our hotline operators, call 1-800-FARMAID. That’s 1-800-327-6243. Or reach out online at www.farmaid.org/podcast.

LUKAS NELSON: I’m Lukas Nelson, and we are on the grounds of Farm Aid in Noblesville, Indiana.

KURN: As we were first launching against the grain in the summer of 2023, the horrible fires that engulfed Maui had just started to be contained. Wildfires in Hawaii used to be relatively infrequent. The islands are rarely dry enough, but thanks to climate change and the spread of invasive grasses, wildfire risk today is much greater for the island state.

FOLEY: Those devastating wildfires that killed 102 people on Maui in 2023 and destroyed much of the city of Lahaina brought all this home.

KURN: And Lukas Nelson spent part of his youth growing up on Maui. So he was on the ground when the fires happened, and we really wanted to hear his firsthand account. We connected with him backstage and asked him about the experience, starting with whether he considers himself a political artist and then about how he got involved on site in Maui during that wildfire emergency.

LUKAS NELSON: No, I don’t consider myself an activist or a political anybody necessarily, only in the sense that, you know, I’m affected by the world around me and so. You know, so I, I think when it comes to politics, uh, there’s too much that can get muddied by partisanship and so on, on, uh, you know, if somebody that you. don’t happen to agree with politically says something good. It makes it difficult for you to agree with them or to acknowledge publicly because, well, I’m aligned with the whole other side and so I don’t subscribe to any of that. I think if you have a good idea and you present it then it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from and we can compartmentalize those things now as an artist myself, I prefer to put my statements in my music. I prefer to put my my statements in my arse, uh, because I don’t believe that, you know, if I wanted to be a politician and stand on a soapbox, I would go out and do that, but I don’t want to alienate anyone. But farm aid is a non-political issue. I mean, I think there’s people on both sides of the aisle that I’ve seen say appreciative words. I understand the necessity of it.

FOLEY: We were interested in the work Lukas has done in the immediate aftermath of the Maui fires and wondered, wouldn’t that be considered activism?

LUKAS NELSON: I mean, this, this is just me helping my community, you know, I, I don’t feel like it’s activism at all. I just feel like I’m just, you know, I grew up there, I lived there, uh, and. Power lines flew over the non-native plants caused fires to start because of an extremely dry summer, and I think that there are practical things you can do to prevent that from happening in the future, and that’s what I think I was trying to use my platform to just make sure that. Whoever’s up there, I don’t care who you are, make sure that this doesn’t happen again, and at that point I was trying to implore everybody not to put the power lines above ground I don’t think it makes any sense. If that’s activism, then I don’t know what, you know, but I don’t consider myself an activist.

KURN: That’s the kind of fight you have to wage to end those wildfire threats in Maui and as Lukas says, to regenerate the soil and start healing our environment.

MICAH NELSON: This is Micah Nelson. We’re in Noblesville, Indiana at Farm Aid 2023.

FOLEY: It’s funny. While we were talking to Lucas that day in Indiana, you could hear his brother Micah playing on the main stage. It would have been cool if while we were talking to Micah, Lukas was playing, but the timing didn’t work out. We were excited that Micah stopped by our makeshift podcast setup in Indiana. You may recall that Micah composed and performs our Killer podcast theme music. And when he plays Farm Aid, it’s sometimes as Particle Kid, always with his dad Willie’s family band, and since last year, as a member of Neil Young’s band, The Chrome Hearts.

KURN: We started by asking Micah if the work he and Farm Aid are doing to address climate change is political.

MICAH NELSON: No, not really, no, I don’t think any of this is political at all. I mean, it’s just about being a person on a planet deciding whether you’re interested in supporting life or not, you know, because life, it’s delicate. It’s a delicate dance on a on a planet with a delicate ecosystem and the soil is the most fundamental source of life and you know it’s so much deeper than politics. It’s so much more cosmic than that, more existential than that. Sure that politics are are involved or they should they should be.

