Forum Conversation: Dr. Vandana Shiva
A World-Renowned Scientist, Writer, and Activist Against The GMO Movement, Describes The Framework For A Sustainable World
In this interview, Dr. Vandana Shiva contributes her perspective to the Forum Conversation, discussing her vision and work toward a better world, rooted in the ancient wisdom of Indian philosophy and culture.
Dr. Shiva’s work and writings have inspired individuals and communities around the world for decades. She is a physicist who studied hidden variables and non-locality in quantum theory and worked in interdisciplinary research in science, technology, and environmental policy at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management.
In 2003, Shiva was designated by Time Magazine as an environmental hero. Forbes Magazine in 2010 listed her as one of the top Seven most Powerful Women on the Globe. Among her many awards are the Right Livelihood Award, Order of the Golden Ark, and The MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity.
Shiva also founded Navdanya, an organization promoting the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially seeds. She continues to support organic farming and a clean environment — and relentlessly battles against destructive corporate agricultural practices.
As a principal activist in anti-globalization, Dr. Shiva is a leader in challenging the mainstream narrative and the status quo of corporate greed.
Forum: Dr. Shiva, please tell us something about your early life — the important experiences that helped to shape your knowledge.
Shiva: As a young child, I was very inspired by Einstein. Even though I went to convent schools, which didn't offer the science disciplines, I kept following the sciences. I searched for inspiring professors and spent evenings with them to learn more. I managed to get a science talent fellowship, which saw me through university and school. My mind was very dissatisfied with the mechanistic explanation of anything because I'd lived in the real world. The idea that everything is an immutable particle, unrelated to each other, and can only be moved by force — didn’t hang together as what I experienced, saw, and understood. So quantum theory became my search — quantum theory totally fit with the world as I understood it — it gave me a much deeper understanding of science.
First, the world is not disconnected little particles but is basically non-separable entities, and once you've interacted, you've interacted forever. For a while, you might look like a particle, but underlying everything is a wave of interconnectedness.
The second, there's nothing like a fixed entity because the entire Cartesian world — and we suffer from that — that whole idea of, you’re with me or against me — you’re an absolute evil or you're absolutely good. That is all part of this essentialism, which really is a description of traits.
In the quantum world, everything is a potential waiting to happen. That's why for me, the idea of potential and the idea of hope go together. Because no matter how dismembered things are, the potential of it going differently is always there. This is so connected to the fact that in an absolutist world, it's perfection or it's horrendous. But in the real world, there's uncertainty. The certainty of those who are in arrogant power today can turn into uncertainty with the disappearance of their arrangements and path.
We've seen that again and again in nature — and again in history. Finally, all of this put together, means you can't have an excluded middle. Because you can be a wave in one moment and a particle in the other; you can be a gardener in one moment and a journalist in the other. These are not separated polarizing categories. Between uncertainty and the non-excluded middle — everything’s a continuum. This is not just the hope for the future, it's a healing for our times.
Yet the most supposedly intelligent people are the ones who are supporting an absolutism in the worst kind of way. They are labeling and rejecting people. It's quite amazing how in the West right now, people are targeted and made out to be villains and evil. Hopelessness grows out of that, hate grows out of that, and polarization grows out of that.
I am so grateful that I've learned so much from nature. The normality of nature is what allowed me to reject the mechanistic Newtonian idea of the world and seek quantum theory. This is what helped me go so much deeper into the learning from ordinary people, like the women of the Chipko movement who lived in the forest, who lived with the water, had never been to school, and could never read or write.
I said, they will be my professors — and I'll be there with them.
What they did for the ecology movement of India is really absolutely amazing. Courageous people who had never been brainwashed with a bad education; but teaching us about life and nature that the forest and the rivers are interconnected, that the soil and the water are interconnected. That there's an economy of nature and of the forest where they have abundance and prosperity. And theirs is not an absence of economy, but the real economy.
So I learned all of this from my different streams. It doesn't just keep inspiring me on a daily basis, but keeps showing me new parts, when the doors close. No door can ever close in a living world. There's always that little crack in the cement where a new plant will come out.
Quantum Theory vs. Monsanto
Forum: How does quantum theory relate to the natural world?
Shiva: A quantum is not a thing — that's the brilliance of it. There are no things in the quantum world. There's no stuff in the quantum world. There's nothing you can destroy or create in the quantum world. There is a potential, the side function, the quantum function it's called — that’s all it is. And it's in a safe space. It's not in this Cartesian space, it's in a safe space of the qualities of unfolding. That's how the world is.
