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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.”
What are people for? What are farms for?
In a thought-provoking essay published in 1990, Wendell Berry asked, “What are people for?” Now more than three decades later, with the aggressive incursion of artificial intelligence (AI) into our lives, Berry’s rhetorical question takes on added magnitude.
What does it mean to be human in the Age of AI? Especially if the craft, trade, or profession you mastered is rendered irrelevant by “intelligent machines.”
Meanwhile…In our moment of history, with the aid of AI, enormous industrial, chemical, GMO infused agri-corporations are continuing to subsume and to overshadow food systems, while colossal billion-buck investment firms continue to hoard farmland. This commercial juggernaut of consolidation and concentration for greater profit brings a second question into focus: What are farms for?…
Note: the rest of my essay is located on my dedicated blog for DEEP AGROECOLOGY. Click here to read the rest.
Deep Agroecology: a slide-show primer
As the pace of world transition intensifies, I’m moved to once again articulate in direct language my understanding of the vision held by millions of people around the world: the vision of agroecology.
Thus, I offer below a two-minute slide show with words and images characterizing some basic elements of the agroecological vision, and also offering a glimpse at how deep agroecology embraces the vision, then endeavors to explore further into positive possibilities.
Note: The slides are set at 7-second intervals. You can start and stop the presentation by using the slide at the bottom.
Chiron’s Museum of Marvelous Memes – Gallery II
Council Circles: a perennial way to mark Earth Day
In 1993 I had the honor of serving as National Coordinator for the annual Earth Day USA observation. When appointed to the position, I reached out to the Seventh Generation Fund. We formed a project partnership, and together we developed a plan and a protocol for community council circles.
People came together with their neighbors in a respectful matter to talk about something they (and their children) all have a stake in: the health of the earth, their responsibilities, and their opportunities.
That year Earth Day was marked with formal Council Circles in over 500 US and Canadian communities, a host of other activities from the Boston Esplanade to the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska, and circles along the Pacific shore.
Now, 29 years later, the materials are still relevant for all kinds of communities. They describe a way to bring people together in a respectful and positive manner.
To access the guidelines and protocol for hosting a community Council Circle (on Earth Day or any day), follow this link then scroll down to where you see the scanned copies of the original typewritten documents.
Council Circles remains a powerful tool for any group of people needing to address serious issues. The circles function as a perennial way of democratically developing and engaging community wisdom and strength.
Council Circles – an Earth Day Perennial
By Steven McFadden – April 16, 2022
In 1993 I had the honor of serving as National Coordinator for the annual Earth Day USA observation. When appointed to the position, I reached out to the Seventh Generation Fund. We formed a project partnership, and together we developed a plan and a protocol for community council circles.
People came together with their neighbors in a respectful matter to talk about something they (and their children) all have a stake in: the health of the earth, their responsibilities, and their opportunities.
That year Earth Day was marked with formal Council Circles in over 500 US and Canadian communities, a host of other activities from the Boston Esplanade to the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska, and circles along the Pacific shore.
Now, 29 years later, the materials are still relevant for all kinds of communities. They describe a way to bring people together in a respectful and positive manner.
Having dug the original typewritten materials out of storage, and then scanned them page by page, it feels right and fitting to share them again, and to make them freely available.
Council Circles remains a powerful tool for any group of people needing to address serious issues. The circles function as a perennial way of democratically developing and engaging community wisdom and strength.
NOTE: If anyone should be motivated to volunteer to type up these antique scanned fax pages for Council Circles so that digital text can be posted for easier reading and download, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can use the contact form to connect.
2022: The Year of Agroecology
By the authority vested in me (and everyone else) by virtue of being someone with something important to say, I hereby declare 2022 to be The Year of Agroecology. Someone needed to do it. It’s time.
I hope the other 7.8 billion human beings on the earth are listening—not to me necessarily, but rather to the swelling chorus of farmers and food workers around the world who are leading the way forward, building a foundation for a clean, healthy, just, and sustainable future. That’s the essence of agroecology. That’s the opportunity before us. And that opportunity addresses a range of critical issues from climate chaos and social unrest to food quality and food security.
Although the word agroecology may sound abstract, it’s a term that’s both plain and exalted. It’s about the food we all eat, the human beings and animals who are part of that web of relationship, the essential care of the earth we all depend upon for our lives, and the utter necessity of our spiritual growth to the point where we human beings efficiently and gracefully engage our responsibility as caretakers of the earth.
We all have an opportunity to help advance the vision of agroecology, and thereby to participate in setting right the ways we human beings are in relationship with farms, food, and the future. This is the vision described in my book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future. Agroecology is a vision now held and practiced by millions of human beings around the world. The year 2022 (and the years beyond) hold the potential and the necessity of agroecology becoming a vision held and supported by billions. That’s what it will take. That’s what we need. 2022 can be, and with wisdom will be, The Year of Agroecology.
Farms and food riled by a host of factors and forces
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…
The Call of the Land: A video conversation about our food, farms, and 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.
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