Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Terra Viva with Vandana Shiva

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

Vandana Shiva is an activist and tireless advocate for food sovereignty for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights. She’s a world-renowned ecofeminist, anti-globalization thinker and scholar, a Right Livelihood Award Laureate; and the author of several books including Reclaiming the Commons, Earth Democracy, Oneness vs. the 1%, Stolen Harvest, and most recently a memoir, Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements. In this conversation, Vandana Shiva weaves together stories of her life with a critical examination of our current economic system along with inspiring stories of non-violent grassroots actions to protect and preserve the health and well-being of people and the planet.   How can we reject the spread of hierarchy and division and begin reclaiming our right to live free, think free, breathe free, and eat free? How can we go upstream to decolonize all the spheres of our lives and focus on strengthening and revitalizing the commons? These are just some of the questions we explore in this Conversation. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify to leave us a review there too. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And also, Upstream is a labor of love. It's really important for us to keep our bi-weekly conversation series and quarterly documentaries free of charge and accessible to anyone who's interested. But it all takes a lot of time and resources. If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so. And if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable,

please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Working in the nuclear training, you know, in the fast-freighter reactor makes your head high. You get an addiction because you have a social roommate that these disciplines are superior, that as a scientist, you are superior. And I'd go to these villages and hear the women knew everything and I knew nothing about the plants. And I became humble. So I learned biodiversity. I learned the relationships of humans and people. I learned

the relationship of economy and ecology through direct practice. And more importantly, I learned that you cannot think you are smarter than others just because you've got a degree. That everyone is a knowledgeable person. And I became very, very aware of epistemic hierarchies and epistemic democracy. And my life has been a practice of epistemic democracy. That the plant has intelligence, the peasant has intelligence, the soil has intelligence, you work with that intelligence. That's nonviolence. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan.

Vandana Shiva is an activist and tireless advocate for food sovereignty and for farmers, peasants, and women's rights. She's a world-renowned eco-feminist, anti-globalization thinker and scholar, a Right Livelihood Award laureate, and the author of several books including Reclaiming the Commons, Earth Democracy, Oneness vs. the 1%, Stolen Harvest, and most recently a memoir, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, which will be available on October 27th. In this conversation, Vandana Shiva weaves together stories of her life with a critical examination of our current economic system, along with inspiring stories of non-violent grassroots actions

to protect and preserve the health and well-being of people and the planet. How can we reject the spread of hierarchy and division and begin reclaiming our right to live free, think free, breathe free, and eat free? How can we go upstream to decolonize all the spheres of our lives and focus on strengthening and revitalizing the commons? These are just some of the questions that we'll explore in this conversation. Here's Della with Bandana Shiva. So just to start, I would love for you to introduce yourself. How might you introduce

yourself for our listeners? I'm Dr. Vandana Shiva from India, born in the Himalayan forests, a child of the forests. That's what I knew in my early childhood. Grew up in nature, but sought to study physics from a very young age. So that's what I am, trained in physics, an ecologist, activist, a feminist. Wonderful. Well, we're so happy to have you. And to start, one of the things that I love unpacking or rethinking is what is wealth and what is development and what is progress? So when you hear those phrases in your own lived experience, in your own life and work,

what is real wealth and what is real development and progress to you? What comes to mind when I ask that question? Well, you know, even language-wise, wealth actually means well-being. Its etymological roots are well-being. Money only begins to be associated with wealth, with colonialism. Before that, there were hundreds and thousands of currencies, but they were merely medium of exchange. For me, wealth means going to a remote Himalayan village with the most beautiful architecture, amazing wood carving, women dressed in the most beautiful clothing and amazing jewelry and singing and dancing non-stop and fields full of diverse grains. That is true wealth and I have lived through it.

I have seen those villages reduced to poverty as in the name of development. Either their crops were replaced with green revolution varieties or worse, their village was drowned under a dam because dams are such a big symbol of development. Development basically means that which evolves from within itself, that's biological term, an embryo. An embryo grows to be the adult. And that self-defined inner evolution is development. But the word development was invented in 1949 in order to keep the older colonies chained. And overnight, the world was divided into the developed and underdeveloped world rather than the colonial and the colonized world. And from then onwards, the new colonization has had the label development.

