Eco-Stepping with Community Supported Agriculture

"Hello, yeah, it's been a while.  Not much, how about you?" 

Okay, so now that you're in a '70's kind of mood, let's talk about Community Supported Agriculture or CSAs.  Community Supported What?

According to Wikipedia, community-supported agriculture (in Canada Community Shared Agriculture) (CSA) is a socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution. A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farming operation where the growers and consumers share the risks and benefits of food production. CSAs usually consist of a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, in a vegetable box scheme, and sometimes includes dairy products and meat.

Still feeling the 70's or even the 60's?  Maybe even a little hippie-ish?  Let's press on with a little history. 
Community-supported agriculture began in the early 1960s in Germany, Switzerland and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land.  That may sound like long, long ago and far, far away, but recent news has indicated otherwise. 

Breaking the Curse of Bigness

An Eco-Steps non sequitur... 

Breaking the Curse of Bigness

Resilience depends on diversity, but banks and businesses just keep getting bigger. How can we break the cycle?

by Stacy Mitchell

posted Apr 07, 2010

photo by D'Arcy Norman

If we were to boil the financial crisis down to its root cause, we could sum it up with former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ phrase, the "curse of bigness.” The crisis was caused by massive industry consolidation, which leads to destructive corporate behavior because the decision-makers at these vast institutions are so far removed from the impacts of their decisions.
Perhaps the best way to understand the problems inherent in an economy that separates actions from consequences is to look at its opposite.

Shop Locally: Get More Flavor for Your Dollar

I recently had the opportunity to visit a locally-owned, coffee shop called Sacred Grounds in upstate New York.   Sure, I could have stopped at that famously-named coffee shop along the way, but I didn't.  I shopped locally.  Why?  For several reasons.

Firstly, it's new in our community and I thought I would check it out. I like to give new local businesses a try.  As a society, we have lost our way in the "Big Box Mart" industrialization for more and more profits, while sacrificing people and our environment.  Plus, shopping locally keeps more money in the local community.  And, shouldn't we really be re-building our economy from the inside out vs. mortgaging our future with loans from overseas?