Mythic Teachings of Our Land: New ebook tells the Legend of the Rainbow Warriors

Here is one way of expressing America’s ancient teachings in a soundbite suitable for the digital age: ‘There will come a time when the Earth grows sick. When it does a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the world who believe in peaceful deeds and not words. They will work to heal the land…they will be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow.’

Over the centuries many of the elders of the Americas have dreamed that people of all colors and faiths would come together on the land and heal the earth.

In contemplating these legends while working in the agrarian realm, I’ve always felt that these mythic notions are in many ways what the good-food, community-food movement is about. It’s not just providing clean food so people might have strong bodies and minds, but also about right relations, and about directly involving people in healing the earth — or otherwise inspiring them to empower ambassadors (farmers and gardeners) to touch and heal the earth on their behalf.

In the way I have learned from the elders, we do not speak of these stories as prophecies, but rather we refer to them as understandings or teachings. The stories originate from many sources, arising from a great number visionary elders of the Americas, figures such as Black Elk, Weetucks, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Quetzalcoatl, Crazy Horse, White Shell Woman, and Eyes of Fire. The understandings have been passed on through the generations to the present with meticulous care, and they continue to inspire hope, vision, and positive action among the people.

Thus, it seemed to me auspicious when earlier this week The Harlem Writers Guild announced the release of a new ebook version of one of my early works that weaves together a great many of these teachings, Legend of the Rainbow Warriors.

Legend of the Rainbow Warriors is a true, carefully researched nonfiction account of these key pluralistic myths and mysteries of the Americas. As critics have noted it’s also an electrifying exploration of how those archetypal teachings are resounding through real time upon the land as we approach the signal date of December 21, 2012.

I’m pleased to add my words in echo to the publisher’s announcement: Legend of the Rainbow Warriors is now available for immediate download in an array of ebook formats — and print editions — from either  iUniverse.com  or Amazon.com

BOOK REVIEWS
“I urge everyone…to read this small yet exceptionally powerful book.” – Odyssey Magazine

“This is one of those books…once you’ve read it you will wonder what you had been thinking of the world before that time. It is informative, inspirational, wise and genuinely important.” – One Heart

“…McFadden offers insight and hope. Further, he speaks to the power of individuals to address the overwhelming and complex problems facing us today—locally as well as globally.” - Headline Muse

“An extraordinary book. We recommend that it be read by all college students and their professors who are concerned about future life on earth. – Cynthia Knuth, FONA

“…you will want to reread it often and keep it handy for reference… Although the prophecies were made many years ago, they ring true for those who are living in today’s world.” - Amazon customer

Cornucopia Condemns Corruption: Accuses USDA of Complicity in ‘Organic Watergate’ Scandal

The Cornucopia Institute, a watchdog organization safeguarding organic farms and food, has charged that there is a conspiracy between corporate agribusiness interests and the USDA that is undermining the integrity of US-certified organic farms and food.

Since 1990 when the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) was established, the US government has for all intents and purposes owned the word organic. With possession of that word, the government also laid claim to the trust of citizens who want food free of industrial chemicals and genetic modification. That trust has been steadily eroded, the Institute alleges, as multinational agribusiness corporations have climbed into bed with the NOSB.

In a 72-page white paper, Organic Watergate, Cornucopia details violations of federal law and a pattern of callous disregard for congressional intent, that has created a climate of regulatory abuse.

Cornucopia’s white paper charges that the NOSB has been stacked with agribusiness operatives. This stacking is a steadily complicating and corrupting influence that violates the spirit of the organic movement and undermines the integrity of the organic standard.

The report underscores the need for people to step forward and restore the integrity of the organic label so that it will mean something sure, steady, clean and strengthening. The report also plants relevant seeds of doubt in the minds of consumers, and may motivate more households to secure food directly from local producers via CSAs and farmers markets and other emerging models.