your real wealth, your resources, your land, your seeds, your knowledge, and be pushed into slums on a very, very strange measure called a dollar a day, which means nothing if you have everything from your land, if your food comes from your land, if your clothing comes from your land, if your rivers and streams are clean and your culture has integrity, you don't need a dollar a day because you're creating that economy. But if you're in the city, a displaced slum dweller because your village got drowned out by a dam or you were displaced for a highway, a dollar a day gets you nothing. Because now in the city, you've got to buy your food, you've got to buy your water, you've got to buy your transport at very high levels. So money as a measure of wealth has been an invention,

and it has served fine to extract what little remains in the hands of the people who are called poor. Thank you for that answer. And we're here celebrating your book, Terra Viva. And thank you for that book. And congratulations on its release. And I know you've written many other books on many of these themes that you've already spoken about. And you mentioned, you know, wealth being the village and your upbringing being near the forest. So maybe let's go there. Can you tell us about your upbringing with your mom and your dad and how half of your time or part of your time was spent in the forest and part of your time was spent in this farm and how those two places have shaped your activism and your work and your outlook on life? Well, my parents themselves have shaped a lot of, you know, the person I am. After all, they brought me to the world biologically. They took care of us with love and care

and let us experience freedom in the deepest way. That's why I am so passionate about freedom because our parents always let us choose what we wanted to do. And if we had to change our mind, our experience should tell us how to change it. So my father was originally a lawyer, then joined the British Army, was a major during the war in Burma. He saw my mother at some party and wanted to marry and she said, only if I continue to do what I do. And at that time, she was an inspectress of schools in the education department in the larger India.

She had studied in Lahore. And then overnight, the British drew a line through our land and decided the other side was Punjab and this side was India. And didn't complete the line in Kashmir, which is why there's been a permanent mess left about Kashmir. My mother had no idea there's a partition which killed two million people. She was out on a camel doing inspections of village schools in what overnight had become Pakistan. And no one would travel to rest.

No one would go because people were scared, people were getting massacred. And our parents had a Muslim cook who told my dad, I'll go. But at the Amritsar station, which is the last station, they caught him and said, he's a Muslim. And of course, you know, this voice for killing, killing, killing started. And he started to shout my dad's name at the station. He just started to shout my dad's name at the station he just started to shout my dad's name and the military officer a British officer on duty there happened to have served as a captain under my father in the army in the army in Burma so he said what were you saying he says Shiva he says why are you calling his name? He says, I work for him, Major Shiva.

So an escort was then, a military escort was organized to rescue my mother and find her and rescue her and bring her back. And when she came back, she said, well, I've broken every grass ceiling. I've done the studies I wanted to do. She was the first in her community to go to college and university. And she said, now I want to be a farmer. And my mother told my dad, she said she wanted him to college and university. And she said, now I want to be a farmer. And my mother told my dad, she said she wanted him to leave the army. And so he joined the forest service.

So my childhood was in the forest or traveling with her. She had us along the way. We had three siblings, a brother who joined the Air Force, a sister who's a doctor, and me, who chose to be a physicist. And our childhood was the forest and the farm. And nature was our teacher.

Nature was our teacher. And, you know, there were later in life, typical of teenage rebellion. You know, we felt deprived, you know. Others go to parties, you know. We go in the forest. Our dad said, you want to go to a party? You want to go to a disco? Get into the car. Drove us to Delhi. We went into this underground disco. It was so boring compared to the beauty and diversity of the forest. Dark lights, same loud music. The music of the forest was so much richer. He said, take us back.

And I, yeah, I remember that about your parents really allowing freedom. And one story you told was that they even allowed you to choose your own name. Absolutely. Right? You and your sister. Coming to names, you know, our parents were part of the freedom movement. My mother had actually traveled as a young student to go personally meet Gandhi while he was in jail. And as part of the freedom movement in India, it wasn't one-dimensional. It wasn't just

about political liberation from British rule. It was about changing society from within also. And that's what true decolonialism is. You know, part of our big problem in India is the caste system, the division into an hierarchy of, you know, the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas and the people who trade and then the people who really do the work, the Dalit. So our parents, who were obviously from a very high caste, just decided together that they would adopt a caste-less name. They would rebel and resist against caste and change the caste.

And my mother, when she was active politically, had wanted actually this to become the norm, that caste name should just be erased in India so you have no idea from the name who is what so Shiva was chosen by them to resist caste to fight caste discrimination and when you know obviously we went to school we had to be registered with names and then we'd reject those names you know we don't like this one and you know later and we went to boarding and our trunks had to be painted with these names we don't like this and my sister and I because we'd been brought up with freedom we kept saying no this one not good enough not good enough not good enough and then I settled I somehow found bandhana and I liked the sound as well as later the meaning, which means an offering. And I feel

my life has been an offering to the earth and society. And my sister chose Meera, who was a queen who gave up being a queen because she was a Krishna Bhakt and part of the Bhakti movement. She was the initiator. So my sister chose to be Meera and I chose to be Vandana. Beautiful. And another person that you describe in your family in the book is your grandfather and how your grandfather, he passed away fasting for girls' education. And I believe it was your mom who was the first student then of the school that he fasted for. then of the school that he fasted for. And I'm wondering, yeah, if you can share a little bit more about nonviolence as a way of, you know, learning from that experience, but also more generally in the history of India and how nonviolence as an ethic and a commitment influences

