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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'll be speaking to world renown environmental thinker and activist Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Vandana Shiva  The reason it lost courage, and it lost compassion, is because it started to be driven too much by money. And when you're too dependent on money, you have to listen to the messages and instructions of the masters. But when you are inspired by nature, by the wild, you listen to the instructions of the Earth. And that gives you courage.

Ayana Young  Well, Vandana thank you so much for joining me in conversation again. I'm truly looking forward to this. So welcome.

Vandana Shiva Pleasure to be talking again.

Ayana Young  So I’d like to start our conversation in recognition of what you call “compassionate courage.” In the movement for Earth your voice has remained one of the very few that has not succumbed to Big Green or the commodification of environmentalism - instead, time and time again you speak to the crisis of our time, a crisis of illusions in which we refuse to confront our penchant for destroying life, and this to me is so rare because lately, it feels the more traction climate and environmental movements gain, the more watered down they become. So, I have this question swirling around courage and direct action; how we can awaken others to the necessity of direct action, and how have you remained unwavering in your commitment to speak truth to power, even when it means standing up to those who were once at your side...What does compassionate courage mean amidst late-stage capitalism?  

Vandana Shiva Well compassionate courage actually means the same no matter what time you live in, except that at the end of age of colonialism, which named itself capitalism, because all the wealth that was accumulated was not from the miracle of money, it was from the violence of land grab, resource grab, and genocide. And it just got structured in a system which said, land is dead, labor doesn't produce, capitalism miraculous creator of things, compassionate courage becomes even more important when we are not just ruled by these illusions, but there's an intolerance of the illusion makers to truth. 

So compassionate courage then means standing by your truth and living by your truth and non cooperation with illusions, constructs that create the billionaires that create the inequalities that even create the pandemics because why would the most amazing wilderness of the world, Amazon be burning if it wasn't for money to be made from GMO soil? So the illusion of a patent, the illusion of money making, the illusion of genetic engineering as a superior system, the illusion of now impossible burger as a way to save the planet, not cooperating with these illusions. is compassionate courage. And it comes from recognizing that we are one with all beings on the Earth. And that is a state of being wild. Because if the wild is nature in a freedom and diversity and beauty and unfolding, then us being part of that means reclaiming our wildness, which means reclaiming our interconnectedness with other life, and realizing other life is sentient.

Ayana Young Yes, I really agree with you. And you write that compassionate courage comes from our understanding that the world is interconnected, our shared sense of interconnectedness emboldens our courage. In the country in which I am speaking to you, I feel many listeners may be disappointed to see that many members of our planetary community have detached themselves from this sense of interconnectedness...remaining deeply committed to an extractive and individualistic mindset. And in settler societies like the United States, I think about how this is emboldened by our obsession and obligation to the so-called nuclear or patriarchal family...so much so that we have fundamentally lost our understanding of our larger family or the world as family. Why is the disavowal of patriarchal structures necessary in order to retain a sense of interconnectedness?

Vandana Shiva You know, there have been many kinds of patriarchies, but not in all societies all the time, even Europe really got patriarchy in the last few thousand years before that the feminine was at the center. And in the old archeological sites, they don't find weapons of war, they find the divine goddess. In Indigenous cultures even today, there is no patriarchy. So patriarchy marriage to money making, which becomes capitalist patriarchy, is really taking two very, very violent systems at the structural level, and making them even more, amplifying their violence and the structural linkages. So if you think of it, who's the individual, in this capitalist patriarchal structure? A man, a property owning man. Can you imagine if instead of this, if the unit was the Earth family, or the community, as Indigenous cultures have always seen their identity, you wouldn't have resource grabbing, you wouldn't have genocide, you wouldn't have privatization of land, of biodiversity, of sea. And you would not accept the harm done to your fellow relatives, whether the relatives are plants and other animals, or other cultures. 

