VANDANA SHIVA: CULTIVATING DIVERSITY, FREEDOM AND HOPE
The Call of the Land
thecalloftheland.wordpress.com
by?Steven McFadden
“Something is happening at this point in history,” Katherine Kelly said as she brought to conclusion an April 17 lecture by international environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. “We are at a point in time where we can make an important change. Dr. Shiva is helping to lead the way. The rest is up to us.”
Kelly, the Executive Director of Cultivate Kansas City in Kansas City, articulated an overarching context for Shiva’s acute critique of the food system as well as her inspirational entreaties.
The context of Shiva’s presentation was further framed by three signal events. National Geographic had just published a cover story focused on the increasingly pertinent “New Food Revolution.” Meanwhile, more significantly, US merchandizing behemoth Walmart announced a program to create an industrialized organic food production system that they intend to use to “drive down the price of organic food.” The same week merchandizing rival Target Corp. also announced it was increasing its offerings of “natural, organic and sustainable” food.
In counterpoint to these industrial-scale, profit-focused initiatives, when Dr. Shiva took the stage at Unity Temple in Kansas City, she swept her arm back, gesturing to a stained-glass window with the word love spelled out in red glass. “That’s it,” she said. “Love. Love is the altar. It’s all about love, about bestowing attention, fostering, cherishing, honoring, tending, guarding, and loving the Earth which provides our food. The only way we can cultivate that essential ingredient of love is with community and diversity.”
The 61-year-old physicist, ecologist and author from Delhi, India then served up a penetrating deconstruction of the mechanistic mindset and the industrial food system it has spawned. This is the same mindset Walmart and Target now intend to apply to organic food.
“For a short time,” Shiva said, “the mechanistic mind has projected onto the world the false idea that food production is and must be of necessity an industrial activity. That’s a world view that is in profound error.”
“When food becomes a commodity it loses its quality, its taste, and its capacity to provide true nutrition,” she said. Industrial agriculture turns the earth into units of production, farmers into high-tech sharecroppers, and is the single biggest contributor to our declining environment. She said industrial agriculture distorts the proper relationship between humans and the natural world.
* * * * * * * *
A physicist by training, Dr. Shiva became an activist for small-scale, decentralized sustainable agriculture in 1987. That’s when she acquired insight into the motivation behind industrial farming and genetic engineering. She attended a conference on biotechnology and heard representatives of chemical corporations say that they must do genetic engineering on crops because it is a way to start claiming ownership over life.
“If we can claim ownership,” the corporate representatives reasoned according to Shiva, “then we can then collect rent or royalties on the seeds’ capacity to reproduce themselves.”
Shiva argued that it is absurd that corporations are allowed to codify life as a patentable and profitable form. “GMO,” she said, “has come to mean ‘God Move Over.’ It violates the rights of the Earth, the rights of the farmers, and the rights of the people who need to eat food to live. The patenting of life violates every principle of law and ethics and morality.”
This kind of one-dimensional, profit-based thinking is the core of what Shiva wrote about in her seminal 1993 book, Monocultures of the Mind. Coming at the subject from her mastery of particle physics and her understanding of the fundamental inseparability of all facets of life, she concluded that “issues about environment, economics and politics are inter-related through the way humans interact with their surroundings and with each other.”
Shiva argues in her book and in her lectures that a mechanical monocultural mindset has led to vicious circle of injurious impacts in the realms of farms, food and the environment.
“A monoculture of the mind in the economic system is what has led to corporate globalization,” she said in her Kansas City talk. “A monoculture of the mind makes it appear as if the only market that there is, is the globalized market controlled by the global giants, whereas the real market, and the real economy, are the economies of nature. That is where local food movements and systems are becoming the solution to the multiple crises created by the monoculture monopoly system.”
“Our mainstream food system is designed by corporate entities having a responsibility to shareholders, investors, and private owners, she said. The bottom line is the almighty dollar. But in maximizing certain kinds of production, we are systematically ‘weeding out’ other kinds of life.
Through the monoculture of the mind we have been establishing what Shiva termed an “Empire of Man” over the earth and lesser creatures (which for people immersed in the monoculture of the mind also includes women and indigenous peoples). It constitutes an attempt at a mechanistic takeover of the universe.
“Diversity has everything to do with food,” Shiva said. “In fact, any system that is not a diversified agriculture system is something else. It’s an industrial system that is producing non-food, food that is unworthy of being eaten and that is creating huge problems in health. Real food provides the diversity of nutrients that our body needs – the trace elements, the micronutrients…Diversity creates decentralization, and decentralization creates democracy.”
