Can Music Help Us Rise To Climate And Freshwater Challenges?

Sustainability Can Music Help Us Rise To Climate And Freshwater Challenges? Jeff Opperman Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Oct 18, 2022, 11:14am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Jason Isbell and Mavis Staples perform during the inaugural Shoals Fest (Florence, Alabama) in 2019.

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[+] (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images). Getty Images This is the third in a series about music and conservation. The first post explored what we can learn about the challenges of rivers and hydropower through the songs of the Drive-by Truckers .

The second placed Jason Isbell’s song River within the tradition of river songs . In this post, I focus on Isbell’s musical roots, actions, and songs to examine how music can help build the collective vision we’ll need to manage rising water and climate risks. As summer fades to fall, the ripple effects of a series of water-related disasters are still washing across the American South.

The record-breaking flooding that hit Kentucky in late July came just a year after similarly shocking floods devastated parts of western Tennessee . Flooding also helped tip the beleaguered water supply system of Jackson, Mississippi into failure, leaving the people of a capital city without drinking water, a shocking outcome with causes ranging from climate change to racial inequities in urban infrastructure. Right now, the full extent of the damage from Hurricane Ian, and associated flooding, is still emerging.

When floods recede, they reveal the underlying vulnerabilities that allowed them to wreak havoc, and it is now clear that the South–just like much of the world–is confronting the consequences of climate change, aging infrastructure and inequitable investment. For these risks and challenges, water is the messenger. If we listen, we can rise to meet these challenges.

Members of Progressive Morningstar Baptist Church direct people to get bottled water following . . .

[+] Sunday service in Jackson, Mississippi (September, 2022). (Photo by SETH HERALD / AFP) AFP via Getty Images Ensuring communities are safe and healthy will require shared vision and collective action. Yet, like much of the country, these enabling conditions seem to be in short supply, with many state governments in the South not even acknowledging that climate change is happening.

Our culture, and our ability to respond to challenges, seems increasingly fractured. MORE FOR YOU Livestream Shopping Stays Hot As Whatnot Valuation More Than Doubles To $3. 7 Billion Payback For OPEC+ Cuts? Biden May Press U.

S. Companies To Limit Saudi Business, Report Says Enjoy A Gabfest With Phil Rosenthal Of Netflix’s Popular Travel Show: ‘Somebody Feed Phil’ But water can also be a messenger of hope, and art capable of healing divides has emerged from Southern waters before – and may do so again. While only part of the puzzle, art can help rebuild collective vision, what commentator David Brooks calls a “grand synthesis ” through which shared stories and traditions first help us move beyond culture wars to reveal our common challenges, allowing us to then work together to fix them.

Can music contribute to a grand synthesis? The music of Jason Isbell, and the region he emerged from—Muscle Shoals, Alabama—both have long histories of producing art that challenges–and sometimes spans–cultural divides. The recording studios of Muscle Shoals have long functioned as a cultural bridge. In the 1960s and 1970s, they churned out hit songs that were the product of collaboration between Black and white artists while much of the South (musical or otherwise) remained segregated.

Tennessean and music journalist Stephen Deusner writes that musicians around the Shoals believed there was “magic” in the water of the nearby Tennessee River that fostered the collaboration and the genius. The band Drive-by Truckers emerged from the Shoals in the 1990s. Ever since, the Truckers have been exploring the “duality of the Southern thing” through bracingly honest songs.

The songs are grounded in the Southern rock tradition, but they also reveal some of the harsh realities of the region’s past and present while pointing toward the more hopeful future that is emerging (as chronicled in Deusner’s book Where the Devil Don’t Stay ). Isbell, born and raised near Muscle Shoals, got his start with the Truckers before forging his own solo career, one that also features a candid exploration of the South’s duality and complexity. His music draws from the culture of the rural South, blending country music and honky-tonk rock ‘n’ roll, with characters that hail from small towns with big struggles.

Though his songs are clearly rooted in past traditions of Southern music, his words and actions point to the need for change. He can convey respect for some of the legends of country music while simultaneously shining a spotlight on the need for the genre to address barriers to people who aren’t white men. Case in point: When he performed eight shows at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium in 2021, seven of the nights featured a different Black woman country artist (his wife, singer-songwriter Amanda Shires , opened one show).

Isbell’s songs indeed seem capable of contributing to a grand synthesis, grounded in broadly accessible musical forms but with honest and introspective lyrics that don’t shy away from the world’s complexities. This is illustrated particularly effectively—appropriately enough—through his songs about rivers and water. When Isbell was with the Truckers, the band produced two songs about rivers, hydropower and people : one that celebrated how hydropower development can uplift whole regions ( TVA) , another about how poorly planned hydropower projects can devastate rural communities displaced by reservoirs ( Uncle Frank ).

Both songs contain truths and, taken together, they convey the complexities inherent to decisions about harnessing rivers for power. And more recently, in the 2020 song River , Isbell forges a new amalgamation within the great tradition of American river songs . That tradition has long flowed across a divided terrain, with river songs nearly always planted on one bank or the other.

On one bank, a light shines and rivers are sources of redemption, grace and bounty (“Down to the River to Pray” and “Take Me to The River. ”). On the other, a dark shadow falls across rivers as crime scenes and places of disaster and punishment (“Down By the River” and “When the Levee Breaks”).

But Isbell’s River is a bridge, a song capable of spanning the banks of light and dark. Life isn’t always one thing or another. Sometimes it’s both.

Isbell’s lyrics offer yet one more bridge, that between today’s pop culture and our past traditions of storytelling that were more strongly rooted in nature. (Interestingly, River was partly inspired by the novel Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, a masterful writer about nature in both fiction and non-fiction. ) The language of nature has been steadily draining from our pop culture, with research showing a steep decline in the importance of nature words in song lyrics over the past half century – depriving us of cultural connections to both the natural world and to shared landscapes, our literal common ground.

Isbell pushes back hard on that trend: in River and many of his other songs, his lyrics paint a landscape of fields and rivers, magnolias and terrapins, chopping wood and fishing, Alabama water and Alabama pines. His stories are shot through with a sense of place. Places worth keeping.

Holding fast to our beloved places and all that they provide in the face of changing climate and rising water risks will not be easy. We need to pull together to make this happen, and for that we need to see that our challenges are shared. Songs that resonate across divides are one of those cultural forms that can help rebuild a sense of shared challenges and common ground.

Water is the messenger. We just need to hear it and heed it. Perhaps something magic can emerge from the water again.

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