So at the heart of the myths of what is called capitalism, but I call it colonialism, it's continuation of colonialism, which is very masculine in form, which is very patriarchal, in form, at the heart of it is denying the life in nature, therefore the life of all our relatives in nature, and deny women's capacities to produce, to create by saying, “This is not production, and creation.” If you know, through non violence in partnership and co-creation, it's declared as not knowledge. As Bacon said, we have to torture nature, we have to subjugate her into slavery. That idea is 400 years old. And colonialism is about 500 years ago. So this structures of separation of fragmentation of illusion of superiority of the settlers and the occupiers and the colonizers over those they colonize, or anthropocentrism, the superiority of the human species over other species, all of these were necessary constructs to invade and grab and extract. And we begin by recognizing that we are members of one Earth family. We begin by recognizing that respect for all life and respect for women, and respect for the Indigenous and the respect for the small farmer, and the respect for the workers is one respect, based on recognizing that they are the true creators of the web. They are the true creators of knowledge.

Ayana Young In Oneness Versus the 1%, you point out that we are living in times where “the 1% controls the wealth and power to destroy our planet and our common lives, with no responsibility or accountability for their actions, because they have found clever ways to create illusions.” This illusory spell that so many have found themselves under feels like it has been generations in the making and I’d like to ask you, what is the illusion, and how are we actually complicit when we refuse to dispel it? Or perhaps, why do you think the global majority has proven itself so dedicated to upholding a system of the elite? 

Vandana Shiva Do you know someone commented, do you really mean 1%? I said, “No, I mean, .0001%”, except that it looks very ugly on book cover, and 1% as subsuming that very tiny number, who, as you notice in the data, the technology barons walked away with nearly a trillion dollars while people lost their homes, they lost their food, they lost their work, they lost their livelihoods, and more people are dying of hunger today then of COVID this is from the World Food Program. This is from Oxfam, this is from anywhere where data is still taken. So illusion number one, that nature is dead in her raw material, and that capital creates. Nature creates, and anything we create with her is based on her creativity. Capital extracts, capital itself is an illusion because the word is Latin roots is ‘caput’, which used to mean heads of cattle, but it also means finished.

Giving capital creative power, a construct of creative power, is the first illusion. And because so much of what people had has been taken away from them, and they've been made dependent on the money machine, they really think that if you have more growth, maybe we have a little bit of chance that there will be more bread on our table. And that’s why there isn’t a rebellion against the bailout, like there wasn’t the rebellion in the 2008 bailout with the financial collapse. These trillions that are being given, are being just harvested by the billionaires. 

The second illusion is that corporations are persons, you know, colonialism mutated into capitalism, through the East India Company, and the East India Company took 300 rogues of England, merchant adventures they were called, put them together in a group and basically they took the power to invade our lands, my country in particular, which is why they were called East India Company, but also to have limited liability. So if the ships carrying our spices returned, it was their wealth, the 300 divided amongst themselves, but if the Dutch East India Company got it, or the French got it, then society had to pay for it, and they still made money. So limited liability was the beginning of a system where they never lost. It was a socialization of the risk and the privatization of the gains. And now they're moving into basically a zero cost economy, they call it zero cost, where they'll have no liability of any kind, new illusions of our times. 

I've just released a book this evening before I came to talk to you in India, it is called Two Futures of Health and Humanity, and it was triggered by three patents. One a patent on the impossible burger and fake lab made breast milk in the name of protecting the Earth from climate change. Bill Gates is everywhere these days. The second is on nanoparticles introduced in our blood for iron deficiency and anemia, when all I need to do is take a few leaves of sainjna, as we call it, or moringa leaves or turmeric, and they can provide you all the iron, all the green leaves. So I put that together and said, “Here are all the alternatives that nature gives us.” And here is a violent invasion created by Google through a new life sciences division that is five years old, you know, they're taking on thousands of years of knowledge that humanity has evolved about our bodies and our health. And a five year old company made with the model that we must defeat Mother Nature, they want to put an untested nanoparticle, metallic nanoparticles into our body. And the third patent on the human body, mining our data, our brain data body data. 

So you know, my work has been guided so much by, beginning with Monsanto and others, wanting to patent seed, that is an illusion. Because a patent is an exclusive right to what you have invented. A seed is not invented by Monsanto. Our bodies are not invented by Microsoft. Invading our bodies is not an invention. It is an invasion. And Google's should totally be prohibited from doing this, and Gates wanting to have the impossible burger and the patents on it with GMO soil, blood made in the lab, and calling it a healthy diet. And he calls it real food. Bob Brown, I think Rob calls it, ‘unimprovable technology’. Real Food is unimprovable technology. Our bodies are unimprovable technologies. Invasions, violence takeover is superior technology. 

