00:01:37.540Dr. Vandana Shiva is a one-woman movement for peace, cultural conservation, and justice for the earth.
00:01:45.380Vandana Shiva was born in 1952 in Dehradun, India.
00:01:49.300Her father was a conservator of forests, and her mother was a farmer with a deep love for nature.
00:01:55.920After receiving her schooling in India, Vandana Shiva earned a BS in physics, an MA in the
00:02:02.000philosophy of science at the University of Gulf, and a PhD in nuclear physics at the University
00:02:08.040of Western Ontario. She is the author of more than 300 papers in leading scientific and technical
00:02:14.180journals, and over 20 books. In 1991, Dr. Shiva founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect
00:02:22.100the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds, and to oppose what she
00:02:28.800calls the colonization of life itself under the intellectual property and patent laws.
00:02:35.440Hello, Dr. Vandana Shiva. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
00:02:39.580Hi. One of the great features of this biodiversity web is that it acts as a safety net. It helps life adjust to an ever-changing climate. And as the mood swings of the climate intensify, many species won't survive.
00:02:58.380An estimated half of all species will disappear this century if we fail to act meaningfully.
00:03:04.820But the more species that do make it, the better the chances of entire ecosystems surviving.
00:03:11.240So Dr. Shiva, through your organization, Navdanya, you've set up seed banks all over India to preserve genetics of plants.
00:03:19.480So in your view, why is biodiversity so crucial?
00:03:22.960And beyond starting seed banks, what can be done on a global level to preserve biodiversity?
00:03:29.280As you said, biodiversity is the potential of life to adapt.
00:03:35.080And we've set up community seed banks to really create a base of another agriculture that is biodiversity-based.
00:03:42.180Because what is called agriculture today is not agriculture.
00:03:46.120It's not the culture of the soil. It's not a culture of the land.
00:03:49.120It's the culture of oil and fossil fuels, which is why I wrote Soil Not Oil.
00:03:55.30040% of the emissions that are creating instability in the climate and pushing us to climate chaos of the kind that creates disasters that have already become real,
00:04:07.800taking lives, destroying ecosystems, destroying food and crops.
00:04:12.46040% of that problem lies in an agriculture which destroyed biodiversity, replaced the functions of biodiversity, whether it was renewing fertility or keeping a balance between insects and friendly pests, allowing pollinators to thrive.
00:04:33.360That destruction of biodiversity was always justified in the name of increasing food production.
00:04:38.600I have spent the last 30 years of my life, since the problem started in Punjab, the land of the Green Revolution, to both understand what went wrong and to try and build alternatives.
00:04:50.180So what went wrong is what I call the monoculture of the mind, which comes out of an industrial culture, a fossil fuel culture, pretends to be more productive, but is actually destroying the potential of the land and ecosystems to provide.
00:05:04.400The more we save biodiversity, the more the land provides.
00:05:09.000Our work has shown that we can produce more food in our food for two planets and better food, not nutritionally empty, toxic food, while we leave the biodiversity for all species to thrive.
00:05:22.480Not in tiny areas of wilderness, but we bring the wild into farming.
00:05:27.880I call open pollinated seeds the rewilding of seeds.
00:05:32.220I call biodiversity-intensive agriculture, which has flourishing and teeming microorganisms in the soil.
00:05:39.940Our farm has six times more pollinators than the forest next door.
00:05:43.900And, of course, GM crops allow no pollinators at all, our studies have shown.
00:05:48.360So it's not the case that we need to separate islands of wilderness while we destroy the planet.
00:05:54.740The foolish idea that we're providing more for humans.
00:05:57.520In fact, we are providing nothing for humans either while taking the planet away from other0.58
00:06:02.200species. And I think it is time to overcome this artificial divide. I think it's time for
00:06:07.480movements to overcome the divide between climate change and biodiversity, erosion and extinction.
00:06:13.300The same problems that lead to climate change are pushing species to extinction. The same actions
00:06:18.740that will protect the species, diversity, will also address climate change.
00:06:23.700With all the modified genetics in the world, you know, thousands of plant varieties in trial, legally or otherwise,
00:06:32.040Kauai actually comes to mind just thinking of the horror of so many GMOs being tested there.