Cornucopia’s challenge of NOSB ethics and standards will reach a cresendo this week (May 22-25, 2012) at the meeting of the NOSB  in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

FULL DISCOLOSURE: My wife Elizabeth Wolf is an employee of The Cornucopia Institute.

Fate of the People Linked to Fate of the Land

“There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people.”

Thus spoke renowned essayist, poet and farmer Wendell Berry as on April 23 he delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Where he lives in Kentucky, Berry said, it has become impossible to close one’s eyes to the consequences of systematic land abuse, because the impacts of mountaintop-removal coal mining are everywhere felt and seen.

“Corn and bean monocultures destroy the land more slowly,” he added, “but down the way, down the line, the destruction will be as complete.”

“There is a growing movement among people who do not ignore those problems, whose work is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food,” an enterprise Berry described as “both attractive and necessary.”

The movement to create and support farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture farms, and other local food economies, Berry said, is driven by “ordinary people who have seen what needed to be done and have started doing it.”

The full text of Berry’s lecture is here. And an online video record of the talk is here.

The Howl of the Land

Listening by Amy Lehr Miller

The land is well beyond calling. It’s howling. Howling so loud it cannot be ignored. Around the world.

This ear-ringing reality came to the forefront today on the pages of The New York Times in a story headlined, “When the ground goes bump in the night.”

The story reports on events taking place in Clintonville, Wisconsin. “Police here have received hundreds of calls this week from citizens awakened by noises that they said seem to be coming from under the earth.

“At times,” the Times reported, the nocturnal noise is “like someone banging on the pipes in the basement, while at other times it was so loud that windows rattled and the ground jolted.”

“There’s something radically wrong with this earth,” Verda Shultz, 47, told the Times.

The unexplained noise in Wisconsin is just one of many such occurrences in recent news. The Huffington Post published a report on several other notable cases from around the world. In that report speculation on the cause of the noise ranged from UFOs to tectonic earth shifts to UFOs, to hoaxes, to widespread industrial-scale  hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which the US Geological Survey has confirmed absolutely causes earthquakes, to possibly the USA’s ongoing, provocatively pulsating HAARP project as it is situated in the north direction. Across the Internet, a  swelling mass of webpages and YouTube videos echo the disturbing sounds that are being heard around the globe.

As I hear the noise — whether it originates from the distress in the earth or from the distress in human souls operating occult technology —  the call of the land has attained an extreme level. It’s howling. The land — our earth — requires our intelligent, respectful, heartfelt and ongoing responses.

Renowned Mayan elder and Daykeeper Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez long ago shared his view concerning foundational native understandings for calendar year 2012 and the general tenor of our era: “Big changes are coming in this frame of time. That’s why it’s important to talk now and tell people to respect Mother Earth, and to stop destroying the water, air, and mountains…”

Video Update on Lakota Blockade of Keystone XL

Members of the Lakota Oyate state their case for blockading the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in this powerful video clip from Native Impact, March 5, 2012. A 92-year old Native Grandmother from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota speaks for the land from her heart.

Lakota Draw a Line on the Land: Try to Block Keystone Pipeline Trucks

A series of events breaking along the border of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota may well develop into a major news story with resonant consequences for the law, for the environment, for treaty rights, and for the land.

Lakota people attempt to block trucks carrying equipment for the Keystone XL Pipeline tar sands project. Photo by Carlin Red Blanket, Sr.

As of Monday, March 5, 2012 the Lakota Oyate* have taken a stand on their Reservation border, drawing a line in an attempt to block the passage of trucks carrying equipment for the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

KILI Radio 90.1 on the reservation has broadcast an Action Alert, calling all Lakota men “to come stand in defense of their treaty-bound reservation land.”

According to KILI, the Pipeline trucks are refusing to turn around claiming they have corporate rights that supercede any other laws

The vast earth-changing Keystone XL pipeline project — ripping up the tar sands of the Northlands and then pumping the toxic goo thousands of miles over fertile but fragile land to the Gulf of Mexico — was supposed to be on hold. But TransCanada, the foreign-owned corporation, continues aggressively to shove, spurt and snake parts of the pipeline forward.