your life in activism. So my mother's father, like her, she was part of the freedom movement, but he was even deeper in the freedom movement. And even before we got independence, there was a group of people, including Sir Choturam, who became the governor of the Northwestern provinces. They decided that if we don't prepare ourselves to govern ourselves, we will never be truly free. If the structures, institutions will still be imperial and colonial. And part of what colonization had done is push women out of education. You know, all the ancient literature teaches us that before British colonialism, the Dalits went to school, the girls went to school, the entire community used to be educated, but all of

the hierarchies of India were deepened and the exclusions were deepened through British colonialism. And this wonderful person who passed away a few years ago, Dharampal, who worked with Gandhi, was Gandhi's secretary, he has done some of the most amazing work on India before colonialism including science and technology in India, education in India, health in India. So my mother, of course, was encouraged by my grandfather to study herself. But my, you know, these friends decided to take up different aspects of freedom.

And my grandfather chose to start women's education. And he started many, many schools. But this, there was a particular school where the girls were very, very committed to education. And there was a call to make the school a college. And those were days that A, you could reach the top. And two, you know, the instrument for meeting your demands was nonviolence and the fast. The fast was Gandhi's highest influence instrument. And my grandfather wrote to the president and said this should be recognized as a school, as a college. And when he didn't initially get the reply, he went on a fast and he died in that fast. So he literally gave his life for girls' education and girls' liberation.

The president sadly arrived the day after to announce that yes, this should become a college. But I was very, very young. And all I remember is, you know, because we cremate when we are dead, you know, picking the bones from the ashes. That's my memory. And of course, you know, his face is there in front of me.

But yeah, so my mother got the legacy from him. We got the legacy from her. And I hope future generations get the legacy from us. Thank you. Yes, I hope so too. get the legacy from us. Thank you. Yes, I hope so too. Another group of folks that you share really influenced you in your upbringing were the folks of the ChIPCO movement. This is a group of mostly women protecting the forests. And you describe how you visited with them, you volunteered with them every summer when you were coming back from school,

from your PhD program. So can you tell us the story of the cheap co-movement and their influence on you and your upbringing? Yes. So, you know, every step of my life, I made a choice and then I've gone on that path and then something happens that is like a wake-up call and then I add another layer to my life I've never abandoned any aspect of my life people think I've abandoned quantum theory I've abandoned academics and and doing research in an institution but the quantum worldview is still my guide and you know dear people like Fritz of Capra have done so much to make the quantum philosophy, quantum worldview accessible to a larger public, especially in his Tao of physics, but also actually in his systems

thinking. So I wanted to go and visit a small forest and trek in a forest before I went to Canada. I decided to do my doctoral work in the foundations of quantum theory. I joined for a PhD in India in particle physics. But my mind was taking me deeper and deeper and deeper into the foundational questions. And so I started to write to people and say, I want to study with you.

I wrote to Bohm. Bohm said, no money in England. Go to my student, Boob, in Western Ontario. I, go to my student Boob in Western Ontario. I wrote to others. They were all at Western Ontario. In that period of five years, Canada had created a colloquium in quantum theory, unbelievable in today's world. And they had attracted the top minds, the top physicists, the top mathematicians,

logicians, philosophers. And it was a concentrated thinking about the foundations of quantum theory. Of course, I applied, I got admission, but I wanted to do a trek in my forest and say, I want to take a bit of my childhood and my forest with me. And then this particular forest was no more. It had been converted into an apple orchard, and the stream that used to come from the oak forest was now more. It had been converted into an apple orchard. And the stream that used to come from the oak forest was now a trickle. So I really felt part of me had been chopped off, you know, because I really, you know, I was part of the forest. And I'm waiting to catch

a bus back to Delhi. And, you know, in India, we have these little tea shops on the roadside that are called dhabas. And so I'm waiting at the dhaba for the bus and I'm having a nice hot chai. And I'm saying, this breaks my heart. The forests are disappearing. And the dhabawala says, but now there's hope, there's chipko. And I say, what's chipko? And he tells me how women are coming out and saying, we will not let you cut the trees.

We will embrace the trees. At that point, I had to catch a flight two days later so i had to go to canada but i took a pledge that every vacation i would come back and volunteer so the first vacation i came back we looked you know i went and found sundalal bahuguna bimla bahuguna amazing gandhians who were very big part of the movement. And the overall CHIPCO, I call it my university of ecology, because if I hadn't volunteered for CHIPCO every summer, every winter, every summer, every winter, the rest of the time I was studying quantum physics and quantum theory. I was coming back and studying nature, but from the eyes of the women. And it did two things which have totally shaped my view on nature, the earth, ecology. First, that nature is not something out there without people. And this is a syndrome that is really contaminating the mind of many

