Ayana Young  Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist. 

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation and of the Slow Food Movement. Founder of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is author and editor of many influential books, including two from Synergetic Press, Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Wisdom, and the Rights of Mother Earth (2020) and the forthcoming Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizens’ Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture, which is slated for release in February 2022.

Well, Vandana, welcome back to the show. I am so looking forward to speaking today. And thanks so much for sharing your time with us again.

 Vandana Shiva  It's good to be talking to you again, For The Wild.

Ayana Young  Yes. Well, so, I want to begin our conversation with an epistemological grounding of the two divergent forces you've described as determining our present global reality, and your book Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Women and the Rights of Mother Earth, you write, "The sovereign option and colonial option emerge from two different paradigms and worldviews, leading to two conflicting ownership systems: an age-old system based on community rights, still, the dominant one in rural and Indigenous communities, combined with national sovereignty, and the ownership system of corporate defined Intellectual Property Rights based on individual private property and enclosures of the commons.” 

This fundamental understanding of the differences between a sovereignty framework of the commons and a colonial framework of neoliberal ownership serves to undergird the conversation we’re sharing today. To start us off, can you speak to the importance of the commons for the well-being of the Earth and if you believe there can be a paradigm shift away from the colonial worldview by those of us who are very much inculcated within a colonial, neoliberal paradigm? What might that look like?

Vandana Shiva  You know, the enclosures of the commons and colonialism go hand in hand. The enclosures were taking place in England. But it was the colonization of the land in order to take the land away from the peasantry, to turn the peasants into cheap labor for the factories and the mines. And it was a necessary part of industrialism, which is celebrated without knowing how much was taken away from people in terms of the inclusions of the commons. But colonialism was the enclosure of the commons, of the colonized lands. In India, land was a commons. We never had private property, and then we had individual use of land. But the use right and an ownership rate a very different use requires that you take care of that piece of land over generations made. Whereas property allows you to buy and sell and trade and commodify and speculate and destroy. Seed was never intellectual property, so commons, and that's what my life has been shaped by over the last 35 years now, of saving seeds and starting the Navdanya movement. When you ask, is it too late to reverse the enclosures? No, it can never be too late, because the commons is what makes life. 

For a short period in the industrialized countries as a result of the worker's rights movement, as a result of the anti-slavery movement, it became possible to, in a way, by the means of living, and that is collapsing right now at this point in these two years of the COVID crisis. And the recurring climate disasters should wake anyone to the fact that the structures that were put in place by colonialism by industrialism by globalization are now being appropriated even further. And this ongoing commons enclosure is the enclosure of life itself for the majority of people. So we will have to learn to reclaim the commons in order to live. We will have to reclaim that which is vital to life: the land, the water, the seeds, the knowledge, community, in order to have a life because within a decade they don't even expect money. They expect cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies will be allocated to you, according to how you fit into a credit system. Just like already is happening in China, most people will be reduced to throw away. Unless we reclaim the commons and start commoning our common future.

Ayana Young  So fascinating in a disturbing way to imagine what is on the horizon. I’d like to hear your thoughts on how long you believe the current death culture can last. Do you believe there will come a time soon when it won’t be a choice to choose food or seed sovereignty? As peak oil, peak soil, and peak water, what do you think the ones in power will do when the resources they’ve been profiting from can no longer be extracted at the same rate?

Vandana Shiva When you ask if the system will give, it is already giving. I mean, look at the fact that here was Mr. Elon Musk, putting SpaceX out and then satellites, and I think 40 of them collapse just yesterday. So you create a hugely artificial infrastructure that needs a hell of a lot of control and support. Well, the heavier your infrastructure, the more vulnerabilities and it is collapsing, if only we will look. It is not thriving. If at all it is in place, it's in place through huge violent force and imposition. Coming from a country like India where I've seen the Green Revolution imposed through force: people didn't choose chemicals, they were forced to have chemicals in agriculture. People did not choose to eat from bad GMO soil, it was dumped on us and ours were made illegal. And that's why I have always participated in movements to defend our right to live a healthy life. 

So when we talk seats over energy, and inclusion of the common stone about a futuristic need. We not only are doing it today, have to do it today. But if you look at COVID How did people respond - people who were free to think and find the solutions - they realize there's a deep connection between vulnerability to infection and your immunity through food and what you eat. And this is scientifically established over millennia. “Let food be thy medicine,” Hippocrates said, in a way, the oldest science of health and living, and I'm sure, mostly food is the first medicine. So we know this. That's how the body works. Good food nourishes, more and more people are shifting to ensuring the food is good. And where the people don't have a choice is where they're more vulnerable to disease. 