Having greater diversity of seeds and of local, smaller-scale farms and food processing operations creates a wealth of options, Shiva said. “We need to intensify diversity and biology, and we can do that only through love.”
Diversity loves diversity, because it is freedom. This, she has said, is a political act, a kind of revolution. To further that revolution, and to save seeds in her home nation of India, Shiva founded Navdanya, a nonprofit organization named for the nine crops that provide food security in India.
* * * * * * * *
With Dr. Shiva’s analysis in mind, one cannot help but question the impact and outcome of Walmart’s and Target’s announced intentions to aggressively exploit what Wall Street financial analysts have branded as “the hot organic market.”
Doubtless some good will arise from increasing the number of farms using chemical-free growing practices, and the wider availability of food with decreased chemical contaminants. But the entry of such large-scale corporate players into a traditionally modest-scale and decentralized endeavor is a game changer. It’s also representative of the industrial mindset that Vandana Shiva – and advocates of food democracy – regard as profoundly troubling.
The burgeoning interest of people in clean, local food, and the accelerated entry of Walmart and Target into the realm of organic food and sustainable agriculture, establishes a critical pivot point for the food democracy movement.
As farmer John Peterson of Angelic Organics explained to me, farmers get beat in to the ground when they work for prices set by wholesalers, and must struggle to make their mortgage, equipment and labor payments and all the rest.
When retailers and wholesalers are in command – as they are in industrial-scale operations – efficiency and profitability become the dominant values. Farmers are contracted under these values and thereby relegated to the role of corporate vassals, laboring in servitude to fulfill the terms of contract on quantity, quality, timing, and pricing – all factors that have little to do with nature or with the rising spirit of the food democracy movement.
“You cannot have the stewards of the land struggling under that much pressure,” farmer Peterson told me. “A farm is not just an economic unit to produce food. It’s also a living social, environmental and educational organism. It cannot be thought of as just a unit of economic production. That just commodifies the farms and farmers, as food is commodified also.”
This is one of the key points Vanda Shiva strove to get across in her Kansas City talk. We have arrived at a pivot point for the food democracy movement. We need a fundamental transformation in the way we regard and relate to farms and food. An industrial-scale monoculture of the mind, and a monoculture of putative organic farms and food, are unlikely to fulfill this ideal. Instead they present a complex range of potentially corrupting possibilities.
“We need to cultivate freedom, to cultivate hope, to cultivate diversity,” Shiva told the Kansas City audience. “We need to build the direct relationship between those who grow the food and those who eat it. Care for people has to be the guiding force for how we produce, process, and distribute our food.”
“We need to shift the paradigm of economics to measure the well being of people,” she said, “not the profits of the oligarchs.”
Shiva spoke about the drastic climate changes underway, and also the corporate hegemony at work around the world. “Our responses must be quick, but not desperate, and also simple,” she said. “Simplicity is the highest order – the simplicity of good food, safe food, and food produced and consumed in love. This can only come out of community. Cultivate compassion, love and food democracy. Food democracy is about action – changing the way we eat every time we take a bite. It’s about people learning, engaging and acting in our food systems.”
“Every movement for human freedom throughout history has needed people to lead, people who stand for love and for higher law. That’s the challenge we face now,” Shiva said. “That is what we need.”
For more information: http://www.cultivatekc.org
Walmart and organics story:
Only a quarter of the 82,000 chemicals in use in the U.S. have ever been tested for toxicity.? http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/chemicals-within-us/#page=2
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC story:
http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/15/national-geographic-launches-natgeofood-com/
Scientists estimate that everyone alive today carries within her or his body at least 700 contaminants, most of which have not been well studied:? http://www.chemicalbodyburden.org/whatisbb.htm
Monocultures of the Mind:? http://us.macmillan.com/monoculturesofthemind/VandanaShiva
Farmer John Peterson link:? http://www.angelicorganics.com/Angelic_Organics___Chicago_CSA/Angelic_Organics___Farmer_John_Writes_about_Community_Supported_Agriculture.html
Author Bio: Independent Journalist Steven McFadden is the author of 12 nonfiction books about the land, farms and food. He blogs at The Call of the Land <http://thecalloftheland.wordpress.com/> .