And I have written repeatedly in my book Oneness Versus 1%. As you will notice, if the first colonization used religion as the civilizing mission, the contemporary colonization of the Earth, of the wild, of our bodies, of our self organization, of our freedom, is using technology as the new religion for a civilizing mission. And what it is pitted against is the freedom of life as self organized, which to me is what wild is, against slavery in old forms, and new forms, and patenting is at the heart of slavery. Columbus set sail with the letters patent, Monsanto took patents on seed, and now big tech is taking patents, not just on software, where they got rich, but now on our bodies and living organisms, and this is the wake up for humanity.  And this is where people of concern need to be responding. You know, you talked a lot about big environmentalism and the reason it lost courage, and it lost compassion is because it started to be driven too much by money. And when you're too dependent on money, you have to listen to the messages and instructions of the masters. But when you are inspired by nature, by the wild, you listen to the instructions of the Earth. And that gives you courage.

Ayana Young  Wow, that was a frightening response and also very empowering at the same time. You know, what I’ve noticed over the years is that when we talk about the perils of technology, it’s through a very individualistic framing...We discuss the implications of social media on our mental health in terms of anxiety and depression, or we talk about the attention spans of future generations, but less so are we holding conversations about the implications of technology and our submission to it in terms of how we are setting ourselves up to become accessories to artificial intelligence and the digital world. This is why I think your writing on how technology will subjugate us as a society is so vital to bring into consciousness. Can you share with listeners how you think technology will restructure our capacity to survive in a sovereign manner? 

Vandana Shiva When I started, and I trained in physics, but I did a lot of interdisciplinary work in science and technology and policy. And the discourse in the 70s and 80s, used to be on science and technology assessment. We assess technologies. And when you assess a technology, the first question you ask is, “So I really need it?” The second question you ask is, “How does it compare to existing alternatives?” The third question you asked is, “Does it have any risks and hazards?” And the fourth question you ask is, “How does it serve nature? And how does it serve society?” Now, all four cases I've addressed in the book, and I'd be very happy to send you the links, but you can look for Two Futures of Food, Health, and Humanity, punished by CISSA and Navdanya, released today, and it is from what I gather from my colleagues already available in digital form. 

The three cases I've taken here, based on the patents these companies have applied for, it's not that this is coming out of my mind, this is reading their patents. Nanoparticles in our blood. Necessary? No. Better than alternatives? Not compared to all the vitamins we have. Risks? Huge, unknown. They haven’t even been assessed. And do they improve nature and society? No. They will create new diseases for which the same companies will have new miracles and new technological fixes, or take breast milk, artificial breast milk in the lab. Is it necessary? No. All we have to do is make it easier for mothers to have situations where they can go away to breastfeed their babies. Superior lab milk, superior? No. Risk assessed? Not at all. And does it improve the wholesomeness of our bodies, of the baby's health? We know for sure, the reason the baby food, the movement against baby food, the lactogen chain, and the fabricated food was so strong, is because the evidence was there that this causes harm. 

So we've got to bring technology back to where it belongs, it's a tool, it needs assessment, societies must have choice. If those things are, if assessment through democratic process, and choice through democratic process, and full informed consent is missing, then you are moving very quickly into the use of tools as dictatorships. Technology then becomes the tools in the hands of the masters, rather than the tool at the service of nature and humanity. And those of us who worked in these fields for so long, know that if I plant diversity in our fields, as I do with Navdanya, the movement I started, there will be lots of insects, but no pests. Diversity is a technology. But it's not a harsh technology. And I remember, this stays in my mind, ‘82 I was launching the organic movement of India, and we decided where else but to Gandhi's ashram, the nonviolence profet. But coming back to the Gandhi ashram, you know, he had celebrated non violence and I saw them using pesticides and I said, “Listen, how can you in Gandhi’s ashram use pesticides? And they said, “You know a friend, a scientists, came and sprayed pesticides and the birds dropped but the insects dropped dead too and we were totally overwhelmed by the power.” So violent power has brainwashed us, violent power has taken away our capacity to live and think, through creative power in nonviolent form. This is the power of the wild. This is the power of women. This is the power of Indigenous people. This is the power, if humanity has to have a future. This is the kind of power that the young people marching on climate change, need to reclaim not panic, not march because of panic. But much because you love the earth so much, that you're not going to let anything come in the way of preventing actions that are harming the Earth, whether through extinction, or climate change, or the pandemic, or any of the other existential crises we face. 

