Another meme I created for my blog at The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century.
Talks
Over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with groups both large and small from coast to coast, and abroad. I’ve spoken at conferences, workshops, and seminars, as well as in banks, insurance companies, hospitals, forests, farm fields, fire houses, bookstores, churches, libraries, and colleges.
My gift is to offer audiences inspiration and empowerment by speaking about visions and practical ways to realize them, grounded in expertise and experience.
Contact ~ Steven McFadden
Click here for more information.
Wise elders say that we have only this generation
to come into a harmonious, inter-connected way of living,
or our human family will be extinct!
I invite you join me and
my colleague Brooke Medicine Eagle
for an amazing, complementary gathering of wisdom keepers
beginning November 16th:
RETURNING TO EARTH ~ BECOMING FULLY HUMAN
Moving Through Current Challenges into
Thriving, Sustainable, Respectful Life
focusing on empowering you with
real, workable, sustainable solutions
for our current personal and global challenges.
To register for this free summit, please follow this link.
Sample Talks and Workshops offered by Steven McFadden
The Call of the Land: Deep Agroecology ~
Our relationships with the earth, with our local environments, and with our food are being actively challenged. Agroecology and deep agroecology are intelligent, sophisticated, and effective ways to meet and to transcend those challenges, establishing a clean, healthy foundation on the earth for our food and for the next evolutionary step of humanity. We can respond wisely and decisively to the chaos in our climate and culture, for the present and for future. My talk on The Call of the Land offers facts, experiences, ideas, and ideals leading to the well-being and upliftment characteristic of deep agroecology.
Tales of the Whirling Rainbow ~
Gather round to hear true, dynamic tellings of some of the key multicultural, multifaith myths and mysteries of the Americas, and to consider how those legends may resound helpfully in real time. They are stories worth knowing.
The ominous reality of hate-mongering and cultural division are symptoms of a deeper crisis of meaning and purpose. Because these stories arise from the deepest roots of the Americas, the Tales of the Whirling Rainbow can be of high service as we pass through the present cultural and environmental tempest.
Odyssey of the 8th Fire ~
It is my honor to be able to sound a drum, to offer flowers, to take a place in a circle, and to relate the true, epic saga of a multicultural band of pilgrims who made a prophetic journey walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific under the dramatic sky sign of the Whirling Rainbow, and the sure guidance of traditional keepers and spiritual elders of North America. Through this saga, and interactive telling, we may engage the elders’ great and generous giveaway of understandings about our land, and our lives together upon the land.
Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms
– Meet Your Ambassadors to the Earth –
If you love clean, fresh, local food, then you will want to head to the Farmer’s Market on April 17, 2018 to Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms, an early evening educational get together. The public is cordially invited to join with some of Santa Fe’s pioneering community farmers and authors to sample, delicious, healthy local foods, and to explore visions of how Santa Fe can become more food secure and food healthy.
The first annual Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms event is set for Tuesday evening, April 17, from 5:30-7 PM at the Farmers Market on Paseo de Peralta. Donations to help defray costs are welcome.
Learn about what’s happening with local community farms, and engage with dynamic agrarian visions of what is possible for the Santa Fe community.
Sponsored by Beneficial Farms CSA, the early evening celebration will feature samples of local food, and several short presentations from local farmers and authors, including Thomas Swendson of Beneficial Farms, Mark Nelson of Synergia Farm, Steven McFadden (author of Farms of Tomorrow, and The Call of the Land), and also (other speakers ? This list is all male. We should invite a woman to speak. Who?). Tejinder Ciano of Reunity Resources will fill us in on the destiny of the historic Santa Fe Community Farm at San Ysidro Crossing.
You are cordially invited to join with your Santa Fe neighbors to Celebrate our community farms, and to explore the possibilities for supporting our local farms, increasing our local food security and food health, and helping to strengthen community.
Reiki Training – I’ve been practicing and teaching the art and discipline of Reiki hands-on complementary healing for almost 40 years. I offer Reiki training classes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Everyone can learn Reiki healing, and everyone is welcome. Certificates awarded. You must complete Reiki I before taking Reiki II. For more information or to register, click here.