The current world is seemingly shaped by all the stuff in the supermarkets and all the junk clothing and all the junk food. Rather than it being determined by powerful interests ruining the world, destroying our health, and taking away farmers' livelihoods — the ultimate reality is that quantum function shapes the world. You can see it that way. You can see it in terms of all its history of evolution and all its past — all its future unfolding.
There are two people in quantum theory that have been very inspiring for me. One is David Boehm who described a quantum as an unfoldment of the multiple parts of reality waiting to happen. What part will be followed is according to the context. So if I create a context to look for a wave, I'll find a wave. If I create a context to look for a particle, I find a particle. But the quanta are both the wave and the particle at the same time — and they're not mutually exclusive words.
The second step in understanding this for me was from the great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. He described the relationship between waves and time in what we know as the quantum equation. From his reflections, he wrote a brilliant book called What is Life? It should be read by every person in the world. Here is a physicist who developed the clearest thinking on quantum theory, and like many quantum theorists, he turned to Indian philosophy to make sense of the world. Schrödinger countered the logical and mechanistic Cartesian view, showing that nothing was mutually exclusive.
Many biologists have been inspired by Schrödinger, including my friends, Dr. Mei Wan Ho and Brian Goodwin — people who started to look at the self-organization of systems. I worked with them on understanding the GMO issue. Mei Wan Ho talked about how from the tiniest microbe, the tiniest molecule, there is a self-organized intelligence at work.
Importantly, Schrödinger says that the brilliance of life is that it reverses entropy — it is negative entropy. A machine must have external energy — and any external energy must create waste.
Entropy is wasted energy I cannot use — that is pollution — that is greenhouse gases. That is all the mess we have in the world.
All living systems that are self-organized, reverse entropy, because they're self-organized — like a quantum unfolds. A little acorn will not turn into a coconut tree — an acorn will become an oak tree. And just like in a quanta, everything is unfolding in terms of its potential in the seed — that's already there, waiting to become the full plant.
Not seeing that, denying the potential, calling seed an empty machine: that is what Monsanto did. We know that's not the way life works. And the reason I started to save seed was because this denial was so against my understanding of quantum theory, so against my learning of Chipko — this so-called Green Revolution. I started just from 1987 onwards, dedicating myself to deconstructing the fiction of the seed as property — intellectual property — and a machine.
And it surprises me no end that there are people with an intention to own, extract, and destroy — the will to power is what the green machine runs on. But for me what's more surprising is such large numbers of intelligent people fall for the trap. Someone calls a seed a machine, why do people even accept it?
When suddenly health agencies deny that we have immunity in our body, that our body has any capacity to heal and resist is like the Green Revolution saying the soil is an empty container for pouring nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from factories. So I have looked at this industrial mechanistic mindset from a quantum perspective. And I can tell you it is crude colonialism in the epistemic domain.
Colonialism And Moral Anesthesia
Forum: Some would argue that the source of destructiveness is evil. And some would say it's just ignorance. Do you have a sense of what drives the willingness of this continuing destructive behavior?
Shiva: I work on reflection and observation and my observation of the forces of destruction, which is what then inspires me to try and write the story. You know, how is it that the British thought the forests were just their timber mines? How could they, having destroyed their own oak forests, then declare that the forests of India were their property? Where does that come from? Quite clearly a colonizing mindset that anything, anywhere is mine. So that urge to control and conquer on — is related to the idea of a separation from nature — that I can conquer nature — I can own the seed.
And related to all of this is the illusion of superiority. I know all over the world, everyone's awakening to white superiority. As an issue, we've had to deal with that idea for a very, very long time.
Just at the time where on the one hand movements are finally talking about white superiority, we have a war in Ukraine where refugees are being differentiated, according to whiteness and being colored. Indian students, 20,000 students in Ukraine were treated like trash because they were colored. Of course, India brought them all back.
I think this is not just about human superiority over other species. The very idea of thinking you are separate from and superior to anything — is thinking of petty minds and petty minds create conflicts. Petty minds have the urge to take what belongs to others. They create the limitlessness of wanting to own more and more. That is the disease that has allowed the one percent to emerge. It's the disease that allowed the techno-barons of today to harvest 1.5 trillion dollars, while ordinary people lost 3.4 trillion during the lockdowns and the COVID crisis.
And this has occurred at the human level, at the level where we are all Earth citizens, and we are all related to each other. And when you're related, you care, you have compassion. These relationships immediately inspire you to do no harm. I will not do harm to my baby whom I love, I will not do harm to the seeds I'm saving.
