Holding the Center: Building an Institute for Art and Ecology (and other land-based projects)

Part 1 of a series on shifting our culture toward ecological ways of being in the world.

What do these projects — outdoor music festivals, folk schools, nature centers, eco-villages, community gardens, retreat centers, camps, and farmer training programs — have in common?

Without getting too broad, let’s say that these are projects that take place on the land, that are integrated into the surrounding ecological and social environment, that are run by communities, smallholdings, farms, organizations, or businesses, and that often encompass more than a single building or service. That’ll have to hold for now. No doubt there are exceptions: Woodstock ’99 was definitely an outdoor music festival but failed utterly at integrating into either the ecological or social environment.

Done well, though, land-based-projects like these are an essential and under-valued part of our communities, and perform a host of key functions that we can’t live well without. To name a few: ecological education, creating safe space for gatherings of all kinds, creating abundant opportunities for people to connect to the natural world, often in life-altering ways. My favorite: hosting a diversity of programs such that interesting connections between them are revealed and celebrated. They are the best kind of community center — they hold the values of a community, but in a setting more immersive and dynamic than institutional “concrete block” community centers, and they might expand their notion of community to include the non-human members of a place.

This is the “holding the center” mentioned in the title. The rest of the title is “building an institute for art and ecology (and other land-based projects),” in case you are interested in creating something similar. I’ve included some first-steps, which you’ll find at the end of the essay.

I’ve had scores of conversations during my tenure at Crosshatch with people who wanted to create a land-based project. Common themes in these conversations include recently buying or inheriting land, wanting to farm (or wanting to rent land to farmers), wanting to host classes or build something like a folk school, and wanting to host artists. Common concerns include zoning, finding board or staff members, grabbing the gold ring of IRS non-profit status, and of course, funding. There’s a lot of people out there who want to do cool stuff, and every conversation is a reminder of how lucky I am to be doing this work every day. I’m glad when some of us can find each other.

That said, these conversations rarely feel fruitful, and I wish that ten of us could gather around a table instead of two of us on a Zoom call. I’ve learned from the Artist Communities Alliance the power of a network, and I can see how it could apply in this case. I want to make that happen, which is one reason for writing this piece.

But before we get into that, we gotta have the talk. About non-profits.

I have come to realize the value of non-profits as tools for facilitating and scaffolding many of the larger cultural changes I care about. Having a good non-profit around is kind of like having an old tractor — they are not absolutely essential, are oftentimes a pain, can be expensive to operate, fiddly to maintain, run too loud, and aren’t doing the environment any favors. Still, they allow you to act with speed and power in an emergency, and they easily replace the work of a dozen stout people until such time as you’ve scaled up your capacity for hand-work.

Likewise, non-profits come with a pretty slick set of tools and behaviors that enhance your speed and power: legibility for funders, access to philanthropy (especially grants), plug-and-play connections to larger systems of government and economy, and a built-in capacity to exist longer than any individual, and so the ability to act as holders of community and/or ecological knowledge.

The downsides are that they are built in the model of corporations, and so are artifacts of the industrial economy. Too often, non-profits imitate the behavior of their corporate mirrors: pro-active self-interest, a zero-sum/scarcity mindset of competing for resources, paying lip service to community engagement and collaboration, but unable to do either without hogging the spotlight, stealing the credit, and poaching resources.

When asked to act with integrity they can instead develop a nervous fixation on “protecting the brand.” Even on their best days, many non-profits (with income on their minds) have internalized a tendency to use relationships as leverage. The list goes on: narrowing their mission to prioritize philanthropic legibility over actual good work, upholding systems of inequity in order to preserve the flow of capital, exploiting workers, and dehumanizing those they serve. Given the dominant story of progress alive in the western world, and our widespread adoration of big business and billionaires, much of this behavior is understandable. But we can do better.

A land-based-project isn’t a foregone exceptiom. One can act in the dominant paradigm of big-business non-profits and still qualify as a land-based-project. Our aspiration for Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology is to do more—to find a way out of the non-profit traps. I don’t know what to call such a feat, but the definition is thus:

A non-profit that goes beyond the standard mission of a church, nature center, food hub, art center, community center, etc. to engage with questions about how to build resilience and organize a community to transition away from the industrial economy and toward a de-growth, ecologically-centered culture. Organizations of this kind act in resistance to the monoculture mythology of progress, a myth founded in capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and the industrial economy; and act in a space of prefiguring — creating memories of the future — restoring the 10,000 cultures which regenerate right-relationship with place and people.

(If you’re wondering about this “10,000 cultures” reference, stay tuned.)

This is a short essay with limited scope, and the content regarding non-profits is worthy of much more than I can put into words here. More substantive critiques can be found in the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, as well as the books Decolonizing Wealth and Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. Exceptional analysis couched in good humor can be found at the website Nonprofit AF.

As far as I know, there are no conferences, subreddits, or message boards for land-based projects. Most of the included organizations wouldn’t call themselves that, many aren’t aware of the full scope of the field, and very few are comparing notes about how to do this work better. I’d like to change that.

Instruction, Part 1

I offer this exercise in the ambitious hope that one incredible land-based-project can take root in every sub-basin in the United States. Even if you’re not trying to start such a project, you might find other kinds of value in this brainstorming exercise, including good dinner-party fodder.

