About This Website and Blog
My name is Chrysalis Ostrander. I’m the one who puts this website and blog together. My hope has been to provide useful information to folks about organic and sustainable agriculture and how it all fits in to the creation of a viable, joyful and peaceful future. Over the decade or more I’ve presented this website (and been an avid emailer of relevant news and views to a fairly wide audience as well), I have received numerous brief thanks you notes, in-person thank you’s, messages from people who have used my “Ten Reasons to Eat Organic Foods (and counting)” in classrooms, etc. Knowing I’ve been helpful, even if just in a small way, inspires my continued efforts.
I’ve been in the natural foods/organic movement since the late seventies when I dropped out of college to join a communal whole foods bakery in Bar Harbor, Maine. I’ve been a tree hugger in the ecology movement since tagging along with my father for the World Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972 (where I learned what the rest of the world thought of the US’s disproportionate negative environmental impact and violent, unjust foreign policy). It didn’t take me long to figure out that so many peace, justice and environmental issues are directly related to food production and consumption that someone with any desire to help make positive change could get active in food issues and that activism would serve as a lever to affect change “all the way up the food chain” so to speak.
I started farming in Watsonville and Santa Cruz, CA at the close of the eighties after having been part of an organic produce distribution collective in both those cities for five years previous. One of the farms I worked at was an intentional community and I also spent a good amount of time hanging out at Camp Joy in the Santa Cruz mountains, another intentional community inspired by the work of Alan Chadwick, one of the most famous importers to the US of the French intensive gardening method who began or inspired many influential gardening projects in the sixties and seventies. Deciding that farming and community were together some kind of calling for me, my partner at the time, our son, her other son, a dog and various cats and kittens began a trek north from Santa Cruz that involved visits to several intentional communities before we finally settled at Tolstoy Farm way out here in Eastern Washington, where I’ve lived since February, 1990.
Now it’s a whole lot of life changes later. In 1998 I had a daughter come into my life, who I parent half of every week out here on the farm (the other half she’s with her mom in Spokane). I’ve been fortunate enough to be marginally involved in a huge amount of organizing work being done by a fantastic movement of folks working on sustainable agriculture and food security in the Pacific Northwest. I also try to homestead and raise goats on my 4-acre micro-farm located on the grounds of Tolstoy Farm (founded 1963), the oldest, still extant, non-religious intentional community in the US.
Please feel free to contact me if you wish:
Chrys Ostrander
Chrysalis Farm @ Tolstoy
Organic Micro-permaculture
33495 Mill Canyon Rd.
Davenport, WA 99122
509-725-0610
chrys@thefutureisorganic.net
http://www.thefutureisorganic.net
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”
Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc - “The organization of work” 1839
Karl Marx - “Critique of the Gotha Program” 1875
“The purpose of agriculture is not the production of food, but the perfection of human beings”
Masanobu Fukuoka (February 2, 1913 - August 16, 2008) - “One Straw Revolution” 1978
“We will never have an organic future and a stable climate until we pull all the troops out of Iraq and redirect our annual $650 billion military budget to greening the economy and guaranteeing a sustainable environment and economic justice for everyone.”
Ronnie Cummins, National Director, Organic Consumers Association at the “Farms Not Arms” public forum and protest in Manhattan, September, 2007
Please consider making a contribution towards my sustainable agriculture organizing work. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=424800
Thank you.