This developing confrontation between Native peoples – who from their traditions understand that they bear responsibilities as keepers of the earth — and the huge multinational corporate XL Pipeline complex, could become an international focal point.

Updates from the scene as of Tuesday report that the trucks are being allowed to pass, and that Lakota people were arrested late Monday as they attempted to halt the trucks from entering their sovereign territory.

Meanwhile, troubles on the South edge of the Pine Ridge Reservation (the border between South Dakota and Nebraska) came into a strange, fuzzy focus in today’s edition of The New York Times. The Times published a disturbing story about the alcohol-induced heartache and misery anchored in Whiteclay, Nebraska, a notorious town squatting on the south border of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

* Notes on Oyate from Wikipedia: In January 2008, the Lakota Freedom Delegation split into two groups. One group was led by Canupa Gluha Mani (Duane Martin Sr.). He is a leader of Cante Tenza, the traditional Strongheart Warrior Society, that has included leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. This group is called Lakota Oyate. The other group is called the “Republic of Lakotah” and is led by Russell Means. In December 2008, Lakota Oyate received the support and standing of the traditional treaty council of the Oglala Tiospayes.

“The Limits to Growth” – 40 Years Later

“Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.”  - Pythagoras

On March 1, 2012 The Club of Rome and the Smithsonian Institution are hosting a symposium to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launching of the book, The Limits to Growth. The symposium on this landmark work and its implications for today will be globally webcast for free starting at 9 am EST.

When The Limits to Growth was published in 1972, it had a seminal impact on me and thousands of others who responded to its message — the call of the land articulated in stark scientific terms — with healthy, positive agrarian initiatives. Collectively, those initiatives helped lay the groundwork for the good food movement of today.

The Limits to Growth was selected as one of the most influential environmental books of the 20th century, and it sold over 12 million copies in 37 languages. It was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits.

Forty years later, the planet continues to face the economic, social, and environmental challenges outlined in the book, and environmental health and stability continue to deteriorate.

One of the original co-authors, Dennis Meadows will give the first presentation at the seminar,”It Is Too Late for Sustainable Development.” His formal remarks will describe how his understanding about the interaction of limits with physical growth on the planet has changed over the past 40 years, and also justify his proposal that humanity’s focus should now be more on resilience than on sustainability.

The symposium will also include original coauthor Jørgen Randers, Neva Goodwin, and Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.

Left Behind: Unraptured by the Transgenic Tsunami

When Stewart Brand spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in mid-January, he broadcast a vision of a Genetically Modified (GM) future toward which he felt we should all be charging with bright-eyed enthusiasm. “Get out there where it’s getting weird,” he exhorted, “and get weird with it.”

As I sat and listened to Brand talk of the future, I was carried in reverie not forward but backward to 1964. That’s the year my mom took my sister, my brothers and me to the New York City World’s Fair where we made a pilgrimage through the most celebrated exhibit of all, Futurama. Sponsored by another GM (General Motors), the exhibit offered a glimpse into what life would be like in the future — as GM engineers wanted to conceive of it. Of course, the future materialized its own way, not in accordance with immaculately engineered visions.

Likewise, Stewart Brand’s exhilarating vision of a corporately-owned, genetically-modified World of Tomorrow — a world subsisting on a diet of what he calls ‘Green Ag BioTech’ — seems to me unlikely and ill advised.

Stewart Brand

Founder of the famously countercultural Whole Earth Catalog back in 1968, Brand now styles himself as an “ecopragmatist.” He said that three global dynamics – climate change, urbanization and biotechnology – are causing people like himself to reverse long-held opinions and to embrace nuclear power and genetically modified food.

Brand is vivid and likeable on the stage, and his talk was expansive and entertaining. Because he is such a prominent convert to biotech, his philosophical reincarnation as an ecopragmatist advocate for nuclear power and GMO food might well have a measure of influence. But not with me.

