Volume 4 • No. 10 • New Moon • May 27, 2025
Waterboy II • Acrylic Monotype on Canvas • 37" x 43" • 2022
Night Cat • Acrylic on Canvas • 60" x 48" • 2025
Albino • Acrylic Monotype on Canvas • 43" x 37" • 2021
Building the New: the NMEAC Keynote Address
by Brad Kik
This essay is adapted from a keynote address given at the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council’s Environmentalist of the Year Awards on May 16, 2025.
Bob Russell was a friend and mentor who passed away in 2013. Bob was known for his contagious curiosity across a broad range of topics, as well as his unwavering activism and his acerbic wit. His favorite interjection, after he or someone else held forth on the current litany of despairs and tribulations, was “We’re doomed!”
Bob at least figured out how to say it without cursing, which I rarely do. Wendell Berry has a more eloquent take yet:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…
(from Peace of Wild Things )
The dark edges of the world are growing; old evils we thought buried are reviving themselves in front of our eyes, and this moment’s dreadful combination of instability and absurdity adds to the horror. What to do?
Lean on a good piece of grandmotherly wisdom, to start: count your blessings. Allow me to indulge in three.
First—somehow, outside of any willful intent of my own, I came to understand that cynicism wouldn’t root in me. Seeing that cynicism didn’t serve me, and certainly didn’t serve my community, came from first understanding that I was weird, and that I loved being creative, and that I wanted to make worlds come alive. It was a choice between destruction and creation.
Second—Amanda Jones Kik, my partner in life and work, who looked down these narrow foggy life paths with me and said “why not?” often forging through the thorny briars while I paused.
Third—radical badasses of all kinds, who showed that a wide set of skills and personalities was needed to build the future we wanted. So many of them inspired me, gave me hope, helped me see my own limitations and errors of thought and action, and continued to invite me to work alongside. If you are reading this and we’ve met, there’s a good chance you are one of those fine people.
These blessings are not just an antidote to despair, they also make for a really good segue. So let’s get into it—let’s talk about how the work of repairing the world can take root in joy, curiosity, and courage. And how we can honor the work of building trust that’s essential to it, and how to savor the occasional big victory and the small moments of connection and meaning that arise from the process.
Some of the aforementioned radical badasses came to me via five years of canvassing for Clean Water Action and some similar organizations. While I have no current desire to knock on doors, I’m grateful for those years. Beyond the very fine radicals that I met, I also learned a lot from the 40–60 people I encountered each evening—by my count something like 30,000 or more in the course of doing that work. The number of doors slammed in my face by angry homeowners numbers in the dozens, maybe, a number far outpaced by the number of deeply meaningful conversations I had with people whose eyes shined when they heard about the campaigns we were working on. In the middle, the vast majority of people, well, they cared. They were often busy, almost always distracted, sometimes uninformed or misinformed, but for the most part the average person I talked to, no matter the place, income level of the neighborhood, or campaign, they cared. Many donated—far more than you’d think. All-in-all, this was work that energized me, when you’d expect the opposite.
I’m also grateful because for about 20-30 minutes each day, most days, we’d bring in someone to talk about just about anything related to political issues. It was through those presentations, as well as the books and magazines and websites they’d recommend, that I learned about the American Indian Movement, Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. About Mumia Abu Jamal, the MOVE bombing, the assassination of Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, and the Chicago 8. This is where I first learned about the organic food movement, CAFOs, and GMOs, and about corporate greenwashing and lobbying tactics. So much more: histories of labor and other movements, migrant worker rights, prison abolition, the ERA, car-centered development and sprawl, the military industrial complex, environmental racism, cancer clusters, Silent Spring, and of course a whole host of water issues from mining to lead to arsenic and oil spills.
Most importantly, I began to see these issues weaving together, the result of complex systems that prioritized money and power over caution and care. This is where the cynic in me could have taken over, but at the same time it was so obvious that all of these systems were built by people, and that we could build new ones too. What might have become cynicism became curiosity, and creativity, and a desire to see what else we could do.
I didn’t know it then, but this movement I was leaning into has some names. Carl Boggs coined the term “prefigurative politics” and David Graeber, among others, used the phrase “building the new in the shell of the old.” Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown, among others, showed the importance of building these movements at the speed of trust, with a focus on how groups work together. As adrienne says in Emerging Strategies, “Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.” That rhymes with these words from artist and activist Caroline Woolard: “What group can build something that they have not yet imagined, drawn, debated, revised, and still desired?”