00:06:38.780And there's also GM animals and GM trees, all cross-pollinating with natives.
00:06:44.380So I'm wondering, will everything become contaminated?
00:06:47.820or are certain plant families immune because they're sexually incompatible with GM plants?
00:06:54.620What are the prospects for uncontaminated life on Earth?
00:06:59.780Well, the first is that very few crops are genetically modified and they're in very few
00:07:07.060countries. Of course, the industry would like to pollute and contaminate everything,
00:07:12.940but they aren't intelligent. They aren't smart. They might call themselves smart,
00:07:17.820But a technology that could only introduce two traits, both toxic, BT traits and herbicide resistance traits, both are putting toxic genes into plants.
00:07:28.260In four crops, two traits, four crops, a handful of companies, largely one, is not a very stable way to do agriculture.
00:07:38.300So most other crops at this point are not genetically engineered.
00:09:50.860So you began fighting for seed freedom when you realized that the forces of globalization control seed.
00:09:57.760And you've even compared this seed slavery to human slavery.
00:10:02.980Plants are denied their ecological purpose and turned into food machines, just like farm animals.
00:10:08.940And in such a way that squanders soil and water, fossil fuels and habitat.
00:10:16.360So can you speak about how colonialism, the caste system, the social ladder and and all the systems of dominance spill over to our treatment of the natural world?
00:10:26.720It is because hierarchies that have no place in an earth family, that have no place in a human family, have been artificially constructed through systems of power and then been naturalized, whether it is the domination of patriarchal structures over women or it is the domination of capital and those who control capital.
00:10:52.220Because capital is nothing. Capital is a construct. But there are people who control capital. There are people who create corporations. There are people who hide behind the corporate form and harvest those super profits. They have literally absorbed every hierarchy of the past, whether it be casteism.
00:11:11.440In my view, it's a casteism which says farmers don't breed, even though every seed used by the industry has come from farmers, often pirated.
00:11:22.380But in any case, all evolution begins from nature is continued by farmers.
00:11:27.480And then there's a little tinkering, normally negative from the perspective of farmers and from the perspective of nature.
00:11:34.620Feudalism, which we got rid of, is coming back in the system.
00:11:38.720slavery of the worst kind, which is making people slaves, but is making all life enslaved.
00:11:48.820And that's why I just pour all my breathing, you know, living time, probably even my sleeping
00:11:55.120time, because, you know, consciousness doesn't sleep, to put an end to the slavery.
00:12:01.940You've alleged that Monsanto uses the guise of humanitarianism
00:12:05.840to circumvent import restrictions on GMOs.
00:12:09.280For example, in Orissa, India, following the 1999 cyclone,
00:12:13.620and in Haiti, following the earthquake.
00:12:16.600So can you explain how the biotech industry
00:12:20.120employs this kind of disaster capitalism
00:12:24.180and how it is patenting thousands of climate-resilient food varieties
00:12:29.960to profit from climate destabilization?
00:12:32.980I have witnessed in the last decade and more that every time there is a disaster,
00:12:42.780it could be an earthquake, it could be a super cyclone, it could be a drought.
00:12:48.460Monsanto is there to push its GM seeds or its GM crops.
00:12:53.540In India, they couldn't have pushed the seeds at that time because the laws didn't allow it.
00:12:56.480So they use the U.S. government and CARE and other agencies to try and push the rice eaters of Orisa to eat corn and soya blend.
00:13:06.680And the farmers and those displaced complained to us and said, we can't eat the stuff.
00:13:11.640So I took samples, had it tested. It was GMO, totally illegal, wrote to the health ministry.
00:13:16.600It was banned from imports because it was illegal.
00:13:19.560And yet the narrative that's created by Monsanto and its lobbyists is I prevented people from eating.
00:13:24.740No, what we did was distribute rice, not just rice to eat, but seeds of salt tolerant rice, which we had conserved in our seed banks so that farmers could grow rice in spite of the salt.
00:13:37.220And then the farmers of Orissa gave that rice when the tsunami destroyed agriculture in Tamil Nadu, two truckloads of seed gifts.
00:13:50.540And we were asked by farmers of Nepal to send them seeds because 50% seed is destroyed.
