Transcript: DR. VANDANA SHIVA on Diverse Expressions of a Living Earth /311
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking again with Dr. Vandana Shiva.
Dr. Vandana Shiva So I think we need a new human solidarity and we need a new Earth solidarity, because the north south divide was created by colonialism, but now they're dissolving it to make everyone equal in denying the right to life to everyone.
Ayana Young Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, and of the Slow Food Movement. She is also the Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights. Dr. Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards and the author and editor of a score of influential books, including her latest book coming out Oct. 27 from Chelsea Green Publishing "Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements." Well, Dr. Shiva, thank you so much for joining us, I'm always so honored to spend time with you.
Dr. Vandana Shiva Always a joy to spend time with you.
Ayana Young Thank you. Well, my goodness, I know we have covered so many topics over the years and have been just in awe of your devotion and the prolificness of your work. And I'm really excited that your new book, Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements is personal. And there's some beautiful shares in your book that I want to maybe start off with, and I'm thinking of one quote, you say “For me, the forests of my childhood, were the source of abundance, beauty, diversity and peace.” And I'd love to start this conversation by hearing a bit about your childhood and how your youth continues to influence you today.
Dr. Vandana Shiva You know, at the end of the day, you're shaped by your experiences. We of course live in a world where it's assumed that textbooks and words shape our reality. But our real reality is shaped by the multiple interactions that we have with nature, community, with family. And my parents chose to have a life in the forest. My father was a major in the British Army during the war, he would have probably been commander in chief if he had stayed in that military force. My mother had been a very senior educator in what became Pakistan overnight, and she became a refugee. And then she said, now I've broken all the glass ceilings, I've studied everything women didn't study, I've got jobs that women didn't have. And now I want to be a farmer. So my mother chose to be a farmer, my father was in the forest. And this was the world I knew. But in a little library in a forest rest house, you know, these are little camping houses in the forest, in a little library in a forest rest house and with a lantern, you know, kerosene lamp, I read a tiny little book somewhere by Einstein and I said, “Well, this is the kind of human being I want to be.”
So of course, the forest has shaped me, but my seeking to understand the world through the kind of science that Einstein did was also a big shape of my life. And so I did my PhD in the foundations of quantum theory and it's when I saw the forest disappear that I decided I would also give my life to protect the forests and joined the Chipko movement as a Volunteer. Now if I hadn't had forest as an imagination, if it was merely, you know, sustained years of even aged forest management, you know, it would never ever have something that hurt me, pained me, it would just have been a neutral fact about which I had no understanding or imagination. So I think the work I've been able to do in ecology is because my reality is the reality of the wild, reality of nature. reality of life, interconnectedness, self organization, and abundance.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really appreciate hearing about your origins and I think it brings me to this question of commitment and focus and I'm truly in awe that across your life, you have had to have an incredibly focused and deep attention span. Rather than following the trends of activism or media or even potentially your whimsy. And so I want to talk about this idea of staying with the trouble and I'm quoting Donna Haraway, because I've seen, and I've learned from you, the value of sticking with something, and I think in the dominant culture, and especially for millennials or younger, there's definitely been a culture of non commitment, and moving around and shifting our dreams, which I want to have compassion for and sometimes we need to do that. But I see what you've been able to do and I think so much of your power comes from your commitment. So I'd like to just explore that a bit with you.
Dr. Vandana Shiva There is a living Earth, of which we are a part and that doesn't change, what changes is that at a particular moment, it's the destruction of the forest that triggers your compassion, and your care to do something about it. At another moment, it could be agriculture, that you know, 1984 it was witnessing the violence of Punjab and the violence in the city of Bhopal, thousands were killed. Now, agriculture was nowhere in my field of study. But I had studied in Punjab, and I knew from my mother's farm and I realized that what was going on in the Green Revolution in industrial agriculture was wrong. Now, it might look like there was a forest issue and now there's an agriculture issue, but all of these are new divisions that have been created in order to exploit from nature, extract from nature, dominate over society and nature. A sustainable farm is a forest, and forest is farmed by Indigenous people. You know, the Amazon is a farmed forest, the Australian continent is a farmed wilderness.
So we've created these very artificial divides. And partly, my training in quantum theory has taught me that this artificial separation of either all you know, you are with me or against me, you’re either a forest or a farm, you’re either a city or a country, all of these artificial exclusions have actually been instruments of driving out nature’s ability to be wild, to produce, to create. And this really is, to me, the extinction crisis. For me, all of my life's work is a continuity of a simple act, Earth is alive, her expressions are diverse, protecting the Earth’s–providing us with our breath, our food, our water, is the true economy and that economy, the art of living, as Aristotle called it, is really doing economic activity. But we've had an economy separated from nature trying to master nature, and the economy has been reduced to money making, to the flow of cash, and then the money machine is driving the agendas. It's of course, you know, the billionaires now control and own the media. And that's why you know, media like yours, communicating directly people to people becomes so important in our times.