Just do the mapping of COVID deaths, most of them were linked to “comorbidities” as they call it, you know, junk diets because you can't afford to eat properly, and diabetes, and cardiovascular problems. So people are actually dying because of a bad food system. And health comes from a good food system for the health of the planet and the health of people. So reclaiming the commons of life, growing our food, reclaiming seed sovereignty, and food sovereignty is not a luxury, it's a necessity. And that is also the reason why the powerful have always wanted to control food. Kissinger wrote and said, “let's have food as a weapon.” 

You control food, you control people.

Right now the biggest investments of big tech, you would imagine the big technology barons that are already the richest, at some point, it would be enough - no, now they want our food. They're hungry for food and they want to make it artificial. They want to make it in the labs with GMO soya and cellular meat and cellular milk and cellular this but it will need feedstock and they are looking at turning our agriculture into an even bigger acreage of roundup sprayed soya and corn, which will now not be commodities but will become raw material. And I think it's the biggest violation of food, to reduce it to raw material - to then turn it into bad systems, which will further aggravate the planet's instability in climate change in terms of species disappearance, but also our own health. So, are they collapsing? I think you withdraw the force they're using to impose the options, they have no relevance. So for a while, they will use coercion, for a while they will use force, and more and more people will either not have the money to participate, or will have a consciousness that will say, “I will not participate.”

Ayana Young  I want to explore this consciousness a little bit more. And I'm wondering if you might speak to your own story a bit for listeners about choosing to fight in the struggle for collective liberation, earth healing, and for those of us who are positioned with such unearned privileges, who oftentimes feel disconnected from the issues affecting different classes, I'm wondering, what do you say to people who feel that they can choose privilege over the struggle for liberation? And I bring this up, not as a way to judge folks, it's more that the system is also designed to keep people complicit and especially in the States to keep people comfortable enough to not want to fight in the struggle.

Vandana Shiva  The number of people who are having their comfort maintained is becoming fewer and fewer. Again, let's go back to these two years of COVID. The number of people who became unhoused in America - the 2008 crisis that put people in tents looks small compared to the number of people who can't afford to pay a rate and are out on the streets and are being criminalized - the number of people who've lost their jobs and livelihood. So the crisis is very, very deep. Now that the system has a very clever way of taking a small part of society and humanity and hanging a carrot and saying “participate and you will earn much more, and help us.”

So the other day, you know, Zuckerberg was launching his Meta in India. And they were full-page ads in every paper about how they were going to have about a million trained people to push the metaverse which is this artificial reality and virtual reality, which is now the owner of Facebook. Well, you know, his stocks collapsed, Meta lost $129 billion, and he lost about 21 or 22 billion in one flip of a button. So we are talking about a very, very fragile, privileged system. Very, very fragile. It's a house of cards, and it can collapse any time. And those who have the privilege of choice need to make the choice. Not on the terms being offered by those who have made them the new digital slaves. There have always been different slaveries. The first way our bodies were slaves, the Africans captured from Africa and taken into the cotton fields. Then there was slavery in the factories, the automobile factories, then there was slavery now of a digital kind. And in the digital kind of slavery, the slaves are being paid hugely to make them forget that they're slaves. And they have no idea where their options are. 

But I realized this because at Navdanya, the movement I started, where we have an Earth University and we offer courses. The two groups of Indians who come for our courses on ecological farming and return to the land and seed saving and ecological farming, one group is the IT industry who are earning huge amounts and they are getting empty with them. The next group is the people from finance. So those are the two classes earning lots; they have privilege. Everyone else is being excluded. And I think we need a new solidarity: not a new solidarity based on narrowness, but a new solidarity between other species. And as you know, this very artificial division between nature and humans which is still dominating so much of the discussion. 

The wild is not where people are absent, it's not the uninhabited. The wild is where people live in harmony with nature, and 80% of the biodiversity of the planet today is in the 20-25% of the land left with Indigenous people. That's how we will protect nature. And that's how we will protect our future. And for that, we will have to give up these constructions that say they're primitive - if they don't stamp on every ecological process they’re primitive. You are living in a hut in Alaska: you've chosen that. You have chosen a solidarity with the Earth and the snows, we can choose our different solidarities and all the violence and all the brutality of 500 years of colonialism, 200 years of industrialism, 30 years of neoliberal globalization, all of that, we can find creative ways to transcend by realizing that: a) we are one humanity on one planet, and b) that both humanity and the planet are rich because of their diversity. 