00:13:56.440Monsanto, I'm sure their hand is in it, tried to pass rules to say only Monsanto and its subsidiary seeds can be distributed.
00:14:04.200It took us 10 days to work through this corruption to get open pollinated seeds to the farmers who had lost everything and needed to rebuild their lives.
00:14:16.780In terms of then trying to patent the very seeds that can allow people to rebuild and rejuvenate their lives after disasters, there are three myths being spread.
00:14:28.560First, that only genetic engineering can put salt tolerance and flood tolerance and drought tolerance genes.
00:17:56.240I say that because the farms of the Western Ghats
00:18:01.280they had even more diversity sometimes than Ashola Forest next door.
00:18:09.000Because when people work with nature, they enhance habitats for nature.
00:18:16.400As I mentioned, our farm has six times more pollinators than the forest next door.
00:18:23.200That means we have created more habitat for wild species.
00:18:26.380It's an agriculture which is using lethal poisons, herbicides, pesticides that is destroying the habitat, not just on farmland, but in wilderness zones.
00:18:37.880After all, the nitrate runoff from nitrogen fertilizers is going into the oceans and killing dead zones.0.86
00:18:46.160Albert Howard was sent by the British to improve Indian agriculture
00:18:52.460which meant introduce what chemicals there were at that time
00:18:55.540not that many in 1905, not as many as after the war
00:18:59.320but to reshape agriculture in India like the agriculture of England
00:19:05.060and he arrived and found the soils were fertile
00:19:07.480the insects were flourishing but there was no pest damage
00:19:12.240and as he writes in the book he wrote called the Agricultural Testament
00:19:16.140I decided to make the pest and the peasant my teacher.
00:19:20.100Now, this book has been called the testament for modern organic farming.
00:19:26.380There's a very strong paragraph in that book,
00:19:29.320and I would recommend everyone who has exaggerated the violence
00:19:33.260and damages of industrial agriculture,
00:19:35.500the violence and damages of factory farming to all of history and all cultures.
00:19:40.820Howard says, agriculture in the Orient, you know,
00:19:44.580China, India were called the Orient in those colonial times, and the West was the Occident.
00:19:50.360And he says, agriculture in the Orient has passed the ultimate test of permanence.
00:19:57.500The agriculture of the small farms of India is as permanent as the forest, the prairie,
00:20:05.740And that can only happen when you make your farm or your little pond with fish, like an
00:20:13.860ocean or like a forest. So what are the tools for restoration that produce more food? First is you
00:20:21.480cannot destroy the relationship between animals and crops. That's another thing Howard observed,
00:20:28.260that any agriculture system that has to last and not destroy ecological processes must have
00:20:34.420perennials, which means it must be agroforestry based. And Indian agriculture was always very
00:20:40.060intensely forestry based. My own father was a forester and he used to tell me how there are
00:20:44.400more trees on the farms of India than in the reserved forests of India. Second, livestock and
00:20:51.720animals cannot be separate. It's when you separate crops and trees and livestock and put trees in a
00:20:59.000forest, livestock in factory farms, and the annual crops of the monoculture that the damages begin.
00:21:05.740After all, it is a visionary called Matsunobu Fukuoka, whose book, The One Straw Revolution, promoted natural farming.
00:21:14.520The word was natural farming everywhere.
00:21:16.900He worked with rice, but he made it as permanent as a forest.
00:21:21.680So I do feel people need to look much more closely at the diversity of systems.
00:21:25.840The fact that this diversity of systems has brought wilderness into agriculture, whether it is the wilderness of the soil with diverse organisms,
00:21:35.740or it is the wilderness of the pollinators
00:21:39.020or it is the wilderness of every seed.
00:22:05.740that is rewilding. Here in the western U.S., drought is on everyone's mind, especially as
00:22:13.560these catastrophic wildfires rage on. Where I live, the sky is dark with smoke. And so we think about
00:22:20.780chemical fertilizers and how they require huge amounts of water to dissolve and mobilize
00:22:26.540nutrients. And in the western U.S., over 90% of water is used by industrial agriculture.
00:22:34.860So can you talk about how drought and desertification are tied to industrial agriculture and how traditional farmers cope with water shortages?
00:22:50.080First of all, traditional farming actually creates water conservation.