VANDANA SHIVA:
The End of Consumerism
is the Beginning
of the Joy
of Living
Dr. Vandana Shiva
ecowatch.com
December 21, 2012
My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests and India’s forest civilizations.
My involvement in the contemporary ecology movement began with “Chipko,” a nonviolent response to the large-scale deforestation that was taking place in the Himalayan region.
In the 1970s, peasant women from my region in the Garhwal Himalaya had come out in defense of the forests.
Logging had led to landslides and floods, and scarcity of water, fodder and fuel. Since women provide these basic needs, the scarcity meant longer walks for collecting water and firewood, and a heavier burden.
Women knew that the real value of forests was not the timber from a dead tree, but the springs and streams, food for their cattle and fuel for their hearths. The women declared that they would hug the trees, and the loggers would have to kill them before killing the trees.
A folk song of that period said:
These beautiful oaks and rhododendrons,
They give us cool water
Don’t cut these trees
We have to keep them alive.
In 1973, I had gone to visit my favorite forests and swim in my favorite stream before leaving for Canada to do my Ph.D. But the forests were gone, and the stream was reduced to a trickle.
I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement, and I spent every vacation doing pad yatras (walking pilgrimages), documenting the deforestation and the work of the forest activists, and spreading the message of Chipko.
One of the dramatic Chipko actions took place in the Himalayan village of Adwani in 1977, when a village woman named Bachni Devi led resistance against her own husband, who had obtained a contract to cut trees. When officials arrived at the forest, the women held up lighted lanterns although it was broad daylight. The forester asked them to explain. The women replied, “We have come to teach you forestry.” He retorted, “You foolish women, how can you prevent tree felling by those who know the value of the forest? Do you know what forests bear? They produce profit and resin and timber.”
The women sang back in chorus:
What do the forests bear?Soil, water, and pure air.
Soil, water, and pure air
Sustain the Earth and all she bears.
Beyond Monocultures
From Chipko, I learned about biodiversity <http://ecowatch.org/p/biodiversity/> and biodiversity-based living economies; the protection of both has become my life’s mission. As I described in my book Monocultures of the Mind, the failure to understand biodiversity and its many functions is at the root of the impoverishment of nature and culture.
The lessons I learned about diversity in the Himalayan forests I transferred to the protection of biodiversity on our farms. I started saving seeds from farmers’ fields and then realized we needed a farm for demonstration and training. Thus Navdanya Farm was started in 1994 in the Doon Valley, located in the lower elevation Himalayan region of Uttarakhand Province. Today we conserve and grow 630 varieties of rice, 150 varieties of wheat and hundreds of other species. We practice and promote a biodiversity-intensive form of farming that produces more food and nutrition per acre. The conservation of biodiversity is therefore also the answer to the food and nutrition crisis.
Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming that I started in 1987, is spreading. So far, we’ve worked with farmers to set up more than 100 community seed banks across India. We have saved more than 3,000 rice varieties. We also help farmers make a transition from fossil-fuel and chemical-based monocultures to biodiverse ecological systems nourished by the sun and the soil.
Biodiversity has been my teacher of abundance and freedom, of cooperation and mutual giving.
Rights of Nature On the Global Stage
When nature is a teacher, we co-create with her—we recognize her agency and her rights. That is why it is significant that Ecuador has recognized the “rights of nature” in its constitution <http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-animals-save-us/whats-so-special-about-humans> . In April 2011, the United Nations General Assembly—inspired by the constitution of Ecuador and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth initiated by Bolivia—organized a conference on harmony with nature as part of Earth Day celebrations. Much of the discussion centered on ways to transform systems based on domination of people over nature, men over women, and rich over poor into new systems based on partnership.
The U.N. secretary general’s report, “Harmony with Nature,” issued in conjunction with the conference, elaborates on the importance of reconnecting with nature: “Ultimately, environmentally destructive behavior is the result of a failure to recognize that human beings are an inseparable part of nature and that we cannot damage it without severely damaging ourselves.”
Separatism is indeed at the root of disharmony with nature and violence against nature and people. As the prominent South African environmentalist Cormac Cullinan <http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/interview-with-cormac-cullinan> points out, apartheid means separateness. The world joined the anti-apartheid movement to end the violent separation of people on the basis of color. Apartheid in South Africa was put behind us. Today, we need to overcome the wider and deeper apartheid—an eco-apartheid based on the illusion of separateness of humans from nature in our minds and lives.