But then the media has spins and fashions, and if you follow these fashions fully you will be ankerless, jumping from issue to issue to issue. Whereas if you work from your grounding as an Earth citizen, as an Earth being, then you will look at different facets of the Earth, from that same grounding, the same grounding of diversity, of integrity of beauty, it could be trees, it could be seeds, it could be a river, it could be a beaver, whatever it is, it these are amazing diverse expressions of the creative living Earth. And if of course, you have to then fit into this machine somehow, one must always remember, these are means, these are not ends. Means means you have another end to which you need to go, that end is our life on Earth–a living Earth with abundant life, and we keep focus then on that abundance and those currencies. And we use the means of the finances, of the money as and when and that means you have to be much more creative than a mechanical replication of the fashions of the day. You have to be much more creative in order to do the real work that matters, and yet be able to write a report that fits into the boredom of the money machine.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really agree with you and I see the complexity of living simply and playing in the game of capitalism when we need to, and I have a few questions that I was inspired thinking about what you were saying. And there's one part of me that's thinking about our attention spans, and how mass movements, as important as they are, and learning about what's going on in the rest of the world I think is important for our critical thinking, but I wonder, Is that debilitating us? And what is the best way for us to reclaim our power as individuals and small communities? Do you think that we're more effective that way? And I guess I'm asking this from even a personal lens, because I know I can get wrapped up in the problems of the world. But where do I actually have the most power? And I have this sense that I see other people like me get wrapped up through media, in these whirlwinds of destruction and overwhelm, then we lose our ability to focus on our backyards. Yeah, maybe just some reflections on focus and effectiveness.
Dr. Vandana Shiva Because we are Earth beings, we are animals, you know, we totally forget that we are biologically animals. And therefore, we are rooted in the flows of the local of our particular ecosystem. That's what shapes us in the deepest sense of being, but we are also conscious beings, and we live in a conscious universe and being conscious, in a conscious universe, means a larger understanding of the state of the world, both the amazing laws of ecology, the laws of nature, that are universal, and yet, their particular expressions, you know, in a dry area becomes a desert, in another area becomes a rainforest, but it's the same nutrition cycle and food cycle. It's the same hydrological cycle and water cycle. So as understanding, it makes sense to know what's happening, but not through the dominant media, it has become the ultimate source of misleading humanity at this point, also shutting down reality, their movements everywhere, one of the things I've done in my life is respond to movements when they call me. And for me, that's the biggest learning and signal what's the state of the world.
So when land was being grabbed around India, and everywhere, people were resisting the loss of their land. What I did was go to visit them, give them support. But second, I said, each of you is fighting about the same thing. Let's make one day the day for sovereignty of Mother Earth and your sovereignty as a child of Mother Earth, we call it the Bhu Swaraj movement, swaraj meaning movement, bhu is the Earth. And that changed everything. It changed everything, because the movements were still local, but the connectedness at that moment became national with the International Forum on Globalization, we were dealing with the issue of seeds and intellectual property and agriculture in India in a very deep way. In practice, with the farmers building the movements, but as the International Forum on Globalization, we also joined hands around the world. We could stop the most powerful institution that was supposed to shape the world by time, the World Trade Organization, and people shut it down. Now, I'm not saying everyone should do all of these things. All I'm saying is, we need regenerating the Earth where we are, we need to love the place where we are. We need to connect to others in whichever means, you are connecting to me far away. You're sitting in Alaska, I'm sitting in India, we're connecting through this dialogue. We need to be fully aware of the way the world is going, not through the misleading fake science and fake news that is being manufactured to shut our eyes and make us blind.
But to open our eyes, open eyes to nature, open our eyes to the pain of communities as they suffer a cost of living crisis, as the lockdown in a way continues through other means. And because we are Earth beings, I have a deep sense that just like a tree needs to live, and a salmon needs to live in a stream. Human beings need to live human rights or civil rights, and there's no connection to nature, I think that's another division that we need to correct. And when we correct that, we find our particular place of contribution. I have always said, we are not atlases carrying the Earth on our shoulder, the Earth is carrying us. Our work is to tread lightly on this beautiful Earth, but our work is also to find a place for service to find where in her web is our best contribution. And always being aware that someone else is making a contribution somewhere else, and to be in resonance. That is the power, our true power is the inner power of doing the right thing, knowing the right face by observing, listening, living, and responding to others' pain through giving your power. And there is nobody, there is nobody who doesn't have power. That is both my understanding as a physicist, as well as man standing as an activist for 50 years, that we have power, it's when we forget we have power, when we let others run us we become powerless, and we start to lose our own confidence, in our knowledge, in our strength in our compassion.
