In this 2021 summer of fires, smoke, and drought, I’m inspired to publish this meme, Messenger. The substance of the meme was first set out in my book Legend of the Rainbow Warriors. Having been through many editions since the 1980s, the book remains acutely relevant.
Colossal forces—social, financial, technical, environmental, governmental, and climatological—are whirling emphatically this year, directly engaging, disengaging, and impacting our farms and food. Each human being on Earth has a stake in how it all settles out. It’s that basic.
Among the forces: climate extremes, environmental breakdowns, food security threats, the Covid-19 pandemic, all accompanied by a burgeoning corporate involvement in the realm, including big finance and the advance guard of data-driven AI technologies.
Those forces are met with the soul-yearnings of millions of human beings of all colors, faiths, and nations. They hunger and thirst for a planet-wide realization, a spiritual awakening that results in a sincere, whole-hearted, justice-based reckoning with the critical, foundational matters of our farms and food.
This is no time for co-opted or fake measures, no junk agroecology. Things are real.
The consequential vectors—big money, big tech, big GMO, big chemical, the human beings, and the poisoned politics of our times—are engaged for a defining moment, a moment likely reaching a crescendo in September, in New York, at the UN Food Systems Summit 2021 #UNFSS.
A classic yang-yin polarity thus emerges in sharp relief as we move through critical points on the pathway to the future not just of farms and food, but also of all that rests upon the foundation that farms and food constitute. Mechanical, material, technical efficiency and profit reside in a yang zone, while the yin realm is home to the basic, upwelling needs of every human being for dignity, respect, justice, adequate clean food, a beautiful, sustainable world to live in, and a dynamic active vision that includes the full circle of life…
The rest of this blog post is at Mother Earth News…
My wife Elizabeth and I are on our way out of Nebraska, work having summoned us once again to the southwest. In parting from this stalwart state, I want to share a vision.
The Lincoln Journal-Star, the paper of record for the state’s capital city, recently published an article about the intention of some local developers to establish an “iconic” building in Lincoln’s Haymarket district. That article prompted me to recall an iconic vision I had nearly a decade ago when I first moved to this Cornhusker State.
At that time my office window had a direct view of the Nebraska State Capitol, a 400-foot tall building graced at the top with an iconic image of The Sower—a universal and greathearted figure hard at work, purposefully sowing seeds across the land that we might have the food and fiber that sustains us all.
The Sower is an indisputably handsome and worthy icon for an agrarian state. I was always inspired looking out my window and up at his powerful figure. But then I began to think: Nebraska is The Cornhusker State, not The Cornsower State. 
Where was a statue depicting The Huskers: the people who husked, or harvested, the crops rising from the seeds?
With memory of that vision activated, I wrote a “comment”—basically a digital letter to the editor—and posted my comment at the end of the Journal Star story. This is an updated version of my comment:
“Here’s my idea for an icon they can put on the roof of the proposed Haymarket building: a monumental statue of The Huskers. By that I mean a 20-25 foot high sculpture in the style of The Sower, using similar materials.
“Sculpt The Huskers as a man, woman, daughter, and son working their way (husking) through a field of sculptural corn 20′ or more high. Build the monument so that the four figures are universal human beings (as The Sower appears to be) bringing in the goodness of what The Sower has sown. Build the monument so that it’s facing The Sower, and is a pubic attraction with its own access and egress, so as not to disturb the businesses in the building.
“A monument like that would bring honest pride, dignity, and joy for all Nebraskans (and visitors) as they might walk among the sculptured people and their giant sculptural corn field. The two monuments (Sower and Huskers) would tell children and adults in a glance the story of the plains and the grains and the people. Such an epic sculpture of The Huskers would express the heart of the state, and thus would be ICONIC indeed.
“I’ve always felt that such a monument would be fitting for the north end of Lincoln’s Centennial Mall, but the Haymarket would also be fitting in many ways.
“The Cornhuskers” monument could complete what might be thought of as a sculptural yin and yang, bringing a visual and energetic dynamic into perpetual play. The moral lesson would be both implicit and explicit: you reap what you sow.”
A monument for The Huskers in combination with The Sower would distinguish Nebraska in a way the Gateway Arch marks St. Louis, the Statue of Liberty accents New York, and the Golden Gate Bridge signifies San Francisco.
by Steven McFadden
You may imagine that your involvement with the food system begins and ends with your refrigerator, your pantry, your local supermarket, and your backyard garden, if you are lucky enough to have one. But that fantasy would be tragically misleading.
The inescapable facts: at this passionate, volatile, hotly contested moment of history, your breakfast, lunch, and dinner are in almost all cases intimately, irrevocably enmeshed in the matrix of the global food system. Outside of radical self-sufficiency, which is not what most people are capable of, there’s no escaping that matrix.
As it happens there’s a great debate underway about that system—about the people, values, politics, and profits that influence our farms, our people in the fields and packing houses, our farm animals, and ultimately our food and our health. That debate will reach a crescendo this coming October at the UN’s global Food Systems Summit 2021. The Summit has been convened to restructure the regulatory environment for farms and food. That’s a immensely consequential responsibility.