environmentalists in the West, that nature is out there to be protected, people must be removed, in the West, that nature's out there to be protected, people must be removed. The entire wildlife conservation stuff, displacement of people. Now, wilding without people. No, wild is where people are who take care of the forest. Wild is where people are who take care of the soil. Wild is where people are who don't kill the birds

and the mycorrhizae. Wild is living with nature in peace because we are part of nature, therefore we are part of the wild. So this eco-apartheid that I call it, the separation of humans and nature is what has led in such a serious way to the idea that people should be removed from the earth and the land and then put into slums and cities and food should be removed and people should eat precision fermented food lab food animals should be removed first put into factory farms and tortured and all the world subsidies should go for that and now farmers should

be attacked to say why do you have animals yeah it's it's a strange schizophrenic state way of thinking chip could got me out of that very early. You know, I really thought working in the nuclear training, you know, in the fast breeder reactor makes your head high. You get an addiction because you have a social roommate that these disciplines are superior, that as a scientist, you are superior. And I'd go to these villages and hear the women knew everything

and I knew nothing about the plants. And I became humble. So I learned biodiversity. I learned the relationships of humans and people. I learned the relationship of economy and ecology through direct practice. And more importantly, I learned that you cannot think you are smarter than others just because you've got a degree, that everyone is a knowledgeable person. And I became very, very aware of epistemic hierarchies and epistemic democracy.

And my life has been a practice of epistemic democracy, that the plant has intelligence, the peasant has intelligence, the soil has intelligence, you work with that intelligence. That's nonviolence. Thank you. Yeah, as you're speaking, I'm reminded of a, we had a conversation with Prakash Kashwan about fortress conservation, very similar to what you're saying about wilderness needing to be out there and something to be protected and not the living with nature. And I'm also hearing the process of the enclosures, right, that you're describing people being forced off land and into, you know, cities and urban spaces. deep ecology from Chipko and your upbringing is very clear, and as well as feminism. I'm wondering, can you speak a little bit more about the quantum theory and how that thread has continued,

even not in traditional or mainstream research? How has that continued to be a part of your life? And how does that shape your thinking and worldview, quantum theory? Yeah. Well, you know, I went towards quantum theory because I went to physics because I was inspired by Einstein. That's why I've got a bust of his behind me, which I made in my gap between MSc and PhD. And I wanted to understand the world. But as you get deeper and deeper and deeper and higher and higher and higher in education, two things start to happen. Questions disappear. Understanding disappears. And it all becomes about calculus.

Just do the calculation. I remember a particular moment when my PhD guide in particle physics said, don't ask questions, just do the calculations. I said, but a computer can do that. Only a human mind can ask questions. Please ask questions. Just do the calculations. I said, but, you know, a computer can do that. You know, only a human mind can ask questions. Please ask questions. And then I went on. So how has quantum theory guided my every bit of my work, including my study on the Punjab violence?

I couldn't have done it without a quantum training. Number one, quantum training tells you there is no stuff in the world. It's just potential waiting to happen, what Bohm calls the implicate order, waiting to become explicit in the context of what is the context. So you put a quanta through a machine that measures particles, you get a particle. If it measures waves, you get a wave. But the expression of the potential is created by the context. So potential first. And that's from that, again, even in humans' conditions, I have never accepted women are inferior, blacks are inferior, IQ, IQ, IQ, you know, rubbish, arithmetic rubbish created to rule over the people. The second is, my thesis topic was

hidden variables and non-locality in quantum theory. Non-locality. There's nothing like separation. Everything is interconnected and stays interconnected no matter how many miles, you know, light years away your particles can be. This non-separation, non-locality is the most powerful concept. Third, because a quanta can

become a wave and a particle, there's nothing like an excluded middle. In Newtonian physics, a particle is a particle, a wave is a wave, and the two can't mix. So there is an excluded middle of a very serious kind. And this excluded middle is, in my view, the roots of all the hatred in the world, and all the polarization of the world and all the untouchability on the world. The fourth very important principle is uncertainty. Because you are in this very fluid universe, there are probabilities of where things can go, but there's never a certainty. So I have learned to live with uncertainty and I have never sought certainty. And it's very, very violent imposition because if you think of the fact that GMOs,

oh, we shoot precisely. You can't in a delicate balance of life, rupture that balance of life and say I shot precisely. It's still shooting and disrupting. So my quantum thinking helped me understand agriculture. My quantum thinking helped me understand why the metaphors of genetic reductionism were so wrong. And then I went on to work on the whole issue of biosafety and evolving, including the legal frameworks. It's my quantum thinking that has allowed me to understand

how globalization has totally messed up the world. If I didn't have that framework of those four principles, I would not be able to see how free trade has led to the emergence of hate in the world, how free trade has created hunger in the world. Because the non-locality also means connecting that which Cartesian mechanics separates. There is no separation in an interconnected world. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Vandana Shiva. We'll be right back. ছেরো শকারে ছেডো না মোরে ছেডো না अशार गाने निर्भाल निर्भाल निर्जार शाजने शांगे रहो ছিনো সখাই ছেডো না মোরে ছেডো না आधने रहा धन आनाते रोनात हो एव अगले रोभाद। ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ਹੋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱੋ ୋੱ੾ ভানা তুরে নবিন করো হে শুধা সাগার Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha

Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha Chiru Sakha That was Chirosaka Cherona, written by Rabindranath Tagore and performed here by Rajaswari Dutta. Now, back to our conversation with Bandana Shiva. The theme of the show is very much about economics.

