repeats?
Podcast book review of Deep Agroecology (5 minutes)
Academia.com recently reviewed my book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food and Our Future. They rendered their review in a five-minute podcast. You can listen to it by clicking below on the start arrow for the MP3 recording.
Their AI-generated Abstract
Steven McFadden’s book Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future presents a blend of spiritual and scientific perspectives on agroecology.
The book argues for the inseparable connection between agroecology and the survival of the Earth, emphasizing a holistic approach that integrates the physical and spiritual realms within food systems.
Through a critical analysis of modern agricultural practices and historical contexts, McFadden advocates for a shift towards sustainable agroecological methods, which he posits as essential for addressing ecological crises and fostering an intentional relationship with nature.
The book suggests that by seeking deeper knowledge and connection with our food and farm sources, we don’t just eat better, we participate in much bigger, far more consequential healing deed as our life-sustaining Planet Earth passes through an era of tremendous challenge.
Click on the start arrow to listen to the brief podcast review:
This is a rendering of an AI poster for the book, also from Acdemia.com. In my view it is just kind of ok, but one statement is way off the mark. AI claims the book “advocates for the fusion of human and non-human life.” What? I never wrote that, never even thought it. Dangerously wrong “wishful thinking” on the part of AI.
Half a Century Later: My Odyssey in Journalism
A HALF CENTURY LATER – From the Sandia foothills of New Mexico, I send greetings to all, and a brief message about the art and craft of reporting. I’m a graduate of Boston University’s 1975 journalism program at what is now the College of Communication (COM). I’m still standing. Still writing. Still passionate. Still reporting on the Beauty Way paths integral to our land and our lives.
Fifty years ago as a student, I had the good fortune to be a small part of The News, a valiant student newspaper that in my era had been defunded and kicked off campus. The paper’s great offense? Reporting facts and opinions that embarrassed what we regarded as an increasingly authoritarian BU administration. In other words, putting the skills we were learning in the classroom to the test, and learning that they were often unwelcome.
Vibrant and cheeky, The News persevered through the late 70’s as I recall. Then soon enough – scorned by the admin and depleted of resources (yet possessed of unforsaken integrity) – The News faded away into the vast and ever-expanding morgue of yesterday’s stories. For me, though, the excitement and learning that came from having been part of that honorable student effort endures as a soul satisfaction, a pearl of great price.
This snippet of COM history comes to mind for me now in parallel as the current Administration in Washington intensifies its attacks on all forms of media that exercise their First Amendment Rights (and Responsibilities) by reporting facts or opinions that do not conform to government desires. The stakes are obviously far higher now in the present challenge, far more consequential. The attacks are real, immediate, and impacting every communications professional.
I expect that there’s much ongoing discussion and debate at journalism schools about all of this: the many systematic, focused efforts to muzzle or otherwise control the press. There better be discussion and a great many waves of wise courageous journalism, or we’re in for a long, hard season of thought control, domination, and abuse of power.
My COM professor for JO 101 was Jeremiah (Jerry) Murphy, an affable old-school writer for The Boston Globe. In various ways over that first semester in 1973 he asked us to ask ourselves, “Who am I as a professional? What do I stand for? How can I best fulfill my mission?” Damn good questions.
I’ve had five decades to engage. At age 76 my responses are known: I’m a maverick independent journalist; I stand the best I can for honesty, caring, sharing, and respect for all the people and all the creations in the Sacred Hoop of life; I best fulfill my mission by asking, listening, and reading carefully, then deliberating to sort out what I have found to be worthy, ennobling, and possessed of potential to endure in goodness for the next Seven Generations of our children, and more.
Thus now at graduation season 2025, as is the prerogative of elders, I hereby raise my medicine song into the ethers, extending my blessings to the COM community, to those who are studying and graduating, and to all working journalists. May your education, Jeremiah’s questions (and a thousand other meaningful ones), serve you in cultivating worthy insights and good work for yourself, your colleagues, your communities, and our world. We need you to be strong and true.