But when you disconnect people and you've put owning first, you objectify the other. You made women your property, you made indigenous people your slaves, you made mother Earth your private property. All of this then allows you simultaneously to give freedom to harm. I would call it moral anesthesia. If I'm living, then I'll feel the pain of everything around me. But if I'm anesthetized by greed, by power, I will not feel that pain. So in a way, the rich and powerful are living under the anesthesia of cruelty.
The Nine Sutras Of Navdanya
Forum: Let’s explore the Nine Sutras of Self-Reliant India described on the Navdanyawebsite. The first centers on a topic that is central to your work — the importance of seeds. How does seed represent a primary force in the world today?
Shiva: Navdanya, which means nine seeds, grew out of not accepting the seed as intellectual property. This concept had popped out from Monsanto — from the idea that seed was a machine.
We held onto the cosmic universal reality of which we are a part — where life is seed — and the source of life. And the word for seed in our language is bija, which means, that from which life arises on its own forever and ever and ever. The permanence of the renewal of life from its own inner capacity of self-organization and evolution — that is what seed is. That is, I think the understanding of most cultures.
We had evolved the nine sutras about 10 years ago, but at that time, we didn't have this current assault on health. We did not have this new idea of fake food. These are new elements that recently entered.
Sutra has a very deep meaning, just like seeds represent life. The Sutra holds wisdom and knowledge; the right way, the right part. And these have emerged not by us sitting in offices. Our efforts have been to converge three things.
The first is the deep ecological wisdom of Indian society. At the top of each of the nine Sutras is actually an ancient Sanskrit text defining the seed. Acam bicha: first the seed.
Then there's all the learning we've had over these thirty years of Navdanya — and 40 years of my research.
Then we added all the experiences of the peasants and the farmers.
So it's a convergence of three knowledge streams; the seed for us is where freedom of life evolves. That’s why for a seed, freedom is not just a human trait — it’s the planet's trait.
There's the freedom of the farmer to save and exchange seed, and that is what the corporations were taking away. They sat in that room in '87 at a meeting and they said, we've got to make sure that by the year 2000 all seeds are GMO. All seeds will be patented under international law. The GATT, which became the WTO, attempted to ensure no farmer could have their own seeds. They wrote intellectual property law to criminalize farmers' seed saving.
I started to work with Navdanya to defend the seed and its diversity. To stop the pollution, to have freedom from toxics and GMOs, to defend the farmer's right to save seeds; as our ultimate duty to the Earth and each other — and future generations.
And to defend the farmer's rights to exchange seed, because you can't just save seed, you've got to exchange it. And this also includes the freedom of farmers to grow seed and importantly, the freedom of people to eat real size seed and food from seed.
There used to be this nonsensical slogan in those times called willingness to pay: we will only protect the part of nature that will work for us commercially. This was a conservation ideology of that time.
We said, no, if nature gave the seeds and our ancestors emerged, there's something in this. And we will trust nature and our people, and we will not say, this is worth throwing away. So we saved everything. Many of these seeds we saved were salt and flood tolerant seeds — which we distributed when nothing else was viable.
I was recently celebrating 25 years of one of our programs in Arisa where in 1999, a super cyclone hit, that came three miles inland. It was three times the velocity of all other cyclones, thousands died, but we had saved seeds, and we saved seeds without questioning. And those seeds saved us.
Seeds we've saved are also what is helping us get through climate change. And we are now doing research on them, because nobody looked at their benefits before. They only said they were low yielding — they can't feed the world. Our research is confirming these are nutritionally dense seeds — they were bred for good eating. Today's commercial seeds are created for owning — when you own something and you want to sell it, you don't really care what's in it.
When you're going to grow a seed and eat it, you make sure it's the highest quality. So often you need only to grow one quarter of the amount of food to have more nutrition. Seventy percent of the nutrition in the West has gone from food because of the kinds of seeds we are using and the kind of methods of agriculture employed.
However, seed is the ultimate metaphor; the seeds of the universe, the seeds of the Earth, the seeds of our cultures, the seeds of love and compassion.
Forum: The second Sutra discusses native diet and the power of diverse food as medicine. This is about seed, food, and diversity.
Shiva: The Earth is a planet of diversity, and particularly in the parts that are in the tropics, the diversity is even richer. The colonialists came and we Indians were called primitive — and our diversity was seen as a problem. Because that mechanistic mind, the superior mind, thought everything has to serve the extraction. So everything must start looking the same.