00:22:55.320Our research shows that the more the organic content of the soil, which is the result of
00:22:59.780organic farming, Howard called it the law of return, I call it the law of return, returning
00:23:04.060to the earth what you receive. We actually increase the water holding capacity of soil
00:23:08.520to the extent that with 1% increase, you can go up to nearly 80,000 liters per hectare of water
00:23:15.080storage in the soil. I have seen this happen empirically. Every time we've had a drought,
00:23:21.680our organic farmers haven't had a crop failure the chemical farmers have had a total wipeout
00:23:27.700of their crop so not only does industrial agriculture use more water and my analysis
00:23:33.820in my book called the violence of the green revolution worked out from government figures
00:23:38.120that it's 10 times more water to produce the same amount of food it's such a waste and the
00:23:44.000assumption was this limitless water but more than that it destroys the capacity of the soil to hold
00:23:50.100water because that capacity comes from having humus in your soil, which comes from putting
00:23:54.680organic matter in the soil, which creates soil aggregates, and they then turn the soil into a
00:24:00.560sponge that can hold water. But this also is a solution to flooding because when there is more
00:24:06.240water holding capacity, then you have less flooding. More importantly, not only are chemical
00:24:12.060fertilizers guzzling, but the breeding of crops has made crops more thirsty. So I'll give you an
00:24:20.720example of the cotton. The cottons that India evolved, and India is a land of cotton, and we
00:24:26.740got our freedom through spinning cotton in Gandhi's footsteps, native varieties of cotton are drought
00:24:32.620resistant. They grow in rain-fed conditions in very dry areas. The GMO cotton is put into a hybrid
00:24:39.220which needs irrigation. So you have the damage caused by use of fertilizers. You have damage
00:24:45.840caused by thirsty cultivation, water-intensive crops planting in very dry areas. We've just
00:24:53.860done a manifesto, and I would suggest you and your colleagues read it. It's called Terra Viva.
00:24:58.940Its English version is available. And in that, we have tracked how land use linked to the spread
00:25:07.740of new varieties adapted to chemical farming, have created more land degradation, have created
00:25:13.780more desertification, have also contributed more to climate change through producing more
00:25:18.160greenhouse gases. And in fact, the story of Boko Haram and the story of ISIS needs to be told
00:25:25.220through the soil. 2009 is when Boko Haram starts. 2009 is when Syria problems start. Both were a0.68
00:25:33.660result of extended drought and extreme weather events, extreme climate. Lake Chad has shrunk to
00:25:42.300five percent and less what it used to be. That is what is leading to the conflicts around Lake Chad
00:25:48.420in the area where Boko Haram has risen. It so happens the pastoralists are Muslim,
00:25:53.360the settled agriculturists are Christians. When I did my study on Punjab, it was so clearly an
00:25:58.600issue of sustainability. It was so clearly an issue of farmers saying our land is destroyed,
00:26:03.680our rivers are captive, we aren't earning enough. It was fun to say it was about religion.0.92
00:26:10.320Religion has become a very easy excuse to cover up the true story of a war mentality in agriculture
00:26:20.740devastating the planet and soils. We really need to start telling history from the point of view0.95
00:26:26.440of the earth. You've written and spoken so much about water theft and water colonization. And I'm
00:26:34.660wondering if you can go into how India is being affected by this and where you see the water
00:26:40.940crisis heading. You know, where I wrote Water Wars, I wrote it partly because there were so many
00:26:46.560conflicts around water, including India. People were dying. And why were they dying? People have
00:26:53.080lived as riparian communities along rivers for millennia and they haven't killed each other this
00:26:58.400way but when you create an agriculture where every farmer wants 10 times more water than they've used
00:27:04.740in the past and instead of putting water clean water back into the river they're draining it off
00:27:10.700creating waterlogged deserts creating salinated deserts rivers start to run dry
00:27:16.500that is the root of conflicts but then there's privatization when i was writing the book
00:27:23.900someone leaked to me a monsanto document which said what is getting polluted what is disappearing
00:27:31.080sustainability in the water sector will be privatizing it because these profits will be
00:27:37.940sustainable profits since everyone needs water and they were talking about not just linking
00:27:43.280chemicals to seed as they've done with Roundup Ready crops, but linking the chemicals on
00:27:47.620the seed and the water, so if you didn't buy their water, you wouldn't have a crop because
00:27:59.500But water, as you already mentioned, the biggest waste of it is in industrial agriculture.