So we will have to overcome these divisions that make the Other an enemy because you're not exactly like me: “therefore, you're my enemy.” And this way is Cartesian thinking this is very, either-or thinking. It's extremely brutalizing for people. And this polarization is kind of overwhelming the world, not because people by instinct love to hate each other because you're somewhat different but it's because a very small group of people - and you know, just during the lockdown when people lost lives, livelihoods, work, they made $1.5 trillion extra just sitting around and harvesting the lockdown. They want to make sure that people don't unite to protect their and each other's lives. And that's why they create new kinds of divide and rule, around race, around ethnicity, around gender, around class. We need to fight for justice. The fight for justice does not mean hating each other. We need to overcome racism but that does not mean having an animosity because someone else has a different color of skin. Or even more seriously, because someone else was on a different trajectory of history. We have to create a common trajectory. That to me is the ultimate reclaiming of the commons, our common future. 

Ayana Young  Beautiful, thank you for that. And I definitely want to talk more about the fall of late-stage capitalism. But before that, you were touching on Indigenous knowledges.

In their book Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments and Regaining Health, Rudolph and McLachlan provides an essential understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the health of food and the land as non-separate and in constant relationship with each other. They write, “An Indigenous food sovereignty framework connects the health of food with the health of the land and identifies a history of social injustice as having radically reduced Indigenous food sovereignty in colonized nations.” This understanding is crucial for framing the present-day extractive agricultural practices in India and around the globe as a continuation of the colonial legacy. Provided this, can you touch upon the differences between a food sovereignty or seed sovereignty framework that accounts for the health of soils, the sanctity of seeds, water, and air, against the more myopic aims of food security that are based solely on the health of the individual and very much disconnected from food’s relationship to ecosystems. Here, I’m thinking about monoculture-engineered fields designed to be more nutritious. In your view, how do traditional ecological knowledges support food sovereignty, and how might food security measures actually collude with bio-agriculture and neoliberal understandings of the earth?

Vandana Shiva  You know, when neoliberalism was being forced on India, it was ‘91, and in that period, during the election campaigning, our prime minister of that time, you know, was standing for elections Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. And then the politicians were campaigning, including the person who became the Prime Minister, and I remember a speech he gave. He said: food security is not food in your godowns (your village storehouses), food security is dollars in your pocket. And this was in India where dollars is not a currency median for rupees, and it was in a peasant area where most of the peasants are women in northern Karnataka. And I remember this woman getting up and saying: “A) we don't deal with dollars. Secondly, we wear saris, we don't have pockets.” 

So the idea of food security has been so manipulated and messed up that it has become absolutely meaningless. It can mean Monsanto growing or GMO crops and the claim that you will have more yield which is not true, or GMO rice, which is golden rice will produce more beta carotene but you don't look towards rice for beta carotene, you go to a carrot, you go to the pumpkins, you go to where there is already richness of vitamin A. And that's why our different foods have different nutrients. And our work in Navdanya has shown that the more you care for the soil, the more nutrition the soil gives you. Nutrition is not an external input. Nutrition is the relationship of care between the seed, the soil, the farmer producer, the plants. And the data is now so clear. We are starting a new study, we've been saving seeds now since 1987. And just eating that food we know it has one nutrition. This year we're going to study the nutritionally empty hybrid seeds, nutritionally empty hybrid vegetables, and the nutritionally dense seeds that have been evolved for eating. The difference between Indigenous cultures of seed and the industrial system of seeds is the industrial system is based on extracting money by creating obsolescence: hybrids have to be bought every year, GMO seeds have to be bought every year, and it has an extractive system. On the other hand, peasants have been bred for diversity because as so many peasants in India said to me, we have to beautify the earth - and the more diverse the systems are. One wild grass, the Oryza sativa, Indian peasants evolved 200,000 varieties of rice - look at that brilliance of breeding. And because they were breeding for eating, they bred nutrition. Because they were breeding for growing, they bred resilience. So diversity and nutrition resilience is what Indigenous knowledge maximizes. 