Much of the land of the indigenous people of the Americas had to become cotton fields because cotton empires were growing. And more recently, the so-called Green Revolution destroyed the diversity of crops and reduced them to rice and wheat — and to varieties bred for chemical fertilizers and poisonous defoliants.
I have worked with farmers and supported seed saving. And when they'd say, what can we do? I’d say, save your older heirloom seeds. So old wheat seeds in weight, might look a little less, maybe ten percent, because that's all the gain of the so-called high yielding varieties and chemicals. But I just keep telling people to save seeds.
Next time I went back to that community. They said, we are eating half the amount because those seeds have so much more nutrition that we don't have to eat four chapatis because two is enough. More than that they said, we were always told that we will never be able to make a living with our saved seed, that we'd starve to death. Now we are eating half the food, so we have actually twice the amount. And when we bring it to the market, others realize this is tastier, healthier, more nutritious. They are paying us twice as much.
So the economy just totally shifted and people started to eat better. So real seed gives you real food. Diversity gives you real food. And now we are realizing that traditional foods are based on diversity — whether it's the Mediterranean diet or traditional foods.
In an Indian Thali, you'll have one or two vegetables. You’ll have dhal, you always have a chutney, which has all the micronutrients, and you will always have taste. And according to the Ayurvedic philosophy, you must eat six tastes in every meal — then you have a balanced diet. But you can only have six tastes if you're growing with diversity. So diversity on the field translates into diversity on your plate.
That is true food security. That's why we've also shifted the measures. We said, measuring the weight of something and calling it yield and talking about how much got sold in weight is a very meaningless term. So I said, we must measure nutrition because what matters is nourishment. We say health per acre rather than yield per acre. And we started to measure the nutrition per acre. We can feed two times India's population by conserving our diversity and saving our assets.
Forum: The third sutra on organic farming is a rejection of chemical fertilizers and anything artificial in the soil. Why are organic methods of farming better than conventional techniques?
Shiva: So the word organic means the science of life. That's what its original meaning was. You look at the dictionary, the organic is the whole, the organic is the living. Then Hitler's Germany created all these chemicals, poison gases and fixing nitrogen in the atmosphere for explosives. Our book, Oneness vs. The 1%, traces the intimate connection between IG Farben and Standard Oil — they were working together in Austria. The oil and finance were coming from Standard Oil, the chemistry was coming from IG Farben. So they put oil and money to chemical use, to retool these chemicals that were designed for the concentration camps and wars to make them agro-chemicals. Then the assault started on organic.
Yet before the war, there was no discipline called agriculture. The British just wanted to make money from farming. Universities didn't have an agricultural side, but they sent their top scientists. The Imperial Economic Botanist, Albert Howard, was sent to India to improve Indian agriculture. He arrives and he says, the soils are so fertile. He saw the insects are all over the place, but there's no pest damage. So he realized he was going to learn good farming from Indian peasants. In his book, An Agricultural Testament, he also describes making the pests his teacher.
Howard became the fountainhead of articulation of the organic movement. But as he says it very humbly, I learned all this from the Indian peasant. How did they learn? By doing it — and from our ancient wisdom.
Howard distilled two principles from his learning in India. One is you all always grow with diversity — you never grow a mono-culture. Because only through diversity, can you have cooperation. Otherwise you have competition. And the second is basically the cycle of life — he called it the law of return. If I'm growing plants in my field, then some of it must go back to the soil. He saw Indian peasants working this way and developed it further into what we now know as composting.
An Agricultural Testament has been published by the Rodale Press in America. And the Soil Association was created as a result of this. They reclaimed the original language of the science of life and called it organic.
The chemical industry has always attacked organic — we live it on a daily basis. Somewhere I get called a Nazi for promoting organic, and today there was a tweet calling me a leftist for promoting organic. It’s fascinating how the labels are created for deception, that any label can be put on anything. I can be painted in any color.
The agro-chemical companies that came out of profits of war and commerce have always contested organic. And they did three things. The first is they, of course, privileged themselves: half of Europe's money is spent on subsidizing chemicals and industrial inputs. In the United States, all the subsidies that go to agriculture, go to industry. So what is a very high-cost production becomes cheap.
The second thing they did was create rules, create conditionalities, which became more and more difficult for organic farmers. The poison sprays you'll never see on a label; this apple has this pesticide and this herbicide — that’s what should be true labeling. Instead, the poor organic farmer has to spend huge amounts of money for certification to prove, I didn't use the chemicals. We should know what the chemicals are and then avoid them.