00:28:06.680And water has to get enslaved when it has to be bought and sold.
00:28:11.800You can't sell a free-flowing river, but you can pipe that river, channelize that river, dam that river, and then you can pretend that that water is your property.
00:28:24.740The good thing is, just as in the case of seed, we've managed in 90 percent countries to roll back laws that would make seed saving illegal.
00:28:33.080And I do want to mention in the U.S., in every state on the basis of a 2004 federal law, state after state is trying to make local seed saving illegal through seed libraries.
00:28:45.080There is also a California law which says corporations are persons, only corporate financing can breed good seed, no level below the state, which means no county can make any law related to seed, including GMOs.
00:29:01.960And a neighbor is 30 feet away, which means you can't go to your neighbor one mile away and exchange seed.
00:29:11.780So this attempt has been made everywhere.
00:29:15.00090% of the time, we were successful through the Seed Freedom Movement
00:29:18.940to roll these initiatives back in the last three years.
00:29:21.960In the same way, water privatization, 90% of the projects supported by IMF and the World Bank
00:29:27.660so that these five companies could make profits, they have been rolled back.
00:29:32.460Because colonizing nature is an attempt to colonize the wild.
00:29:37.040And one thing about the wild is it will burst free.
00:30:11.020women in nature share a history of oppression by patriarchal societies you wrote one of the
00:30:25.740early works on ecofeminism in 1988 a book called staying alive women ecology and development
00:30:32.140And if I understand correctly, you argue that oppression has escalated as industrial development has been imposed on the, quote, developing world.0.99
00:30:46.400Men with machines are still wrecking the natural world.
00:30:49.720Despite all the talk about a paradigm shift, we're still wrecking the place.1.00
00:30:54.140So how can feminism help societies reconnect to Earth and disarm the violence against her?
00:31:03.640You know, as I've written in that book that was started in 85 at the Big Women's Summit in Nairobi,
00:31:09.600which is when my publisher said, you know, this connection between ecology and feminism hasn't been made with the right book.
00:31:16.600Why do I say the violence against women and the violence against nature have the same roots?0.54
00:31:22.380Because it is the so-called scientific revolution and so-called rise of an economic paradigm centered on capital that declared nature as dead and inactive and valueless, declared women as passive, as unproductive, non-creative, empty heads.
00:31:41.180That death of nature and the exclusion of women from the recognition of their creativity and productivity is at the root of the violence.
00:31:50.340it's also at the root of the violence because by refusing to look at the creativity of nature0.65
00:31:56.160by refusing to look at the intelligence of women violent systems were made to look like absolute0.89
00:32:01.860creators creators of food while you blast the planet up 75 of the destruction of the planet1.00
00:32:09.040has come from industrial agriculture which is only giving 30 of the food and the gmos are only0.99
00:32:14.160providing 10 to unwilling consumers because if there was labeling no one would be eating it0.78
00:32:19.200Most of it goes for biofuel and animal feed. That violence has aggravated in India. Just in the last 20, 30 years, more than 30 million girls haven't been allowed to be born. The brutal violence against women has increased. And my reading of this is that when more and more violence enters the economic paradigm, when it enters your everyday thinking, then violence becomes the basis of your relationship.
00:32:44.860objectification becomes the basis of your relationship. You have no source for reverence
00:32:50.900for nature, for respect for women. And the way ecology and feminism coming together1.00
00:32:57.700can stop this violence is by recognizing that the highest creativity lies in nature. The highest0.54
00:33:05.540creativity is in women. I have done campaigns on the silly golden rice, which will be hundreds of1.00
00:33:11.320percent less efficient if it was to come to be and in any case it has now been proven the papers
00:33:16.440published to justify it were totally manufactured and the paper had to be retracted a so-called1.00
00:33:23.040science that has to be based on manipulation really has no place leave it to women's creativity1.00
00:33:28.200we can solve every malnutrition problem on this planet because women have always worked with1.00
00:33:32.740biodiversity and it's the marginalization of that knowledge of biodiversity that is at the root of1.00
00:33:38.100malnutrition that is at the root of hunger. More importantly, the ability to be compassionate,
00:33:46.060the ability to be loving, which survived in women. I'm not saying it is built into the genes of0.97
00:33:51.500women, but it survived in women because women were left to look after the economy, which was1.00
00:33:56.700not considered important. It was not the economy of war. It was not the economy of profits and the1.00
00:34:01.680market. It was the economy of care. That economy of care needs to be everyone's economy.
