For The Wild - DR. VANDANA SHIVA on Diverse Expressions of a Living Earth ⧸311

00:00:00.400 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking again with Dr. Vandana Shiva.

00:00:10.920 So I think we need a new human solidarity, and we need a new earth solidarity, because the North-South divide was created by colonialism, but now they're dissolving it to make everyone equal in denying the right to life to everyone.

00:00:27.100 Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International

00:00:33.420 Forum on Globalization, and of the slow food movement. She is also the director of Navdanya

00:00:39.440 and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, and a tireless crusader

00:00:44.680 for farmers, peasants, and women's rights. Dr. Shiva is the recipient of over 20 international

00:00:51.260 awards and the author and editor of a score of influential books, including her latest book,

00:00:56.580 Teraviva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements.

00:01:03.060 Well, Dr. Shiva, thank you so much for joining us.

00:01:06.800 I'm always so honored to spend time with you.

00:01:10.720 It's always a joy to spend time with you.

00:01:13.880 Thank you.

00:01:15.920 Well, my goodness, I know we have covered so many topics over the years

00:01:21.420 and have been just in awe of your devotion and the prolificness of your work.

00:01:31.720 And I'm really excited that your new book, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements,

00:01:38.780 is personal.

00:01:40.840 And there's some beautiful shares in your book that I want to maybe start off with.

00:01:47.200 And I'm thinking of one quote.

00:01:48.540 You say, for me, the forests of my childhood were the source of abundance, beauty, diversity, and peace.

00:01:56.960 And I'd love to start this conversation with hearing a bit about your childhood and how your youth continue to influence you today.

00:02:08.480 You know, at the end of the day, you're shaped by your experiences.

00:02:12.600 um we of course live in a world where it's assumed that textbooks and words shape our reality

00:02:21.940 but our real reality is shaped by the multiple interactions that we have with nature with

00:02:28.340 community with family and my my parents uh chose to have a life in the forest my father was the

00:02:37.500 major in the british army during the war he'd have been probably commander-in-chief if he had

00:02:42.040 stayed in the military forces. My mother had been a very senior educator in what became Pakistan

00:02:49.780 Overnight, and she became a refugee. And then she said, now I've broken all the glass ceilings, 0.99

00:02:57.160 I've studied everything women didn't study, I've got jobs that women didn't have, and now I want 0.57

00:03:02.420 to be a farmer. So my mother chose to be a farmer, my father was in the forest, and this was the

00:03:08.080 world I knew but in a little library in a forest rest house you know these are little camping houses

00:03:13.900 in the forest in a little library in a forest rest house and with a lantern you know a kerosene

00:03:20.720 lamp I read a tiny little book somewhere by Einstein you know says quotes and I said well

00:03:28.120 this is the kind of human being I want to be so of course the forest shaped me but my seeking

00:03:33.760 to understand the world through the kind of science that Einstein did

00:03:38.460 was also a big shape of my life.

00:03:41.200 And so I did my PhD in the Foundations of Quantum Theory,

00:03:44.140 and it's when I saw the forest disappear

00:03:46.280 that I decided I would also give my life to protect the forest

00:03:52.260 and join the Chippo movement as a volunteer. 0.99

00:03:55.280 Now, if I hadn't had the forest as an imagination,

00:03:57.640 if it was merely you know sustained yields of even aged forest management um you know it would

00:04:06.360 never ever have something that hurt me pained me it would just have been a neutral fact about which

00:04:15.220 i had no understanding or imagination so i think the work i've been able to do in ecology is because

00:04:21.100 my reality is the reality of the wild reality of nature reality of of life in interconnectedness

00:04:29.820 self-organization and abundance yeah I really appreciate hearing about your origins and I think

00:04:37.560 it brings me to this question of commitment and focus and I'm truly in awe that across your life

00:04:47.860 you have had to have an incredibly focused and deep attention span rather than following the

00:04:54.400 trends of activism or media or even potentially your whimsy. And so I want to talk about this idea

00:05:03.820 of staying with the trouble, and I'm quoting Donna Haraway in that, because I've seen

00:05:10.160 and I've learned from you the value of sticking with something. And I think in the dominant

00:05:18.260 culture and especially for millennials or younger, there's definitely been a culture of

00:05:24.980 non-commitment and moving around and shifting our dreams, which I want to have compassion for.

00:05:32.840 And sometimes we need to do that. But I see what you've been able to do. And I think so much of your power comes from your commitment. So I'd like to just explore that a bit with you.

00:05:47.940 There is a living earth of which we are a part. And that doesn't change. What changes is the fact that a particular moment, it's the destruction of the forest that triggers your compassion.

00:06:02.840 and with it your care to do something about it at another moment it could be agriculture that you

00:06:09.480 know 84 1984 it was witnessing the violence of Punjab and the violence in the city of Mupal

00:06:17.000 and thousands were killed now agriculture was nowhere in my field of study but I had studied

00:06:23.480 in Punjab and I knew my mother's farm and I realized that what was going on in the green

00:06:31.200 revolution in industrial agriculture was wrong. Now, it might look like there was a forest issue

00:06:36.920 and now there's an agriculture issue, but all of these are new divisions that have been created

00:06:41.900 in order to exploit from nature, extract from nature, dominate over society and nature.

00:06:50.020 A sustainable farm is a forest, and a forest is farmed by indigenous people. You know, 0.92

00:06:56.680 the Amazon is a farmed forest, the Australian continent is a farmed wilderness. So we've

00:07:04.520 created these very artificial divides. And, you know, partly my training in quantum theory

00:07:09.680 has taught me that this artificial separation of either or, you know, you are with me or

00:07:14.960 against me, either a forest or a farm, or you're either a city or a country, all of

00:07:20.320 these artificial exclusions have actually been instruments of driving out nature's ability to be

00:07:28.980 wild, to produce, to create. And this really is, to me, the extinction crisis. For me, all of my

00:07:38.720 life's work is a continuity of a simple act. Earth is a life, should expressions are diverse,

00:07:45.700 protecting the earth's providing us with our breath our food our water is the true economy

00:07:54.580 and that economy the art of living as aristotle called it is is really doing economic activity

00:08:01.860 but we've had an economy separated from nature trying to master nature and economy has been

00:08:09.500 reduced to money making to the flow of cash and then the money machine is driving the agendas

00:08:17.520 it's of course you know the billionaires now control and own the media and that's why

00:08:23.420 you know media like yours communicating directly people to people becomes so important in our

00:08:29.720 times but then the media then has prints and the media has fashions and if these fashions is what

00:08:37.780 you follow fully then you will be anchorless you know you'll be jumping issue to issue to issue

00:08:45.720 whereas if you work from your grounding as an earth citizen as an earth being

00:08:50.200 then you will look at different facets of the earth from that same grounding the same grounding

00:08:56.280 of diversity of integrity of beauty it could be trees it could be seeds it could be a river