On the other hand, the extractive economy of seed colonization maximizes the manipulation of seed to sell more chemicals. And in the process, you empty the seed of its nutrition and the soil of its nutrition. Data is showing that about 70 to 80% of the nutrition has been lost in food in industrialized countries. But the third link between diversity, Indigenous knowledge, and our health is: we eat diversity. There is no Indigenous culture that eats only one crop. Even the ancient systems of Mexico and the Three Sisters in North America always had corn, beans, and pumpkin because you never ever eat one crop alone. 

I remember when I went to do my Ph.D. in Canada, what really struck me coming from India where we ate diversity was going to a supermarket and there would be about 50 kinds of Campbell's soups. But we look at the ingredients, they are the same ingredients. So all that supermarket diversity is actually uniformity. Of more and more GMO soya, more and more GMO corn, and all the lab foods that Mr. Gates wants to promote, the Impossible Burgers, and the Beyond Meat, etc. are all GMO, GMO, GMO, GMO soya. That is a disaster for our gut microbes. We are a living diversity, we are a rainforest within, and that rainforest wants diversity of nourishment. The more we punish it with a uniform diet, the more it gets desertified, the more we punish it with toxic Roundup residues, the more the diseases of today grow. All diseases of today, chronic diseases begin in the gut, doctors are recognizing that the gut microbiome and its destruction is basically at the root of chronic diseases that so many people are suffering, actually. So health is absolutely a continuum, from the soil to the plants we grow. To have that microbiome.

Ayana Young  I want to talk a little bit more about our health. And whether it's the gut microbiome or beyond, when it comes to GMOs, I think that when the conversation around GMOs (I think was really more prevalent, maybe about around a decade ago), people, I felt, we're talking more about how our bodies (and the earth-body, but how our human bodies) were being impacted by the tools of GMOs. So I just want to remind people and honestly myself, that eating GMOs are toxic for us. And if you could share a bit about other examples that you've seen of people getting sick and the diseases that come from that, I think it's a really important reminder for those of us who maybe at one point knew it but those memories have faded for us. 

Vandana Shiva  My work on seed saving began because I did not accept the illusion that chemical companies using genetic engineering tools to make GMOs were now the creators of life and therefore to be owners of the seed. That was the simple reason I started saving seeds. And in the process, started monitoring GMOs. I was part of the United Nations expert group that frame the conventional biosafety, which is the aspect of safety linked to GMOs. We have an international treaty, the United States didn’t sign, but globally, we have a biosafety protocol: Cartagena protocol and it's supposed to regulate the harm. Europe has it, my own country had a law even before the Cartagena protocol. In all of these years, what has the genetic engineering industry, which is the chemical industry (which I call the poison cartel, because that's all they make, they make poisons), they only produced two applications. One was crops that are resistant to Roundup: Roundup Ready crops. And the second was crops in which a BT toxin has been put into the plant. So in one, you have a crop that is loaded with glyphosate, which is now established to be death: destroyer of vital organs, infertility. Every day 10 studies are coming out, and then the huge number of cancer cases and Bayer which bought Monsanto has lost already four of them. 

And people are realizing that the studies that were laughed at hold truth because they're living through this. I had a very dear friend who we lost recently, he was the top scientist in England. And he was asked by Mr. Blaye, to do a study on GMOs - GMO potato - and he was actually totally for GMOs but he was a scientist, he was asked to look at the impact. And his work showed huge inflammation of the intestines of the rats that were being used in his experiment. His name was Árpád Pusztai, he was out of the Rowett Institute. And when he found this, he said, “If three months of feeding a rat with the stuff can totally damage the intestines, what's going to happen with a lifetime of eating to the human digestive tract?” So he told his director and he held a big BBC interview. And for half a day the news went all over and then everything was shut down. His lab was shut down. Dr. Árpád Pusztai had a stroke. He had come to England as a refugee after the war and he went back to Hungary from where he had come. He said, “I left Hungary for freedom. I'm going back to Hungary for freedom. I had thought capitalism will give me freedom, but corporate control is robbing everyone of freedom.” We lost him about a month ago. 

Séralini, another brilliant scientist who was part of the regulatory process, found the files of Monsanto were bringing rubbish. So he said I'll do the research myself even back to University. His research was the first that showed tumors and organ failure with GMOs and glyphosate. The second application is the BT toxin. Now here you have a plant where every cell is expressing a toxin all the time. Our research is showing it's killing the soil organisms - the soils have lost 60% of the beneficial organisms with BT cotton plants. Our research is showing there are no pollinators in the BTTs because the bees know that they would be eating poison. Our farmers have gone into deep debt 85% of the 400,000 farmers' suicides in India are in the Cotton Belt 95% of which is Monsanto's BT cotton. So whether you look at the socio-economic health of farmers or you look at our health, basically there are two applications, both of increasing the toxics. 