00:34:08.100And I see rewilding and creating economies of care as one process at its roots.
00:34:18.680So I read that you and a band of other women acted to defend the forest in northern India
00:34:23.820by literally surrounding the trees, holding hands.
00:34:27.680So were there any historical precedents that inspired that action?
00:34:31.840Or how did that come about? And was it successful?
00:34:35.280The movement called Chipko, which means to hug, which was my inspiration.
00:34:40.280I call it my university of ecological knowledge and ecological activism because my PhD otherwise is in the foundations of quantum theory, in non-locality in quantum theory, very far away.
00:34:51.640I really learned so much from the women defending the forests through this act of deep love, of embrace.
00:34:58.020The women who took this initial action spontaneously didn't really know that there had been a precedent.
00:35:04.300those of us who then started to do more research found out two things.
00:35:10.600First, that at the time when Gandhi led the salt march,
00:35:15.380you might remember the colonizers wanted to monopolize salt for profits,0.65
00:35:20.400to buy more ganas, to shoot more Indians.
00:35:22.620And Gandhi walked to the beach, picked up the salt from the sea,0.99
00:35:31.560And that was a very famous Satyagraha, the power of civil disobedience, to obey higher law and disobey brute law.
00:35:40.120Exactly at that time, in the forests of India, in every part of India, and I've written about this in my book, Ecology and the Politics of Survival, in the chapter on forests, in the western Ghats, in the forests of central India, and in my region up in the Himalaya, people were turning to the forests and telling the British, leave, these forests are our mothers.
00:36:00.780You cannot own them as your property. But even more historical than that is a movement led by a woman called Amrita Devi, who was defending a sacred tree in the desert of Rajasthan called the Kejri.
00:36:19.000Now, Rajasthan is a desert, but it's the most populated desert because centuries ago, they realized what is the actions we need to take to reverse desertification.
00:36:30.300Part of it was building amazing tanks and the culture of tanks in Rajasthan is so rich, planting these very, very drought tolerant trees like Kajri, declaring every animal as sacred.
00:36:41.420So you're not allowed to kill animals, not the blackback, not the peacock.
00:36:44.960And Amrita Devi was following this religion, which is called Bishnoi, which means 29 rules.
00:36:50.700And all 29 rules are of nature conservation, protection of species.
00:36:54.940I think it's the only religion in the world dedicated entirely to protection of nature.
00:37:00.620And when the king's men came to cut the tree, to burn, to paint the palace walls with land,
00:37:08.600she hugged the tree and said, you can't cut it, you'll have to take my head.
00:37:13.220Then her two daughters came. They chopped their heads up. 270 or more villagers sacrificed their lives. When the news reached the king, he was, of course, outraged and totally banned the cutting of the sacred tree. So there is precedence. And I'm sure in periods of history, even earlier, where we have no record, people have sacrificed their lives for the protection of the earth and her diverse species.1.00
00:37:37.780wow i have chills thank you for sharing that story yeah i feel people in the u.s and many
00:37:47.460other places are so severed from their ancestral traditions that they hunger for any and every
00:37:55.260glimpse into those rare places around the world that have not been bled out by globalization
00:38:00.120where people hold dearly to traditional values and knowledge and and I know you were born in
00:38:08.020the foothills of the Himalayas and your town Daradun has probably changed quite a bit since
00:38:13.480your childhood but I'd like to ask if you would share some of your memories or even the memories
00:38:20.120passed on to you by your parents or grandparents about that reality that village life what have
00:38:26.280you taken away from that upbringing that can help guide social experiments going on today from
00:38:33.020eco-villages to collectives to transition towns and beyond? Well, interestingly, you know,
00:38:40.040my other book on eco-feminism, I co-authored with my dear friend Maria Mies in Germany.