And the theme is called Upstream because it's about going upstream to the root causes of the challenges we face. And it division and hate that you spoke about, the destruction of the forest near your home, your upbringing, also the farmer suicides, which we haven't spoken about yet, but I know is very important to your work. When you go upstream from those downstream problems or challenges that we face, what are the upstream causes? What is it in the ways of our thinking or our systems that is causing this suffering? What do you see when you go upstream from those challenges? Well, two things. The first, you know, the downstream is really the symptoms and consequences of a paradigm guided by greed, reductionism, separation. And it's made to look like this is inevitable because the Cartesian mindset says it's always

been like this, a false universalism starts to be used to interpret things. Food was always a commodity, land was always property. The second problem with taking consequences and symptoms is you don't ask what caused it, because it is an absolute entity in itself. This is how it is and has always been. The upstream, my understanding now after all these years, you know, 50 years of a life in this direction with constant leaps and constant evolution is very much at the root of it is colonialism. Partly because I've lived personally in cultures that has large elements not colonized. When the colonization takes place, I can just see it. You know, the seed is a common overnight. A Monsanto seed is an invention and therefore patentable.

So the ridiculousness of the claims becomes so obvious. Upstream is also hierarchies created in order to control nature, women, society. So eight years before, the Papal Bull, you know, which was written after the Columbus journey, and this is the one that gave license to take over the world and, you know, kill the barbarians and, you know, take over their lands,

things that are even today being practiced, actually, except that the barbarians are new breeds, you know, and the land is still being grabbed, and the seeds are being grabbed, and the water is being grabbed. But the key issue in the break was the colonization of Europe before Europe colonized the world. And this is the papal bull, eight years before the doctrine of discovery. This was the papal bull on the witch hunts. I think we haven't looked enough at it. I think it's been erased. It's been erased from our thinking. But nine million people

were killed. And what were they killed for? Thinking differently. What was the different thinking at that time? That we are part of nature. Ecological thinking became the crime. Oneness with nature became the crime to kill you as a witch. And sadly, they don't burn you on stakes today, but I have lived through a huge number of years of the new witch hunts, the contemporary witch hunts, because you're not supposed to say the seed is living. You're not supposed to say peasants have knowledge. You're not supposed to say the soil is living, and there's still this new witch hunt, except that now the stake has been substituted by social media and big tech. This is where the witches get burned now.

It's a fascinating time, but we need to go back upstream to that. We need to go back to the fact that a you know, a chancellor is appointed in England and this having debates on chancellors still. But the chancellor of England was the head of the Inquisition and the witch hunts, Bacon. So he took all his thinking about society and that there are witches out there who must be tortured to reveal their secrets. He applied that to knowledge and said nature must be tortured to reveal her secrets. She must be subjugated for the empire of man. And that's not all. He then writes a book called The Masculine Birth of Time. Before that, time was feminine. Worse, the royal society is created to implement the masculine philosophy. Is it any accident that we have a dominant system

which is extinguishing knowledges everywhere, extinguishing economies everywhere, killing women, killing peasants, killing indigenous people? That genocide and ecocide that was sown with the purple bull before Columbus continues today. And upstream, if we have to understand what went wrong, with the purple bull before Columbus continues today.

And upstream, if we have to understand what went wrong, we have to go to those roots, but also because the narratives are so false. The narrative is, oh, you know, England got in the machine and therefore it ruled the world. 200 years, they robbed the land of India. They robbed the land of America. They displaced the indigenous people. After that, when they grabbed all this land and could get all these resources,

then they mechanized textile production. But they had to first have their supply of cotton. They first had to have the supply of, have the slaves. The big part of colonialism was it ruptured the relationship of economy and ecology. Both come from the word oikos. And then onwards, economy became piracy, commerce, stealing, theft, extractivism, and ecology became the wild. And again, that excluded middle was created. And the real people were punished from both sides. They were punished because they were not in the dominant economic system. And they were punished because they were not elephants and tigers. Yes, thank you. And I enjoy in my own ancestry as a white American going back to the Christianization and asking folks to go back and see what are the spiritual

