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“Hard-hitting. Powerful. A step further.” – A review of Deep Agroecology

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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.

Deep Agroecology

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What’s your moral obligation in response to our climate emergency?

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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
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Now complete – Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future

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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

Deep AgroecologyLINCOLN, 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.

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Let us now praise the common sense of agroecology

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The precautionary principle is a simple, common-sense ethical guideline that is a core part of ecology and agroecology. It’s so fundamental to sustainability, and so uncommon in our government today, that it’s worth reaffirming.

The precautionary principle holds that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment that sustains our life, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those promoting the product or the action…

…We’d be wise to bypass government failure to act, and do the uncommon thing, as the late humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) put it: act with common sense. Act personally, swiftly, and strategically. There are a 1,001 things individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities can do. Get your search engine going, and then act. The vast archives of Mother Earth News, and the Pathways resource page open up some of the possibilities…

The rest of my blog post is available on

Note: My new book is set for publication November 1, 2019

Farms, Food and Our Future

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Sleepwalking into Catastrophe, or Awakening via Agroecology

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In early July, just as the United Nations (UN) was releasing stun-level, scientific reports about climate changes, food disruptions, and accelerated extinctions, meteorologists reported that the preceding month, June 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. They also reported that for the first time ever in recorded history temperatures in Anchorage, Alaska soared into the 90s, while rising up to 115 degrees F in Paris, France.

As baldly stated in one of the UN reports from the Human Rights Office, if we maintain our economic and agricultural course we are headed for deeper disaster. Going forward on a status quo pathway will have a mighty impact not just on some remote places featured on TV news, but on our backyards, pantries, refrigerators, supermarkets, and our overall way of life. We are, as the report put it, “sleepwalking into catastrophe.”

Note well these parts of the report: Climate change also threatens basic human rights, and democracy itself. Within the next 10 years or so, the report states, climate change will cast tens of millions more human beings into poverty, hunger, and displacement from their homelands…

…Agroecology: A Righteous Response

Although mass media paid minimal attention, on July 5, 2019 The UN’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) released a notable report, Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition.

The CFS report offers detail on the global food system, which they regard as perched precariously at a crossroads. The report concludes that the food system needs a profound transformation at all levels, including the local level. We face complex, “multidimensional challenges…

…In a paper published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community, Professor William E. Rees writes: “Based on current trends, the most food-secure populations by the second half of the 21st century will be those populations that have deliberately chosen and planned to re-localize as much of their own food systems as possible.”

My complete blog post is on

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Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future ~ now available for pre-orders

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Deep Agroecology now available for pre-order
Publication date August 1, 2019

Cover by Angela Werneke, River Light Media.

As of today – Earth Day 2019 – my new book Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future is available for pre-order.

According with the spirit of Earth Day, we are publishing Deep Agroecology in service to the perennial ideals of healthy, and fulfilled lives for one and all on our home planet, Earth.

A quarter of a century ago, I had the privilege of serving as National Coordinator for Earth Day USA. I partnered with the Seventh Generation Fund to help bring the Council Circles project to hundreds of North American communities. This year I’m happy to mark the day with  announcement of a book that once again brings a council circle of wise voices together to offer native and agrarian wisdom ways forward for human beings and for our earth.

The way we tend the land that produces our food, and the way we eat, are the key factors in our physical, moral, and spiritual survival and development in this tumultuous era.

Elizabeth Wolf, my wife and partner, has played an indispensable role in bringing this book to life in a powerful and elegant way. I’ve dedicated the work to her, with love and appreciation.

EBOOK COPY – You may pre-order the eBook version of Deep Agroecology now at this link.  Please note that the actual publication and shipping date is August 1, 2019. 

SIGNED COPY – August 1 is also the publication date for the print edition. If you’d like to pre-order a copy of the print edition of Deep Agroecology personally inscribed to you by the author, please click on the Buy Now link below, which will take you to PayPal. The cost of the signed print book is $25 plus tax, inclusive of handling and shipping.

DEEP AGROECOLOGY
The ways we farm and the ways we eat
will determine the destiny of life on earth.
Agroecology is an ecological approach to growing food and fiber that views farms and orchards as ecosystems. Internationally, agroecology is increasingly recognized as an approach capable of meeting productivity goals while replenishing the soil, sequestering climate destabilizing CO2, and striving toward justice for all the human beings and animals in the food system.

Deep agroecology arises from recognition that the way we farm will determine the destiny of life on the earth. As a philosophy and as an approach, deep agroecology weaves the spiritual realities of planet earth into direct and balanced relationship with the physical realities. Deep agroecology is a natural, logical and necessary next evolutionary step, graced with an array of wholesome, leading-edge principles and practices.

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Awakening to Agroecology

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At first the word agroecology hits the human ear with the dull thud of a complex, intellectual abstraction. But in truth it’s a term describing an approach to farms, food, and life that is real, urgent, positive, earth-based, science-informed, and altogether of the heart. We need agroecology now, and we need it on neighborhood, heartland, and planetary scales.

In the universe of ideals for farms and food, agroecology has in recent decades captured international attention. Now it’s becoming better appreciated in North America. Now it stands out as a range of essential, broad, and wise pathways forward for humanity…

The rest of my blog post is available at Mother Earth News.

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Revolution Underway for Organic Farms and Food

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“The beginning of wisdom
is to call things by their right names.”
– Confucius

Thanks to the convenience of the Internet, I got to watch Dave Chapman’s riveting on organic farms and food. He spoke on the topic with restrained passion earlier this month at a symposium held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. A few days later sitting at my computer in New Mexico, I heard his message loud and clear. It matched what I know from my own observations, and he added depth of understanding: there is revolution afoot in the realm of organic farms and food.

The foods being labeled and sold as organic in America are under enormous pressure in the marketplace. Chapman, associate director of The Real Organic Project (ROP), said that people have discovered that there can be a lot of money in organics. By now it’s a $50 billion industry. “We are cursed by our own success,” Chapman commented. “The money is like blood in the water.”

…The rest of my blog post is freely available at

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Journal offers substantive review of “Awakening Community Intelligence: CSA Farms as 21st Century Cornerstones”

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With all that’s happening in the world in general, and to our farms and food in particular, I was happy to read this positive, edifying review of one of my books on the subject of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The book is titled Awakening Community Intelligence: CSA Farms as 21st Century Cornerstones.

I wrote this slender volume – a vision and a call to action – in 2015, immediately after my twin brother Michael died. I felt his spirit urging me to direct in a constructive way the maelstrom of feelings that swarmed me within and without. Awakening Community Intelligence is the result.

The substantive review appears in the current edition of the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.

Here’s the review’s first paragraph: “In the slender volume Awakening Community Intelligence, journalist and long-time community supported agriculture (CSA) advocate Steven McFadden argues for the exponential expansion of CSAs. In the face of profound, disruptive challenges in the 21st century—climate change, resource depletion, geopolitical instability—McFadden believes CSAs have the potential to become “community cornerstones” that provide “key points of stability and orientation.” In ten very short chapters, McFadden unfolds his vision of this potential and issues a call to action…”

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