Regina Folk Fest artists speak out about climate crisis concerns - CBC.ca

Regina Folk Fest artists speak out about climate crisis concerns | CBC News
Saskatchewan

Regina Folk Fest artists speak out about climate crisis concerns

The three-day festival, featuring dozens of musicians, wraps up on Sunday

The Regina Folk Festival celebrates the importance of music in the community and this year some artists are using the space and their platforms to share their concerns about climate change.

"All of these things we were told were going to happen are happening now, we're in it," Tamara Lindeman, the Toronto-based frontwoman for the Canadian band The Weather Station, told Shauna Powers, host of CBC's Saskatchewan Weekend.

The Weather Station is one of the dozens of bands performing at the festival, now in its 52nd year, which started Friday and runs through Sunday.

Lindeman learned about climate change in the 1980s and the band's 2021 album Ignorance was written out of frustration that the issue is still being ignored. She compared the action taken to manage the COVID-19 pandemic to how the climate crisis is being handled.

"Look how much change we were actually able to endure," she said. "Then look at the climate crisis and think: 'we could be taking climate action but still hugging our friends, we could still be seeing our family, we could still be actually doing all the things we really value.'"

Lindeman is among a handful of those involved with the festival who have placed climate change among the principal themes in their music or advocacy.

Allison Russell, who is also performing at the festival, has spoken about subjects like sexual abuse and climate change in the past.

When asked why she used her platform to speak for others, Russell said: "because my survival depends on it."

She believes the human species is at a crisis point because of its abusive and extractive practices both between people and between people and the land.

"It's pushing us toward a mass extinction if we don't turn things around," she said.

Russell believes art is one of the ways to help the world get out of its tailspin.

Kim Fry isn't a musician, nor does she have a foot in the music industry, but she's a longtime climate activist and has seen how music can start a chorus of conversation about issues like climate change.

Fry, a guest curator at the festival, is a co-founder of the Canadian branch of Music Declares Emergency: a group of artists, organizations and music industry professionals calling on government to declare a climate and ecological emergency.

The music industry's cultural power and influence is enormous, Fry said.

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One of the musicians she recruited for the festival was Shad, a hip-hop and rap artist, who she said signed on to an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and has been supportive of the message.

"Musicians can touch us in ways that environmentalists and scientists cannot, they get into our souls and our hearts," she said, hoping that Regina attendees are impacted and also feel a sense of community.