Ayana Young I am so inspired by your sheer dedication and fearlessness and courage. It's really a necessary reminder for all of us who feel desensitized, discouraged by what's happening in the world. You just give us this spark of light, like fire again, and it just feels so it feels so good to hear you say these things. And now you write; “We must reclaim our real freedoms, and not be seduced by the false freedoms of ‘free trade’, corporate rule, algorithm-run democracy, and consumerism. We must stand firm and reclaim the meaning of wealth and the conditions for being well.” In a world where we are trained to consume, the call to reclaim our intellectual freedom is an act of resistance and a battle against addiction... This leads me to think about the importance of active remembrance and looking at historical examples of freedom that we can revive. Personally, what examples of freedom do you seed inspiration from and how do you practice growing these memories into reality? 

Vandana Shiva You know, as I mentioned, the East India Company was created to colonize India, even Columbus set sail for India. That's why all the Indigenous people of the Americas are called Indians. He thought he had landed in India for the spices, which was the big issue of that time. The East India Company, basically, you know, wanted our textiles and our spices, they took the richest textile economy of the world and destroyed it. 

They colonized North America and took the land from the Indigenous people by violence, because they grabbed so much land, and at that time, there was no fossil fuels, there was no mechanization, they had to capture Africans as slaves to do the cotton picking on these giant sized plantations, which they had grabbed. So the workers had been captured as slaves, the land had been captured and enslaved. And then with all of this cotton, they were able to use the fossil fuel industrialism to destroy textiles everywhere, dump clothing, machine made clothing, and Gandhi then pulled out the spinning wheel and he said “We will not be free until we reclaim our economic freedom. And if the empire of cotton is enslaving us, then we will make our own cloth.” So when I realized the corporations were wanting, the agrichemical, poison cartel wanted to own life through patenting through GMOs, I thought back to our history and I remembered that it was the spinning wheel that mobilized India's self confidence that we could be free. It was in our power, no one was using spinning wheels at that time, they'd all been destroyed. We taught ourselves to spin, we taught ourselves to make handloom clothing again, and from nothing, 75% of our clothing came from hand spun hand woven cloth, and beautiful textiles at that. 

So when I realized that the corporation's wanted to own the seed, I took inspiration from the spinning wheel, and said, the spinning wheel of today is the seed because the empire of cotton has given way to an empire where life itself through trying to own life. And just like the spinning wheel is small, and because it's small, it can be in the hands of millions, the seed is small and can be in the hands of the poorest peasant. And this is what I've done through Navdanya for the last 33 years, defend the freedom of the seed and its wildness, because non-GMO seed is a wild seed, a non-hybrid, living seed is free seed. It is alive, it is wild. And when farmers create with that seed to make 200,000 rice in India, from one grass, or thousands of corn in Mexico out of one teosinte. This too, is one wildness outside the apartheid. I call it the ecological apartheid, which said we are outside nature. The wild is nature. We are domesticated. No, when we are free, we are wild, because we are a part of nature. When we are enslaved through fossil fuel technology or digital technology or toxic technology of the glyphosate and roundup and the pesticides, that's when we lose our freedom and our wildness. So the three things that have constantly inspired me all the things I've done, begin with the small, which is why I don't get panicky, when big money isn't happy with what we do. The earth is happy. Diversify. Let many people do things in their own ways. And the third is self organization, and for me if there's one word that defines what is wild, it is that which is not controlled by the outside, that is why self organization is wilderness.