In the sense that uh you know the people that are representatives of communities or states or countries um should be paying attention to this and talking about it a lot more and recognizing what’s at stake, you know, we should be asking political leaders where they get their food from, and that’ll tell you a lot about. Where their priorities are, so in that way it’s political, but I don’t, I don’t think about it that way really in terms of partisanship or I think it’s a bipartisan issue. It affects everybody regardless of your political leanings, so it’s it’s outside of that to me, even though everything’s intertwined, I think it should be approached as just a human issue.

KURN: This is one of the things that I’ve loved about asking the same questions to so many artists. The variety of responses has been fascinating.

FOLEY: Right, in Micah’s case, kind of like in Lukas’s, the term political is too limiting, particularly that it seems to conjure for him a sense of partisanship or division, same way Lukas talked about the term activism.

KURN: We covered lots of topics with Micah, enough to fill a few podcast episodes. But for this one, let’s hear what he has to say about what we all can do for the environment.

MICAH NELSON: People want to learn, I think, more than ever. They want to learn how to be resilient. They see what’s going on in the world, learning this stuff makes you less fearful. People want that knowledge and the experience, I think.

FOLEY: For context, here he was referencing Farm Aid’s HOMEGROWN Village, which is such an important part of the festival experience that happens every year, and in particular the Skills Tent where festivalgoers can learn a variety of skills like square foot gardening, cheese making or composting.

MICAH NELSON: And so having a space where you can tell people come here and we’ll show you how to do it and then you can do it on your land or or you you know you can apply these skills to whatever you’ve got going on because everywhere is different, every microclimate and every landscape, but no matter where you are, soil is king. As long as you figure out how to get your soil healthy and happy. Thriving then then you can kind of do anything, or at least you can do a lot more than you would have otherwise. Some people are maybe more driven and more, you know, passionate about it, or maybe that their life depends on it, their livelihood, but it’s science and it’s nature. It’s right there. Just look at look outside and you’ll see it happening.

MICAH NELSON: Self-sufficiency gives you confidence, gives you something to give to some. else too, you know, and that’s these kinds of conversations I think are naturally going to become more and more frequent and the more the everyday person has this type of knowledge, you know, the idea of saving the world is really big, but it’s just really about saving your town, you know, saving your community and the little things that make up the world.

KURN: Community and science. Relying on these concepts feels productive, and there’s a common sense case for relying on science in this historical moment, especially when we’re hearing powerful people be so dismissive of science and data.

FOLEY: When we come back, we’ll hear from Allison Russell, who’s performed at a number of Farm Aid festivals in recent years.

KURN: She tells us about her experiences and observations of climate change as a touring musician.

FOLEY AD: Farm Aid 40 will be at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on Saturday, September 20th. We hope you’ll be there too. Tickets are still available. Head to Farmaid.org/podcast for details.

RUSSELL: I’m Alison Russell. I’m a mother, a musician, an activist, an author, an artist, and I live now in Nashville, Tennessee, but I’m from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I’m a Scottish Grenadian Canadian, a Queer, Black, new immigrant to America.

FOLEY: We featured Allison Russell on the second episode of our podcast when we first discussed corporate concentration in the farming and food sectors with Dave Matthews and others. You can find that episode with all of our episodes at FarmAid.org/podcast.

RUSSELL: I think everything is political. I think it’s semantics when people try and say, I don’t want to get political. Saying I don’t want to be political is a political statement in and of itself, right? We, every part of our life is regulated by policy, right? There’s um when we talk about what does political mean, it doesn’t mean we’re asking you to endorse a particular candidate, but every choice that we make with our dollars, Margo really dug in on this at Farm Aid, where do we put our dollars and what are the political ramifications of where we put those dollars.

KURN: Allison stands on everything being political, right down to how we make decisions about the food we buy, just shows how many opinions there are from people doing good work.

RUSSELL: Every single thing we do, from the meat that we buy to the produce that we buy to the policymakers that we support, um, you know, to the clothes that we wear, to the cars that we drive or don’t drive, all of it has a political existence and ramification and so none of us gets to say, gets to be free of politics to some degree, I know that’s a semantic um sort of block for some folks, but we just have to face that we are In constant communion and connection with each other and everything that we do affects everyone else. And so life is political. It just is, whether we want to say it or not, talk about it or not, it just is.