The use of glyphosate and poisons in America has increased 10-15 fold since GMOs were introduced. And if you look at the data, there was a brilliant doctor called Nancy Cartwright, I think her name was, but she had done these graphs of the introduction of GMOs, with them the introduction of toxins, and 99.9% correlation with all kinds of diseases that are linked. This is also in a book published by André Leu, these graphs are there. Andre Leu is a fellow founder of the regeneration movement, and was the president of the forum and his book, Poisoning Our Children. Look at his book on pesticides, and GMOs, and you will get this data of how harmful GMOs are because GMOs are married to chemicals. GMOs are introduced by the chemical industry which gains were selling more toxics that are anywhere harmful in themselves. But the load increases with GMOs. Rachel Carson woke us up to poisons in agriculture. I think 30 years of this experiment with the human body should stop.

Ayana Young  Thank you so much for those reminders, they're so important to just remember that this is not something to forget or play around with. Following this thread, you provide an understanding of not only the sovereignty of India’s patent laws but of the sovereignty of life against biopiracy seeking to extract local, traditional ecological knowledge, and organic seeds for profit. In an article you wrote for Lifegate, titled “We are Earth, We are Nature: Patenting Biodiversity Means Stealing the Nature of Life,” you write, “The patenting and piracy of life — of biodiversity, of natural processes, and nature itself (including the minds and bodies of human beings) — is a violation of spiritual law, ecological law, biodiversity laws, and human rights laws.” In response to the surge in recent decades of the patenting of bioresources, you have posed this question with utmost clarity: how can you patent that which is already alive? So, can you please speak to the jurisprudence that protects the commons and prevents biopiracy and comment on the ways that patents for bioresources are undermining national sovereignty?

Vandana Shiva  I woke up to the question of patents on living systems and seeds at a meeting in 1987, when there were no GMOs, but the industry was seeking to have patents on seeds through GMOs. Their main purpose for introducing GMOs was owning seed, and they said it so clearly, that this is where our profits will come from. Because if you have a patent, you have the right to prevent anyone else from using what is your patented property, intellectual property, so the farmers would not be able to save seeds. And then they wanted to make an international law which became the trade-related intellectual property rights agreement of the WTO, through which they wanted to make it illegal for any farmer anywhere in the world to have their own seeds to save the seeds and share their seeds. 

And I said to them, “a) seed is not a machine you invent. Seed is evolution and is constantly unfolding. It carries millions of years of memory of the past and millions of years of potential for the future. It is not your invention.” So the two things that I started to do was save seeds. I made it my life's mission but also to work with my parliament and work with our government to make sure our laws did not suffer the illusion that seed is an invention, created and invented by the poison cartel. And that's why we have in our patent law, Article 3J, which says plants, animals, and seeds, and any part of them are not inventions, therefore they cannot be patented. And this is the clause that Monsanto has been very troubled by because they've been wanting to own the seed, and this is coming their way. They're still trying to undermine our biodiversity law. 

You know, we have an international law called the Convention on Biological Diversity, and I had a big role with my government and other governments in ‘92 at the Earth Summit in framing a lot of the issues. The three things we put into this law were that these are not open access systems - they belong to communities, biodiversity belongs to communities, and it belongs to countries, therefore, sovereignty was put into that law, sustainability was put into the law, that it is a duty to use biodiversity sustainably. And the third was, yes, there must be sharing on fairness and justice. 

We implemented this with our national biodiversity act, and my government also plays a role in that. And just a few days from now, I will be going to Indian parliament, to give witness to how they're trying to change that law and undermine it, to remove the items of sovereignty, to remove the items of conservation and sustainability, and turn it into a big biopiracy law, so that they can patent everything in India. There are hundreds and thousands of medicinal plants that are recorded in Ayurveda and are used by local communities, the thousands and thousands of seed varieties that we have saved, protected, multiplied, and distributed over these last 35 years. So, whatever we did 35 years ago is in a way being brought right back and we have to just get strength from our own work, the strength from our communities, and build resilience, and also hold accountability and use every level there is. 