Ayana Young I’m really hanging on every word. This is so personally good for me to hear. So thank you for everything that you're saying. And I wanted to bring up that this past year, divisions have become amplified in many parts of the world, and I think many are contending with the reality that hatred is not easily wiped away. The changing of ruling political parties does not remediate the hatred that has grown in the cracks of deepening inequalities. You speak to the reality that social violence and disintegration is becoming the norm, and I’m curious to hear how you think we can operate amidst all of the hatred that our generation is being left to bear, how do we dismember the politics of hate that has become so pervasive?

Vandana Shiva I think that there are three aspects of transcending this constructed hate, I call it constructed hate, because it's not essential to human beings to hate. And it isn't in every period of history, that people who have had historical inequalities and injustices, continue every moment to prevent that history from creating a new unity of humanity, a new unity of justice. The Civil Rights movement in the United States overcame segregation, but not to create segregation. And so many people who were white joined the civil rights movement, every law that was passed, was because people united over the larger cause. Before I wrote Oneness Versus 1%, I wrote Earth Democracy, after Seattle, because we were being repeatedly told, “ Oh the anti-globalization movement knows what it's against, it doesn't know what it's for.” And I said, “You didn't get it. We are against your free trade and against your globalization, because we know we are for the biodiversity we are for the Earth, we are for people's livelihoods and, and jobs. We are for equality and justice, and we are for sovereignty and democracy.” So I wrote Earth Democracy and in that I have shown how a neoliberal deregulation of commerce, which is called free trade, robs people of their basic securities, their work, their livelihoods, it then fuels divisions, and the divisions then become the capital to keep fueling the money machine. I developed that further in Oneness Versus 1%. 

So it isn't an accident, that those who are billionaires were financing the hate votes of 2016, the same big money, instead of allowing people to unify on making sure everyone has work. Everyone has dignity. Everyone has access to health care. Everyone has access to good education not being enslaved to a computer, but classrooms in the wild, you don't people in a classroom? Okay, get them out of the cement, but don't lock them in with a computer, let them roam in the forest, that too is a classroom. So these new enslavements are actually fueling new divides. And that is also the very big reason we always have to be very alert to see what is money driving society to. They control the media. They definitely control the social media. 2016, Facebook sold its data that it had stolen without your permission to Cambridge Analytica, Cambridge Analytica used for four hates to turn into political messages; hate of women, hate of Black people, hate of Muslims, hate of migrants. 

So the 2016 election was an algorithm run election. And as a Newsweek article said, “And it elected an artificial intelligence president”. So a lot of the divisions are being maintained and deepened because it suits the money making machine that I talked about in Oneness Versus 1%. It suits the billionaires and the super rich. When the British realized they couldn't stay in India, because India rose against them and united across religions. In 1857, we drove the East India Company out. So what did the British do after that? They said “We have to divide and rule”, and they started engineering, immediately after, hate between Muslims and Hindus, and if Pakistan was divided from India, it was through an engineering by the British rulers thinking they could continue to stay on. But they left a divide that had not healed, the greed machine creates divide and rule. The love and compassion and the courage has to unite to know we are one humanity on one planet, there is no division, there's no separation. And that is where reclaiming our own autonomy comes into the picture, where we don't look at social media messaging, we look at experiences, we look at our relationships, we live freedom, we live our lives.

Ayana Young Through each conversation I hold on the podcast, I’m reminded of the inability of corporate governments to ever provide us with meaningful leadership, change, or transition; and while the 20th century once held hopeful democratic uprisings - by now most of us feel stymied by visions of “democracy”, or fear that whatever semblance of democracy we once knew is now being eroded by the technological age. I see this as a period where we must revitalize our understanding and practices of self-government. Can you delve into the concept of swaraj for listeners and how it fits into our larger movement for a way of living that does not seek to exterminate life itself?

Vandana Shiva Just like compassionate courage is relevant in each age, but becomes more relevant, when systems of the economy of governance become more violent. In a similar way, self rule, self governance, self organization, is the only way for every bee and every human being to live. And, of course, the self governance then spreads from the individual, to the communities to the local to the regional, to the national, and to the planetary. So the word swaraj, raj is to rule, swaraj means to rule through yourself, self rule, and this was the word across the world, at the time of British colonialism. Even in Hawaii, the word they used was self rule and home rule. This is exactly the same principle as the principle of the seed being self organized complexity in evolution, like nature evolves in freedom through self organization, through free societies evolve in freedom through swaraj, and swaraj also means not just understanding the limits of the market, and the limits of a state married to a market, but having the compassionate courage to say no. And that is civil disobedience. 

