The Call of the Land
Steven McFadden
“Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews. Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.” ~ Naomi Klein
Author Naomi Klein has stepped forward once again with a book – This Changes Everything – that is compelling, momentous, consequential. Her work weaves science, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism to sound a sane yet urgent call to action.
In this context, farms and food are keys to the challenges that require action, and to the solutions.
Our current global economic models, Klein writes, are waging war against life on earth. This economic war has unleashed pervasive and accelerating climate chaos. This does indeed change everything.
Confronting this reality is no longer about recycling paper bags and changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe.
“Either we leap,” Klein writes, “or we sink.”
It is with increasingly sharp appreciation of these realities, and with full respect for the enormity of the challenge we face for ourselves and our children, that I undertook this year the task of writing Awakening Community Intelligence: CSA Farms as 21st Century Cornerstones.
The book is also a manifesto, though of a narrower scope. Awakening Community Intelligence is a call to households, communities, and organizations of all kinds to directly and actively engage with farms to establish hundreds of thousands of CSAs around the world. This might not change everything. But it would change a lot and in so doing it could make a big, positive difference.
Community farms in their many possible permutations represent new thinking. They hold tremendous potential for economics, the environment, human health, and social well being. CSA farms – on a far more widespread and innovative national and global scale – have potential to serve as stabilizing community cornerstones in our era of raucous transition.
The imperative matters concerning our life on planet earth will be brought into sharp relief this week when the Roman Catholic Church hosts ‘People and Planet First: the Imperative to Change Course.’ Ms. Klein has been invited to play a key role in this landmark conference, which will focus on Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter on Ecology.
The thrust of the conference is toward economies and lifestyles that work in justice and balance for people and planet. CSA farms, I submit, can play an increasingly important role as we go forward.