KURN: Alison spoke passionately about industrial scale farm and food production and how it negatively affected not only our physical environment, but also our spirits.

RUSSELL: It’s so, so intertwined because our mental health as a species has been suffering as we get more and more disconnected from the fact that the earth is our mother and we need every part of her in order to thrive. We’re not in dominion over. We are in symbiosis, well, hopefully in symbiosis with unfortunately we’ve been out of whack. We’ve been extracting too much because we Uh, have been trapped in this idea of um exponentially increasing increasing profit forever and ever. Amen, which is, which is a cancerous way to think and a cancerous way to behave on the planet and it hurts the planet, yes, but it hurts us the most and the species that we take with us. So I, I think, and, and as a result of that, we feel greater and greater schisms within our own psyche.

I think, you know, that I don’t think it’s any coincidence that um mental health suffers the most in in urban centers, you know, where we are so, so, so disconnected from the rhythms of the earth, from the mycelial network, from the the boon that walking through a forest and breathing in. All of that beautiful oxygen from the forest. Like we need we need our mother to be OK. And when we are so so removed from those diurnal rhythms and earth rhythms, circadian rhythms that we suffer.

FOLEY: This sounds pretty cosmic, as Micah said earlier. Here’s Alison’s takeaway from talking to farmers on site at the festival.

RUSSELL: We were talking about last year and what the farmers for climate resilience and better policy to sustain and support and have the same kind of tax breaks and subsidies and and and payouts for farmers who are doing the work to reverse climate destruction and fatal climate change, you know, as opposed with these, these massive factory farms are getting, it’s not, it’s not they’re getting subsidized, they’re getting all kinds of hidden Sources of both hidden and upfront sources of funding that we’re not seeing that happening for the family farms. We’re not seeing that happen for specifically farmers working to put oxygen back into our atmosphere.

KURN: The stakes could not be higher for all of us.

RUSSELL: If we don’t get our food supply right, it so exponentially harmfully impacts every other thing that we’re facing. You know, like that’s if we had clean, healthy food available to everyone on farms that did not exacerbate the climate crisis, that would be transformative. We can make these changes and that’s what we’re talking about every year at Farm Aid, and that’s what we’re working on every year, and that feels really positive and hopeful to me to get to be part of it.

FOLEY: We’ve got two more amazing episodes coming up in this series on artists and activism, so we hope you’ll keep tuning in.

KURN: Next week, more from Alison Russell, Waylon Payne and Hunter Park, who performs as She Returns from War. We’ll chat about the politics of everyday life, not only for artists, but also for anyone who needs to find a chosen family or community where they can feel safe and be treated with dignity.

RUSSELL: You know, I was 15 and I knew that I was safer sleeping in a graveyard on a park bench than I was in the home of the people who called themselves my family at that time. You know, and then eventually we need community, we need, we need, we don’t, we’re not, we don’t thrive in isolation.

FOLEY: That was Allison again as a teaser for our next episode. And speaking of community in the final episode of this series, we’ll take you back to Luck Reunion, where we recorded a live conversation with artists who’ve lived through climate disasters. They spoke powerfully about how to maintain and sustain community in the face of these kinds of horrific events. You don’t want to miss it.

KURN: Is there something you want us to cover in the future? Send us an email or drop a comment. You can email us at podcast@farmaid.org and find us on social media, which is @Farmaid on Instagram, Facebook, threads and now on BlueSky.

FOLEY: And don’t forget YouTube, where you can watch almost 40 years of performances and other content. Let your friends know about Against the Grain. We’re beyond grateful when you listen, share, like and subscribe to this podcast.

KURN: Against the Grain was written and produced by us with sound editing by Endhouse Media and direction from Dawn Sarokin. And thanks to Micah Nelson for our awesome theme music.

FOLEY: Thanks so much to all the artists who took the time to speak with us. Head over to our website to watch videos, check out those playlists, and learn more. www.farmaid.org/podcast. And thanks to all the farmers out there. We’ll chat with you next time.