Ayana Young Yeah. Gosh, I'm just thinking about a few moments ago, and you were speaking about the economy, but the natural economy in the sense of valuing water and food and and I'm paraphrasing here, you said it much more eloquently. But for those of us who are wanting to devote ourselves to service, and commit, there's still this question of how do we make money? Now, of course, we could say, well, we don't need money, if we have water, shelter, and food, and maybe we do that communally. Or maybe we do it through the trades, maybe there's a way to get through for some of us not being in the money economy. But for instance, I'm up here in Alaska right now fighting a mining project. And a lot of the community is like, well, we can't just say no to everything. Maybe we'd say no to a mine, but we'll need something else to come in. And so then there's all these theories about regenerative economy, and what could we do to make money that is restorative? Or that isn't as destructive or is local? And so I find myself sitting in the middle of a tornado of economic questioning, kind of like existential, economic questioning of where do we go from here? Do we try to create a new regenerative economy knowing that people still need money? Do we, like, have sub movements where we're just trying to get away from money altogether? I know some people have tried to do that in smaller communities. Do we just hope that collapse comes sooner than later, and we forget about being in the capitalist system, which is constantly extracting to make money? Because, you know, I don't know of any money that doesn't come from fossil fuels. At the end of the day, if you follow the money train back far enough, it's always coming from extraction. But I guess I'm sitting in this question specifically around conservation, because money has to come from somewhere to even conserve land. And so I don't maybe I'm asking in an impossible question here or, or going down a line of–
Dr. Vandana Shiva Very important. It's an extremely important question. Now, you know, when I started my life as an ecological activist 50 years ago with the Chipko Movement, the movement to come out and protect the forest, at that point, how did the women support the movement? You know, these were remote villages in the Himalaya, no cash economy. They used to grow their food, each woman would bring a fistful of rice every day, to contribute. And then maybe in a community of 500, 100 women would be sitting in the forest till the forest logging was shut down, and they'd be community cooking. Not one rupee of donation was raised. There was no financial contribution. And I think that is the reason that movement lasted for 10 years. The women supported it with their resources. Now, but have, you know the dystopia that has been created is the idea that money runs the world. But money is a very recent, dominating factor. First of all, there were many monies during the Great Depression.
Dr. Hazel Henderson, a dear friend, who's no more brilliant, you know, feminist economist, she showed me a book about the 3000 currencies that were created to deal with the depression, because the dollar was killing people. So people created their local currencies, and there's still a big movement of local currencies. But local currencies don't only have to be money in our area. You know, in the valleys, we grow Paddy, if you want to hire labor for the package, transplantation, you can afford fine. But women get together, you know, and the pool will work as a gift. They work on one woman's land and they work on the next woman's now. And within five days, the whole village's transplanting has taken place. So part of what we have to transcend is the commodification of every aspect of our lives. Commodification means that water, when it's commodified, means you buy it from Nestle and Coca Cola and Pepsi and that, to me, is an absolute obscenity and crime. When food is a commodity, we grow more and more commodities, but more and more people starve. When we grow true food, there will be no hunger. When seed becomes a commodity and intellectual property, there's famine, the seed famine, farmers die, 4000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of debt and scarcity created by monopoly on seed. That's why I've created community seed bags, the seed itself becomes the currency. And one seed gives you 1000 seeds, in the case of millets. Next year is the year of millets, we could define them to be primitive crops that should disappear. We said these forgotten foods we're going to bring back because they use 250 millimeters of water compared to industrial agriculture that uses 2500. They use little water, they can grow on any soil, and they give you more nutrition than all the industrial crops, the industrially produced food is totally empty. That's why we shifted from yield per acre to health per acre, hope is the currency nourishing is the currency.
So I say my first thing is, Let us shift our minds to regenerating the currencies that make our life work, and the currencies that come from nature as the original source. These are the currencies of food currencies, of water currencies, of bread, currencies of love, relationship, currencies of being cared for, and the capacity to care. Now, once you do that, then instead of looking towards the market, or the financial sources, you start to turn to nature and to each other to say, what is it that we can do with this amazing body that has been made to disappear in the Cartesian world, Descartes said, I'm a thinking thing without a body, that break is the curse of humanity, because it crippled us from air, recognizing that we are bodily beings that connects to the Earth's body. And as bodily beings, we have needs of food, water, air, but as bodily beings, we have creativity of the most amazing kind, I think we'll have to reclaim our capacity to work physically. And for that we have to turn to Indigenous people, because they are the people who created abundance and wealth before the fossil fuel age before the age of capitalism. But another very important issue and this is particularly for our work in protection of nature, at this point capitalism is where the big financial world is. The Wall Street, New York Stock Exchange, Stock Exchange, and Rockefeller who created the money economy, the financial economy, the banks, who created worlds with I.G. Farben in Hitler's Germany, to create the chemicals that are killing species, driving wildlife to extinction. Yeah, there was a Standard Oil I.G. Faber partnership.
Standard Oil, Rockefeller provided the oil and the finances, and I.G. Farben provided the knowledge of chemistry. And that's how the toxins that made Rachel Carson write Silent Spring 60 years ago. So that bundle of thought is now saying, We should own nature. They tried it with seed and I fought that back. That's why I created Navdanya. I said you don't create the seed, you don't own the seed. Seed is not your intellectual property. It's not your machine. See this the self expression of nature in her diversity and the co creation between farming communities and the earth. Now they want to own all of nature. So if we only think of money, and don't think of the other currencies, we will be trapped in the new financial slavery they're seeking. They're talking about making 4000 trillion dollars annually, by dealing with nature as an asset on Wall Street to buy and sell, by the second, the black rocks and the Vanguard's will run this financial economy, pretending it will protect nature. And because we are entering the space of a new slavery on on the last Mother Earth Day on 22nd April, I wrote a piece on this it's called Mother Earth is Not For Sale, and yes, we have been made more and more dependent, you know, they took the land, they made it impossible for us to grow our own food, then they took water, made it impossible for drink from our clean streams and our clean wells, then they try to own the seed. That is where I said no, no way, this is really crossing our limits. Now they want to own all of nature, every acre of land, every stream, every forest, and they're thinking of 4000 trillion dollars. That's why to that money, we must say, you are a fiction, we do not accept you, we will not be enslaved by you, and then turn to free money, money that is not tied to conditionality to see how, you know, 1000 people can contribute $10 each. That is how the future of using money as a means to build community to build the human community that regenerates the Earth and the Earth community with which we regenerate. That's how it's going to happen. Many smiles joining hands anyplace there's a quickie solution with big money it's going to be a curse, it's going to be a new enslavement.
