ABSTRACT
What about playing music, as an activity, might contribute to the environmental movement? Might it do anything at all, or, is asking such a question to fiddle while Rome burns? This essay discusses how I developed a critical environmental ethnographic research methodology to promote justice for a community that is struggling to replicate its radical ecologies of self-governance and of identity as a place for counter culture experimentation. On Hornby Island in British Columbia, Canada, playing music contributes in important and significant ways to the solidarity of this small rural community that is facing a difficult future. On Hornby, musicians intervene into the island’s “vibe” to create a feeling of togetherness, even while young people struggle to find ways to make a home and a living in the community. Even with rising ferry fees, land taxes, and property prices, which are compounded by housing inequality, gentrification, poverty, water needs, an average age of 66, and a struggling tourist economy, islanders have remarkable systems of self governance to manage their annual population that moves quickly from 800 to 5,000 for only two summer months of the year. In my description of the band-as-community on Hornby, I tease out how the soft skills developed in dialogue with others in rehearsal are essential to creating and promoting the Island’s capacity to continue to (or at least aspire to) subvert mainland norms of life in pursuit of wealth and consumption.