When you asked, “How do you frame laws beyond these corporate laws of private ownership.” That's where we've to bring our cultures of the commons back. And remember 1989-99, it was before June 5th Environment Day, I worked with communities. Two hundred villages gathered and they did this beautiful declaration of the biodiversity and they said, “All this diversity are our relatives, they cannot be a property. And therefore we do not accept any law that tries to reduce it to intellectual property.” And then they had a beautiful letter-writing campaign to Michael Moore who was the Director-General, from different parts of India in different languages, they wrote postcards (postcards were still available those days), and they wrote and said, “You're overstepping your jurisdiction. Our relationship with biodiversity is about ecology. It's about ethics. It's about our culture. It's not about international trade.” And then Mr. Michael Moore came to meet me and he said, “I've been told I should talk to you about this.” I said, “No, you got the letter from the 6000 villages. Go to those 6000 villages.”

There’s no shortcut to democracy, and the idea of living democracy, the idea of earth democracy grew out of that process. So that's how we create a common law, a common law of our oneness with the earth, the oneness with diversity, recognizing that diversity is our kin, our relationships, it is not Monsanto's intellectual property and now Mr. Gates intellectual property if you would like to have the gene editing, which is where he's trying to go. And, and this is where commoning and reclaiming the commons becomes more and more important. The more the greed and the limitless grab grows, the more the need for defending community and commons groups.

Ayana Young  Absolutely, yeah. This power grab that is seemingly more and more desperate as the fall of late-stage capitalism becomes more of a reality is disturbing to witness. I mean, I just am wondering, with people like Bill Gates: what do you imagine them doing as the apocalypse becomes near when you think about these people and nations and power? And with their capitalization on life itself and the hoarding of resources, what do you imagine them doing? And how do we as common people knock them off the power pedestal that they're on, and also just their own power through their own wealth, but also, of course, their power is connected to so much political and global support. So yeah, I guess it's a two-part question of how do you see the manifestation of their desperation as late-stage capitalism falls? And what can we as common people do to knock them off their power pedestal?

Vandana Shiva  Well, as far as their desperation is concerned, it is exhibited in the level of coercion and violence they're using in terms of over-regulation and over-policing of society. And everyone has been kind of made to look only towards a virus, but behind the virus, they've just taken over our lives. I mentioned how the tech giants have made $1.5 trillion additional while they prevented us from having work, small businesses from running. And they are really trying to create a surveillance empire. I mean, this brilliant book called Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard University. And she has pointed out very clearly that not only do they need new raw materials (and for that they're going to get more violent), but they have reduced the human being to raw material for data. And the fact that they talk about data as the new oil and data extraction as the new mining. I mean, when they talk about Bitcoin, and they are talking about these giant-size servers and processes, they are using exactly the fossil fuel metaphors because it is mining. It is processed with pollution.

And not only are they mining… If you mine oil and then you turn it into plastic, you've dumped the plastic somewhere else and your mine in some other place. But we as human beings are becoming the mine. Our bodies and our minds are becoming the mine for data, and then manipulated data… they've declared a whole new science of behavior science, manipulating us as the junk that is dumped on us. So we are being junked, and Metaverse and Facebook are the ultimate junk for human beings who are living such bad and painful lives, that they're going to live in virtual reality to be in permanent illusion. How do we dump this by not living that illusion? How do we dump this by cultivating more and more of our real relationships with the natural world, which gives us so much: cultivating our real relationships with community because, in my view, community and commons are the alternatives to capitalism and capital. If I have three people, I can build a home with our labor, that's how third-world societies run. The societies they call primitive are actually sophisticated in terms of the commons. But if I have to have a rent to pay for a house, the minute I don't have that rent, I'm out of the house. 

That's why we have to reclaim our ability to collectively create the worlds in which we live our lives. I call this the infrastructure of life. The more we become aware of our own possibilities and potential, all of which we have denied: we were made to look down on our bodies, we have to reclaim our bodies, we were made to look down on bodily work, we have to celebrate working with our body. You know, we run a course at Navdanya, which I call yoga of the earth because all the time I hear people, “oh, agriculture and farming is drudgery.” And then I ask “do you go to a gym? Do you do yoga?” “Yeah, yeah, it's so relieving. And so enriching.” I said, but in the field, you do exactly the same postures. And we have a beautiful poster, where what you're doing in gardening is a yoga of the earth for the earth. 