Ayana Young Yeah, I want to keep following this train of thought and hear a bit about the Global South experience with debt and foreign exchange because I think this is really hidden and Western media and it's getting pretty bleak. For example, Sri Lanka's foreign global debt is over 12 trillion, mostly borrowed from China and Japan. And then there's this quote I wrote down: “Zambia’s debt repayment plan includes making 100,000 hectares available to foreign investors for export agriculture, and using $3 million in World Bank loans to build roads, electricity and dams for the farms. So if you could speak to that in the Global South, and you know, further that, that'd be great.
Dr. Vandana Shiva So you know, India actually is the country where people should look to see how this system that is called capitalism was created, because it's really another name for colonial commerce. What was colonial commerce, colonial commerce was East India Company, East India Company, 300 merchant adventurers got together, wrote a charter that the state would provide them military support, that if they had losses during trading the society would bear those losses, that's where limited liability, you know, not a full liability, that when they came back with the spices and the gold, it would be theirs. But if they lost it to the Dutch, or to the French, then the people would pay so they never lost. This was the creation of a corporation. This was not that long ago, just 1600. That's how recent the structure we are facing is. What the East India Company then did was declare that all the land of India belongs to England. And therefore the peasants who worked the land now became landless peasants who had to pay a tax, a royalty, a land royalty, half of the produce, not in quantity, but an average calculated in cash. So in a year of drought, they were in debt. This is how the famines were created in India, not because we didn't know farming, every fat system of farming that is today regenerating the earth, organic farming, biodynamic farming, they all have been inspired by Indian practices, Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner, they all came to India and learned how Indian persons worked with diversity, with the Law of Return, with giving back, with recycling.
So 40 to 60 million people were pushed to famine in that period, 1945 the war ended, 42’ was the last great famine and the women of Bengali rose in revolt. They said we will not give our rice, we would rather give our lives. We will fight you when you come to take our rice. And that triggered an amazing national movement called the Quit India Movement telling the British you must Quit India. Within no time the old colonizers realized they were losing control. So in 1944, they got together in Bretton Woods. It was called the Money Men of the World Meet. Bretton Woods is a New Hampshire Hotel. And I was invited for 50 years of Bretton Woods and I went down to the basement where I saw the first day powers and this money men of the world meet. The money men of the world who were extracting till then said, now we will not be able to extract so we need to find new ways. So they created the World Bank and IMF and the GATT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff, which they could not bring into implementation because the first document was prepared by Havana. And this was about correcting the injustices of colonialism, of the need for the North to pay the South for all the harm of colonialism. So it was not brought to reality, until 1995 when the Uruguay round of GATT, created the World Trade Organization. So the three institutions, the World Bank, which gives you loans for things for which you don't need to get you into debt, I have worked for so long, I joke and say, every ecological crisis, I have had to address behind the damage is the World Bank. Fighting the dams, World Bank loans, eucalyptus in the Deccan, World Bank loans, Green Revolution in Punjab, World Bank loans to use chemical fertilizers, importing the seeds, importing the fertilizers make the big dams for irrigation. So what's happening in Zambia now is what the World Bank did in the 60s.
By the year 1991, the debt was 91 billion. And when the debt gets too high, the IMF and World Bank come in and say, now you have to restructure your economy. They call it structural adjustment programs. That's when they say now you have to give your land. Now you have to give your electricity. Now you have to allow your food system to be privatized and not feed the poor. This structural adjustment that happened to India when I did a quick calculation, about 1/3 of the loans were for doing destructive industrial agriculture, which we didn't need for pesticides and fertilizers. We were doing agriculture without borrowing money forever, we could have done farming. And the work I'm doing is to correct that error of external interdependence both in terms of loans as well as external dependence in terms of inputs. So when you cite Zambia, you cite Sri Lanka, the IMF world bank are the mechanisms and the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. There are mechanisms for creating debt dependencies, and then allowing the debt to go so high, that you then take over the natural resources of the country, you take over the economic productivity, which is a public part of the country and privatize it. And that's why when I talked about the Rockefellers and the New York Stock Exchange coming up with these new natural asset companies, they are looking at the fact that the World Bank IMF have created a debt Trap, and China has, they've created a debt trap. And right now, the Ecuadorian people are fighting against the new agreement between Ecuador and China on agriculture. I have watched as I was an ambassador for Ecuador to protect the Amazon forests of Ecuador. I was an advisor to the government when they wrote in their constitution that the Earth has rights. And then because elections need money, and elections need to build roads and elections need to build highways, and airports, before you know it, politicians make the country borrow for their elections, and then the people who are trapped, have to pay with their lives.