Good luck, Steven McFadden
HALF A CENTURY LATER PHOTO – While digging in the garage over Memorial Day 2025, looking for a family photo, I came upon this one. It shows some fellow staffers at The News (Boston University) late one night in 1975. It’s a photo that I took as a deadline was looming for the next edition. I was completing a photojournalism assignment for a group photo. Just about everyone else on staff had the same homework, and the group had already been assembled over and over again as the week went on. I think I was about the last person to implore folks to get together so I could complete the assignment. They were tired, fed up with posing yet again, and wanting to get it over with and go home. But they let me click the shutter and record their exasperation for posterity.
Key talk about farms and food 2025 – English y Español
As of 2025 one of the classic books about the CSA movement—Farms of Tomorrow Revisited—has been translated and published in the Spanish language as Las Granjas del Mañana Revisitadas: Comunidad apoyada por Granjas, Granja apoyada por Comunidades.
Nearly 40 years ago I was the Organic Outlook columnist for a rural newspaper when I met a farmer setting down roots the next town over, Trauger Groh (1932-2016). Trauger and his colleagues Lincoln Geiger and Anthony Graham were founding one of the first CSAs in the nation: the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire.
Recognizing the importance of the seeds the first CSAs were planting, Trauger and teamed up to write Farms of Tomorrow in 1990, published by the Biodynamic Association.
Eight years later we returned to the subject and wrote Farms of Tomorrow Revisited (1998) to consider what farmers and communities were actually experiencing and learning. That’s the version of the book now translated as Las Granjas del Mañana Revisitadas by Martin Alonso of StayTrue Organics in Argentina.
Along with other CSA books, educational materials, and organizations, our books have helped to spark and to support well over 8,000 CSAs (est.) in the USA, and many thousands more worldwide.
Journalist Steven McFadden stands before a poster for Farms of Tomorrow, and also one for Farms of Tomorrow Revisited.
Whether in English or Spanish, the subtitles for our books express a main point of focus: “Community Supported Farms, and Farm Supported Communities.” The phrase reversal in the subtitle highlights an key point. In recent years CSA has often been promoted as a “marketing model,” whereas Trauger and I—along with many others—envisioned CSA as a “community model.” Consequently, in our writing we actively explored social, environmental, and spiritual dimensions of this emerging form.
Our explorations remain healthfully provocative now in 2025, and beyond, especially the explorations of “associative economy,” “parallel polis,” and the preservation of farmland via innovative trusts, that young farmers might be enabled to fulfill their vocations.
Note: In early February 2025 I participated in an online zoom conversation about CSA with the publisher of Las Granjas del Manana. The English-language recording of that zoom call is at this link; the Spanish-language recording is at this link.
In a review of the English-language version of our book, Resurgence Magazine commented “It is rare to come across any practical farming guide that sets out, from its inception, a set of principles that embrace social, spiritual and economic concerns on completely equal terms…The wisdom and clarity of philosophy are striking throughout.”
As Bill T. put it in an Amazon review: “The concepts of community supported agriculture (CSA) grab at the imagination: reconnect with the land and farmer, know exactly where your food is coming from…”
In yet another review published in the Journal of Applied Communications, Mickie Swisher wrote “For those who have little or no previous experience with community-based agriculture, this book brings together information and resources in one place. Even for those who think that community-based agriculture is either unimportant or unrealistic, Groh and McFadden’s book is worth reading. It will, at the least, stimulate thought. With luck, it will produce action.”
The actions now needed – actions that Las Granjas del Mañana Revisitadas can help stimulate – are the further development and networking of clean, healthy, just CSA farms in thousands more communities, both Spanish and English speaking, along with the many other languages of the world.
Chiron’s Museum of Marvelous Memes – Gallery V
You can take a shortcut to the start, Gallery I Gallery II Gallery III Gallery IV
Ga
Link to Gallery VI
Odyssey of the 8th Fire accelerates in 2025
Mythic, illuminated Sirens sing out from eras ancient, present, and forthcoming, We are all being invited once again to make a journey through time, space, and spiritual fire. Big changes are afoot.
Beginning on Christmas Day last, 2024, the hashtag #Odyssey went viral. Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) had just announced his next project: a film of Homer’s enduring classic, The Odyssey.