00:09:03.960 it could be a beaver whatever it is it are these are amazing diverse expressions of a creative

00:09:09.740 living earth and if of course you have to then fit into this machine somehow one must always

00:09:18.980 remember these are means these are not ends means means you have another end to which you need to

00:09:28.040 go that end is our life on earth a living earth with abundant life and and we keep focused then

00:09:37.680 on that abundance and those currencies and we use the means of the finances of the money

00:09:45.760 as and when and that means you have to be much more creative than a mechanical replication

00:09:52.420 of the fashions of the day you have to be much more creative in order to do the real work that

00:09:59.320 matters and yet be able to write a report that fits into the boredom of the money machine

00:10:05.920 yeah I really agree with you and I see the complexity of

00:10:13.480 living simply and playing in the game of capitalism when we need to. And I have a few

00:10:23.840 questions that I was inspired thinking about what you were saying. And there's one part of me that's

00:10:30.840 thinking about our attention spans and how mass movements as important as they are and learning

00:10:41.340 about what's going on in the rest of the world, I think is important for our critical thinking.

00:10:45.540 But I wonder, is that debilitating us? And what is the best way for us to reclaim our power

00:10:52.940 as individuals in small communities? Do you think that we're more effective that way?

00:10:59.640 And I guess I'm asking this from even a personal lens, because I know I can get wrapped up in the

00:11:05.080 problems of the world, but where do I actually have the most power? And I have this sense that

00:11:11.020 I see other people like me get wrapped up through media in these whirlwinds of the destruction and

00:11:18.600 the overwhelm, then we lose our ability to focus on our backyards. Yeah, maybe just some reflections

00:11:27.840 on focus and effectiveness because we are earth beings we're animals you know we totally forget

00:11:35.820 that we are biologically animals and and therefore we are rooted in the flows of the local of our

00:11:45.800 particular ecosystem that's what shapes us makes us in the deeper sense of being but we are also

00:11:56.080 conscious beings and we live in a conscious universe and being conscious in a conscious

00:12:03.560 universe means a larger understanding of of the state of the world both both the amazing

00:12:12.980 laws of ecology the laws of nature um that are universal and yet their particular expressions

00:12:21.700 you know in a dry area become a desert in another area it becomes a rainforest but it's the same

00:12:27.120 nutrition cycle and food cycle it's the same hydrological cycle and the water cycle

00:12:32.040 so as understanding it makes sense to know what's happening but not through the dominant media it

00:12:42.060 has become the ultimate source of misleading humanity at this point also shutting down reality

00:12:50.180 there are movements everywhere one of the things and I've done in my life is respond to movements

00:12:57.180 when they call me and for me that's the biggest learning and signal of what's the state of the

00:13:02.660 world so when land was being grabbed around India and everywhere people were resisting

00:13:08.100 the loss of their land what I did was a go to visit them give them support but second I said

00:13:16.000 each of you is fighting about the same thing. Let's make one day the day for sovereignty of

00:13:23.880 Mother Earth and your sovereignty as a child of Mother Earth. We call it the Bhu Swaraj movement.

00:13:30.300 Swaraj is self-rule. Bhu is the Earth. And that changed everything. It changed everything because

00:13:37.240 the movements were still local, but the connectedness for that moment became national

00:13:43.660 with the international forum on globalization we were dealing with the issue of seeds and

00:13:48.520 intellectual property and agriculture in india in a very deep way in practice with the farmers

00:13:55.660 building the movements but as international forum on globalization we also joined hands around the

00:14:02.220 world we could stop the most powerful institution that was supposed to be shaped the world of our

00:14:07.780 time, the World Trade Organization, people shut it down. Now, I'm not saying everyone should do

00:14:14.080 all of these things. All I'm saying is we need regenerating the earth where we are. We need to

00:14:22.640 love the place where we are. We need to connect to others in whichever means. You're connecting

00:14:29.960 to me far away. You're sitting in Alaska. I'm sitting in India. We're connecting through this

00:14:34.940 dialogue, we need to be fully aware of where the world is going, not through the misleading fake

00:14:41.260 science and fake news that is being manufactured to shut our eyes and make us blind, but to open

00:14:48.080 our eyes, open our eyes to nature, open our eyes to the pain of communities as they suffer a cost

00:14:52.780 of living crisis, as the lockdown in a way continues through other means. And because we

00:14:59.160 earth beings I have a very deep sense that just like a tree needs to live and a salmon needs to

00:15:06.320 live in its stream human beings need to live human rights are civil rights and and there's

00:15:12.560 no connection to nature I think that's another division that we need to correct and when we

00:15:16.720 correct that we find our particular place of contribution I don't I've always said I know

00:15:22.520 we are not atlases carrying the earth on our shoulder the earth is carrying us our work is

00:15:28.740 to tread lightly on this beautiful earth but our work is also to find our place for service

00:15:35.360 to find where in her web is our best contribution and always being aware that someone else is making

00:15:43.340 a contribution to someone else and to be in resonance that is the power our true power is

00:15:50.020 our inner power of doing the right thing knowing the right affairs by observing listening living

00:15:59.860 and responding to others pain through giving your power and there's nobody there's nobody who

00:16:09.640 doesn't have power that is both my understanding as a physicist as well as my understanding

00:16:14.820 as an activist for now 50 years that we are power it's when we forget our power when we let others

00:16:21.780 run us we become we become powerless and we start to lose our own confidence in our knowledge

00:16:31.360 in our strength in our compassion yeah gosh i'm just thinking about a few moments ago and you

00:16:40.760 were speaking about the economy, but the natural economy in the sense of valuing water and food.

00:16:50.540 And I'm paraphrasing here. You said it much more eloquently. But for those of us who are

00:16:56.140 wanting to devote ourselves to service and commit, there's still this question of

00:17:05.060 how do we make money now of course we could say well we don't need money if we have water and

00:17:14.400 shelter and food and maybe we do that communally or maybe we do it through the trades maybe there's

00:17:19.840 a way to get through for some of us not being in the money economy but for instance I'm up here

00:17:29.340 in Alaska right now fighting a mining project and a lot of the community is like well we can't just

00:17:36.620 say no to everything maybe we'd say no to a mine but we'll need something else to come in and so

00:17:41.500 then there's all these theories about regenerative economy and what could we do to make money that

00:17:49.020 is restorative or that isn't as destructive or is local and so I find myself sitting in the middle

00:17:56.540 of a tornado of economic questioning, kind of like existential economic questioning of

00:18:03.260 where do we go from here? Do we try to create a new regenerative economy knowing that people

00:18:09.260 still need money? Do we like have sub movements where we're just trying to get away from money

00:18:16.680 altogether? I know some people have tried to do that in smaller communities. Do we just hope that

00:18:22.260 collapse comes sooner than later and we forget about being in the capitalist system, which is

00:18:29.080 constantly extracting to make money because, you know, I don't know of any money that doesn't come