So we have to change our categories and all the categories of enslavement of our minds that prevent us from living our full potential in freedom from the Gates, the Monsanto's, their money, their capital, their control, and that freedom means we turn more and more towards the Earth in partnership, and turn our backs to them rather than what they've made us do: turn our backs to the Earth and turn towards them with begging hands.

Ayana Young  So beautiful, Vandana. I'm really feeling what you're saying. I'm feeling revitalized and empowered, which is what feelings you usually leave me with. And I really feel those last sentiments and I can't help but wonder still, why do the powers-that-think-they-are want us to be enslaved to them? I mean, we could easily say, “Oh, well, they want more money. And if we play their game, then they get more money.” But why do they want more money? I guess, there's part of me that wants to hear your thoughts on the psychology of these Gates’, and the Zuckerberg’s and all those that we don't know their names. I mean, there are many more who aren't in the news who are every day doing these things that are sinister to control us and to destroy the Earth, but I'm not so sure that they think that they are the “bad guys.” But something clearly is going on in their psychology where they want to destroy and control and somehow they've gotten control of most of us. So yeah, I just want to break that down a little bit. Like, why are they doing this? What do you think is going on for them?

Vandana Shiva  Well, control for sure. Control in and of itself but the fact that it also brings them big money and brings the profits adds an incentive. But when you ask I'm sure they think they're doing good. Well, when the colonizers came and killed Indigenous people, they were “civilizing” us. They named the butchery “civilizing the barbarian.” So they work, they spin the narratives in their heads. 

It must have been very early 2000-2001, the World Economic Forum was taking place in Melbourne, and I was in a panel with Bill Gates, but the people were out protesting. And I was watching with them. So I asked the people I said, “you know, I'm supposed to go in and talk, do you want me to go, or you don't want me to go? I'll follow you because I believe in democracy.” And they quickly wrote a piece for me to read inside of the World Economic Forum. And then I was there on this platform with Bill Gates. And here he was, you know, obviously, he controls the whole software world. And he went on and on and on and on as if the biggest deprivation is digital deprivation. And I had to remind him, “the people without water, the people without food, the people without the basics because of the greed of a few of you. You're trying to create an artificial market for your digital devices, and your digital control, you cannot reshape the world, don't make it your new civilizing mission.” 

But on the psychology of it, Ayana, as an eco-feminist, I've always felt “where does this come from?” I think even deeper than control is fear. Fear of anything that's alive on its own terms, alive and free. So why are they afraid of nature? Why does Google start a life sciences, and then the head of life sciences said, “we have to defeat Mother Nature forever.” Five years ago, they started a new division - Google. And their agenda is to defeat Mother Nature as a poor pathetic creature. They are so threatened by Mother Nature. And why is there so much violence against women, women who will live their autonomy and agency? They're the ones who are victims of femicide, the same fear of anyone any being that's alive and free. So there's freedom of life and freedom of fear, no, fear of life and fear of freedom. We have to become unafraid to defend and celebrate our lives and unafraid to defend our futures. 

Ayana Young  Yes, that makes so much sense. I think it's important for us to remember that those in power are coming from a place of fear because I think it gets so overwhelming for many of us, how much power a very few have amassed, and how do we even chip away at that? And how do we feel empowered, knowing that there's so much weight put on us by these systems? And I think what you spoke to is it and it feels really good to hear that and I want to go back to one of your books, Biodiversity, Agroecology, Regenerative Organic Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty and Climate Change, where we learn that “industrial agriculture is one of the main sources of climate-altering gas emissions contributing up to 30% to 50% of total emissions” and that “the increase in biodiversity and the spread of agroecological practices, such as organic farming, can, in fact, stop and even reverse the harmful phenomena taking place. While, at the same time, provide answers to other open questions such as food sovereignty, respect for the rights of workers in the sector, and the global health crisis related to poor nutrition.” Can you speak about Navdanya International’s research on the efficacy of organic agriculture practices in mitigating the effects of climate change and increasing the output of nutrition levels in food, as well as to the interest of the scientific and political community in supporting bio-agriculture and the hesitancy to embrace and act on these findings?

Vandana Shiva  You know, my own work, what really started just loving and protecting the biodiversity of seeds and biodiversity of crops and plants. But in the process, we've realized that doing an agriculture where conservation of biodiversity is our objective, we are more putting organic matter back in the soil. We've done research on our soils: 100% more nitrogen, 100% more carbon, more magnesium, more zink. On the other hand, in the chemical soils over the last 20 years, the zinc has gone down, the magnesium has gone down, the nitrogen is negative by 22%. You're adding urea, but the nitrogen of the soil is actually depleting because the soil is a living system. 