His talk left me unconvinced and unraptured by the whole vast global laboratory experiment on nature and our food that is currently being executed with slam-bam systemic speed. I just don’t hear the call of the land as a plea for more industrially created, corporately owned genes and the petrochemicals necessary to sustain them. What I hear instead is a full-throated call for natural respect. Same as it ever was.

Special Pleading

Brand told the story of how on his way to Nebraska to speak he had flown over the Sierras. While in the air he saw that there was no snow pack at all on the mountains this year. This kind of ominous drought, he said, has not occurred since the 1880s. Climate change is catastrophically real, he then affirmed, saying it was a central motivating force for the work he does in the world.

In the context of our unfolding climate calamity, Brand asked rhetorically, “What is moral and ethical?” He answered his own question in the same breath, saying that nuclear power, genetically modified plants and animals, and geo-engineering are all essential ways to the future, and that we — corporations, universities, governments and amateurs — ought to go full steam ahead into a more fully nuclear-powered, genetically modified world.

Brand said that at this point in history environmentalists have only hand wringing to contribute to the future. He derided “enviros,” saying they are people caught up in a web of suspicions and superstitions. They are just “sad reactionaries,” he lamented.

A man of signal accomplishments, Brand at one point shifted and began declaiming, aflame with the scripture of material technology, his rap devolving to include a disheartening damnation of unbelievers. In the years to come, Brand warned from his perch on stage, the leading edge of biotech will not be here in America but rather far afield in China, Africa and the Third World. Those places lack opposition. But in places where there is opposition, he warned, organic and sustainable farmers and supporters will be “left behind.” Organic farming will be more expensive and will yield food with less nutritional value than patented transgenic crops. Organics will become irrelevant.

Brand tossed off several ad hominem slams to imply that opposition to a GM future arises not from authentic, evidence- and ethics-based concerns, but rather from irrational fear. In that sense his presentation was a special pleading: a form of argumentation where a person excludes facts or details that would upend the case they are attempting to make. Enraptured with his subject, Brand stuck to sweeping generalizations, and neither acknowledged nor refuted the substantial body of legitimate concerns about GM corporate industrial farms and food. This struck me as a disservice to the debate.

Likewise, Brand said nothing about the ramifications of corporate ownership and monopoly over various life forms. He said nothing about informed choice or human free will, absolutely massive aspects of the GM miasma. He said nothing about the mounting studies and literature reviews documenting concern about the impact of GMOs on human health and the natural world over time. He said nothing of the Precautionary Principle. And he said not a word about the suicides in India of hundreds of thousands of farmers — the largest wave of suicides in human history — in consequence of the debt and suffering incurred by becoming involved with corporate biotech.

These matters – scientific concerns about GMOs, the free will of human beings, and a saddening, stupefying wave of suicides — must be addressed in any discussion of corporate industrial agriculture and GM seeds and food. To ignore them, or to gloss them over, creates a dangerous distortion of reality.

Sans Spectrum

At one point Brand showed a PowerPoint slide with a double-headed arrow to illustrate the spectrum of opinion on climate change: from total denial to full acceptance. But he made no allowance for a justifiable spectrum of opinion on GM food. In his view, at least as I heard him express it, there are only two stances: sanguine acceptance of corporate genetic manipulation of the food chain, or pitiful irrational fear of the future.

There are millions of people who, for sound ethical and scientific reasons, oppose GM farms and food. And there is a mounting library of research that should give any thoughtful person pause.

The health consequences of eating genetically modified organisms are still largely unknown. GMOs just have not been proven to be safe over the long term. Increasingly, studies are suggesting that grave health problems — for plants, animals and humans — may well be caused by GMOs. We’re all still guinea pigs. Make no mistake: the jury is still out.