traditions beneath Christianization where they're from. So I really hear you. Yeah. And a fascinating point, like I was saying earlier, was it was made to look like the scientific revolution of Bacon and the people of his time was a challenge to the church. You know, you read the literature. That's what it is. Scientific revolution beat the church. No, the reality is very different. Boyle was made the first president or chair, whatever it was, of the Royal Society

that was created to implement Bacon's idea of a masculine domination of the earth. What is Boyle? Also the governor of the New England Company. The New England Company was designed to colonize New England. So clearly, if you look at Boyle, he says that the church has to use its Christianizing of the indigenous people in order to implement Bacon's philosophy. So the church and the new scientific revolution were actually one. And can you speak a little bit more too about the Cartesian divide and Descartes and

non-duality and how that is part of this upstream answer? Yeah. So, you know, Bacon basically pushed us to thinking that nature is, you know, a slave, a witch, must be tortured, and we must have a domination over nature. Descartes actually had taken it much further, that there is nothing like life. There's only extinction and mass. So he called this primary qualities, and he called the fact that I can touch, I can smell, that these are secondary qualities. In Indian epistemology, all of these are epistemic roots of knowing. And Descartes basically then created the divide between the mind and the body. If you ask me what's happening right now in the US around abortion laws, it's part of the Cartesian divide carrying on. It is part of a separation of that which is interconnected, you

know. A fetus in a mother's womb is one organism. And to then take one part and pit it against the other part is part of that Cartesian fight, yeah. So the second thing Cartesian said, I'm a thinking thing without a body. And I say, you know, the poor man, obviously, it's only privileged men who can think that way, where their needs, the bodily needs are taken care of by others. So they can say, I have no body. And the demonization of the body of the earth and worldview also created the domination of measurement and quantity over life and experience. That if you can measure as an external player, you have superior knowledge and therefore the right to own. And the person who's taken care of those seeds, that biodiversity, that forest, that river, who lived the river, who lived the forest, and didn't go around with a yardstick constantly measuring, they can be disenfranchised. So between the Baconian and Cartesian thinking, what we have really is the recipe of the ecological collapse we are witnessing today,

social collapse we are witnessing today. Absolutely. And you've spoken many times around the seed. And I love in the book, Terra Viva, you speak about how Gandhi had the symbol of the spinning wheel, right, of self autonomy and localization of economy and self sufficiency, but also nonviolent action. And then you speak about how the seed is similar for you. So can we take a moment to honor the seed in your experience of it? What does the seed mean to you? And what do you hope it means for the world right now? So if you know, 84 was the year I was forced to turn to agriculture because Punjab, I had had done my MSc honours in particle physics, erupted in violence. And that same year, Bhopal had a disaster where a pesticide plant leaked and killed thousands of people.

So that year, I asked myself the question, why is there so much violence in agriculture? Where did this agriculture come from? And I traced it back to Hitler's labs and IG Farben and their partnership with Standard Oil. Because I wrote a book at that time called The Violence of the Green Revolution, which has been published by Kentucky University Press, I was invited to a meeting on the new biotechnologies in 87. There was no GMO in the world at that time. But the chemical industry was looking at the new tools of recombinant research in order to do genetic engineering.

So the idea was there for them. And they were now using this to impose patents. So at this meeting in 87, which is called Laws of Life, I'm invited because of my book on the Green Revolution. And the industry is saying, we have to do genetic engineering because we are not making enough money. They're poor, poor things are poor. And the poison cartel wanted to make more money. So they said, we have to do genetic engineering and do GMOs. That'll allow us to claim we've made something new, novel organisms. Then we'll be able to take patents. But because most of the farmers of the world are in the South, we will need a global treaty to prevent farmers from having their own seeds and force them to

have our patented seed. That was the TRIPS agreement of the GATT and the WTO. That is what put me on the deeper journey of agriculture with a focus on the seed. So on the flight back, you know, on the first I'm saying, my God, they want to, and they even said we'll be four companies owning the world's health and food. They said it so clearly. And that is the reality today. Big pharma, big ag, all one. On the flight back, I pulled out, I always carry these notepads and I write in my notepads. So I did a thing. I said, okay, so we had colonialism, we had cotton, a buy of cotton, how did Gandhi fight it? And the spinning wheel came out, the raw material.

So I said, what was the raw material, cotton? What was the resistance? The spinning wheel. Of course, we missed the chemical revolution. Rachel Carson wrote about it, but the movements that are happening today did not happen at that time. The pesticide just spread.