And the third thing that they did was promote monocultures. If I'm growing diversity, the soil needs part of it returned. So I give some to the soil, but the farming family needs to also eat. Half the world's hungry are farmers now. But they're not allowed to eat because they grow monoculture commodities.
On a diverse farm, a family grows some food that their neighbor also needs. One family is growing onions and peppers, another family is growing eggplant. They'll exchange food at the village level — that's how economies used to work. Then you're growing high quality. You can bring it to your local market, but now you're not desperate.
All of this means that chemical monocultures drive the depression of prices of the food produced with high-cost inputs. And they make it artificially look like organic is expensive.
That's how the false story of chemical versus organic has grown, and the worst is really what we are witnessing right now on the whole censorship question in every field. Censorship has constantly turned to make it look like the real science of life is unscientific. And the methods of killing life, not knowing the relationships of life, but knowing the science of making tools to kill, that is considered science.
Being a scientist, I find that definition very, very misleading. Making a GMO, making a chemical fertilizer — is the science of making a tool. And the purpose of that tool is to kill. So it should be called the science of death.
The science of life is about the system and the organism. The science of organic is the science of living.
Forum: There is more about organic farming in the fourth sutra — knowledge that is thousands of years old. Do you see that the organic movement is coming back in a way that gives you some optimism?
Shiva: Oh yes. The international trade data won't show it to you because the trade data only measures the container ships that are leaving from one port to another port. The real thing to measure is the farms. Even the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) admits that eighty percent of the food we eat comes from small farms. The rest comes from the industrial system, only twenty percent.
When you look at the fact that eighty percent comes from smaller farms, and you look at the fact that during lockdowns and COVID the supply chains collapsed, you should ask, where are the people of the world eating from? From local, organic farms and gardens.
Our members, the women I work with, say not only has it not affected us, but it has also made us even more confident. We continued to not just grow our own food, but we created so much abundance that we could share. And we remembered that we can grow abundance and reclaim the culture of sharing.
Additionally, which is so important in our times, we remembered everything our grandmothers used to do for immunity. We have so many herbs in India — no matter which village I go to! And we grew the herbs and drank the power of these herbs and not one person in many villages got COVID.
So it's about health. It's about immunity. And I personally am very hopeful because the greater the crisis, the more people are turning to a garden. The more people are turning to biodiversity and the more people are turning to their knowledge. The industrial system merely has knowledge of how to extract and kill. And here you are, your life is at stake. There's a pandemic happening. You want to eat. And no matter how much propaganda is done, there's nothing like natural immunity.
Every system has resilience and immunity. That is the capacity to be healthy. The minute a living system is a living system, having health through immunity is part of its nature.
To deny this is part of the concept that chemical fertilizers are the only way you can grow food. And a century of denialists rule the world, not just by falsehoods and science, but by bullying — by ugly, ugly bullying.
The beauty of the best response is you just do the right thing. The plants grow, communities grow, self-reliance comes back — and below the radar, there's an amazing growth taking place.
Forum: The fifth sutra talks about organic food representing health sovereignty, and how diseases come from poor soil. What are farmers doing to support the soil?
Shiva: I studied the Green Revolution when violence erupted in Punjab. And I said, this is not the way to farm. I started to work and turned towards nonviolent farming. Then we found out that in ancient systems we had about 24 ways of enriching the soil — recorded in our writings. That's where the cow is so central to Indian farming systems. The cow urine and the cow dung, and then a little bit of enzyme creation and all of these different ways of composting. On the one hand, it was simple fermentation, but on the other, we realized much of what people used to do, had been forgotten.
And just like that we were able to regenerate organic practices. We've been able to renew the ancient systems and we combined it with the best of science. Good farmers know how to treat the soil well, but they don't have microscopes to know all the soil organisms. They see the soil as healthy, the same way you can see how a person is sick or healthy just by the way their skin looks.
Healthy soils are brown, they are rich, and have humus. We combined the farmer’s instincts with an entirely new knowledge that was coming from understanding soil organisms. Howard had talked about the most important element — the soil fungi. To understand them better, you need a microscope. So we work with peasants who have their knowledge, and we work with scientists. We can do deeper tracing. We have learned that you merely have to do the right thing for the soil. The soil does the rest of the work. It's not a machine, it's not an input/output system — you put in this method, get out that much.