Consider. Nearly 50 countries — including Brazil, China, South Korea and the European Union—already ban many genetically engineered foods altogether. They also generally require labeling of GMO products so their people will know what they are eating.

As expressed by UC Berkeley professor of microbial ecology, Ignacio Chapela, “…the fundamental truth stands that over the decades no real benefit has offset the proven harm caused by GMOs.”

Most Americans, however, are every day ingesting plate loads of lab-created DNA while having absolutely no idea about what they are doing, and no choice in the matter. There are no labels. Our free will has been rendered inconsequential, even though surveys show overwhelmingly (93%) that Americans do want labels. More than half a million people have already signed a petition to the FDA asking for the basic information and protection of labels.

For these and other reasons I have written about, I am altogether at peace with the idea of being left behind by the corporate GM onslaught. I remain unraptured. I’ll take my stand for the future on clean, organic land and food. Same as it ever was.

A Titanic Transgenic Courtroom Clash

The debate about GM food will amp up considerably this year, starting on January 31. That’s the day that the courts will hold a preliminary hearing on the lawsuit the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA), and others have brought against Monsanto. The hearing will determine whether this landmark case goes forward.

Along with 83 family farmers and organic ag groups — a group totaling over 300,000 members — OSGTA is challenging Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seed.  The plaintiffs are carrying a banner in a crucial courtroom stance for everyone concerned about GM transgenic food.

The 300,000 member plaintiff group will set their case out in opening remarks at the hearing: “Society stands on the precipice of forever being bound to transgenic agriculture and transgenic food. Coexistence between transgenic seed and organic seed is impossible because transgenic seed contaminates and eventually overcomes organic seed.”

The Plaintiffs say they are seeking relief from the court because organic, biodynamic, and other farmers need legal protection against contamination by Monsanto’s transgenic crops. They will present evidence to show transgenic food does not serve the public interest, nutritionally, environmentally, agronomically, or genetically.

This case is of resounding significance not just for farmers but also for consumers. There are far-reaching potential health consequences of transgenic food, particularly for future generations of plants, animals, and people. All this and more will arise for courtroom debate.

Futurama - GM at the 1964 World's Fair

Unraveling the CSA Number Conundrum

In the beginning it was easy to count. The year was 1986, and there were only two Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives in the USA: Indian Line Farm in western Massachusetts, and the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in southern New Hampshire. But not long after that, as the CSA concept spread across America and around the world, the number of farms became a bit of an enigma.

No one was ever quite sure how many CSAs there were. The federal government didn’t track the number; at the same time, for a variety of reasons, many CSAs wanted little to do with government or larger systems.

Now however, thanks to several sources, it’s possible to gain a fair idea. Estimating conservatively, there are currently over 6,000 CSAs in the US, possibly as many as 6,500. Meanwhile, the trend of growth continues onward and upward.

I arrived at this estimate after contacts with a range of knowledgeable sources, including Erin Barnett of LocalHarvest, CSA author Elizabeth Henderson, Professor Ryan Galt at UC-Davis, Jill Auburn, Senior Advisor for the USDA’s Ag Systems, and others. No one specifically cited the 6-6,500 number — but after considering all the expert input alongside my own observations, it’s a number that seems about right.

CSA farms and the networks they establish are in so many ways a positive, creative response to the swift and fundamental changes taking place in the world, in our food, and in the way the land is held and treated. CSAs are becoming a significant alternative to the industrial agrifood system. For many reasons, their steady proliferation over the last 26 years is noteworthy.

Alternative Visions

Back in 2006 I had an opportunity to speak at the Kettunen Center in Michigan at a conference marking the first 20 years of CSA in the US. As part of the talk I offered alternative visions of the next 20 years.

On the hopeful side it was possible to envision CSAs prospering in virtually every town and city: providing people with clean food, enabling dignified work for growers, building healthy community relationships, and establishing oases of environmental health.