Odyssey of the 8th Fire – June, 2015 marked the 20th anniversary of the first steps along the Odyssey of the 8th Fire. To celebrate it, journalist Steven McFadden will sound the drum, tell the tale, and show an 8th Fire film relating the fundamental wisdom teachings of North America.
This one-time evening event – Odyssey of the 8th Fire – is set for Thursday evening, June 25, 2015 , 7-9:30 PM at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, 6300 A St. Lincoln, Nebraska. The Odyssey is free, although the storyteller will “throw a blanket” to cover costs.
Storyteller McFadden will relate the true tale of a great prophetic pilgrimage from the Atlantic to the Pacific which began precisely 20 years ago — a pilgrimage which remains suspended in mystery. The journey began in the east at the Atlantic sea, then the pilgrims walked for eight months across the Heartland, fading at the Pacific’s Western Gateway.
In the unfolding of this true tale, learned elders of all nations make a great and generous giveaway of the teachings they carry for human beings.
If you’d like to sit in the circle and hear the story, you can join the Facebook events page for Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
Watch the trailer for the film at this link: http://imagicapictures.com/_movies/Trailer_8th_Fire.html
Millennial Agrarians Rise to Meet ‘Grim Vision’
An authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of what lies ahead: climate change will cause shortages and violence, provoking much of civilization to collapse.
This blunt warning is the heart of the 2009 State of the Future study from the UN’s Millennium Project. The report, which will be made public in August, is based on the input of 2,700 researchers, and backed by a range of organizations including UNESCO, the World Bank, and the US Army.
According to the report, “The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability.”
The immediate problems are rising food and energy prices, shortages of water and increasing migrations “due to political, environmental and economic conditions,” which could plunge half the world into social instability and violence.
The report suggests the threats could also engender wise and healthy responses. “The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood…Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies…and to put the world on course for a better future.”
What is good and healthy and helpful?
Leon Secatero
Reading the stark forecasts from this report put me in mind – thankfully — of someone I knew and admired, the late Leon Secatero of the Canoncito Band of Navajo, To’Hajiilee, New Mexico. Whenever Leon would hear pronouncements of inevitable doom, he would acknowledge the potential, then respond calmly.
In one of our conversations back in 2005, Grandfather Leon spoke with me about the future. “The journey we are beginning now is for the next 500 years. What will be the sacred path that people will walk over the next 500 years? Even in the midst of all the changes taking place and all the things falling apart, we are building that foundation now. That’s something important for us to remember and to focus on. If we don’t do it, no one else will.
“All anyone needs to do is look around,” Leon said. “We have been destroying nature systematically for many decades. Now nature is destroying us with winds and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes. All that was known a long time ago. The elders have been telling us for years that this would come. Now it’s here and it’s hurting us.
“We need to take a close look at this and then really come to terms with ourselves,” Leon said. “To move ahead into the next 500 years we must leave some things behind or they will contaminate or even eliminate the future. We cannot go forward if we keep destroying the earth. But we must also ask, what is good and healthy and helpful? Those good things can be part of our foundation, part of our pathway into the next 500 years…”
There is a growing cohort of people who are actively asking these questions, and responding creatively. I have come to think of them as the Millennial Agrarians, and they got a nod of acknowledgement this week from USA Today.
In the story, reporter Elizabeth Weise wrote “Agriculture specialists say there is a burgeoning movement in which young people — most of whom come from cities and suburbs — are taking up what may be the world’s oldest profession: organic farming.
“The wave of young farmers on tiny farms is too new and too small to have turned up significantly in USDA statistics, but people in the farming world acknowledge there’s something afoot.
“For these new farmers, going back to the land isn’t a rejection of conventional society, but an embrace of growing crops and raising animals for market as an honorable, important career choice.”
In the face of the grim vision described by the researchers involved with the State of the Future report, these Millennial Agrarians are an embodiment of hope. We are going to need millions more people – perhaps as many as 80 to 100 million more – to face what is happening in our world, and to respond intelligently to the call of the land.
(For more on this theme, including many more creative responses, see my blog at The Call of the Land.).
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