00:18:35.900 from fossil fuels at the end of the day. If you follow the money train back far enough, it's

00:18:41.700 always coming from extraction. But I guess I'm sitting in this question specifically around

00:18:47.860 conservation because um money has to come from somewhere to even conserve land and so i don't

00:18:56.760 maybe i'm asking in an impossible question here or or going down a line of no and it's very

00:19:02.760 important it's an extremely important question um now you know when i started my life as an

00:19:11.660 ecological activist 50 years ago with the chipco movement the movement to come out and protect the

00:19:16.620 forest. At that point, how did the women support the movement? You know, these were remote villages

00:19:25.840 in the Himalaya, no cash economy. They used to grow their food. Each woman would bring a fistful

00:19:33.720 of rice every day to contribute. And then maybe in a community of 500, 100 women would be sitting 1.00

00:19:41.360 in the forest till the forest logging was shut down and there'd be community cooking not one

00:19:47.420 rupee of donation was raised there was no financial contribution and I think that is the reason that

00:19:54.300 movement lasted for 10 years the women supported it with their resources now part of you know the

00:20:02.320 the dystopia that has been created is the idea that money runs the world but money is a very

00:20:09.320 recent, you know, dominating factor. First of all, there were many monies during the Great

00:20:16.840 Depression. Dear Hazel Henderson, a dear friend who's no more brilliant, you know, feminist 1.00

00:20:24.160 economist, she showed me a book about the 3,000 currencies that were created to deal with the 0.86

00:20:32.540 Depression, because the dollar was killing people. So people created their local currencies, and

00:20:38.920 there's still a big movement of local currencies but local currencies don't only have to be money

00:20:44.060 in our area you know in the valleys we grow paddy if you were to hire labor for the paddy 1.00

00:20:51.660 transplantation you couldn't afford farming but women get together you know and they pull 0.98

00:20:58.240 their work as a gift they work on one woman's land then they work on the next woman's land

00:21:03.040 and within five days the whole village's transplanting has taken place so part of

00:21:08.080 what we have to transcend is the commodification of every aspect of our lives. Commodification means

00:21:15.140 that water, when it's commodified, means you buy it from Nestle and Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

00:21:21.100 And that, to me, is an absolute obscenity and crime. When food is a commodity, we grow more

00:21:27.940 and more commodities, but more and more people starve. When we grow true food, there will be no

00:21:33.000 hunger. When seed becomes a commodity and intellectual property, there's famine. The seed

00:21:39.000 famine, farmers die. 4,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of debt and scarcity

00:21:45.240 created by monopoly on seed. That's why I've created community seed banks. The seed itself

00:21:51.140 becomes the currency. And one seed gives you a thousand seeds. In the case of millets, next year

00:21:56.860 is the year of millets, which were defined to be primitive crops that should disappear. We said

00:22:01.760 these forgotten foods we're going to bring back because they use you know they use 250 millimeters

00:22:08.200 of water compared to industrial agriculture that uses 2500 they use little water they can grow on

00:22:17.440 any soil and they give you more nutrition than all the industrial crops the industrially produced food

00:22:24.640 is totally empty that's why we shifted from yield per acre to health per acre health is the currency

00:22:32.020 Nourishing is the currency.

00:22:33.480 So I say my first thing is let us shift our minds

00:22:36.520 to regenerating the currencies that make our life work

00:22:40.660 and the currencies that come from nature as the original source.

00:22:46.180 These are the currencies of food, currencies of water,

00:22:48.300 currencies of breath, currencies of love, relationship,

00:22:52.080 currencies of being cared for and the capacity to care.

00:22:56.020 Now, once you do that, then instead of looking towards the market

00:22:59.440 or the financial sources you start to turn to nature and to each other to say what is it that

00:23:06.940 we can do with this amazing body that has been made to disappear in the cartesian world

00:23:13.860 descartes said i'm a thinking thing without a body that break is the curse of humanity because

00:23:20.820 it crippled us from a recognizing that we are bodily beings that connects to the earth's body

00:23:26.380 And as bodily beings, we have meats, food, water, air. But as bodily beings, we have creativity of the most amazing kind. I think we'll have to reclaim our capacity to work physically. And for that, we'll have to turn to indigenous people, because they are the people who created abundance and wealth before the fossil fuel age, before the age of capitalism.

00:23:50.180 But another very important issue, and this is particularly for our work in protection of nature, at this point of where capitalism is, where the big financial world is, the Wall Street, New York Stock Exchange, and Rockefeller, who created the money economy, the financial economy, the banks, who created, who worked with IG Farben in Hitler's Germany,

00:24:16.960 to create the chemicals that are killing 0.61

00:24:19.260 species, driving

00:24:20.680 wildlife to extinction

00:24:22.780 there was a Standard Oil

00:24:24.980 IG Farben partnership

00:24:26.840 Standard Oil, Rockefeller provided

00:24:31.200 the oil and the finances

00:24:32.560 and the IG Farben provided

00:24:35.220 the knowledge of chemistry

00:24:37.360 and that's how the toxics 1.00

00:24:39.280 that made Rachel Carson

00:24:41.200 write Silent Spring 60 years ago 0.68

00:24:43.420 so that bundle

00:24:45.580 of thought is now saying we should own nature they tried it with seed I thought that back

00:24:52.720 that's why I created Navdanya I said you don't create the seed you don't own the seed seed is

00:24:57.300 not your intellectual property it's not your machine seed is the self-expression of nature

00:25:02.980 in her diversity and the co-creation between farming communities and the earth now they want

00:25:09.600 to earn all of nature. So if we only think of money, and don't think of the other currencies, 0.58

00:25:16.400 we will be trapped in the new financial slavery they're seeking. They're talking about making

00:25:22.300 $4,000 trillion annually by dealing with nature as an asset on Wall Street to buy and sell. 0.72

00:25:32.260 By the second, the Black Rocks and the vanguards will run this financial economy, pretending it will protect nature. 0.96

00:25:42.440 And because we are entering this phase of a new slavery on the last Mother Earth Day, on 22nd April, I wrote a piece on this. 0.91

00:25:52.600 It's called Mother Earth is Not For Sale.

00:25:56.000 And yes, we have been made more and more dependent.

00:25:59.900 They took the land. They made it impossible for us to grow our own food. Then they took water,

00:26:05.120 made it impossible for drink from our clean streams and our clean wells. Then they tried

00:26:09.640 to own the seed. That is where I said, no, no way. This is really crossing all limits.

00:26:15.440 Now they want to own all of nature, every acre of land, every stream, every forest.

00:26:22.080 And they're thinking of $4,000 trillion. That's why to that money, we must say,

00:26:26.660 you are a fiction we do not accept you we will not be enslaved by you and then turned to free

00:26:34.200 money money that is not tied to conditionality to see how you know a thousand people can contribute

00:26:42.580 ten dollars each that is how the future of using money as a means to build community to build the

00:26:50.520 human community that regenerates the earth and the earth community with which we regenerate

00:26:56.320 That's how it's going to happen. Many smalls joining hands. Any place there's a quickie solution with big money, it's going to be a curse. It's going to be a new enslavement.