On the shadow side it was possible to envision a totalitarian ordering and tightening coming about in all sorts of systems. Clean food and direct farmer-household connections might well be encumbered with harsh, unreasonable rules, requirements and regulations, and thereby quietly, steadily marginalized. I could picture a time when industrial processed food was the only “officially safe and allowable” option, and the good food movement had been demonized, strangled and driven underground.

Back in 2006, even I had to wonder whether I wasn’t stretching my nightmare vision a bit too far into the realm of paranoid hyperbole. But now in 2012, in the light of ongoing trends and events, it no longer seems so far-fetched.

Within this context, one of the many intriguing aspects of CSA came home to me again when I reflected on a passage from Chapter 13 of Michael Pollan’s, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He notes therein that the Soviet state foundered on the issue of food. The government sacrificed millions of small farms and farmers to the dream of a vast system of collectivized industrial agriculture. But the state’s imperious industrial ag plans soured and foundered.

“By the time of its collapse,” Pollan wrote, “more than half of the food consumed in the Soviet Union was being produced by small farmers and home gardeners operating without official sanction, on private plots…”

He goes on to report what he heard while interviewing American farmer George Naylor: “…during our conversations about industrial agriculture, he [Naylor] likened the rise of alternative food chains in America to ‘the last days of Soviet agriculture.’ The centralized food system wasn’t serving the people’s needs, so they went around it. The rise of farmer’s markets and CSA is sending the same signal today.”

CSA Waves

An estimated 60 CSAs had come into being in the USA by 1990. That’s the year the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association (BDA) published the first book on the subject, Farms of Tomorrow: Community Supported Farms, Farm Supported Communities by Trauger Groh and me. The activity of the BDA, the book, and the advocacy of Robyn Van En, helped spur growth through the 1990s so that by the year 2000 the number of CSA in the US was perhaps 1,000.

In the latter part of the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, the impetus from the developing local food movement and from economic uncertainties helped grow the number of CSAs. Two other factors played an important role: the publication of Sharing the Harvest in 1998, and the establishment of LocalHarvest.com, a website hub for local food.

Sharing the Harvest: A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture by Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En brought the story of CSA to a diverse audience, and inspired many to take a step in a new direction economically, environmentally, and socially. The book was widely acclaimed and eventually translated into several languages, including Japanese and Chinese. For an increasing number of households, CSA was being recognized as an effective response to the globalization of the food supply.

Shortly thereafter the website LocalHarvest went online in 2000 and became a key resource for the buy local movement. The website is a searchable directory of CSAs, farmers markets, and other local food sources.

Eventually, in 2007 the federal government took a crack at a national count of CSAs through a question on the Agricultural Census. They came up with the number of 12,549. That stunned most observers. It was more than three times greater than anyone had imagined.

Ryan Galt, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Agricultural Sustainability and Society at UC-Davis, was among those surprised by the USDA estimate. He noted a wide discrepancy between CSA counts by LocalHarvest, the internet hub with the most comprehensive CSA listing (2,932 at the time) and the ag census number (12,549). He set out to study the matter using a critical cartography/GIS approach and multiple CSA data sets.

His research in this and related matters led to a couple of well researched and highly informative papers on CSA. Galt observed that significant overcounting of CSAs by the 2007 ag census likely occurred because of ambiguity in the relevant question. The ag census, as read by many, seemed to be asking how many farms are, to one extent or another, involved with CSA, rather than how many farms are in fact actual CSAs.

After applying his analytical tools, Galt arrived at an estimate of 3,637 CSAs nationally for the year 2009. While he reckoned that this was a more reliable estimate than the census data, he noted that his number was based on extrapolating from California to the nation. This could be problematic, he cautions readers, because of differences in land rent, structure, political orientations, and other factors.

By now, of course it’s 2012, not 2009. By all accounts, CSA has continued to proliferate. The growth has been spurred by a deepening crisis of confidence in Big Ag, Big Food and Big Chem, by a sharper sense of economic and environmental uncertainty, and as always by ideals, including a deeply rooted desire to eat clean and healthy, and to do something positive for the earth.