00:38:45.860It's just called eco-feminism. And we have a chapter in there, Maria wrote the chapter.
00:38:50.540it's called they long for what they have destroyed the point you made about trying to look for places
00:38:56.900where the destruction hasn't happened so I was very privileged you know to be born in the Himalaya
00:39:01.600my mother was displaced in the partition chose to become a farmer even though she was very highly
00:39:06.540educated and had a government job and she said I've broken all glass ceilings for women and now
00:39:11.960I'm going to go back to the earth this is what I'll do so I grew up on a farm I grew up traveling
00:39:16.120with my dad in the forest. And at that time, you know, we'd step out of the town and we'd see
00:39:21.760tigers, we'd see elephants. Wildlife was right there. The town itself was small because the
00:39:30.460destructiveness of industrial agriculture, which is called the Green Revolution in the Third World
00:39:36.200when it's introduced to our parts of the world, and it's not green and it's not revolutionary,
00:39:39.980it's just an extension of the war that should have ended in 1945. That has led to a lot of
00:39:45.440displacement of farmers and the rush to cities. Most of the city growth is through slums where0.98
00:39:50.400people don't find a place, a dignified, meaningful place. Our town was so beautiful that the British
00:39:58.240used to write about how beautiful this valley is, how beautiful the town is. This rush to
00:40:04.960build bigger and bigger cities is contaminating every town where there are benefits, where there
00:40:10.320our facilities. I'm very fortunate that I managed to return to my valley when I was asked by the
00:40:16.680Ministry of Environment to look at mining, which was destroying the valley. And I came and did the
00:40:21.400study for the ministry. And the study went all the way to the Supreme Court as a basis of a case.
00:40:26.900And it was the first ever environmental decision in India, 1983, where the Supreme Court ruled
00:40:34.360and said when commerce destroys life commerce has to stop because life has to carry on
00:40:41.320and the mining was stopped and the polluting industry around that mining was stopped
00:40:45.320so we got rid of pollution and managed to declare our valley a green valley and then of course i
00:40:50.120built the navdanya farm and the seed bank and the teaching center the earth university
00:40:55.280and like i was saying you know it is as wild a place as you can have but it also gives you food
00:41:55.980They're just drowning in denial and profits.
00:41:59.360but more and more people are recognizing that the economy must contract industry must size down
00:42:08.300and you know population must contract and our living arrangements must reflect the dire needs
00:42:16.480of the planet so those who see it coming or recognize it's here and happening faster than
00:42:23.580we or other species can adapt are calling this a collapse others call it a transition
00:42:30.900so if you were to lay out a roadmap for navigating this era of change what can we do
00:42:39.200what are the real world tangible steps the global community must take and is capable of taking for
00:42:47.360a graceful return to a mosaic of regional earth-minded societies?
00:42:54.400First issue in the transition is to know that ecosystems are collapsing, species have been0.97
00:43:00.800driven to extinction, economies are collapsing everywhere, entire societies, like in Syria,1.00
00:43:05.460people are living in refugee camps somewhere else. You know, that's a collapse. It's a social1.00
00:43:10.120collapse. I think in the towns of Baltimore and in the towns of Missouri, we see a social collapse.
00:43:16.520But the key is not to respond to either fear or panic or hate, because that is what is triggered for those who would like to maintain power in this period.
00:43:32.180When I hear the speeches of your presidential candidates, you know, based on fear and hate, they are actually making sure there can't be a transition.
00:43:42.380So the transition needs, instead of fear, it needs hope.
00:43:57.760Either I can start a garden or I can be a good teacher or I can be a wilderness protector.
00:44:04.260But even while we play our little role in our care for the earth, we have to be deeply aware of the web of life.
00:44:12.380And it's only when we see those interconnections at every step, we will stop doing what society has done for too long, competing with each other. Climate movement competing with the agricultural regeneration movement, the labor movement having to compete with the environmental movement. Too long have we been pitted against each other by those who thrive on divide and rule.
00:44:33.560The third very, very important aspect of the transition is, you know, 250 years of paradigms and economy and science and technology have literally groomed generations to think that, oh, my God, what's going to happen if I don't have a job?