The crescendo of the debate will arrive in the context of at least three extreme factors: the global pandemic, global climate change, and widespread social discontent with the status quo. Those factors are at work forcefully on our one and only planet, and consequently on most everyone’s plate. Like it or not, your pantry is in play…
The rest of my article is freely available on my auxilliary blog < DeepAgroecology.net >
Now that I’ve finished telling the tale a second time, via the supplemental medium of memes, I’m happy to invite you (one and all) to engage the Odyssey of the 8th Fire. Through following the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific you will meet and learn from traditional wisdom keepers of North America. What they share is directly relevant to this moment in history.
My first telling of the story was through an epic-length narrative. That’s a demanding literary adventure for readers, but also, I feel, very rewarding.
But if you set out on the journey through the second telling—8th Fire slide shows that I’ve created and posted to Youtube—you can engage this true, epic adventure with the wisdom keepers, and complete the journey, in less than an hour. Check it out.
The Odyssey of the 8th Fire meme slide show is now live on Youtube at this link. ~ SM
As yet another United Nations Code Red warning flashes around the world, I join with those who propose that ginawaydaganuc is an essential and realistic mind set, and who encourage general, wholehearted embrace of all that it denotes and connotes.
What in our vast, entangled cosmos is this thing called ginawaydaganuc? Suffice for the moment to say that it’s a word from one of the original languages of North America, Omàmiwininìmowin(Algonquin). That language has been extant on North America for many thousands of years – a vital vernacular.
This Algonquin word is easier to say than you might at first imagine. It’s pronounced with a soft ‘g’: gee-na-way-dag-a-nook. Try speaking the word aloud phonetically, and experience how the sound feels in your head, heart, and soul. Ginawaydaganuc denotes the fundamental reality that we are all related–with each other, with the natural world, with the cosmos.
There’s more to say. But before contemplating the ramifications of ginawaydaganuc, take a moment to breathe, and to absorb the full impact of one of the latest Code Red warnings. This one comes from the UN’s 2020 report, The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene.
“We are at an unprecedented moment in the history of humankind and in the history of our planet,” the report says. Under relentless pressure from climate chaos, species loss, inequality, natural destruction, and COVID-19, our planetary and social warning lights are “flashing red”…
My complete blog post is live now at .
Reviewed by Steve Leshin for Readers’ Favorite
Classical Considerations by Steven McFadden brings focus to the ancient Greek philosophers and culture that have influenced our modern society in the arts, mathematics, politics, and philosophy. This is accomplished by introducing the reader to the lectures of Harvard professor John H. Finley, Jr., a popular classicist who taught a generation of men at Harvard how to live through his courses, none more popular than Humanities 103 – the Great Age of Athens.
McFadden picks a good sample of Finley’s lectures beginning with a short discourse on Diogenes, the ancient Greek who wandered the streets of Athens carrying a lighted lamp in daylight. When asked why, most people assumed it was to look for an “honest man”. It was really to look for a “human being.” What this means is explained by the late professor in clear and engaging language.
Classical Considerations gives a good sampling of Professor Finley’s lectures and the reader will learn as well as appreciate his knowledge and how the study of ancient Greece is very relevant in our world of the present day. Steven McFadden gives his personal insight and how he formed a friendship with John H. Finley, Jr. after he retired in the 1970s.
I, for one, hope to look at Finley’s study of the Odyssey by Homer. I recommend this book to anyone with an appreciation of Professor Finley and to those who seek knowledge of how to be a human being through the Greek classics.
Photo of author Steven McFadden by Justin Wan, Lincoln Journal Star
I’m pleased to report that my nonfiction saga Odyssey of the 8th Fire is getting some publicity this week, in both formats: online journal and the work in progress slide-show of memes. Both of those formats for engaging the tale are currently live and freely available for readers around the world.
Columnist Cindy Lange-Kubick at our local daily newspaper, The Lincoln Journal Star, wrote and published about me and the long journey that is at the heart of the epic, nonfiction saga in our era of profound change.
“The simple reason for the walk ” as the story reports, was to find teachings that had long ago been left by the side of the trail — and to bring them forward into the present so they can be applied as we go into the future..
My video conversation with Brooke Medicine Eagle about The Call of the Land and the accompanying slide show, is freely available now on Youtube. To learn more about deep agroecology and the possibilities for our food and farms, follow this link.
Part 4 of the Odyssey of the 8th Fire Memes – Days 120-160 slide show is now live and freely available on my Youtube channel. The memes at this link tell a shorthand version of the longer true, epic saga available at 8thFire.net.
In invite you to undertake this adventure, to check out the tale, and through the tale to vicariously journey from the Eastern Door at the Atlantic toward the Western Gate at the Pacific, meeting and learning from insightful elders. As the tale of true adventure unfolds, the elders freely share a wealth of wisdom teachings. I recommend viewing the slide shows on a large screen.
To give a sense of how the story is told by memes over the 230 days of travel, I’ve posted three of the memes below as a sample: Days 63, 145 and 159. If you click on the images you’ll go directly to my Youtube channel. There you can access Parts I, II, III, and IV. I’ll post the concluding Parts V and VI as they are completed in the months ahead.
Your actual, real-time Odyssey parallels this Summer’s ‘blockbuster’ film
New and improved: Classical Considerations
Behold the Light: Farms, Photons, Futures
Our Collective Odyssey: Song and Story for the Generations Arising