The Dead-Earth Worldview
The war against the Earth began with this idea of separateness. Its contemporary seeds were sown when the living Earth was transformed into dead matter to facilitate the industrial revolution. Monocultures replaced diversity. “Raw materials” and “dead matter” replaced a vibrant Earth. Terra Nullius (the empty land, ready for occupation regardless of the presence of indigenous peoples) replaced Terra Madre (Mother Earth).What Nature Teaches
This philosophy goes back to Francis Bacon, called the father of modern science, who said that science and the inventions that result do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”
Robert Boyle, the famous 17th-century chemist and a governor of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the New England Indians, was clear that he wanted to rid native people of their ideas about nature. He attacked their perception of nature “as a kind of goddess” and argued that “the veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.”
The death-of-nature idea allows a war to be unleashed against the Earth. After all, if the Earth is merely dead matter, then nothing is being killed.
As philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant points out, this shift of perspective—from nature as a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter—was well suited to the activities that would lead to capitalism. The domination images created by Bacon and other leaders of the scientific revolution replaced those of the nurturing Earth, removing a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature. “One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body,” Merchant wrote.
Today, at a time of multiple crises intensified by globalization, we need to move away from the paradigm of nature as dead matter. We need to move to an ecological paradigm, and for this, the best teacher is nature herself.
This is the reason I started the Earth University/Bija Vidyapeeth at Navdanya’s farm.
The Earth University teaches Earth Democracy, which is the freedom for all species to evolve within the web of life, and the freedom and responsibility of humans, as members of the Earth family, to recognize, protect, and respect the rights of other species. Earth Democracy is a shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. And since we all depend on the Earth, Earth Democracy translates into human rights to food and water, to freedom from hunger and thirst.
Because the Earth University is located at Navdanya, a biodiversity farm, participants learn to work with living seeds, living soil, and the web of life. Participants include farmers, school children, and people from across the world. Two of our most popular courses are “The A-Z of Organic Farming and Agroecology,” and “Gandhi and Globalization.”
The Poetry of the Forest
The Earth University is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s national poet and a Nobel Prize laureate.
Tagore started a learning center in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, as a forest school, both to take inspiration from nature and to create an Indian cultural renaissance. The school became a university in 1921, growing into one of India’s most famous centers of learning.
Today, just as in Tagore’s time, we need to turn to nature and the forest for lessons in freedom.
In “The Religion of the Forest,” Tagore wrote about the influence that the forest dwellers of ancient India had on classical Indian literature. The forests are sources of water and the storehouses of a biodiversity that can teach us the lessons of democracy—of leaving space for others while drawing sustenance from the common web of life. Tagore saw unity with nature as the highest stage of human evolution.
In his essay “Tapovan” (Forest of Purity), Tagore writes: “Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city. India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds. The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man. The culture of the forest has fueled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life, which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.”
It is this unity in diversity that is the basis of both ecological sustainability and democracy. Diversity without unity becomes the source of conflict and contest. Unity without diversity becomes the ground for external control. This is true of both nature and culture. The forest is a unity in its diversity, and we are united with nature through our relationship with the forest.
In Tagore’s writings, the forest was not just the source of knowledge and freedom; it was the source of beauty and joy, of art and aesthetics, of harmony and perfection. It symbolized the universe.
In “The Religion of the Forest,” the poet says that our frame of mind “guides our attempts to establish relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy.”
The forest teaches us union and compassion.
The forest also teaches us enoughness: as a principle of equity, how to enjoy the gifts of nature without exploitation and accumulation. Tagore quotes from the ancient texts written in the forest: “Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through greed of possession.” No species in a forest appropriates the share of another species. Every species sustains itself in cooperation with others.
The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.
The conflict between greed and compassion, conquest and cooperation, violence and harmony that Tagore wrote about continues today. And it is the forest that can show us the way beyond this conflict.
Visit EcoWatch’s BIODIVERSITY <http://ecowatch.org/p/biodiversity/> page for more related news on this topic.
——–
<http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-would-nature-do/what-would-nature-do> Vandana Shiva <http://ecowatch.org/vshiva-articles/> wrote this article for What Would Nature Do? <http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-would-nature-do/what-would-nature-do> , the Winter 2012 issue of YES! Magazine <http://www.yesmagazine.org/> . Shiva is an internationally renowned activist for biodiversity and against corporate globalization, and author of Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; Soil Not Oil; and Staying Alive. The last section of this essay was adapted by the author from “Forest and Freedom,” written by Shiva and published in the May/June 2011 edition of Resurgence magazine. Shiva is a YES! contributing editor.
