By CAROL SOUTH
TRAVERSE CITY -- Merging environmental education and activism with music, art and community, The Water Festival is uniting the generations to protect the future.
Scheduled this weekend in Traverse City, the three-day gathering will include talks, performances, information, advocacy and fun at the City Opera House on Friday evening and Saturday. Moving to Higher Grounds for Sunday, the festival will wrap up with an afternoon of workshops plus more music.
Organizers of the event range from veteran activists to college students, working together to make a difference.
"Our generation is the generation that's going to be affected by it, so it's important for us to try to make a difference," said Casey McKeel, a University of Michigan senior and part of a student team helping to organize the festival. "(Water) is an issue that's really important."
To raise awareness about the festival, McKeel, Northwestern Michigan College students and other community members hosted Water Movie Night Sunday at the college, featuring "The Water Front" and "Chinatown."
The brainchild of Earthwork Music Collective, the fourth Water Festival features two firsts: the first in Traverse City and the first held in the winter. The Traverse City event is co-sponsored by Earthwork, SEEDS and Higher Grounds Trading Company. Previous festivals have been held in Mackinac City and Grand Rapids, where it is now an annual event.
Co-founder Seth Bernard of Earthwork said the festival's goal is to open a dialog on "the central issue of our time, which is water." Living in a region surrounded with sparkling fresh water does not insulate residents from these water concerns, which run from local to worldwide.
Water is center stage from the Alba injection well to the sulfite mining in the Upper Peninsula, from threats to the Great Lakes to global issues where Bernard noted that a third of the world's population cannot access safe drinking water.
"We're in the midst of something that has never really happened before: water being treated as a commodity," said Bernard, adding that water can be seen as the oil of the 21st century. "It's scary because we're in the equivalent of the Middle East here."
Grounded in a philosophy that music is also a vehicle for community organizing, The Water Festival includes a heavy-hitting roster of acoustic performers. The lineup spans generations and genres, ranging from Breathe Owl Breathe to Squeaky Clean Cretins, Claudia Schmidt to the FunDubmentals. Bernard and Daisy May will perform Saturday night.
Interspersed with the music over the weekend are speakers including Tom Kelly of Inland Seas, Jim Olson of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and Chris and Jody Treter on the Chiapas Water Project. Bob Russell and Sally Van Vleck of the Neahtawanta Center will give the keynote address.
Winners of a student art contest will showcase their work Saturday afternoon.
Workshops will be held Saturday afternoon -- including sessions on African drum and dance, waltzing and children's activities -- and Sunday. Options Sunday afternoon include water law, the media and global freshwater crisis, bicycle maintenance, children's activities and mapping our watershed.
Creating a coalition of local environmental organizations, area artists and musicians plus activists, The Water Festival organizers believed it was time for an integrated conference on water in Traverse City. This weekend's gathering will be another piece in an ongoing effort to raise awareness about water issues and promote advocacy.
"I don't know if people realize this, but you can't make water but you can pollute it and make it unsafe for human and animal consumption," said M'Lynn Hartwell, a festival co-organizer. "That's what we're doing, we're not being good stewards of the finite supply of water -- as we grow in population we continue to use more."
"Water is life, we can't exist without it," she said.
For more information on The Water Festival, see www.thewaterfestival.org.