So right now, there's a protest going on in Ecuador because the Chinese debt trap is leading first, you know, they took the oil from the Amazon, and now they want the food. So a debt trap is a sure way to appropriate, not just the freedom of a country, a community, a person, it is basically, in today's world, where the issues are life and death issues, it is taking away the means of living of billions of people, this is the genocide and ecocide we are living through, and it can become impossible for the majority. If we don't create another economic paradigm. If we do not tell the World Bank and IMF, you know, we will have protests in front of these agencies. I was in 1988 in Berlin, when the Big World Bank meeting was happening, I was asked to give the big talk and there was a Berlin wall behind me, I suppose, like this shouldn't exist and institutions like the World Bank shouldn't exist, well the wall is gone, but the World Bank is still here. And I think we do this at the level at which we need to be much more planetary in our thinking globally. And I think we don't have to act globally, always. Think globally, act locally used to be a slogan of the movement, we have to understand what the global institutions are designed to do, what they're doing to allies, and finding ways at the local level, and with an interconnected solidarity, to stop them. I mean, if we do not stop the money machine, now, people will not be able to live, the Earth's life will be made to disappear because they live through a false equivalence.
My last concluding part of my first book, Staying Alive, compares the movement of Chipko, defending the economy of the forest, nd an economist who got the Nobel economics prize called Solo, who said there's nothing like an ecological crisis, because everything in nature can be substituted, we can destroy the forest and make fake plastic trees. They actually are making fake plastic trees. You know, we can destroy food and make lab food. No, you can't because it'll still need feedstock, it'll still need land. So we are at a cusp right now and this cusp is telling us that freedom from debt means all the past debt is absolutely unjust, and should be forgiven. This is what's called the Jubilee, there was a whole movement for Jubilee, forgive the debt. And more than that, repatriate all the extraction that you have done, and second, for everyone to live in ways that you don't get into a drag, turn to community, turn to family. We will not be able to live if we do not cultivate family and culture. And family doesn't mean a nuclear family. That is an absolutely absurd construction that is fitted into the capitalist structure, first to borrow to build your house, to send your child to school, and secondly, to be the consumer unit. Larger, extended families and extended families include the trees and the animals, as you know so well I know. Our family is the family and the Earth family doesn't run on the money machine. The Earth family lives on care, mutuality, synergy, and giving.
Ayana Young Yes. Oh, my goodness, there is so much in that response. And I was just thinking about debt and its relationship to aid as well because I know that you have been known to critique foreign aid that comes into countries and pretends to help they very much perform as if they are saviors and it feels similar to me with the debt you know, before a country goes into debt. It's again, the colonial savior that comes in that puts them into debt because they're telling them they need other things, and it is just the cycle between debt aid and and then it kind of made me start thinking about the war on Ukraine and the anti GMO laws and Russia. And I guess, I know, I'm kind of spewing a lot of maybe things that seem unrelated. But I, I think I'm just, yeah, I'm just questioning what is the suggestion about our movements and goals when we're taking into account this debt aid war machine? That seems all very connected? And if you could speak to that, and its relationship to Ukraine and Russia, that would be really great. Yeah.
Dr. Vandana Shiva I think aid is such a misleading term because it is really the instrument for trapping in debt. I'll give you a simple example. So, you know, when Monsanto entered India very illegally, I fought them in the courts. They entered with the GMO BTcotton. The farmers didn't have the kind of money they wanted to charge, you know, they wanted to charge about 4000 rupees for a kilogram of seed, with original seeds, local seeds were five rupees a kilo, why would a farmer ever pay 4000 rupees? Of course advertisements were made, you will become a millionaire, you will become rich, you know, you will own giant tractors, you will own giant limousines. And they were showing ads of American farmers. There was one ad which even showed a farmer becoming Superman by using this GMO seed. Of course, at the end of it, farmers were in debt because they didn't have the money to buy, they were just having to sign and sign and sign. And then they turned up at their doorstep, like they're turning up at the doorstep of Zambia to say, now your land is ours. The agent of the companies would say now your land is ours, you haven't paid the debt. So 400,000 farmers suicides of which 85% are in the cotton areas of which 95% is Monsanto.
So this is the model even when the institutions are like World Bank, or like the ADB and, you know, we are building roads, increasingly 1/3 of the fertile land of the Ganges basin has been buried by highways, 1/3 of the most fertile soil of the world that has fed people for 10,000 years, and would be feeding people forever buried under concrete and steel. And when these bills come for paying for superhighways to rush to nowhere a little faster, that’s when the next structural adjustment of India will happen. So aid is really another name for a debt trap. And a dear friend no more, long ago passed away, Majid Ranima said aid is AIDS. AIDS is the acquired immune deficiency. And he says aid is an acquired immune deficiency in the economic sphere. It is designed to make you incapable of producing for yourself what you need. And the very definition of growth is also part of this trap because growth is measured by saying if you produce what you consume, you don't produce. So self reliance and self sufficiency and nature's economy are defined into zero. And that's why this madness for growth and you know, the whole British economy collapsed because they were single mindedly destroying their society for more growth and more growth and more growth. So the word growth in the economy has no place, growth in plants, growth in ecosystems, growth of children, growth of happiness, that is accurate. Aid doesn't exist, solidarity and support. But solidarity and support always comes with no conditions with no strings attached. If I see someone who's hungry, I will go get food without saying come and work for me for free, conditionality in chains is slavery. It is not aid. Finally, the aid, the debt, and now the new credit systems with the financialization of nature, you know, there's a new colonialism that we are facing. And at this point, I think what the south faced over 500 years is that those means of appropriation are now being brought in the countries that created welfare states, you know, where there was distribution, there were rights, there were workers rights and environmental rights, and all of those rights are being dismantled.