00:27:06.540 The forest will wail 0.98

00:27:22.240 Black bouquet

00:27:26.360 Rock revealed

00:27:32.540 Patiently waits

00:27:38.480 Highest cry

00:27:42.020 Highest cry

00:27:44.780 As well

00:27:46.180 From a cage in

00:27:50.360 The insects are dying

00:27:52.740 Their bodies are hiding in the cracks

00:27:56.800 They lie on their backs

00:27:59.640 Yeah, I want to keep following this train of thought and hear a bit about the Global South's

00:28:20.820 experience with debt and foreign exchange because I think this is really hidden in Western media and

00:28:26.640 it's getting pretty bleak. For example, Sri Lanka's foreign global debt is over $12 trillion,

00:28:34.460 mostly borrowed from China and Japan. And then there's this quote I wrote down,

00:28:39.980 Zambia's debt repayment plan includes making 100,000 hectares available to foreign investors

00:28:45.840 for export agriculture and using $3 million in World Bank loan to build roads, electricity,

00:28:54.800 and dams for the farms so if you could speak to that in the global south um and you know further

00:29:01.560 that that'd be great so you know india actually is the country where people should look at

00:29:06.500 to see how this system that called is called capitalism was created because it's really

00:29:13.560 another name for colonial commerce what was colonial commerce colonial commerce was

00:29:19.280 East India Company

00:29:20.960 300 merchant adventurers

00:29:23.880 got together, wrote a charter

00:29:25.800 that the state would provide

00:29:27.920 them military support

00:29:29.040 that if they had losses during trading

00:29:31.880 the society would bear those

00:29:33.780 losses, that's why a limited liability

00:29:36.300 you know, not a full liability

00:29:38.160 that when they

00:29:39.920 came back with the spices and the gold

00:29:42.140 it would be theirs, but if they lost it 0.85

00:29:44.100 to the Dutch or to the French 0.87

00:29:45.960 then the people would pay 0.80

00:29:48.020 So they never lost. This was the creation of a corporation. This was not that long ago, just 1600. That's how recent the structure we are facing is.

00:29:57.740 What the East India country then did was declare that all the land of India belonged to England, and therefore the peasants who worked the land now became landless peasants who had to pay a tax, a royalty, a land royalty, half of the produce, not in quantity, but an average value calculated in cash.

00:30:23.360 So in a year of drought, they were in debt. This is how the famines were created in India, not because we didn't know farming. Every system of farming that is today regenerating the earth, organic farming, biodynamic farming, they all have been inspired by Indian practices, Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner.

00:30:42.500 They all came to India and learned how Indian peasants worked with diversity, with the law of return, with giving back, with recycling.

00:30:53.220 So 40 to 60 million people were pushed to famine in that period.

00:31:00.860 1945, the war was ended.

00:31:03.840 42 was the last great Bengal famine.

00:31:06.920 And the women of Bengal, women in Bengal rose in revolt. 0.77

00:31:10.680 they said we will not give our rice we would rather give our lives we will fight you when

00:31:15.380 you come to take our rice and that triggered an amazing national movement called the quit India

00:31:20.960 movement telling the British you must quit India within no time the old colonizers realized they

00:31:27.140 are losing control so in 1944 they got together in Bretton Woods it was called the money men of

00:31:35.640 the world meet. Bretton Woods is in New Hampshire, a hotel, and I was invited for 50 years of Bretton

00:31:44.920 Woods and I went down to the basement where I saw the first state powers and this money men of the

00:31:49.960 world meet. The money men of the world who were extracting till then said, now we will not be able

00:31:55.740 to extract, so we need to find new ways. So they created the World Bank and IMF and the GATT, the

00:32:01.580 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which they could not bring into implementation because

00:32:08.920 the first document was prepared by Havana. And this was about correcting the injustices of

00:32:15.120 colonialism, of the need for the North to pay the South for all the harm of colonialism. So it was

00:32:21.500 not brought to reality till 1995, when the Uruguay Round of GATT created the World Trade

00:32:28.980 organizations so the three institutions the world bank which gives you loans for things for which

00:32:34.840 you don't need to get you into debt i have worked for so long i mean i joke and say every ecological

00:32:43.580 crisis i have had to address behind the damage is the world bank fighting the dams world bank loans

00:32:54.100 Eucalyptus in the Deccan, World Bank loans for social forestry.

00:33:00.100 Green Revolution in Punjab, World Bank loans to use chemicals, fertilizers, import the seeds, import the fertilizers, make the big dams for irrigation.

00:33:11.160 So what's happening in Zambia now is what the World Bank did in the 60s.

00:33:16.900 By the year 1991, the debt was $91 billion.

00:33:22.420 And when the debt gets too high, IMF and World Bank come in and say, now you have to restructure your economy. They call it structural adjustment programs. That's when they say, now you have to give your land. Now you have to give your electricity. Now you have to allow your food system to be privatized and not feed the poor.

00:33:42.600 this structural adjustment that happened to India when I did a quick calculation

00:33:48.460 about one-third of the loans were for doing a destructive industrial agriculture which we

00:33:58.620 didn't need for pesticides and fertilizers we were doing agriculture without borrowing money

00:34:06.180 forever we could have done farming and the work I'm doing is to correct that error

00:34:11.760 of external independence both in terms of loans as well as external dependence in terms of inputs

00:34:17.680 so when you cite Zambia you cite Sri Lanka the IMF World Bank are the mechanisms and the Asian

00:34:26.280 Development Bank and the African Development Bank they are mechanisms for creating debt dependencies

00:34:32.220 and then allowing the debt to go so high that you then take over the natural resources of the

00:34:39.680 country. You take over the economic productivity, which is a public good of the country, and

00:34:46.080 privatize it. And that's why when I talked about the Rockefellers and the New York Stock Exchange

00:34:51.720 coming up with this new natural asset companies, they are looking at the fact that the World Bank 0.56

00:34:58.160 IMF have created a debt trap, and China, you know, they've created a debt trap. And right now, 0.61

00:35:05.940 the ecuadorian peasants are fighting against the new agreement between ecuador and china

00:35:11.060 on agriculture i have watched i was an ambassador for ecuador to protect the amazon forest of

00:35:17.580 ecuador i was an advisor to the government when they wrote in their constitution that the earth

00:35:22.060 has rights and then because elections need money and elections need to build roads and election

00:35:28.260 needs to build highways and airports before you know it that politicians make the country borrow

00:35:37.660 for their elections and then the people who are trapped have to pay with their lives so right now 0.84

00:35:45.840 there's a protest going on in Ecuador because the Chinese debt trap is leading first you know they