It's because we heal the soil, we heal the climate. Because I think we are not realizing that what is called climate change is a disruption of the Earth's carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle. Now the Earth was the dead Earth, and she created life, that's why she's called Gaia. 3.3 billion years ago, microbes and plants started to do photosynthesis, and the temperature of the planet used to be 290 degrees without life, and she reduced it to 13 degrees centigrade with life. The carbon dioxide has been 98% 4000/5000 parts per million. She reduced it to 0.3%, 270 parts per million. That process is what allowed human beings to emerge, evolved. And that niche is what we are disturbing. First, through colonialism and destroying the biosphere of its diversity. Second, through the fossil fuel idea that somehow coal, oil can substitute all the functions of biodiversity and calling cultures that lived in biodiversity economies primitive and backward. And third, finding new ways to play tricks to make money out of pollution. 

The book on Gates that the financial capitalism book has all of these elements of geoengineering as a climate solution, fake meat as a climate solution, fake breast milk as a planet solution. Now everything is becoming a climate solution. But 50% of the greenhouse gases come from an industrial system of agriculture that is also destroying our health because destroying the soil and is destroying our gut microbiome. 12 to 14% is from the production system but about 20% is from destroying the forest: the Amazon for GMO soya - just look at the maps of the expansion of GMO soya in the Amazon, or palm oil in Indonesia - and by 2030, the palm oil will kill all the rainforest. Another 20% greenhouse gases for mining bauxite and turning it into aluminum for packaging, mining oil and turning into plastic for packaging, taking good healthy food and turning it into ultra-processed disease creating food. So the packaging, the processing, the food miles add up to another 20%. And then because this globalized system needs uniformity, it creates a lot of food waste. 50% of the food of America is wasted farm to the shop - American Wasteland is a very good book that describes this. 

So it's a system that's destabilizing the climate system, it destroying biodiversity and it's destroying our health. On the other hand, the kind of work we do at Navdanya, we intensify biodiversity therefore we have more health per acre and more nutrition per acre. Our farmers are earning 10 times more by not buying external inputs, and growing higher quality of food. And the idea that organic is a luxury, my experience shows that if people have a choice, they'd rather eat healthy, nutritious organic food. So I encourage our communities to distribute locally. And you know, someone grew onion, someone grew potatoes: they're creating their local distribution systems. Farmers are going with their vegetables in the morning and to us, the village itself is consuming it. So localization, diversification, freshness, going from the globalized fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive supply chains that are harming the Earth's health and harming our health to local biodiverse organic systems with short supply chains are where you heal the planet, heal our health, and create new livelihoods. 

I have this dream that instead of being thrown out of homes and living on the streets, people will get together and say, “I will join 40 others and farm.” And you know when the abolishment moment and the liberation of slaves took place, the slogan was “40 acres and a mule,” if I remember right. And I think for America's new liberation from this collapsing Empire should be 40 acres and a mule, but communities joining hands to create a new society, healing the earth, healing our waste. You know, not only do we have a lot of waste created through this food system, it's wasting people because it only measures how a few people work on the land. That is called efficiency and productivity. But behind it our energy slaves, as Amory Lovins talks about, hundreds and hundreds of energy slaves, which is then causing all the greenhouse gas emissions. So as long as we can open our minds, learn from nature, learn from Indigenous people, discover our own potential and stop absorbing messages of fear, start cultivating the love, compassion, and hope that is our basic human instinct.

Ayana Young  Vandana, thank you so much that is like our rallying cry. And I'm with you and I so agree with you, and I'm really grateful that you connect so many dots for us because I think it's really overwhelming what's happening on this Earth right now and our communities, both human and more than human and to have someone like you take the time to decipher so much of what's happening is really necessary for us to understand and to make different choices. So, thank you so much for this time with us and for all the time that you put into protecting this earth.

Vandana Shiva  Thank you Ayana, I enjoy being with you again, and take care.

Ayana Young  Yes, you too. Thanks, Vandana.

We can choose our different solidarities and all the violence and all the brutality of 500 years of colonialism, 200 years of industrialism, 30 years of neoliberal globalization, all of that, we can find creative ways to transcend by realizing that: a) we are one humanity on one planet, and b) that both humanity and the planet are rich because of their diversity. 

Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Peals, Peia, and Kaivalya. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, and Julia Jackson.