My new book Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future is available globally through amazon.com
Engage the heart of the earth with deep agroecology
We will define our destiny by the ways we farm, and the ways we eat.
Back in the 1980s, perhaps earlier, Trauger Groh articulated that foundational idea. An agrarian adept and a CSA farm pioneer, Trauger (1932-2016) was my coauthor for both Farms of Tomorrow, and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited. His ideas made an enduring impression on me, and many others.
I felt then and I feel today that the point is irrefutable. Farms and food are the foundation of our corrupted present. They also embody the practical promise of a wholly balanced and healthy destiny on earth for human beings, animals, and plants.
Because we are at a critical stage of our group life on Earth, I wanted to emphasize this foundational idea again. That’s one key reason that motivated me to write another book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future.
After over 40 years of engagement with farms, food, and the escalating climate crisis, I regard agroecology as our best set of tools for tending land and animals, for feeding ourselves wisely, and for making an intelligent, strategic effort to stabilize the deteriorating environment…
The rest of my blog is live now at Mother Earth News.
Harken to the Wisdom Ways of Agroecology
Harken – pay heed to the wisdom ways of agroecology and to our native roots. That’s my advice as climate and geopolitical whirlwinds intensify. Those wisdom ways mark the path to a sane and healthy future for us all.
Last year the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published a kick-in-the-gut report about the surging wave of extinction upon our local life-support system, Planet Earth.
Their report—based on the work of 450 researchers from around the world and 15,000 scientific and government reports—warned of immediate, grave danger. “The overwhelming evidence…from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture.”
The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating rapidly. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
…The late Algonquin elder Grandfather William Commanda was among the many native elders offering explicit, and enduring guidance on how to reckon with this…
The rest of this blog post is available via this link at Mother Earth News.
Image by FlashAlexander, Pixabay.
The Mandatory Morphing of America’s Family Farms
The United Nations has declared the years 2019-2028 to be the “Decade of Family Farming.” With this declaration the UN intends to create opportunities for people to transform existing food systems around the world so they are clean, sustainable, and just both economically and socially.
In this manner the UN hopes our farms can be key actors in helping the world achieve the urgent markers of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Necessary goals, no debate about that. But at the end of the very first year of the special UN Decade (2019), here in America our family farms are swiftly swirling down the drain. It’s an economic, climate, environmental, and social catastrophe fast surpassing the tribulations of the 1980s farm crisis.
This time, for America and for the world, the stakes are heaps higher…
Reality, not ideology, makes morphing of the family farm mandatory….
The rest of my blog post is at
“Hard-hitting. Powerful. A step further.” – A review of Deep Agroecology
Midwest Book Review has published a review of my new book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future. Here are some snippets, and a link to the full review written by senior reviewer Diane C. Donovan.
“…deep agroecology is more than the promotion of another growing system. It represents a fundamental change in the perceptions of humans about the choices they make in planting, harvesting, and eating food, incorporating an ecological perspective that has its foundations in the long history of agrarian idealism…
“Deep Agroecology goes beyond farming systems to probe the philosophical, spiritual, and moral roots of human relationships with the land.
“The result is a hard-hitting, powerful survey that takes the food system ideal a step further by interrelating it to pursuits of justice, freedom, and health for the entire planet…”
The complete review is here.
What’s your moral obligation in response to our climate emergency?
Image courtesy of Extinction Rebellion
According to the Alliance of World Scientists, as professionals they have a moral obligation to warn humanity about what they see evidenced. On November 5, 2019, over 11,000 of the group’s allied scientists warned us all again, this time via a formal statement in the journal BioScience: “Planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”
Now that the scientists have once again fulfilled their obligation to warn of danger, it’s time for each of us to meet our moral obligation. What might that be? From my perspective, each of us has a responsibility to carefully consider the scientists’ warnings, and then to respond with wise action…
- The rest of my blog post is at
Agroecology is a dynamic response to climate change
Agroecology is a dynamic concept that has gained global prominence in scientific, agricultural, and political discourse. But not so much so far in the USA. More widespread knowledge is essential. Time to make that happen.
My new book — Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future — offers an introduction to the subject of agroecology, and then takes this critical subject wider and deeper.
Go agroecological or go extinct
… Based on the multitude of hard realities engendered by corporate chemical agriculture, it’s time to uproot the “get big or get out” farm slogans of Earl Butz and Sonny Perdue, and to supplant those damning words with something both wise and realistic: “Go agroecological or go extinct” …
The rest of my latest blog post is now live on
Now complete – Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future
After many long seasons of work, I’m pleased to announce that my new book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future, is now complete and on sale.
Among the many people deserving thanks and appreciation for helping to bring this book to life (in both print and ebook editions), my wife Liz Wolf stands front and center. She is the publisher, under the umbrella of Light and Sound Press, LLC. Thank you wholeheartedly, Liz, for your 1,001 deeds of support, encouragement, artistic insight, and professional advice.
For the record, here is the text of the press release we are sending out:
Nebraska Author’s New Book on Ecological Farming
Launches November 1 at The Hub Cafe in Lincoln
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA—Inspired by a casual conversation with a UNL professor of agronomy and agroecology in 2012, independent journalist Steven McFadden penned the new title Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future. The book is now available on Amazon in print and ebook editions.
A launch party will be held on the book’s official publication date, Friday, November 1, 2019, at The Hub Cafe, 250 N. 21st Street, in Lincoln. The author will offer remarks on the subject of deep agroecology and read from the book. The free event will feature complimentary appetizers and a cash bar.
According to McFadden, he wrote Deep Agroecology to explain to a general audience what agroecology is and to expand the concept to include subtle, spiritual dimensions.
The Hub Cafe – community & sustainability.
“Farms are the foundation of our civilization, and that foundation is undergoing massive upheaval,” the author explains. “We must build a new agrarian foundation that can support in a healthy, spiritually intelligent way the high-tech, digital waves of technology and culture sweeping so powerfully around the world.”
Author and journalist Steven McFadden has been writing about the earth, farms, and food for decades. He blogs for Mother Earth News and at deepagroecology.net.
With Trauger Groh he is co-author of the first two books on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): Farms of Tomorrow: Community Supported Farms, Farm Supported Communities (1990) and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited (1998). He is also the author of The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century and Awakening Community Intelligence: CSA Farms as 21st Century Cornerstones. In 2008 McFadden authored a contemporary, epic, nonfiction saga of North America that is freely available online: Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
Engaging the untraveled world
This quote from Homer’s Odyssey felt to me to be the right epigram for the conclusion of my freely available, epic, nonfiction saga: Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