I've helped about six states of India go organic. And I remember once I was with the chief minister of Bihar, and the scientist said, well, we started this research and actually you're right, the productivity is higher with organic. But it can't be because you are not adding fertilizer. I said, here you are, your measurements are showing higher productivity. The doubt in your mind from that NPK mentality (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) is telling you it can't be — because you're not putting anything in. Well, the soil is putting a lot of work in. Soil organisms and Earthworms are putting a lot of work in.
Our study of farms in the Doon Valley has shown a hundred percent increase in carbon, a hundred percent increase in nitrogen — without adding nitrogen fertilizer. Where the farms had urea and nitrogen fertilizer, the nitrogen in the soil has decreased twenty-two percent. You might think if you put it in, there'll be more nitrogen. No, it just has run off.
Scientists are now finding in one cubic inch of good soil, you have eight miles of microscopic mycorrhizal fungi. And the fungi is like the worldwide web working in the soil, going far away and collecting that little bit of mineral that a plant needs. Working with deep symbiosis, and more importantly, working with intelligence to throw the junk out.
I just wish more people in this period of propaganda would work with the mycorrhizal fungi and filter out the toxic junk in the bought media. It brings the purest of nutrition to the plant. There are toxins in the soil, but it filters it out.
I worked with Japanese farmers after Fukushima. The organic farmers have never anticipated this, but they worked on their soils. Organic farming through fungi removed even the radiation from the soil. That's the power of living soil. And the richer the fungi, the more photosynthesis in the plant. Just by taking care of the soil, you can have five times more production — five times more production!
All the violent technologies of industrial agriculture just increase commodities by five to ten percent. So we are giving up the richness of life to live by the rules of a war industry. And this is where humanity can just shift its case from the dominance of the one percent — and shift to the millions of microorganisms and millions of plants of the Earth. The 10,000 plants we used to eat, the plants that grew on their own — if you don't use Roundup.
The Earth is just waiting to gift us abundance. We have to stop our violence, our war, and our theft.
Forum: The sixth Sutra talks about biodiversity defined as a “living democracy.” What does this concept mean?
Shiva: So of course the Earth lives in a democracy daze — corporate science defines a master molecule. There's nothing like a master molecule in life. There's a concert of different entities.
That’s why the debate on the whole issue of our mRNA is very important because the mRNA is not a dead messenger. It's the regulator. It is what determines how DNA will behave.
So the idea of master species, master races, master molecules — these come from that militarized mind. That is the mind that decided we're going to own all life. We took the colonies — now we must own the life on Earth. And the same mentality drove the 1999 assault to make seed intellectual property.
For example, this beautiful plant called Neem, which we used for pest control, that my grandmother used and my mother used — I had been spreading and sharing it after the Bhopal disaster. And they put a patent on it! And meanwhile, the intellectual property rights of the World Trade Organization were being pushed and pushed and pushed.
I was in Amsterdam, working with the government and the parliament. I went back to the Indian communities and I said, you see, this is what's happening at the international level. We were having a big gathering of 200 villages. I said, they don't realize you're part of an Earth family, that the jurisdiction is a jurisdiction of ethics, not ownership. They wanted to act on this. So I said act — you want an address — here, take the address of Monsanto and the WTO chief. And they wrote these amazing postcards — from all over the country in different languages.
Then Mike Moore, the secretary general of WTO came to Delhi and wanted to meet with me. So I went to see him and he said, “Shiva, I'm getting hundreds of thousands of postcards in different languages. And we are having to hire translators. The villagers are telling us to come and they will explain why we are beyond our jurisdiction to create intellectual property on their plants. Tell me what to do.”
I said, listen to them. They wrote you the postcards. They are saying we are a living democracy, come under the people tree, under the ficus tree. Come and see the way we discuss conflict, come and sit with us and explain yourself.
We also have thieves in the villages. We don't have jails. When someone steals, we assume they stole in desperation. We call in the thief and say, explain this to us. Someone will say my child was hungry, therefore I stole bread. Or a boy will say, my mother was sick and I had to get medicine. Therefore I stole some money. And if the reason is humane, we let it be. And if it's inhumane, we take action.
So I said, Mr. Moore, do come and explain your desperation, please. Tell us why you want to steal all the plants and seeds of the world. If there's a real problem, we will feel sad for you and ensure that you get something that you need, but you have to come under the tree and sit with us. I told him that. I said, this is not me — it’s the people of 6,000 villages that have written to you.