So I've had to practice it from the days of saying no to patents on seed. When the GMO lobby wanted to dump GMO soil on us and made our own edible oils, and our cold pressed mills illegal, I had to march with my sisters, for bringing back our oils. So I work on five freedoms that are related to everyday lives, and to the majority of our Indian people. Seed Freedom, beej swaraj, food freedom anna swaraj, freedom of working with the Earth as your mother, but protecting your rights to work with her, therefore, resisting land grabs, bhoomi swaraj, land sovereignty, your knowledge, knowledge sovereignty, gyaan swaraj, and increasingly, economic sovereignty, shaping your economies. Given that since the rise of colonialism mutated into capitalism mutated down into digital dictatorship, the option is always to kill the economies of freedom of the people, swaraj then becomes absolutely vital. And if you project if you read this new book I released today and you project the patterns into the future you know, I predicted the patterns of that time into the future and said “No, I will not allow seeds to be patented.” If you project those patterns into the future, where we are reduced to users, algorithms define our value and then we are assigned cryptocurrencies, already in India. They made cash illegal, the big notes illegal. Don't be surprised if in a very, very short term, they make cash illegal across the world. And then cryptocurrencies, not governed by central banks, reality fixed by the algorithms of the four tech giants. Do we want to live in a world where our value is determined by those who've taken our value away? Do we want to live in a world where we don't have the freedom to go to the local farmers markets, where everyone is under surveillance? Surveillance capitalism is what Zuboff has talked about. So we need to project into the future, the reality that they are talking about, that they are now putting into place and say that part is not my swaraj, my swaraj is this part, that is democracy and democracy, you know representative democracy was never supposed to be democracy. But it was reduced to democracy. Participation in shaping your lives, what you eat, what you grow, how you trade, how your economies are, those participatory systems are, to democracy, and economic democracy is where all of these breakdowns will be addressed, when we reclaim our ability to define the economy economy as the care of our home economy as the art of living, not economy as Wall Street, or the billionaires logic of extraction.

Ayana Young The analysis you just gave on cryptocurrency is not one that I have heard. And that's really frightening and important for us to look into deeper. So I've made a note for myself to dive into that a bit more because I didn't even consider the cash would be taken away. And that's a whole other level. Well, I’d like to transition our conversation to discuss the ways in which corporations like Monsanto have been extending their grip into the world of data collection, which isn’t nearly discussed enough...Why are corporations like Monsanto so interested in remote sensing technology, data collection, and forms of artificial false knowledge? How does this coincide with the calculated attempts at severing ancestral knowledge, and, for lack of a better word, the dumbing down of our land tenders and seed keepers, which poses a significant threat to our ability to adapt amidst changing climate regimes? 

Vandana Shiva When I wrote Oneness Versus 1%, Monsanto had just announced its entry into digital agriculture. It had bought out the world's biggest climate data corporation, and the world's biggest soil data corporation. And through remote sensing, what they are hoping to do is be the only people who can tell you what your soil is like. And then prescribed to you chemicals, they're not going to tell you to feed the soil with organic matter and let the earthworms and the mycorrhizae bring life back, because they can’t make money out of that. 