So I think we need a new human solidarity, and we need a new Earth solidarity because the north south divide was created by colonialism, but now they're dissolving it to make everyone equal in denying the right to life to everyone. I've written in my book Oneness Versus 1%, that, you know, the Zuckerbergs of the world sitting there and creating the Masters of the Universe, you know, to live in a fictitious world, are basically saying you don't need 99% humanity, but the Earth needs us not because the Earth can't go on without us, but we are the people who have to repair the harm that's been done. We have to regenerate. Humans have to regenerate the living Earth, not trying to escape to Mars, like so many of the billionaires are trying to do so I mean, at one level, we are in a very difficult moment. On another multiple level, look at the fact that small contributions by each of us to massive transformation of the paradigm and the dominant structures, that's what we really need right now.
Ayana Young I am wondering if you could tease out some of the details about the Ukraine war and GMOs and how that also relates to the anti GMO laws in Russia?
Dr. Vandana Shiva Sure. So most people look at Ukraine in 2022, but most people forget Ukraine in 2014, when basically a US inspired coup dislodged the elected government and all the laws were changed after that. And Europe has always been very, very active in saying no to GMOs and Ukraine was the first place where the GMOs were introduced and what you were talking about in terms of Zambia? Well, I don't know, I think it's a purge of Ukraine's fertile land that is now owned by corporations, American corporations, who have taken over the food system. And since Ukraine had been turned into the breadbasket for the Soviet Union earlier now for Europe and the world, the shift to GMOs and corporate agriculture means commodity trade and commodity profits will increase. But hunger in the world will also increase.
Why is Russia GMO free? Well, because they had good scientists, their science is not run by corporations. And Russian scientists–I chair an International Commission on the Future of Food, and one of our best members was a Russian scientist, Alexander. He died of cancer, but he and the top scientists of Russia had studied what GMOs do. And how they bomb the ecosystem, the soil, how they harm our body. They said we don't need the stuff. So it was a scientific decision, which was then followed. And then because of the sanctions, Russia has said, “Well, we will grow our food, why should we depend on patented seed for which we have to pay a royalty to destroy agriculture and food security and food sovereignty?” So, you know, there's so many layers to the conflict in Ukraine. But I know when people say to me, the Ukraine, Russia war, I say just look at the economies, you know, look, look at who is gaining from the conflict, look at who is losing from that conflict, and look at who is financing the perpetuation of war, dear Assange is in jail for having told us the truth about the Iraq War. An honest journalist, doing a good journalist job in jail to be extradited to the United States. Assange has said they don't want wars that end. They want wars without end, because that is what fuels the industrial military complex. And I think, again, we should look at Ukraine, and see it's a test. It's a trial of how to destroy people's freedoms, how to appropriate people's resources for its corporate agenda. And the GMOs in our time. You know, if in the time of the Green Revolution, it was chemical fertilizers, in our time, it is the GMOs that are the beginning of a creation of dependency, because first, GMOs don't work. Second, GMOs require more pesticides, they require more borrowing from the same poison cartel that now wants to own the seed. And it is, you know, I've done about six books on the subject who really feeds the world, women, seed sovereignty, which shows that it's a totally failed experiment. And just today, 300,000 scientists of Europe have said that the new GMOs, the gene edited GMOs, which are totally financed by Mr. Bill Gates, who financed the Berkeley researchers, who financed the Cambridge researchers, he controls the patents, and you know, he thinks life in its complexity, and its self organization is like a word program, where you can cut and paste, there's no cut and paste, except by nature, defending ourselves. External cut and paste is one more messing up and scrambling of the ecosystem. So it's the engineering mind, it's the Cartesian mind, the mechanical mind, continuing to push its agenda for extractivism. And on the other hand, those of us who care for the Earth, who love all life on Earth, we work with an ecological mind and a compassionate mind to say, we will do every bit we can to not let that continue the agenda of death and extraction continue. Because continuing it means death every way on a dead planet. Even the billionaires would make money.
Ayana Young Gosh, again, there's so much there and I'm yeah, I'm thinking about a lot. And I, you know, what you're saying about Julian Assange? And it kind of reminded me about a question I had on thoughts on censorship and derogatory, quote, anti scientific labeling on anyone critiquing corporate backed industry and products. And I wonder how, with mainstream media, we navigate how we trust people, whether that scientist or, you know, journalist, it's, it's tricky. It's really tricky. I saw that a lot just in the past few years, whether it's about GMOs or something else, like, you know, mainstream media, scientists are going to tell you one thing, but then if you're hearing it from somebody else, or any, basically any other scientist or expert that's speaking out against empire, will be labeled as I mean, you could say the word quack, I've heard that a lot, or they're, they're labeled in this way that make people feel like they're not trustworthy. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that type of censorship.