Vandana Shiva:
Traditional Knowledge,
Biodiversity and
Sustainable Living
By Bhavani Prakash
Click to see video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9K0cZGQgHA
Dr Vandana Shiva needs little introduction as a prominent environmental, social justice and anti-GM activist. ?In 2010, she received the Sydney Peace Prize and was named by Guardian UK in March 2011 as one of the top 100 women <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/08/vandana-shiva-100-women> in the world.
In the following interview, she explains the work done at the organisation she founded in 1987 – Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm <http://www.navdanya.org/organic-movement> and Bija Vidyapeeth <http://www.navdanya.org/earth-university> , the research and training arm. She reiterates that ecological farming is ?pro-peace, pro- biodiversity, pro-culture and pro-livelihood for the poor.
She spoke to us recently during?“Grandmother’s University <http://> ” at?Navdanya <http://www.navdanya.org/> , Dehradun, India. ?The three day course was intended to celebrate Traditional knowledge, Biodiversity and Sustainable livelihoods in an era of globalisation where these are coming under increasing pressure. Not only is this traditional knowledge disappearing, knowledge as a commons is being appropriated and patented by corporations to be sold for abnormal profit.
The participants of the course interacted with the Garhwali women of the Himalayan hills, who had travelled far to teach us some of their wisdom.
The wisdom of grandmothers is in Dr Shiva’s words, “our capacity to love, unconditionally. In our society of competition, of insecurity and fear, that steadiness of love and compassion is brought to the next generation. Just because they are grandmothers, they have a long view. It’s called sustainability in today’s jargon. It’s really a thinking about future generations – not just of me, myself, today.”
Dr Shiva answers here questions about the myth of GM, how to feed cities, the shadows of growth and development, and the role of civil society.
Video link here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9K0cZGQgHA>
The importance of saving seeds:
<http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2011/03/31/vandana-shiva-traditional-knowledge-biodiversity-and-sustainable-living/seed-list-at-navdanya/>
Seed list at Navdanya
We visited the seed bank within Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm, which distributes valuable traditional seeds to farmers. ?By interacting with the co-ordinators of Navdanya – Rukmini who oversees about 100 villages in the Garhwal region (Uttarakhand district, N. India), and Jumana who works with farmers in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, which has the maximum number of suicides in the country due to the economic hardships caused by Bt Cotton; the importance of saving traditional seed varieties against the onslaught of hybrid and GM seeds became amply clear.
<http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2011/03/31/vandana-shiva-traditional-knowledge-biodiversity-and-sustainable-living/preserving-biodiversity/>
Preserving Biodiversity
Navdanya is now a network of seed keepers and organic producers across 16 states in India. It has helped set up 54 community seed banks across the country, and has trained half a million farmers in sustainable agriculture. It is also actively involved in reviving indigenous knowledge, creating awareness about the problems of GM foods and the rights of people against biopiracy in the face of globalisation and climate change.
Here’s a recording in part, of a session by Dr Vandana Shiva at Navdanya, where she clearly explains four kinds of seeds – open pollination, green revolution varieties, hybrid varieties and GM seeds. This distinction is fundamentally important to understand the arguments against genetic engineering. ?She also describes how the cost of GM seeds and pesticide use soar astronomically, which are major factors behind the indebtedness and consequent suicide of farmers. ? (Kindly excuse the poor lighting conditions in the room, which is more than made up by Dr Shiva’s articulate discourse)
Video link here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGnj67BIDg4&feature=related>
About the Writer:
Bhavani Prakash <http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/about/> is the Founder of?Eco WALK the Talk .com <http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/> . She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world. ?She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on?Facebook, <http://www.facebook.com/ecowalkthetalk> Twitter <http://www.twitter.com/ecowalkthetalk> ,?Linked IN <http://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavaniprakash> and?YouTube <http://www.youtube.com/user/ecowalkthetalk>
Further links you may be interested in:
EWTT: Dr Vandana Shiva’s Sydney Peace Prize Lecture: Time to End War on Earth <http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2010/12/26/dr-vandana-shivas-sydney-peace-prize-lecture-time-to-end-war-on-earth/>
EWTT: Vimla Bahuguna: Treehugger of the Chipko Movement <http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2011/03/28/vimla-bahuguna-treehugger-of-the-chipko-movement/>