The Odyssey hashtag came immediately alive on the Internet, and will likely remain astir at least through 2026 when Nolan’s film will be released. My hope is that in their personal digital journeys, many Net pilgrims will, by use of the hashtag, also come upon the true, online story, Odyssey of the 8th Fire .
8th Fire is an epic tale of a inspired, contemporary journey by people of all colors and faiths. This odyssey tells of an eight-month walking pilgrimage. The multicultural band of men and women were guided, eventually, by dozens of traditional spiritual elders of North America. The long walk took place 30 years ago in 1995-96. It took 230 days to take the steps from the Eastern Door at the Atlantic Ocean toward the Western Gate at the Pacific. Along the way, from sea to shining sea, elders met with the 8th Fire walkers and gave them messages to carry.
Over the last 30 years I’ve remained steady in the view that the long walk of the 8th Fire pilgrims can be regarded as a sample, or an archetypal expression of the great challenging journey that all of us alive are on, right now as the Earth shakes, the winds howl, and governments mutate.
This is an odyssey that we are all on, everyone on Planet Earth. Moving fast now. It appears we are going to go a lot faster, Soon.
What the written story of the 8th Fire Odyssey offers to readers is an opportunity to grasp some of the foundational teachings of this Turtle Island American continent — teachings that have been tried and tested on this continent not just for five or six centuries, but over many thousands of years.
Through this freely-offered nonfiction saga, readers will engage an opportunity to hear and to consider the words of many traditional elders of this Turtle Island continent we now call America.
That has always been my devout intention: to create a bridge of communication and understanding between the ancient, core knowings of this land and our current, forward-leaning civilization. The forthcoming Odyssey film from Christopher Nolan and creative company will help with this, my intuition suggests.
With the wisdom of the elders for support, we are readied for what lies in the present and future. Onward now along our individual and collective odysseys, to and beyond 2025 along the Beauty Way that is indigenous to North America. 
Spiffy new makeover for one of my satellite websites
Screenshot of updated Deep Agroecology blog.
After 16 years wearing the same internet face, my website for Deep Agroecology needed an update. My steady-state blog about food, farms, and our future has been online since 2008. For several years its messages made their way through the digisphere as The Call of the Land. But the blog now bears the name Deep Agroecology. That may sound abstract or academic, but the words actually represent what I regard as one of our main chances for navigating safely and wisely through the cascade of earth changes now unfolding,
My thanks to Tim Hill of Draft Horse Studio for expert web support, making the transition smooth and straightforward for Deep Agroecology.
Chiron Communications–upon whose pages you now gaze, dear readers–is my main, umbrella website, hosting a range of subjects that have drawn my interest over the years.
But to give emphasis to particular subjects, I long ago created and two satellite web sites. They remain alive and active.
The first website is my blog for Deep Agroecology, which has now undergone a facelift. The focus on that blog is the intelligent, and proactive response of farms and communities around the world to establish clean, just, sustainable food systems in the face of ongoing climate change.
My second satellite web site is Odyssey of the 8th Fire. That site tells at epic length the true saga of a great, long pilgrimage on foot from the Eastern Door at the Atlantic Ocean, toward the Western Gate at the Pacific Ocean. The 8th Fire relates a nonfiction tale about a quest arising from the deepest roots of our land, but taking place in the present and the future. In it, circles upon circles, elders make a great and generous giveaway of the teachings they carry.
My 8th Fire website could use a facelift as well, no doubt. But that will have to wait for the right moment. For now, I’m pleased to be able to shine a light upon the new look of Deep Agroecology — a main chance for us all.
Strategic Wisdom in an Era of Change
As cloaks of summer heat settled upon most of North America, and storms raged severe in sky, land, and sea, I happened upon a 2020 academic review of Deep Agroecology.
I’d missed the review at the time, as I was reckoning that year with the passing of generational elders, and also a household move from Nebraska back to the mountains of the Southwest. But I’m happy to have come upon the review now, some four years later. I needed to hear a familiar chord sounded again.
Reading the analysis reminded me of the perilous realities that had driven the writing of the book, realities that had gone into soft focus for me since publication five years ago. That came about as, after the year of transition, I became intent on completing another writing project, the biography of Iina’bi’ho spiritual elder Leon Secatero (1943-2008). That book is moving toward completion.