And now we had the empire of our life, the new genetic engineering, you know, they call themselves life sciences. So I said, so what's the raw material? The seed. What is the spinning wheel? The seed itself. So that's where I decided I got off the flight. I said I wrote letters to everyone. I was doing water work on dams. I was doing forest work. I was doing other. I sent it all off to others who were younger generation that was involved. And I said, now you run this work campaign and this

movement. And now onwards, I'll save the seed. So I took parents' books from my parents' library. And as, you know, as I said, they were highly educated. So, and they had the most amazing networks. The governor of Uttar Pradesh used to come and stay with them. Gandhi's disciples, Meerabai and Sarlabai used to come and stay with them. So what basically I did was take these books, go to the villages. And these were the Chipko villages because how can I just enter a village where I don't know people? And I'd open the book and say, do you have this crop? Do you save the seed? The men would usually say,

no, we grew soya bean, we do potato, we do cash crops. And then the women would always tell me, of course, I've got the ragi. Of course, I've got the jaggura. And initially I said, just keep growing it, keep saving it. And my message was to tell farmers,

don't give up. But the erosion was getting faster and faster. Globalization was coming. And I realized that, A, it could not be just telling decent line farmers, you save your seed. We had to have a movement. And the second is we had to have places where these seeds would be saved for the community and reclaiming of the commons. That's how Navdanya was born. Navdanya means nine seeds. It also means the new gift. I see it as the new gift of reclaiming the commons from the idea of intellectual property rights on seed. So what is seed today to me? Seed is life. Seed is diversity. Seed is resilience. We've just had horrible flooding on our farm and we're going to plant again and the seed doesn't give up. The seed is small but grows into whatever the seed is. I smile in my mind at the world view of the biotech industry where they

assume life doesn't know how to function. They assume that you constantly have to give external instruction, but the seed carries its own instruction. And again, my thinking on the quantum thinking and the seed come together, the implicate order that Bohm was talking about is the implicate order of the intelligence in the seed. And just one more thing, Dale, I might as well mention that. So since the time we started, we now have created 150 community seed banks. We've saved more than 4,000 varieties of rice, of which there are rices that can tolerate salt, tolerate flood. Mr. Gates does not invent all this. Nature and the farmers have evolved it over millennia. And now, because the climate disasters are increasing by the day, our work with climate resilient seeds is also having to accelerate. And the volumes that now have to be saved and grown. is what I call the rematriation of the seed, which was all collected during the Green Revolution,

put in the consultative, the CJIR banks of the World Bank, ERIE and ICRASAT, and all of the world's seeds were put there. And what the farmers received were what they call the modern varieties. Now there is a new realization that we must give back because these seeds kept in these seed banks are really not serving the purpose for which they are. So I hope we'll be able to also reclaim seeds from the seed banks,

which now, interestingly, are in control by Mr. Gates. I have a whole report that I did called Reclaim the Seed of how the CGIAR system, as it gets poorer, has been literally taken over by Gates. And he is now not just the empire. You know, people think he's Microsoft. No, he's the biggest farmland owner of America. He would have liked to be the seed controller of the world. He, of course, wants to be the agriculture lord of the world

with his Ag One. And so much of what's happening in the world today is an outcome of what he thought about and launched literally while the COVID was striking. Gates started the idea of one agriculture for the whole world, a few seeds, big giant tractors, big giant tractors, big giant tractors with our drivers. And Bayer and Monsanto and Gates have merged their interests so intimately.

Yes. And in one story you shared that you've actually worked to save, I think it's 4,000 varieties of rice. And so, yeah, instead of getting more and more monocrop and more and more simplified in our eating, there's actually more and more diversity that's available to us, but we must save it and protect it. Yes. And diversity is your only insurance. Because A, through diversity, you can avoid the chemicals. Two, the diversity is what's your cushion for resilience. Two, the diversity is what's your cushion for resilience. So when we do the 12 crops, baranaja, okay, two might get damaged by excess rain,

but the others will give you food. You might have a drought. Similarly, one might suffer, but the others are still there. So the richer the diversity, our research is showing, the richer the diversity, the more the productivity, the more the profitability of the small farmer, if you do the calculus right, outside the commodification, and the more the resilience in times of climate change. So it's a win-win-win in every way. And in any case, protecting diversity is our duty. That's what the Convention on Biological Diversity was supposed

to wake us up to. And now they are trying to commodify biodiversity itself, as the Das Gipta report has written. life then led to your book, Oneness and the 1%. If you could just share a little bit about that journey. And you mentioned Bill Gates, but what is the main idea of that book that you wrote and how this connects with this whole thing around patenting life and the seed? Well, I wrote Oneness versus the 1% with my son. I was in Paris for the climate summit and Bill Gates was strutting around with heads of state. And I have been, you know, from before the Earth Summit, 92, I have done so many summits. And the heads of state were heads of state.

They're people you elect. Bad people sometimes, but you still elect them. Now the billionaires were walking the stage. Zuckerberg was also there. And they were then telling the governments what they should be doing. Geoengineering, changing the climate through engineering, you know, solar genetic engineering. They must do genetic engineering, you know. They must, of course, They must, of course, adopt new technologies. Of course, who has the technology is the same guys. My son was going to join me at Paris for the Pathways to Paris.