00:35:53.120 took the oil from the Amazon and now they want the food. So a debt trap is a sure way to 0.89

00:36:01.880 appropriate not just the freedom of a country, a community, a person. It is basically in today's

00:36:13.460 world where the issues are life and death issues, it is taking away the means of living of billions

00:36:19.000 of people this is the genocide and ecocide we are living through and it will become impossible for

00:36:25.020 the majority if we don't create another economic paradigm if we do not tell the world bank and imf

00:36:33.120 you know we had protests in front of these agencies i was in 1988 in berlin when the big

00:36:38.940 world bank meeting was happening i was asked to give the big talk and there was a berlin wall

00:36:42.700 behind me i said walls like this shouldn't exist and institutions like the world bank shouldn't

00:36:46.740 exist well the world wall is gone but the world bank's still here and i think we do this is the

00:36:52.200 level at which we need to be much more planetary in our thinking and globally in our thinking we

00:36:57.540 don't have to act globally always yeah think globally act globally used to be a slogan of

00:37:03.480 the movement we have to understand what the global institutions are designed to do what they're doing

00:37:10.480 to our lives and finding ways at the local level and with an interconnected solidarity

00:37:17.460 to stop them. I mean, if we do not stop the money machine now, people will not be able

00:37:24.640 to live. The earth's life will be made to disappear because they live through a false

00:37:30.700 equivalence. My last concluding part of my first book, Staying Alive, compares the movement

00:37:36.560 of Chipko defending the economy of the forest

00:37:39.200 and an economist who got the Nobel economic prize

00:37:42.940 called Solo, who said,

00:37:45.660 there's nothing like an ecological crisis

00:37:47.360 because everything in nature can be substituted.

00:37:50.000 We can destroy the forest and make fake plastic trees.

00:37:52.880 You know, they actually are making fake plastic trees.

00:37:56.300 You know, we can destroy food and make lab food.

00:37:59.140 No, you can't because it'll still need feedstock. 0.90

00:38:01.460 It'll still need land.

00:38:03.120 So we are in this, we are at a past price.

00:38:06.560 now and this cusp is telling us that freedom from debt means a all the past debt is absolutely

00:38:16.700 unjust and should be forgiven this is what's called the jubilee there was the whole movement

00:38:21.960 for jubilee you know forgive the debt and more than that repatriate all the extraction that you

00:38:29.860 have done and second for everyone to live in ways that you don't get into a draft turn to community

00:38:36.860 turn to family you know and we will not be able to live if we do not cultivate family and

00:38:42.800 and family doesn't mean a nuclear family that is an absolutely absurd construction that fitted

00:38:48.920 into the capitalist structure first to borrow to build your house to send your child to school

00:38:55.600 and secondly to be the consumer unit you know larger extended families and extended families

00:39:02.920 include the trees and the animals as you know so well Ayana our family is the earth family

00:39:08.220 and the earth family doesn't run on the money machine the earth family loves lives on care

00:39:15.180 mutuality synergy giving yes oh goodness there's so much in that response and i was just thinking

00:39:29.860 about debt in its relationship to aid as well because i know that you have been uh known to

00:39:38.060 critique foreign aid that comes into countries and pretends to help they very much perform

00:39:45.840 as if they are saviors and it feels similar to me with the debt you know before a country goes

00:39:52.500 into debt it's again the colonial savior that comes in that puts them into debt because they're

00:39:58.820 telling them they need other things and it's just the cycle between debt aid and and then

00:40:06.280 of it kind of made me start thinking about the war in ukraine and how the anti-gmo gmo laws in

00:40:17.380 russia and like i guess i know i'm kind of spewing a lot of um maybe things that seem unrelated but i

00:40:25.740 i think i'm just yeah i think i'm just questioning what does this suggest about our movements and

00:40:33.500 goals when we're taking into account this debt aid war machine that seems all very connected.

00:40:45.220 And if you could speak to that and its relationship to Ukraine and Russia, that would be really

00:40:50.040 great.

00:40:50.660 Yeah.

00:40:51.520 I think aid is such a misleading term because it is really the instrument for traffic in

00:40:56.460 debt.

00:40:58.140 I'll give you a simple example.

00:40:59.940 so you know when Monsanto entered India very illegally and I fought them in the courts

00:41:06.680 they entered with the GMOBT cotton the farmers didn't have the kind of money they wanted to

00:41:13.460 charge you know they would charge about 2,000 rupees for a kilo no 4,000 rupees for a kilogram

00:41:20.960 of seed with the original seeds local seeds were five rupees a kilo why would a farmer ever go to

00:41:28.120 the fourth house and of course advertisements were made you'll become a millionaire you'll

00:41:32.620 become rich you'll become um you know uh you you you will own giant tractors you will own giant

00:41:41.060 limousines and they were showing ads of american farmers there was one ad which even showed

00:41:45.640 farmer becoming a superman by using this gmo seed of course at the end of it farmers were in debt

00:41:51.660 because they didn't have the money to buy they were just having to sign and sign and sign and

00:41:56.680 then they turned up at their doorstep like they're turning up at the doorstep of zambia to say now

00:42:00.800 your land is ours the agents of the companies would say now your land is ours you haven't paid

00:42:06.460 the debt so four thousand no sorry four hundred thousand farmers suicides of which 85 percent

00:42:13.080 are in the cotton areas of which 95 percent is monsanto so this is the model even when the

00:42:19.920 institutions are like world bank or like the adb and you know we are building roads crazily one

00:42:27.000 third of the fertile land of the ganges basin has been buried by highways one third of the most

00:42:33.000 fertile soil of the world that has fed people for 10 000 years and would be feeding people forever

00:42:39.140 buried under concrete and steel um and will this bills come for paying for these super highways 0.66

00:42:46.780 to rush to nowhere a little faster that's when the next structural adjustment of India will happen

00:42:53.420 so aid is really another name for a debt trap and a dear friend no more long ago he passed away

00:43:00.860 Majid Rahenema Majid that said aid is aids aids is the acquired immune deficiency and he says aid

00:43:08.980 is an acquired immune deficiency in the economic sphere it is designed to make you incapable

00:43:15.840 of producing for yourself what you need and the very definition of growth is also part of this

00:43:22.800 trap because growth is measured by saying if you produce what you consume you don't produce

00:43:28.440 so self-reliance and self-sufficiency and nature's economy are defined into zero and that's why this

00:43:35.300 madness for growth and you know the whole british economy collapsed because they were single-mindedly

00:43:40.460 destroying their society for more growth and more growth and more growth. So the word growth in

00:43:46.260 economy has no place. Growth in plants, growth in ecosystems, growth of children, growth of

00:43:54.280 happiness, that is accurate. Aid doesn't exist. Solidarity and support, but solidarity and support

00:44:02.640 always comes with no conditions, with no strings attached. If I see someone who's hungry, I will

00:44:09.380 who would give food without saying, come and work for me for free. Conditionality and change is