The Warp — Ideas and Inspiration
|| 1 || [from Brad] So many great thinkers contributed to this keynote and essay. Here's where to learn more:
Bob Russell, Neahtawanta Research and Education Center
Wendell Berry (and the Berry Center)
Amanda Jones Kik, Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology
Carl Boggs, National University
David Graeber, London School of Economics
Audre Lorde, Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior
adrienne maree brown, movement facilitator, science fiction scholar, doula
Caroline Woolard, artist, educator, technologist
Kay Bond, activist, non-profit director
David Foster Wallace, author
Bill Mollison, permaculturist
Aldo Leopold, conservationist, author
Jo Freeman, feminist scholar, speaker, author
Yvonne Stephens, poet, mycologist
Allen Van Newkirk, artist, activist
Peter Berg & Judy Goldhaft, Diggers, Planet Drum
Gary Snyder, poet, Zen Buddhist
Pete Seeger, folk musician
Sally Van Vleck, Neahtawanta Research and Education Center, founder, NMEAC
Gerard Grabowski, nordic skier, activist, baker
Utah Phillips, labor organizer, storyteller, poet
Rob Hopkins, Transition Town
Megan Quinn (Bachman)
Lisa Franseen, eco-psychologist
James Baldwin, novelist, essayist, and social critic
Grace Lee Boggs, activist, philosopher, author
Stephanie Mills, author, activist, bioregionalist
|| 2 || [from Taylor] I heard that Brad had to get up on stage twice—the second time to accept an award on behalf of Crosshatch staffer Daniel Marbury, for his work in food systems (2025 Environmentalist of the Year in Agriculture/Farming!) That's recognition well deserved. Daniel does a lot, and frankly, he does that lot quite well. Case in point, recent efforts to gather 1,200 suitable plant starts and transport them to Ziibimijwang for tribal garden kit distribution, a need due to damages from the recent ice storms. Daniel drove those collaborative efforts—and the UHaul too.
Similarly, he's been advocating lately for Northern Michigan farms affected by those same storms. There's a bit more on that campaign in the Weft below. I'll copy what's most relevant: "Click here to donate, or here if interested in applying for farmer relief funds."
|| 3 || If you're looking for more of Brad's writing, consider his 2019 contribution to the Front Porch Republic, The Beehive Plan, on the thoughtful and long-term arc of building and sustaining folklife. It isn't hard to find, now that the finishing touches on FPR's website redesign are just settling in. Their web editor (and so much more) Jeff Bilbro detailed the structural changes recently. I'll use that phrase again. There's so much more in the brief write-up than you might expect, like cues, for example, from Wendell Berry's In Distrust of Movements. I'm realizing now that the three above make up a trio of concise writings travelingoverlapping themes, mainly exploring facets of what it takes to establish grounded long-term centers and cautioning against what gets in the way. Each writing offers clues. More importantly, each guides readers toward necessary questions of their own.
The Weft — News and Events
We’re heartened by a wide-range of expressions of resilient communities and gatherings. Here’s a smattering of regional events and happenings that reflect that diversity, collected for your consideration. Choose your own adventure!
|| 1 || Ice Storm Farm Relief Fund—With farmer livelihoods under threat, Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology, and the Local Food Alliance have partnered for a fundraiser to help the region recover. Money raised will be distributed to impacted farms through a simple application process, providing much needed assistance to those impacted by the storm. Click here to donate, or here if interested in applying for farmer relief funds.
|| 2 || Tip of the Mitt Fiber Fair, May 31st-June 1st. Emmet County Fairgrounds in Petoskey. A celebration of all things Michigan natural fiber, including workshops, vendors, petting zoo, food, and more. More details here.
|| 3 || Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference Tickets Now Available!—Leelanau County. Mon-Tues, Aug. 18th-19th. Space is limited; two days packed with valuable content designed to get you excited about the remainder of the season and thinking ahead to future years. Not quite ready to commit? Click here to learn more about this year’s conference, or here to purchase your ticket now.
|| 4 || Little Traverse Beekeepers Guild—Monthly Meeting: Tuesday, June 3rd, 6-8pm. John Stephens will be discussing Splits/Swarms and Queen Introduction. Hoping to meet in a bee yard. Check in here for further details as they become available.
Grand Traverse Beekeeping Club—Monthly Meeting: Thursday, June 5th, 6:30-8:30pm, 206 S. Oak St., TC. Hive Inspections, Splits & Swarms by John Stephens & Greg Deyak. Join the G.T. Beekeeping Group here for more details and additional events.
|| 5 || Repair Café: A Green Door Folk School + TADL Collaboration. June 14th, 10am-2pm. Traverse Area District Library-Woodmere. Bring items for repair, get paired with a fixer, and repair your item. Free, more details available here.
|| 6 || Earful of Fiddle Music & Dance Camp. Rodney, MI, June 22nd-27th. Classes, jam sessions, camping, and community. "We encourage learning to play by ear, knee-to-knee, foot-to-foot, from tradition bearers in a non-competitive setting. The result is the perpetuation of community-based entertainment and creative traditional arts practice." Find out more here.
|| 7 || Interlochen's Nature & Art Series—"A variety of two-hour programs focusing on creative exploration of nature, art, and food," offered June through August. Check out classes and dates, and register here.
|| 8 || The Crosshatch NW MI Small Farm Jobs Board—Check out the job board here. Posting positions is strongly encouraged. Please share in your networks, and keep an eye out for more openings that might be a good fit for you or someone you know.
|| 9 || Happenings at The Alluvion Between Now and the Next Whole Field include: Full Tilt Comedy - Heirloom Variety Improv Show, The Jeff Haas Trio featuring Laurie Sears + Lisa Flahive, Rodney Whitaker's Mosaic Album Release Show, Hiroya Tsukamoto, Big Fun, Ship Yard #6 feat. Nitro Supertonic & Hunter Bell, Jazz 4 All! The Jeff Haas Trio feat. Laurie Sears & Lisa Flahive along with special guests Rob Smith & Chris Glassman, Phillip-Michael Scales, Marcus Elliot's Broken Seeds Vol. II, and Funky Uncle.
Find more information at www.thealluvion.org.
sponsored by:
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