For those who are trying to start a project like this, you’re probably thinking about business plans, mission statements, brand propositions, starting a non-profit on paper, etc. We’re going to zoom out from there and instead talk about creating a simple and powerful overarching ethos. By that, I mean something bigger and broader than any specific metric your organization would tackle. Crosshatch’s ethos might be framed pithily as “pre-figurative post-collapse” and as “a kind of community development organization,” together meaning we work towards a world where we’re coming down from an energy peak (degrowth), where we’re interested in building hyper-local cultures that are embedded in the local landscape and in right-relationship to the land, and we envision that those hyper-local cultures also practice a joyful kind of local economy. Even typing that, though, feels somewhat inaccurate, ripe for misunderstanding, and full of meaningful exceptions. We also adopt ideas like the Beehive Plan (the idea that our work both outlives us and helps to tie us to those who come before and after us), and a love of gathering people for learning, shared work, and great art. If you’ve ever talked with me about our work, or read my writing, these themes shouldn’t surprise you — yet they are a fair bit bigger and fuzzier than our actual programming from year to year. That’s an overarching ethos at work.

To begin:

Take five minutes to think (and talk, if you’re doing this with others)—and either way, write—about the state of the world — yeah, the whole planet. This is intended to be an extremely broad conceptual space for you to hold. What’s going on with the world, do ya think? How are you feeling about it? If you had to summarize the zeitgeist in two or three sentences, what would you say about what’s going on on planet Earth?

Big breath. Now, take five minutes to think/talk and write about the state of your local community, at whatever scale you consider that to be. The phrase “local community” is an abstraction quickly shredded by contact with the messy reality of the land, economy, people, and history of whatever geographic space you are residing in, but we’re not looking for precision, just a framework for ideas. Same questions as before, but don’t be afraid to wander conceptually a bit.

Finally, take five minutes to write about any other cross-section you consider relevant — for example, “regional artists” or “CSA farmers” or “filmmakers with disabilities in North America” — then think, talk, write. Same general questions, same permission to go down rabbit holes if they seem to serve the larger purpose. You can do this last one more than once.

Your goal is not to accurately describe the world, or your local community, or your specific cross-section. Your goal is to describe some sense of your own thinking about these frameworks, with the further goal of explaining, in a broad but potent sense, what you care about.

Some more guiding questions, in case they are valuable:

• What is your emotional response to thinking about the issues at each scale? Hopeful, joyful, despondent, worried, ambitious, critical? How does it differ from one scale to the next?
• What needs to be done, says you? What would you do in the next six weeks with ten volunteers and $10,000? What would you do with 200 acres of prime farmland in your county? What message would you deliver if you knew two million people were going to see your TED talk? What would you do if we gave you the reins at Crosshatch for the next five years?
• If your initial answers are unsatisfying to you, let’s get more personal: What do you love to do with your time? What’s your dream job? What small annoying tasks do others hate but you enjoy? What kinds of problems do you delight in solving? What do you wish you had on your resume that’s not there yet?

Nice work. Take a breath, grab a fresh cup of whatever you’re drinking right now, fold a bit of laundry or take a quick walk around the house to clear out your short-term memory. Then come back and revisit your notes. What stands out? Can you squint and make out a general outline of an ethos, or a plan, or a hope, and can you revise it into something like a vision statement? Or, maybe you’re not there yet? Often we have a stronger sense of the problem than the solution.

In that case, try this thought experiment and writing exercise — you may find it delightful or frustrating, depending on your temperament. Divide your paper into two columns, or otherwise find a way to create a space for thoughts in opposition to each other. Starting in the first column/space, consider the problems you’ve identified or the work you need to do, no matter how abstractly, and briefly answer these questions. Hold this space lightly, especially the first question about scapegoating people.

1. Do you blame some group for things gone wrong? Who, and why?
2. What new technologies are exciting potential solutions? This could include science fiction technologies not yet proven workable in our world, or technologies that you are certain would exist if not for the yahoos from question 1 actively suppressing them.
3. In what ways might humans spiritually evolve, or what practices might bring us a state of purity so that we can begin living in ways that don’t perpetuate these problems?
4. What kinds of slate-cleaning apocalyptic moments (if any) might help create the world you desire?
5. How might the world improve if the people listed in your answer to question 1 stopped being such yahoos all the time (say, after nodding along with your TED talk)?
6. How would you solve the problems in the next ten years, given all the money, power, and technology you could imagine?

That was hopefully a heady rush of ideas. I wonder, too, if one or two of those questions were more appealing to answer than the others? If so, make note of that—it’s an important look at some biases you might bring to your work, though not necessarily for the worst.

Can you guess what to do in the second column? This is a doozy for some people. Answer the question “how can we make things better” but strictly follow these six rules:

1. no scapegoating, no blame, period.
2. no new technologies allowed (those that aren’t in active widespread use already). Old ones welcome.
3. no calls for purifying ourselves or “evolving.”
4. no visions of apocalypse that let us wipe the slate clean.
5. no expectations that the political groups who disagree with you will suddenly come around to your way of thinking. Assume that you can’t educate your way out of this.
6. the major problems will outlive you.

How did that go? Which column do you find yourself drawn to? (These are not rhetorical questions, by the way — I would love to hear your answers in the comments to this article or via email (if that’s how you got here, though I can’t promise your email will get a response).

Part two coming soon, with more thoughts and more instruction.

In the meantime, if you are running or would like to run a program that meets the definition of a land-based-project, we’d love to hear from you! We’re currently building a state (of Michigan)-wide network of LBPs (and yeah, we really need a better name), with hopes of doing all the things networks do so well — sharing information, experience, and other kinds of emotional, logistical, political and material support, creating a group of people to talk shop with and reach out to with weirdly specific questions, and of course offering ways for convening, mentorship, land tours, and on and on. Start by filling out this form, and then share this essay and this link with others you know doing this work!