How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.

I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.

Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.

I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.

Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.

Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet.

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.