So the digital agriculture spin is “We will reduce chemicals by 1%.” But in the process of drones, and driverless tractors, they're going to create ever larger farms that will use ever more chemicals. The theme on Monsanto's website, and I've cited it in the book, was “The future of farming without farmers”, so they don't just want to erode our knowledge they want to make farmers disappear. And the Monsanto legacy, you know Monsanto is not bought out by Bayer. The Monsanto legacy is being pushed ahead by Bill Gates, who appears to be the big philanthropist of our time. I have just released another report on The Gates To The Global Empire, on how he's taking over seed agriculture, all the seed banks of the World Health, of course, the media, education, engineering the climate through geoengineering, and driving species to extinction through gene drives. But he is doing exactly what Monsanto said they would. And he's calling it “ONE”. It was announced this January, just a little before the COVID ad he is announcing one model of agriculture for the entire world controlled digitally, and they're already institute's, like the Dryland Institute in India, they are signing contracts with Microsoft. So first, they mind just like the Microsoft patent application of 060606 is about mining our data and then assigning us value as cryptocurrency. They put people into farms, to mine farming data, then put it into big data and process it through algorithms. And then Microsoft sells it back as big data. And that's the reason everyone's being given a smartphone. That's the reason Bill Gates had an agreement with Mr. Slim, the billionaire of Mexico. So the digital technologies, the poison technology, and Big Pharma, and big finance are all coming together in the next grab, and if they manage it, there will be no life on Earth. It is a recipe of fast forwarding extinction. This is the reason we all need to wake up. If you're worried about species disappearance, wake up to this digital dictatorship. You're worried about climate change, wake up to this. You're worried about democracy and freedom, wake up to this, no matter what your concern. It is being impacted. And it is so invisible. And that's the reason I wrote the book. I really felt it was important for the people to know.

Ayana Young In this new edition of Oneness versus the 1%, you’ve updated it to acknowledge the role of Bill Gates amidst the coronavirus pandemic and how billionaires alike are making money off of disaster. There have been many theories running rampant during this time, some of which, it feels are being used to keep us distracted and disconnected. From a clear voice, I’d like to ask you about what you are observing; what is being obstructed, and what are organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization getting away with while our eyes are turned away? 

Vandana Shiva Well what's being obstructed is the ecological awakening that we are interconnected. What's being obstructed is that our health depends on our immunity, and the same virus can be floating around. But if your immunity is good, you will not be affected. And if you are compromised, you will be affected. If you have chronic diseases because of the junk food industry, it could become fatal. All of those linkages are being blocked. There's so many ways to treat a viral infection. Those pluralities are being blocked. What else is being blocked is an exploration of how in the year 2020. When we know new pandemics are coming from the destruction of the wild, the invasion into forests, the violation of ecosystem boundaries of forest ecosystems. At that time, we should be looking at how do you stop this expansionism and instead, you are being pushed into relentless expansionism. What is also being blocked is the exploration of a food system that doesn't cause disease and doesn't destroy the planet. In my book Soil Not Oil, I worked out how 50% of the greenhouse gases come from industrial globalized food systems. And yet in ecological systems and regenerative agriculture, we have 100% solution, not just to the climate crisis, but to food and hunger. This is being blocked by financing impossible burgers, and making that look like the future of food as if it's already been determined. No, we need an amazing debate on what is food? Is that junk from lab food? Is it worthy of being called food? Or is it just hyper processed junk, which will increase the diseases because it will create a new war against our gut microbiome and then finally, what's being blocked is our thinking. When we are turned into data mines our brain is mined, our bodies are mined, it means we as autonomous intelligent decision makers get blocked. And that’s why never before has humanity faced so many multiple challenges to its own species existence, as we face today. And many of these are in the WIPO offices, they are in the patent offices, but most people don't read that. But maybe they read the book, and through the book, reclaim their oneness, and get the power through that oneness with the Earth with the wild with all other wild relatives, to say five technology barrons cannot push us over the brink.

Ayana Young Yeah I want to talk a bit more about the WIPO parent from March 26 of this year, 2020, which quotes “Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….The body activity that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented…” And this is something you mentioned in your book. And I just, I'm curious to hear a little bit more about this. It's just such a bizarre patent. And I'm thinking you were saying earlier that there could be a connection to COVID? Or is that something you were you were mentioning before in that last response? 

Vandana Shiva Well, the thing is, all the systems being put into place, on grounds of our safety, our systems that are data mining systems, those are surveillance systems. And that’s why for those who think the next smart way that'll monitor their pulse rate and then send signals, or a smartphone that will always be on. They need to read this patent and then make the decision about how they see their own body and how they want to govern themselves. Because if they don't read these patents they will be thinking,”Oh I'm doing this to protect my health” and they will walk right into the surveillance prison.