The 2020 review of Deep Agroecology was written by Hannah Kass, Ph.D and published in the journal Food, Culture & Society. What sparked me in reading the review was her proficient description of my book’s goal: to state plainly the crucial knowledge that agroecology has to offer to the general public, and to sound a call for wide, strategic implementation in our era of mounting perils.
Professor Charles A. Francis (U. Nebraska) suggested the deep agroecology theme to me around 2012. After seven years of study and contemplation what emerged was not so much the expression of a personal vision, but rather the synthesis of a chorus of learned voices. Together they express an evolving vision—a strategic vision—shared by millions of people around the world. Deep Agroecology is my effort to articulate that compelling vision, along with a host of healthy pathways that can lead toward a just, sustainable, and spiritually elevated future.
Despite appearing as an academic concept, agroecology is altogether of the people and the earth: of the way we live on the land, and the way we give and receive sustenance with the earth. As we are at a point of peril, and our farm and food foundations are in critical transition, I wrote Deep Agroecology for the people—for all the people.
In her book review, Kass noted: “Using the framework of extinction and evolution to explain deep agroecology’s spiritual purpose, McFadden aptly demonstrates the inextricability of physical and spiritual worlds in the food system…He connects these worlds to the political economy of food, pointing out the climate’s ties to the intersecting problems of corporate power, industrialization and rural dispossession.”
Agroecology offers a wide array of sensible, sustainable, just, and strategically intelligent pathways to sustain our civilizations, and help them to progress in ever-wiser way.
Terra Madre – We Are Nature
One place where the theme of agroecology will resonate with power and beauty is at this years 20th anniversary Tierra Madre global food community gathering in Turin, Italy (Sept. 26-0).
The 2024 theme is “We Are Nature.” As a key part of the proceedings, the conference is establishing a spectacular space dedicated to agroecology: “an alternative food system paradigm that counters industrial agriculture…It is rooted in the reconstruction of relationships between people, agriculture and environment, food systems and society.”
Time of Transition: Flowers of Possibility
We’re in transition, that’s for sure. By that I mean the rate of change around the globe–climate, business, education, technology, etc.–is cracking along at a wildfire pace: in our faces. We’re moving decidedly toward some new state of life.
To add to the wealth of speculation about what some qualities of that new state may be, I offer yet another descriptor–one with mythic unifying attributes: the Age of Flowers. The concept qualifies as an aspect of deep agroecology.
But rather than lay the whole tale out a second time on this blog, I created a permanent page on this same website. Here’s the link. Give it a click and it will whisk you along to the page with the floral essay.
Note: I wrote this material in the mid-1990s as a facet of Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, an exploration in nonfiction mythology. Now in the summer of 2024, it feels relevant and worthwhile to publish it online and to thereby make it more widely accessible. – S.M.
Sparks for the 8th Fire: a podcast
Thanks to an invitation from The Celebration of Santa Fe, I had an opportunity earlier this month to offer a 20-minute talk about the Odyssey of the 8th Fire. It’s the first public talk I’ve offered in many a year, and it felt just right. As captured in the podcast recording linked below, I began with a classical invocation, then commenced to sing the song of this epic true tale–an ongoing saga involving all of us.
FROM THE PROGRAM –
My bio and talk description:
A delayed reaction to sweetly stinking clouds of Raid ant bomb, along with a pitiful pile of peony petals, set me on the spiraling path of my soul mission. Having kissed a chip of the Blarney Stone, I became engaged with The Gab. Visions arising from summit fasts added focus and passion. Elders offered keys. With patience, steadfastness, and spousal support, I’ve been able to weave ancient teachings, present realities, and future knowings into a shelf of non-fiction books on farming, food, and the core, enduring, illuminating knowings and mythologies of North America. My works include Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, Odyssey of the 8th Fire, Farms of Tomorrow, Deep Agroecology, and more than a dozen other titles.
About 30 years ago I was part of a group of pilgrims who walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific to Save the Planet. As you know from your own life, we were highly successful. The world has not ended…yet. No need to thank me. Survival is its own reward. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that there may be more to do. At any rate, I’d like to begin telling the story of that epic journey.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 16
- Next Page »