According to director Erin Barnett, as of January 2012 LocalHarvest had 4,571 active CSAs listed in their directory. With ten years experience observing the scene, she estimates that the LocalHarvest listings include about 65-70% of all the CSAs in the US. She and her colleagues also feel that their directory’s growth rate over the years has tended to mirror the growth rate of CSAs in general.

If one accepts the 4,571 active listings on LocalHarvest as representing approximately 70% of the total number of CSAs, then it could be posited that there are, in fact, well over 6,500 active CSAs. But allowing for unknowable fudge factors, and because I prefer to choose an estimate on the conservative side, I am — till further informed — going with the 6-6,500 range.

 CSA Prospects

In his research papers Professor Galt writes convincingly that he sees the likelihood that CSA will continue to grow and develop. “Community supported agriculture (CSA) stands as an important social invention to address many of the problems of industrial agriculture,” he notes. He describes CSA is a bright spot in the current economy.

Jill Auburn, the former director of SARE, currently the USDA’s Senior Advisor for Ag Systems and Acting Director Office of the Chief Scientist, observes that in general CSAs are continuing to grow and develop. “I’ve not studied the numbers,” she said, “but looking through the lens of USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program, we see that local and regional markets overall are continuing to grow…We see lots of increasing interest.”

Author Elizabeth Henderson also sees growth, and not just in the US. In 2010 she gave a talk entitled “The World of CSA” at a conference held in Kobe, Japan. She said that what she sees globally is that in some countries CSA is catching on at breathtaking rate. She notes that CSA has found acceptance in Canada, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Italy, England, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and China. She also noted that in Japan, CSA (Teikei) has become a mature movement with millions of members.

The conference Henderson spoke at was organized by URGENCI, an international network of participants focused on community supported agriculture. They provide informational resources for CSA initiatives worldwide with the intention of contributing to the food sovereignty movement. Henderson notes that URGENCI has brought CSA to Eastern Europe and North Africa, notably Mali and Morocco.

“For whatever reason,” LocalHarvest’s Erin Barnett told me, “whether it’s the economy or the availability of oil, how crops are grown and where, or whatever, people will very likely be turning to their neighbors for a network of support. That’s where CSA stands right now as a wise response.”

In the overall context of 2012, of the burgeoning Occupy movement, and of the ongoing emergence of CSA, some words that Trauger Groh and I wrote in Farms of Tomorrow back in 1990 still resonate. “CSA is not just another clever, new approach to marketing for farmers,” we wrote. “Rather, community farming is about the necessary renewal of agriculture through its healthy linkage with the human community that depends upon farming for survival. From experience we also see the potential of community farming as the basis for a renewal of the human relationship with the earth.”

The Whirling Rainbow Year of 2012

For an understanding of how traditional Daykeepers and native elders of North America regard our land as we move toward the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012, check out my ebook Tales of the Whirling Rainbow: Authentic Myths & Mysteries for 2012. It is a swift, powerful and penetrating look at our current era from the vantage of the wisdom traditions that have been anchored on this land for 20,000 years or more. It explores how those teachings may bear upon the present, agrarian and otherwise. You can read the ebook on any Smartphone, iPad, Nook, Kindle, computer, or whatever — 10 different eformats.

Further along the trail I was interviewed not too long ago  by Lyn Goldberg on her radio show about the 2012 end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, and the boundless range of traditional understandings associated with our personal and planetary pilgrimage through the years ahead. You can listen to or download the interview.

Review from Amazon.com: “Tales of the Whirling Rainbow is a stunningly powerful little book. It puts the whole 2012 story in a new, more authentic, and vastly richer and more hopeful context. By seeking out the traditional keepers of medicine wisdom for our era, and having traveled the road of adventure with them, Steven McFadden has assembled a matrix of powerfully intersecting tales, all true and all with immediate relevance. I loved this amazing little ebook.”