And out of the conflict grew the Living Democracy movement, which then became the Earth Democracy movement. And it was real — a beautiful declaration on the banks of the Mandakini River. That was 1999 — this is 2022 and we are going to revisit with those communities. We've had disasters, we've had glacial melt in that valley. And the communities are coming together again to work on how to protect the Earth and the Earth family — defending the rights of all people. That's a democracy.
Forum: The foundation for the seventh sutra is about a living circular economy. How does that work?
Shiva: The economy of colonial commerce is mere ownership and extraction. There's nothing else to it. There's nothing creative about it. Extract the gold, extract spices and extract rents from peasants. So it's a lean, extracted system and all of what is called economy, I call a chrematistic style of money making — it’s an extracting system.
The living circular economy is how nature works — and our communities that are free to organize in that way work well.
Take the bee — it comes to the flower, takes the pollen, fertilizes the flower — the bee is richer with honey. The flower is richer with fertilization. Neither of them lost anything. This is a circular economy of life.
This also is demonstrated by the amazing symbiosis between the roots of a plant and the mycorrhizal fungi. The plant feeds the mycorrhizal fungi with carbohydrates, the fungi bring it all the minerals that the plant needs — that it cannot produce itself. It can take carbon dioxide and create carbohydrates, and everything else from the soil. It's the fungi that bring it. That's a local living circular economy.
I save my seeds and exchange them with my neighbor and the seed becomes next year's seed. And the following year's seed — that’s the circular economy of the seed in renewal — and the circular economy of a community in the commons.
When I have enough, and I'm sharing, there's a circular economy of food. Wherever there's hunger, the circular economy has collapsed. Wherever people are in a circular economy, no one allows neighbors to die of hunger — never. So living circular economies are natural laws of circularity. The circular economies give back to society, to nature and their circle — and the circles within and beyond their circle. And I now have spent enough of my life to know that when these flows are thriving, you see how much nutrition is flowing, how much water is flowing, how much health is flowing, and how much wealth is flowing.
The circular economies produce much more than the extractive economy because the extractive economy destroys in the extraction. It takes it from one place to another. It gives nothing back. People get poorer. Nature gets depleted. The ecological crisis is a result of extraction. The poverty crisis is a result of extraction.
We can reverse all of this depletion through the local circular economy. And this becomes very important now, where the billionaires have already decided there'll be no money. It'll all be digital. It'll be your social credits. You know, you'll be allocated a value — and they're doing this in Ukraine right now — using digital IDs and social credits and digital economies to basically decide who's worth how much. And deciding who is worth how much is already destroying your humanity. So the living circular economy says we are with the Earth. The Earth gives us options. The Earth gives us water. The Earth gives us food, but we have to give back. Giving back in gratitude is the circular economy — sharing is a circular economy.
Knowing that we have the power of gift-giving is a circular economy. Everything that is precious about being human is in the circular economy. Everything that is cruel in the colonial, corporate economy is what the linear extractive system and the post-money system are trying to create. The World Economic Forumhas said it: you own nothing. You'll be happy, they said, but they basically want to own all the seed, all the food, all the air, all the carbon.
I work on climate change. They'd like to own the carbon. They're creating a new carbon colonialism — that’s not the circular economy. Recycling of carbon by the natural ecological process of life, through the beautiful interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere — that’s the circular economy.
Forum: This leads us to the eighth Sutra on self-reliance. How does a community maintain self-reliance?
Shiva: Self-reliance is an ecological concept and a community concept. Industrial colonial systems are extractive of what's produced and depend on external inputs. So if I have to buy urea and I have to buy pesticides and I have to buy Roundup and I have to buy new seeds every year, there is no self-reliance. That is why big money has always tried to undercut the capacity of people to provide for themselves.
When we work with the Earth using our potential to create, with the Earth's potential to create, we create the means without external input — without credit, without loans, without borrowing, producing the food we need. We join hands and can produce the homes we need.
Emery Lowe has just done a beautiful essay on how the only way to solve the climate problem is through conservation. He talked about the mud hut he has built in Denver, Colorado — that's how Indians have lived. Mud huts were called primitive, cement was called sophisticated. If you want cement, you'll have to buy it. You want to make a mud hut — you only need five pairs of hands to join together — our Earth university has done this.
Any place where the capacity of the Earth and the potential of beings can join hands without money and external inputs to provide what they need in food, in water, in clothing, in shelter, in health, and in education — these are truly self-reliant economies. They are not selfish economies — but circular self-reliant economies with give and take — and with freedom from capital and big money.