You remember there was this big Pathways to Paris concert. And he made the most amazing poster immediately. He just got the whole picture. And I said, we must do this as a book. And there were publishers there who, you know, were very, very keen. In the process, we started to write that same period, Monsanto's bought out by Bayer. So I tell my son, I said, let's find out who was bigger, how could Bayer buy Monsanto? Was Monsanto bigger? Was buyer bigger? How did this transaction happen? And he went into the depths.

And that book is the first that revealed that the Black Rocks and the vanguards own the corporations. The corporations aren't the biggest level of organizing now. So the corporations, which were created for colonialism, like the East India Company,

are now owned by the asset management funds. Ten trillion dollars in the hands of BlackRock, six trillion, every company. So in a way, Bayer didn't buy Monsanto. BlackRock Vanguard just did a musical chess because Monsanto's name was getting very dirty. There was no change in ownership. There was no change in ownership. Even more importantly, we then realized whose assets are being managed by them. On the one hand, the billionaires, and on the other hand, all the big money, whether it's in the pension funds, no matter where.

So the money of the world is now in the hands of the asset management funds, who would now like to control our life. Look at the debates taking place in America around rentals. BlackRock is into rentals and housing. Show me an area where they are not. So the oneness versus 1% basically tells the story of our times. There is a 1%, metaphorically, they're much less, they're really a group of gangsters of, you could count them, you could literally count them. They get together and sit and say, now let's do a lockdown, you know, now let's push this kind of agriculture, now let's punish all the farmers we forced into doing factory farming and subsidizing them. So oneness versus 1% is really demystifying the undemocratic rule of our times where the billionaires are making the decisions. And when we fought against WTO, we said the world is not for sale.

And we were talking of corporate rule. But corporations themselves are owned by bigger money. And this oneness versus 1% is not just a wake-up call that we have to create other systems. We cannot depend on the system because people in the West are so used to the welfare state, they think it's still intact. No, the welfare state is being dismantled very, very fast. And people will be thrown into the rubbish bin. We have to create our economies, and it's not that we can't. That's why the indigenous teachings are so important. We have to create our own democracies of participation. We can see, like I said, elected leaders are marginalized, and they

aren't the best. And the process of election itself is being hijacked, especially with that famous Citizen United case. You know, money runs the electoral system now. And oneness versus 1% is basically, you know, laying naked the brute power of big money in our times. So to close, and you're already offering some of them already, I want to ask what are our invitations going forth from this call for listeners to contribute to a more just, regenerative and equitable world? and to fight against the patenting of life and the modification of seeds and instead to save seeds and participate in sharing seeds and also seed banks. And another one that I heard is to embrace uncertainty. I really appreciated what you offered there around embracing uncertainty right now during these times. And then finally, one that you didn't mention specifically, but goes back to the point that you were making around finance and big money is the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking in the US

in the 1930s was repealed. And you speak about and write about how this was a key point to the mess that we're in with big finance. And so overturning that repeal or reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act could be one invitation from your work that folks couldn't get involved with systemically. So what are your other invitations? What more might you add for invitations, both personally and systemic, for folks going forth from this conversation? So besides the points that you have mentioned, I would just add that, you know, the money machine has always used divide and rule. When my mother got trapped on the other side of the line and became a refugee overnight, it was a divide and rule policy of the British, divide the line and became a refugee overnight. It was a divide and rule

policy of the British divide the Muslims and the Hindus make them fight make them kill each other and that toxic is still in India. It hasn't gone away. But the divide and rule is also now pitting people against each other to the level that you just can't build movements. So we have to get rid of that excluded middle, not just live with uncertainty and celebrate certainty, but celebrate the fact that there is nothing like exclusion in a living world. A living world is always an inclusion. And we have to find new ways to reach out and start having conversations

about the deeper level. Simple example, animals of Netherlands to be shut down because of nitrogen, even though the nitrogen problem is big with nitrogen fertilizers. And Mr. Gates says, I love fertilizers. We must have more fertilizers. So it's not that the fertilizers will be shut down, but the small farms will be shut down. The farmers are rising up. Conventional farmers were never part of the conversation about the ecological root. And they need to be part of the conversation

before they start thinking that every action, whether it's on climate, whether it's on sustainability, is an action against them. Yes, I am admitting that the dominant system that has caused the problem, the polluters are now using the pollution they caused to grab the resources of what remains and shut down the people's economy. So we have to start focusing much, much more on how do we create partnerships, how do we create dialogues, how do we create true living democracies. The second thing that for me is so vital and is my life's learning is no matter what the problem, diversity is the answer.

You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Vandana Shiva, author of Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, which will be available on October 27th. Thank you to Rajaswari Dutta for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Support for this episode was provided by the Guerrilla Foundation, the Resist Foundation, and listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please

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