00:44:14.500 slavery. It is not aid. Finally, the aid, the debt, and now the new credit systems with the

00:44:24.680 financialization of nature. We should go back, you know, there's a new colonialism that we are

00:44:30.320 facing and at this point i think what the south faced over 500 years

00:44:35.620 that those means of appropriation are now being brought in the countries that created welfare

00:44:44.900 states you know where there was distribution there were rights there were workers rights

00:44:48.880 environmental rights and all of those rights are being dismantled so i think we need a new human

00:44:54.060 solidarity and we need a new earth solidarity because the north south divide was created by

00:45:00.860 colonialism but now they're dissolving it to make everyone equal in denying the right to life to

00:45:07.980 everyone i've written in my book oneness versus one percent that you know the zuckerbergs of the

00:45:13.600 world sitting there and creating the matters of the universe you know to live in a fictitious

00:45:18.260 world are basically saying we don't need 99 humanity yeah but the earth needs us not because

00:45:25.140 the earth can't go on without us but we are the people who have to repair the harm that's been

00:45:31.280 done we have to regenerate humans have to regenerate the living earth not try and escape

00:45:37.900 to mars like so many of the billionaires are trying to do um so i mean at one level we are

00:45:44.860 in a very difficult moment right now on another level look at the fact that small contributions

00:45:53.020 by each of us can add up to massive transformation of the paradigm and the dominant structures

00:46:00.020 that's what we really need right now

00:46:14.860 Bright to the unknown

00:46:18.840 My vow is to the Spirit

00:46:25.640 And when I am alone

00:46:30.400 Quiet enough to hear it

00:46:39.220 The one, the one, the one

00:46:43.440 The one, the one, the one

00:46:49.920 Oh, humility

00:46:55.020 You have been a most tender teacher

00:47:02.320 I'm wondering if you could tease out some of the details

00:47:14.240 about the Ukraine war and GMOs

00:47:17.340 and how that also relates to the anti-GMO laws in Russia.

00:47:22.880 Sure.

00:47:24.760 So most people look at Ukraine in 2022,

00:47:30.100 But most people forget Ukraine 2014, when basically a U.S.-inspired coup dislodged the elected government, and all the laws were changed after that.

00:47:44.460 And East Europe had always been very, very active in saying no to GMOs.

00:47:51.220 and Ukraine was the first place

00:47:55.440 where the GMOs were introduced

00:47:57.440 and what you were talking about in terms of Zambia.

00:48:00.880 Well, I don't know.

00:48:01.740 I think it's a third of Ukraine's fertile land

00:48:04.440 that is now owned by corporations,

00:48:07.480 American corporations,

00:48:08.900 who have taken over the food system. 0.66

00:48:11.780 And since Ukraine had been turned into the bread basket 0.66

00:48:14.540 for the Soviet Union earlier, 0.95

00:48:18.180 now for Europe and the world,

00:48:19.820 the shift to gmos and corporate agriculture means commodity trade and commodity profits will 0.88

00:48:28.120 increase but hunger in the world will also increase why is russia gmo free

00:48:35.820 well because they have good scientists and they have and you know they did their science is not

00:48:42.120 run by corporations and russian scientists have worked you know i chair an international commission

00:48:48.280 on the future of food and one of our best members was a russian scientist alexander

00:48:54.680 he's no more he died of cancer but he and the top scientists of russia had studied what gmos do 1.00

00:49:02.360 and how they will harm the ecosystem the soil how they harm our body they had said we don't 1.00

00:49:07.720 need the stuff so it was a scientific decision which was then followed and then because of the

00:49:14.200 sanctions, the Russians said, well, we will grow our own food. Why should we depend on patented

00:49:20.300 seed for which we have to pay royalty to destroy agriculture and our food security and food

00:49:25.800 sovereignty? So, you know, there's so many layers to the conflict in Ukraine. But I know when people

00:49:33.680 say to me the Ukraine-Russia war, I say, just look at the economies, you know, look at who is

00:49:40.380 gaining from the conflict. Look at who is losing from that conflict, and look at who is financing

00:49:47.660 the perpetuation of war. Dear Assange is in jail for having told us the truth about the Iraq war. 0.69

00:49:57.140 An honest journalist doing a good journalist job in jail to be extradited to the United States.

00:50:04.200 Assange has said they don't want wars that end. They want wars without end because that is what fuels the industrial military complex. And I think, again, we should look at Ukraine and see it's a test.

00:50:22.220 It's a trial of how to destroy people's freedoms, how to appropriate people's resources for its corporate agenda. 0.91

00:50:32.880 And the GMOs in our time, you know, if in the time of the Green Revolution it was chemical fertilizers, in our time it is the GMOs that are the beginning of a creation of dependency.

00:50:44.340 Because first, GMOs don't work.

00:50:46.380 Second, GMOs require more Roundup, more pesticides.

00:50:49.140 they require more borrowing from the same poison cartel

00:50:52.760 that now wants to own the seed

00:50:54.520 and it is, you know, I've done about six books on this subject 1.00

00:50:58.240 who really feeds the world, women and seed sovereignty 1.00

00:51:01.280 which shows that it's a totally failed experiment 0.95

00:51:04.140 and just today, 300,000 scientists of Europe

00:51:08.420 have said that the new GMOs, the gene edited GMOs

00:51:11.240 which are totally financed by Mr. Bill Gates

00:51:13.740 who financed the Berkeley researchers

00:51:15.600 who financed the Cambridge researchers

00:51:17.840 he controls the patterns in editors amazing and you know he thinks life in its complexity

00:51:26.860 and its self-organization is like a word program where you can cut and paste there's no cut and

00:51:33.360 paste except by nature defending ourselves external cut and paste is one more messing up

00:51:40.560 and scrambling of the genome and the ecosystem so it's the engineering mind it's the cartesian

00:51:45.940 mind is the mechanical mind continuing to push its agenda for extractivism and on the other hand

00:51:52.620 those of us who care for the earth who love all life on earth we work with our ecological mind

00:52:00.460 and our compassionate mind to say we will do every bit we can to not let that continued agenda

00:52:08.220 of death and extraction continue because continuing it means death everywhere on a dead planet even

00:52:15.280 the billionaires won't make money yes gosh again there's so much there and i'm

00:52:24.880 yeah i'm thinking about a lot and i you know what you're saying about julian assange and

00:52:33.680 it kind of reminded me about a question i had on thoughts on censorship and derogatory quote

00:52:40.760 anti-scientific labeling on anyone critiquing corporate-backed industry and products. And

00:52:48.020 I wonder how with mainstream media, we navigate

00:52:55.140 how we trust people, whether that's scientists or, you know, journalists. It's tricky. It's

00:53:08.040 really tricky i saw that a lot uh just in the past few years whether it's about gmos or something

00:53:13.940 else like you know mainstream media scientists are going to tell you one thing but then if you're

00:53:19.680 hearing it from somebody else or any basically any other scientist or expert that's speaking

