How to Survive the Future: Columbus

Event Details

Led by scholar Alex Chambers, Community Food Box Project director Sierra Nuckols, and farmers Liz Brownlee, Nate Brownlee, and Megan Ayres, the discussion will allow us to look at the nature of agriculture in 2022 and ask us to think about where our food comes from and where we want it to come from.

How to Survive the Future is a podcast created by Alex Chambers and Allison Quantz in partnership with Indiana Humanities. In How to Survive the Future, everyday people are asked to imagine a world where they have made it through the challenges of the present and faced the pain of the past and then tell us what life is like after that. Farmers, poets, parents, organizers and others imagine how their lives, and the landscapes around them, will be different than they are now—hopefully for the better, though it’s never that simple.

ABOUT THE EPISODE: Alex visits a farm in Southern Indiana – Nightfall Farm – to talk with the farmers Liz and Nate Brownlee about climate change and crawdads. And all the rain.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Alex Chambers: Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.

Liz Brownlee: Liz is a native Hoosier that runs Nightfall Farm with her husband, Nate. Before taking over the property that had been in her family for generations, she studied natural resources in grad school, looking at the intersection of rivers and farms. Liz and her husband have now been farming in Indiana for close to a decade, with an eye for farming sustainability. 

Nate Brownlee: Nate is a first-generation farmer. He grew up in Franklin, Indiana, where his first job in high school was on a corn and soybean farm. He said then, “I’ll never be a farmer!” but fell in love with sustainable agriculture and the community of people that love caring for the land.

Megan Ayres: Megan Ayers is a beginning farmer in Deputy, IN where she runs Unvarnished Farm. Megan’s farm is a small, no-till operation, committed to growing soil from dirt through regenerative practices. She raises vegetables, bees, poultry, and fruit.

Sierra Nuckols: Sierra is a farmer and food advocate in Indianapolis. She is the director/founder of Community Food Box Project, which refurbishes old newspaper distribution boxes and turns them into little free pantries for people to take food when they need. For 6 years, Community Food Box Project has provided a sustainable source of non-perishable food items to people living with food insecurity. She has also managed two urban farms in the city of Indianapolis (Flanner House and Felege Hiywot Center), and wrote curriculum designed to teach BIPOC and people living with barriers how to farm. She is currently working on purchasing a small urban lot to farm on and develop programming for Community Food Box Project.