Ayana Young Thank you so much for bringing this up. That's something that we really need to hear. Now Vandana, Global society’s fault lines are becoming more and more apparent, and this visibility is welcome after we have been calling for the rupture of these dystopian and exploitative systems. Yet, this is a time of great uncomfort...and of course, there are those who point out that they have already been living in an apocalyptic world; which leads me to think about the multitude of emotions, thoughts, and experiences our world family is holding... I know this is overwhelming for many, making it difficult to think about where we should be orienting ourselves. In Oneness vs the 1% you share a quote from poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore; “Contemporary western civilization is built of brick and wood. It is rooted in the city. But Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not in the city. India’s best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds.” As someone who has found a life of purpose in dedication to the temperate rainforests, I resonate so deeply with this quote. As we come to a close, I wonder if you might share how, in a moment where so much is happening, where we are all feeling so much, we might ground ourselves, actions, and aspirations in reverence to the forest? 

Vandana Shiva I think that there are three ways in which we can and must ground ourselves in the forest, first to return to the forest for lessons of democracy. And that's what Tagore has said in that quote, that we learn democracy from the forest where everything is diverse, and everything is interconnected. True democracy as co-existence of diversity and neutrality of diversity, I think is the first. The second is to realize that the forest is not a wilderness that's doing nothing and should be wiped out and cut down for a mine, or GMO soil in Amazon or palm oil in Indonesia. But the forest is the heart of the planet, and should be our heart and our mind too. The third, and this has been my life's dedication, industrial agriculture and Hitler's chemical tools, moving into the farms through agrichemicals, agro-toxins, the pesticides, the herbicides, even the chemical fertilizers, that this created a monoculture and the destruction of the wilderness of the farm. In India, we protected it. And my work in Navdanya, which means nine seeds is for diversity, not just the diversity we plant. But the diversity that grows when we plant nonviolently. The other day on our farm, I just counted in one square foot, 12 edible plants and medicinal plants that we hadn’t sown, but are there to give us bounty and abundance. So, you know, wrap up the roundup and allow nature to thrive. And the fourth very, very important part of this is we have to remember that we have a forest within our gut microbiome with 100 trillion microbes is a forest. And we have to nurture it. And we nurture it through the link that food provides between the Earth in her diversity and our bodies with the gut diversity. When those two are in sync, there is health for the planet, and there's health for our bodies.

Ayana Young For my last question Vandana, I wanted to bring up the total irresponsibility in which corporations handle life is no surprise; behaving as if there is no sanctity to what we experience or witness during our time on Earth...And I think about this in context to geoengineering, which I might have mistakenly thought to have been pushed to the periphery, not that it was something that is still actively being pursued or being taken seriously - yet weather modification continues to be funded. Can you speak to this a bit? Where does geoengineering currently stand?

Vandana Shiva We just released The Gates Report and our colleagues presented the latest on geoengineering, the research on it continues, and Bill Gates is a big driver, they call him the sugar daddy of geoengineering. Without his money, it would be very dead. He doesn't just fund these reckless experiments with the planet. He actually buys votes by spending public relations money to influence the UN outcome both on geoengineering as well as on gene tracks. So the report on The Gates To The Global Empire is available for free download on the Navdanya International website. For anyone who wants to know more about Bill Gates than I've written in Oneness Versus 1%, as well as geoengineering and the extinction technology of gene drives, please go visit the website of Navdanya International. And when we realize these powers are too big, that is when our paths must be unleashed in unity in solidarity. And what I've done over the many years, is when you bring 20 groups that are all victims together, in one tribunal, I do the seed tribunal, we did the Monsanto tribunal in 2016, and that then makes people realize, well, I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one. And then it becomes the unity of the Earth. And all the people who are victims of harm, whether they be farmers, whether they be consumers, whether they be cancer victims, whether they be farmers who commit suicide because of debt, all this becomes one problem. And corporations and the billionaires and the philanthro-imperialists, like Bill Gates, rest on having the public believe their story. That is why we must tell our stories. We don't have the media, the dominant media, we don't have it, but we do have communication with each other like my conversation with you and we must talk to each other and realize we are all in the same crisis and we will all get out of it together in unity.

Ayana Young Thank you so much for your time Vandana. This has been medicine for, for my soul as I'm sure for the listeners who are joining us.

Vandana Shiva Thank you and stay strong all of you.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by John Newton, Lady Moon and the Eclipse and Dzidzor. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell and Melanie Younger.