00:53:26.500 out against empire will be labeled as i mean you could say the word quack i've heard that a lot or

00:53:35.700 they're they're labeled in this way that make people feel like they're not trustworthy so i

00:53:40.780 just wanted to hear your thoughts on that type of censorship well you know when uh when they started

00:53:46.760 pushing gmos they also started pushing patents and that's the reason i started to save seats

00:53:52.340 and started navdanya but i also started to work with my government and governments around the world

00:53:56.660 to create regulation for gmos called biosafety assess what it does don't just commercially

00:54:02.700 approved don't give freedom to do deliberate releases um and because of our biosafety laws

00:54:09.200 there is some taming down of the unleashing of gmos all over the world now i was invited by

00:54:17.440 the united nations as a scientist to write the framework with the governments of the biosafety 0.65

00:54:23.360 protocol which became the katahena protocol and then came monsanto illegally into india

00:54:29.500 i pursued them i told my government they were wrong the media would cover it totally and then

00:54:36.080 they started what the normal thing is she's not scientific they started to remove my physics

00:54:42.580 degrees from the wikipedia page as if the wikipedia decides my life and not my own learning

00:54:49.100 um and they pay they pay people because my son tried to correct it he sent them all my degrees

00:54:54.800 and uh and they still continue can't be outside of physics no today i look at seeds and yes my

00:55:02.380 quantum thinking of relatedness and non-separation helps me um but i had seen i left a formal job in

00:55:11.760 1982 to start the research foundation as a as a you know for service to the earth and communities

00:55:21.220 that need and i didn't know where it would go but you know that was 82 um so i didn't have a job

00:55:29.400 that they could take away but i know every leading scientist top scientists in their field 0.51

00:55:33.600 arpat putzai brought in by the uk government to look at gmos when he finds that they are totally

00:55:39.680 damaging the intestinal tract and he says if this happens in three months of feeding of rats what

00:55:46.080 will happen with a lifetime of eating the stuff. They did a press conference covered by BBC.

00:55:52.100 Monsanto mobilized, had him trashed, took away his lab, went back to Hungary. He said, I left Hungary

00:56:00.740 for freedom. I'm returning to Hungary for freedom because the world run by money and corporations

00:56:06.980 leaves no freedom for scientists. Eric Ceralini, the top scientist of France, decided to go back

00:56:14.280 to the university to test GMOs. His work, again, covered by the top journals. Monsanto replaces

00:56:21.820 the editor of the journal to retract the published paper. That's the level to which they will reach.

00:56:27.760 People have lost their jobs. People have lost their lives. People have lost their reputation.

00:56:32.200 And that's why censorship in the hands of criminals is allowing criminality to rule.

00:56:40.120 And we must continue to defend our truths and our freedom. And what is truth? How will you know? A, always look at the independence of the scientists. Look at their long-term track record. What else did they do? Don't look at the news. Don't look at Dr. Huber being scandalized just because he wrote to Obama and said the GMOs are the biggest security threat.

00:57:07.780 he was the advisor on security, on biological security. He said the biggest security threat

00:57:14.260 to America is GMOs. And then they went and attacked him, the president's advisor. So no one

00:57:21.500 is left for them. No one is a scientist. No one has integrity. No one has a right.

00:57:29.020 Just gangsters, gangsters whose origins go back to Hitler's Germany, want to tell the world what

00:57:36.380 is science and what's not science. Killing people is the science they learned in the concentration 0.90

00:57:42.380 camps. Killing people and killing truth is still their science. That's why we must constantly 1.00

00:57:49.540 speak our truth, live our truth, know our truth. And truth is the coherence and resonance with the

00:57:59.260 reality of a living earth that's what truth is yes i'm so grateful for your fortitude

00:58:08.260 that you have been able to stay so strong and diligent even when forces try to tear you down

00:58:17.680 and i think that that's a really important lesson for us that kind of reminds me of the beginning

00:58:23.020 of our conversation is how do we stay committed? And I think whether it's mainstream media or

00:58:30.480 corporate powers that try to tear people down and invalidate them, there's also

00:58:37.520 a lot of call-out culture within the movements and infighting within the people that we thought

00:58:46.420 we could trust and so I guess this next question is around skepticism or let's even say critical

00:58:57.520 thinking versus call out culture because it's one thing when corporate powers try to like I said

00:59:05.160 destroy or devalidate us but it's another thing when we find that within our movements and I

00:59:13.420 I think that what we're doing is really, you know, wounding us more, but also putting a huge block in front of our effectiveness when we call each other out.

00:59:27.360 But I do think, of course, there is place for critique and there's place for learning.

00:59:31.920 But I wonder what you what your reflections are on that.

00:59:38.280 Well, I have three reflections.

00:59:40.620 First, that is, as human beings, each of us has freedom to think the way we think, but none of us have a freedom to impose our thinking on anyone else.

00:59:53.260 That's why the call-out culture is epistemologically on Paul's ground.

00:59:59.320 Your freedom is what you will be.

01:00:02.100 be who you want to be

01:00:05.340 but your freedom cannot

01:00:07.260 become taking away

01:00:09.380 another person's freedom to be what they

01:00:11.480 are

01:00:11.960 and this

01:00:14.480 negative

01:00:17.540 politics and negative identity

01:00:21.460 is a child of

01:00:23.080 corporate globalization

01:00:24.520 when I wrote my book Earth Democracy

01:00:27.300 I wrote it after we stopped

01:00:29.660 W2N Seattle

01:00:30.600 But I was watching very quickly how the same forces of globalization were creating, one, a destruction of democracy. People electing candidates they knew and they liked. That politics got over with corporate globalization.

01:00:47.440 now it was what dark money was able to finance and put in place and you know there's a book in

01:00:54.880 america on dark money there's lots of writings about the brexit and the dark money so dark money

01:01:00.560 hijacked democracy of course it hijacked economy through globalization then it hijacked democracy

01:01:05.820 through planting unknown people on the top but they couldn't do this unless they blinded

01:01:12.840 the people through the new divide and rule you know the british used divide and rule to create 0.93

01:01:18.960 conflicts between hindus and muslims that was the basis on which they chopped up india into pakistan 0.89

01:01:24.360 and india uh chopping up that is still causing conflicts and harm but more importantly the 0.95

01:01:31.920 contemporary divide and rule is based on a identity now identity is who you are yeah an identity is

01:01:41.720 you love the wild I love the wild that's our identity of being part of the earth our identity

01:01:48.840 is earth beings but when I start to say I am not you and that's your only identity that has already

01:01:56.920 flipped into a negativity and this you know Samuel Huntington was writing books when Assange is

01:02:04.380 writing about the Iraq war Samuel Huntington is writing about the clash of civilizations

01:02:09.740 and in his books he says you cannot know who you are till you know who you hate this is where the

01:02:16.280 negative politics and negative culture start and people like the Samuel Huntington's are created