Dr. Vandana Shiva Well, you know, when, when they started pushing GMOs, this also started pushing patterns. And that's the reason I started to save seeds and started Navdanya. But I also started to work with my government and governments around the world to create regulations for GMOs called biosafety. Assess what it does, don't just commercially approve, don't get freedom to do deliberate releases. And because of our biosafety laws, there is some taming down of the unleashing of GMOs all over the world. Now, I was invited by the United Nations as a scientist to write the framework with the governments of the biosafety protocol, which became the cutterhead protocol. And then came Monsanto, illegally into India, of course, sued them. I told my government they were wrong, the media would cover it totally. And then they started what the normal thing is, she's not scientific. They started to remove my physics degrees from the Wikipedia page as if Wikipedia decides my life and not my own learning. And they pay people because my son tried to correct it. He sent them all my degrees and they still continue to. I look at seeds. And yes, my quantum thinking of relatedness and non separation helps me. But I had seen no, I left my former job in 1982 to start the research foundation, as you know, for service to the Earth and communities that need it, and I didn't know where it would go. But you know, that was 82. So I didn't have a job that they could take away. But I know every leading scientist, top scientists in the field, Arpad Pusztai brought in by the UK Government to look at GMOs when he finds that they are totally damaging the intestinal tract. And he says if this happens in three months of feeding rats, what will happen with a lifetime of eating the stuff? They did a press conference covered by BBC, Monsanto mobilized, had him trashed, took away his lab, and went back to Hungary. He said I left Hungary for freedom. I'm returning to Hungary for freedom, because the world run by money and corporations leaves no freedom for scientists,
Gilles-Éric Séralini, the top scientist of France, decided to go back to the university to test GMOs. His work again covered by the top journals, Monsanto replaced the editor of the journal to retract the published paper. That's the level to which they will reach. People have lost their jobs, people have lost their lives, people have lost their reputation. And that's why censorship in the hands of criminals is allowing criminality to grow. And we must continue to defend our truths and our freedom and what is truth? How will you know, always look at the independence of the scientists and look at their long term track record? What else did they do? Don't look at the news. Don't look at Dr. Hoover being scandalized just because he wrote to Obama and said the GMOs are the biggest security threat. He was an adviser on biological safety, he said the biggest security threat to America is GMOs. And then they went in and attacked him, the President's advisor, so no one is left for them. No one is a scientist. No one has integrity. No one has a right, just gangsters, whose origins go back to Hitler's Germany, want to tell the world what is science and what's not not science, killing people is the science they learned in the concentration camps, killing people and killing truth is still their science. That's why we must constantly speak our truth, live our truth, know our truth. And truth is the coherence and resonance with the reality of a living up. That's what the truth is.
Ayana Young Yes, I'm so grateful for your fortitude, that you have been able to stay so strong and diligent, even when forces try to tear you down. And I think that that's a really important lesson. For us, that kind of reminds me of the beginning of our conversation is how do we stay committed. And I think, whether it's mainstream media or corporate powers that try to tear and tear people down and validate them, there's also a lot of call out culture within the movements and infighting within the people that we thought we could trust. And so I guess, this next question is around skepticism, or let's even say, critical thinking versus call out culture, because it's one thing when corporate power has tried to, like I said, destroy or devalidate us. But it's another thing when we find that within our movements, and I think that what we're doing is really, you know, wounding us more, but also putting a huge block in front of our effectiveness when we call each other out. But I do think of course, there is a place for critique and there's a place for learning, but I wonder what your reflections are on that.
Dr. Vandana Shiva Well, I have three reflections. First, as human beings each of us has freedom to think the way we think, but none of us have the freedom to impose our thinking on anyone else. That's why the call out culture is epistemologically on false ground, your freedom is what you will be. Yeah, be who you want to be. But your freedom cannot become taking away another person's freedom to be what they are. And this negative politics and negative identity is a child of corporate globalization. When I wrote my book Earth Democracy, I wrote it after we stopped WTO in Seattle, but I was watching very quickly how the same forces of globalization, were creating, one, a destruction of democracy, people electing candidates they knew, and they liked that politics got over with corporate globalization. Now, it was what dark money was able to finance and put in place. And you know, there's a book in America on dark money, there's lots of writings about the Brexit and the dark money. So dark money hijacks, it hijacked the economy through globalization, but it hijacked democracy through planting unknown people on the top. But they couldn't do this, unless they blinded the people through the new divide and rule. Yeah, the British use divide and rule to create conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. That was the basis on which they chopped up India into Pakistan and India, chopping up that is still causing conflicts and harm. But more importantly, the contemporary divide and rule is based on a identity. Now identity is who you are. Yeah. And identity is, you love the wild. I love the wild, that's the identity of being part of the Earth. Our identity is Earth beings, but when I start to say I am not you, and that's your only identity that has already flipped into a negativity. And this you know, Samuel Huntington was writing books when Assange was writing about the Iraq War. Samuel Huntington is writing about the clash of civilizations. And in his books, he says, you cannot know who you are until you know who you hate. This is where the negative politics and negative culture start. And people like Samuel Huntington are created to make people think you have to find a target of hate to know who you are. That's where the call out culture is fitting into that divide and rule call out culture is I have to hate you and deny you your uniqueness, your freedom to be who I am. It's wrong. Every part of the Earth is a self organized entity from the molecules to the cells, to the smallest bacteria and the virus to the herbs in the forest and the giant trees, or one continuum of harmony, self organization, self determination. And because the party's in mind made us think about self determination in atomistic and isolation terms, we did not see that we could be interconnected, but different and diverse. Diversity is at the root of interconnectedness, diversity is at the root of freedom. The call out culture is denying diversity in humanity. The Divide and rule culture in organized form is denying the true aspirations of particular individuals and different cultures. And we have watched this, we have watched how particular campaigns would be created to shut down a particular kind of community. And then there would be resistance from the bottom. It has never ever worked. Imposed ideas do not last, evolved ideas have a lasting character, and to those who are engaging for their identity and meaning in all our culture, I say, there's so much to do, find your identity with the Earth, find your identity in humanity. Those are our two basic identities. The rest is our unique freedoms. And no one else can tell us what we should think, what we should say, how we should be.