00:44:49.600Oh, my God, what's going to happen when we run out of oil? Oh, my God, what's going to happen if I got to return to the village? What's going to happen when there's no electricity?
00:44:56.880The only way we make this transition is by looking at small farmers and their societies, looking at indigenous people and their societies, first developing respect for them, not looking down on them as primitive, but realizing that they created a very, very large footprint with a very high culture.
00:45:17.960we can only make this transition as an earth family we can only make this transition through
00:45:24.140the joy of living not being married to the junk that industrial society has created you know when
00:45:32.960i got into a flight after my phd immediately i defended my thesis in the morning and i was on
00:45:38.180a flight back home and everyone would say but you know why did you come back you could have been a
00:45:42.380tenure track put professor i said i know i could have done all that but i know by the end of 10
00:45:47.680years, I'd have become so attached to the vacuum cleaner and a car and a big mansion that I'd have
00:45:53.220been dysfunctional to do the real work in life. And I don't want to become dysfunctional. So I'm
00:45:58.540so glad I threw myself into what others would think of as deprivation, but I saw as liberation.
00:46:06.040Every time we can get rid of some of that industrial infrastructure junk, whether it's in
00:46:11.600consumption or it's in terms of dependence every time we can through solidarity. Whether it is in
00:46:18.600agriculture, where through solidarity with biodiversity, we produce our food and say,
00:46:22.800oh, we can produce better food without chemicals. So bye-bye Monsanto, bye-bye GMOs,
00:46:28.260bye-bye pesticides. And we can do that in every sector. So if we were able to come together as
00:46:34.480activist? How can we keep fighting for a diversity of issues, but as a united movement that can stand
00:46:42.840strong in the face of extraordinary odds? What can our unifying cause be? And how can that be
00:46:49.360agreed upon? So you might remember, or you might not remember, you're so young, that WTO was stopped
00:46:57.000in Seattle. And of course, the media started to say, oh, these anti-globalizers know what they
00:47:03.400against, they don't know what they're for. And we said, no, no, no, we know we are against
00:47:06.920patenting of life because we love life and we respect the integrity and self-organization of
00:47:12.940life. We're against free trade in agriculture because we love our farmers, our soil, our food
00:47:18.960and our health. And we know globalization of agriculture will destroy all of that.
00:47:24.700That's why I wrote The Earth's Democracy. So of course, we have to first know what we are for
00:47:29.160and we have to be for life in all its diversity.
00:47:32.920Not just human life, but all life on earth.
00:47:36.380The second part of it is to widen our understanding
00:47:43.460that democracy is going once in four years or five years
00:47:46.820and putting a ballot and getting someone into power
00:47:49.360who then is controlled by the corporations
00:47:51.100and has no relationship with the citizens
00:47:53.160and will impose GMOs, even when people don't want it,
00:47:56.600will impose laws that say you can't have labeling,
00:47:59.160even though people want labeling, which is the dark act, which imposes monopolies on seed,
00:48:05.060even though farmers everywhere struggle to defend their right to save seeds and their duty to save
00:48:10.020seeds. What we're really against is a continuity of what was started in terms of the knowledge
00:48:16.540paradigm with Newton and Descartes and Bacon, the declaration of the earth as dead and merely
00:48:22.100material for exploitation. The earth is alive and that sets everything else for us.
00:48:29.160Because the earth is alive, we must do agriculture in a way that the life of the earth flourishes rather than diminishes.
00:48:35.240Because we are part of the earth, we have to live in ways that our health and our communities and our societies flourish rather than become diseased, become violent, lose hope.
00:55:19.040that the only workers there are are slaves.
00:55:22.600I mean, if you read the literature today, whether it's the farms of Europe or the United States, or it's the big fishing vessels, they are working on the basis of slavery.
00:55:35.660Slavery is the economic base of the way the economy is running when so much wealth is being extracted.
00:55:43.420And that's why in Terra Viva, I've talked about the linear extractive economy that's concentrating everything in the hands of 1% versus a circular economy where we reclaim our capacity to live as one with the earth.
00:55:57.360And that can only happen through local economies and decentralization.
00:56:01.220And this contest between paradigms, this contest between different ways of thinking will grow more intense in the next few years.
00:56:07.960And what we have on our side is our alliance with the earth and our solidarity with each other.