01:02:21.920 to make people think you have to find a target of hate to know who you are that's where the

01:02:28.820 call out culture is fitting into that divide and rule call out culture is I have to hate you and

01:02:35.900 deny you your uniqueness, your freedom to be who I am. It's wrong. We are each, every part of the

01:02:43.560 earth is self-organized entity from the molecules to the cells, to the smallest bacteria and the

01:02:50.540 virus, to the herbs in the forest and the giant trees, all one continuum of harmony, self-organization,

01:02:58.640 self-determination. And because the Cartesian mind made us think about self-determination in

01:03:06.340 atomistic and isolational terms, we did not see that we could be interconnected, but different

01:03:13.240 and diverse. Diversity is at the root of interconnectedness. Diversity is at the root

01:03:19.900 of freedom. The call-out culture is denying diversity in humanity. The divide and rule

01:03:28.100 culture in organized form is denying the true aspirations of particular individuals and

01:03:35.960 different cultures. And we have watched this. We have watched it, how particular campaigns would

01:03:40.720 be created to shut down a particular kind of community. And then there would be resistance

01:03:46.680 from the bottom. It has never, ever worked. Imposed ideas do not last. Evolved ideas have

01:03:56.700 Overlasting character. And to those who are engaging for their identity and meaning in call out culture, I say, there's so much to do. Find your identity with the earth. Find your identity in humanity. Those are our two basic identities. The rest is our unique freedoms. And no one else can tell us what we should think, what we should say, how we should be.

01:04:17.480 beautiful that really speaks to gosh so much of what i feel people are struggling with right now

01:04:28.340 in movement spaces and um there's definitely another piece to that which is

01:04:36.400 something or like i i have this question that's something around toxic masculinity

01:04:42.000 i've read in so many of your books this uplifting the feminine and the matriarchy and i think there's

01:04:50.440 so much importance to that but then i see our men or the more masculine sides of us kind of

01:04:57.940 they're at a bit of a loss like i guess what am i trying to say here is

01:05:03.620 how do we honor the masculine to honor the feminine or how do we help toxic masculinity

01:05:13.720 detoxify because it's to me it's not that masculinity in itself is evil or it's not that

01:05:23.980 that's what caused industrialization capitalism colonialism and of course that's I don't think

01:05:30.000 that's what you're saying but i am wanting to speak to whether it's the the people who identify

01:05:36.400 as men out there or those of us i mean i know i have masculine sides in myself and they have been

01:05:43.300 toxic at times uh yeah i it's like how do we welcome healthy masculinity that supports the

01:05:52.700 divine feminine well first by recognizing that the divine feminine is in everyone in every being

01:05:59.640 The divine feminine is in the masculine too. And the dynamic, creative part of all beings, including human beings, including the masculine human beings, that is the sacred feminine.

01:06:16.380 It is not only about women. It's not embodied only in a body that is female. It is embodied in all creative expression of life.

01:06:29.860 um the what we what i think the being female and being male has constantly been constructed in

01:06:39.260 society and you know in india of course we have some of the worst violence against women but we

01:06:44.240 also have the amazing you know uh the amazing divinities you know the divinity of food the

01:06:50.620 divinity of the river ganges the river yamanaya all of nature is sacred and and a divine feminine

01:06:56.920 uh colonialism was definitely a patriarchal enterprise now patriarchal patriarchy is

01:07:04.340 different from masculinity masculinity is you know the feminine and the masculine uh which can 0.85

01:07:11.500 be in total harmony and total balance but patriarchy is the domination of of the toxic 1.00

01:07:19.340 masculinity in order to deny the humanity of the women and that is where the toxicity begins 1.00

01:07:28.760 but then with capitalist patriarchy which is what colonial level was 0.98

01:07:33.520 reaches much higher levels first the corporation you know if you look at how is the corporation

01:07:41.600 formed what is it it was 300 men who created the east india company which was like a man

01:07:48.220 a militarized conquering man. So patriarchy then gets embodied in the structures of society that

01:07:55.860 we create. When we don't have decentralized participatory democracy, democracy in terms of

01:08:02.640 money power and electoral power then becomes a masculine game of patriarchy. So the masculine 1.00

01:08:10.980 without the feminine deprived of the sacred feminine and the creative principles of the 0.73

01:08:15.960 feminine, then starts to become toxic. And patriarchy is why we have to, you know, I think 0.99

01:08:22.660 men, too, are enslaved by it. Women are made to disappear. Nature is made to disappear. 1.00

01:08:28.700 Capitalist patriarchy basically begins with the assumption that nature is dead and women

01:08:32.620 are passive. Ecofeminism begins with a simple recognition. Nature is creative. Women are

01:08:38.300 creative. And we've been associated in passivity and therefore domination and violence. We can 1.00

01:08:45.040 be associated in creativity and non-violence and non-violence in creative form is the power we

01:08:51.520 bring to the world along with nature. Men too are enslaved in patriarchy because to be forced to be

01:09:01.760 a violent person, you know, to be a person who can't cry, who can't have compassion, that's

01:09:06.880 already robbing you of your humanity. So ecofeminism, you know, when I launched the

01:09:13.120 diverse women for diversity movement which is written about in the book terra viva

01:09:16.860 we did it at the convention on biological diversity meetings in bratislava and of course many of

01:09:24.120 you know the utopian environment minister to walde was there amazing men who have played a very big

01:09:31.720 role in the protection of the earth and i had taken the bindi you know i always wear a bindi

01:09:36.120 and i had taken a bindi and i put it on everyone who was in the room and i reminded the men

01:09:42.760 you too have the sacred feminine. And this little bindi is the symbol of the feminine creative power

01:09:50.320 of the universe. It's also, of course, connected to the fact that we are connected to the universe.

01:09:57.120 And I think for men, ecofeminism is very liberate-free because it allows them, A, to be fully

01:10:05.400 themselves, fully human, their unique humanity. And second, recognize that the sacred feminine is in

01:10:11.960 them to practice all the qualities they have been told in toxic masculinity cannot be part of

01:10:20.180 masculinity yeah thank you so much for uh sussing some of that out with us and bandana thank you for

01:10:29.460 everything honestly every time i speak with you i feel revitalized and refocused and just

01:10:36.260 remembering who I am and I really appreciate you in so many ways so thank you for spending

01:10:43.440 more time with us and for reawakening us in times when I know so many of us can feel a bit lost

01:10:52.360 thank you so much Anna always wonderful to join you love to the trees around you

01:10:57.560 love to Alaska and love to all your listeners

01:11:00.060 thank you for listening to for the wild podcast the music you heard today was by henry johnson

01:11:09.040 shin lace and doe paro for the wild is created by ayana young erica ekram francesca glassbell

01:11:18.280 and julia jackson

For The Wild - November 02, 2022

DR. VANDANA SHIVA on Diverse Expressions of a Living Earth ⧸311

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