Ayana Young Beautiful, that really speaks to gosh, so much of what I feel people are struggling with right now in movement spaces. And there's definitely another piece to that which is something of her like I have this question. That's something around toxic masculinity. I've read so many of your books, this uplifting the feminine and the matriarchy. And I think there's so much importance to that. But then I see our men or the more masculine sides of us, kind of, they're out a bit of a loss. So, like, I guess what am I trying to say here is how do we honor the masculine to honor the feminine? Or how do we help toxic masculinity detoxify? Because to me it's not that masculinity in itself is evil, or it's not that that's what caused industrialization, capitalism, colonialism. And of course, that's I don't think that's what you're saying, but I am wanting to speak to whether it's the people who identify as men out there, or those of us I mean, I know I have masculine sides and myself, and they have been toxic at times. Yeah, it's like how do we welcome healthy masculinity that supports the divine feminine?
Dr. Vandana Shiva Well, first by recognizing that the divine feminine is in everyone, in every being, the divine feminine is in the masculine too. And, and the dynamic, creative part of all beings, including human beings, including the masculine human beings, that is the sacred feminine, it is not only about women, it is not it's not embodied only in a body that is female, it is embodied in all creative expressions of life. What I think about being female and being male, has constantly been constructed in society. And you know, in India, of course, we have some of the worst violence against women, but we also have the amazing you know, the amazing divinities you know, the divinity of food, the divinity of the river Ganges, all of nature is sacred and and the divine feminine colonialism was definitely a patriarchal enterprise. Now, patriarchal patriarchy is different from masculinity, masculinity is you know, the feminine and the masculine, which can be in total harmony and total balance, but patriarchy is the domination of a toxic masculinity in order to deny the humanity in of the women and that is where the toxicity begins. But then with capitalist patriarchy, which is what colonial war was, reaches much higher levels.
First, the corporation you know, if you look at how the corporation formed, what it is, it was 300 men who created the East India Company, which was like a man, a militarized, conquering man. So, patriarchy then gets embodied in the structures of society that we create, when we don't have decentralized participatory democracy, democracy in terms of money power and electoral power, then becomes a masculine game of patriarchy. So, the masculine without the feminine deprived off the sacred feminine, and the creative principles of the feminine, then starts to become toxic. Nature is made to disappear, capitalist patriarchy basically begins with the assumption that nature is dead and women are passive. Eco feminism begins with a simple recognition, nature's creative, women are creative. And we've been associated with passivity. And therefore domination and violence, we can be associated in creativity and non violence and non violence and creative form is the power we bring to the world, along with nature meant to enslaved in patriarchy, because to be forced to be a violent person, you know, to be a person who can't cry, who can't have compassion that's already robbing you, of your humanity.
So ecofeminism you know, the diverse women for diversity movement, which is written about in the book Terra Viva, we did it at the Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in Bratislava. And of course, many of you know that the minister, amazing man who have played a very big role in the protection of the Earth, and I take in the bindi, you know, I always wear a bindi, and I taken a bindi and I put it on everyone who was in the room, and I reminded the men you to have the sacred feminine, and this little bindi is the symbol of the feminine creative power of the universe. It's also, of course, connected to the fact that we are connected to the universe and I think for men ecofeminism is very liberating because it allows them a to be fully themselves, fully human their unique humanity and second, recognize that the sacred feminism them to practice all the qualities they have been told in toxic masculinity cannot be part of masculinity.
Ayana Young Yeah, thank you so much for seeing some of that out with us and Vandana thank you for everything honestly every time I speak with you I feel revitalized and refocused and just remembering who I am, and I really appreciate you in so many ways. So thank you for spending more time with us and for reawakening us in times when I know so many of us can feel a bit lost.
Dr. Vandana Shiva Thank you so much. Always wonderful to join you, love to the trees around you, love to Alaska, and love to all your listeners.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Henry Johnson, Scinnlaece, and Doe Paoro. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.