Forum: This division of motivation is at the center of the conflict in the world today. Those who want the Earth to serve us, and those who appreciate that we are very much part of the Earth’s natural systems. The ninth and final Sutra describes how we are one Earth family, and helps us understand the importance of our relationship to the Earth.
Shiva: Most of humanity, in all cultures, has existed to serve the Earth because the Earth is the organizing principle of life. Being aligned with those organizing principles is the way to sustain life. So for 60,000 years, the Australian Aborigines lived that way. They didn't destroy Australia. They were colonized because the British defined destruction as ownership. Captain Cook said, “I can't see any damage, therefore, they can't own it.” Therefore, the land is terra nullius, the justification for colonization.
The ninth sutra is based on a concept from our very ancient Sanskrit texts that says: those who say I am separate from you, or that you are less than me — or anyone who says this is mine and this is yours — that is the petty mind. That's where greed and superiority come from.
An evolved mind sees the World as one family. Our word for this is Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam— and this is Navdanya's philosophy of organizing.
For 10,000 years we farmed in India — and didn't destroy the land — we've left it richer.
We have seen five-hundred years of colonial thinking and extractive logic and economics that have been built on competition. You're made to feel, if I don't take more, I'll have less. And I think that is the big blunder.
Whereas in the giving economy and the sharing economy, if I give more, I have more. So if I give more seeds, there'll be more seeds everywhere. If I share more food, there'll be more food everywhere. You know, I can go to the poorest villages in the desert region of Rajasthan and the women might have walked 10 miles to get their pitcher of water. You enter their home — and the first thing they do is give you a glass of water.
You enter a middle-class home today and they won't offer you water — because sharing water has disappeared from their thinking. When you're living in the economy of life, water is a vital currency. When you're living in an economy of the Earth, food is a vital currency. Food is not a commodity. Water is not a commodity.
When you see the Earth as one family and you see within it, the human community, as one family, gift-giving increases — with abundance and prosperity and well-being for all. And we practice this. It's in our wisdom traditions.
The economy of the gift is the only way to have peace. And the economy of grabbing will always create conflicts.
Every war comes from greed, greed for resources, greed for exploitation of people, and greed for markets — and wanting to desperately sell unnecessary junk food all over the world.
Whereas the gift economy says, I must take care of this beautiful planet. I must take care of everyone around me. I must take care of the children who are to come. And instead of scarcity over which we are fighting, we have abundance through which we are sharing hope and well-being, and no one is deprived.
The Earth's potential is there. Our potential is there. Switching the mind off the brainwashing is all that it needs. It's a paradigm shift. The rest falls into place.
Forum: I do know that many people through the pandemic and with the dark clouds of war, find it hard to be optimistic. On the other hand, there's a sense that these powerful greedy forces are making a final, desperate attempt to control everything. Does that give you room for more optimism?
Shiva: I'm not mechanical in my thinking. So their desperation doesn't make for my hope. Their desperation is purely a confirmation that power — and everything that comes from it — ultimately destroys its own foundations. Because it's denying the Earth that supports everything and it's denying support and care for people.
So they put on blinders and more blinders — and they see the whole world as a place to manufacture products. This world is their illusion, and beyond a point, it all falls apart. And every time it is threatened, then they get more desperate and want to control more. But there is no way a world of free, living beings can be controlled. It bursts forth all the time. So I can see the desperation — that’s why I wrote Oneness vs. the 1%.
I see these things converging; the desperation of the greedy and the powerful, and the activities of those at their level who are doing the right work of caring for the Earth and regenerating it.
There are also those who thought that the system has a place for them and are now being told that you don't count. You had a home, we'll throw you out. You had a job, we'll take it away. There's no place for you. There's a very large number of potential throw-away people whose eyes are being opened.
About 20 years ago, I was giving a talk in Germany about how development and dams had displaced people — and how our farms get destroyed by the Green Revolution. They told us this was in our best interests.
At the end of my talk, a young man at the back of the auditorium put up his hand and said, now I understand what you're saying. We are like a free-range chicken who knew how to take care of herself — how to find the worms and greens and eat freely in nature. Then she was thrown into a battery cage, fed like a prisoner. Like her, we have been thrown into a cage and given poor-quality food; this is presented as an improvement and development.
We were in that cage, but we won’t stay because the food is fake and the water is rising. If we all meet at the door of the cage they’ve attempted to keep us in — and reject the greed economy — we can teach each other how to live in freedom.
Each open mind changes the World. Please share.
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A summary of this interview appeared on Children’s Health Defense Defender website.
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