The Importance of Liberalism: Bret Speaks with Vandana Shiva
Bret speaks with Vandana Shiva on the Darkhorse podcast. They discuss a wide range of topics from GMOs to Covid, and the meaning of liberalism.Find Dr. Shiva on Twitter: @drvandanashiva (https://twitter.com/drvandanashiva)Her new memoir Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements will be out October 27, 2022 (Chelsea Green Publishing)*****Sponsors:www.westernrazor.com/darkhorse and use promo code DarkHorse at checkoutVivo Barefoot: Shoes for healthy feet—comfortable and regenerative, e...
The left today has to be about uniting people around their common humanity, connected with diversity.
Diversity is not an obstruction to unity, and unity is not uniformity.
So, organizing through our diversities for the common good, for the common good of the planet, for the common good of society, and Overcoming both this new polarization that is economic of the 1% and the 99% and the manufactured polarities in society so that people are unable to work together, think together, live together.
Transcending that is the project of the left today.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting today with Vandana Shiva, or I should say Dr. Vandana Shiva, who is a physicist, an ecologist, a feminist, and a leading activist in, is it fair to say, left-leaning circles?
Is that correct?
Ecological and left and all progressive things, yeah.
Marvellous.
Always trying to make the world a better place for plants and animals and humans.
That is a very noble goal, one I of course share with you.
I should say I became aware of your work some 15 years ago.
A student, Josephine Jarvis, alerted me to your work and I've been a fan ever since.
So, from the point of view of what we might discuss, I think my audience should know that you have, your PhD is in Philosophy?
My MSc Honours in Physics is in Particle Physics.
Particle Physics.
And that took me to the foundations of Quantum Theory, so I went to Canada.
At the University of Western Ontario, where they actually had a program dedicated to quantum theory and they had attracted the best minds of the world.
So, I wrote to people in South Africa, I wrote to people in Poland, I wrote to people in Australia, and all of them were at Western.
So, that's where I did my PhD, on the foundations of quantum theory.
And the topic of my PhD was hidden variables and non-locality in quantum theory.
And why is that important?
Because no matter what you try, you can't bring determinism into the quantum world.
Always stay uncertain.
And the second, you cannot bring separation in the quantum world.
It is always entangled.
That's why non-separability and non-locality.
And these were issues that fascinated me and have continued to guide my thinking, including my work in agriculture, my work in ecology, my work on rivers.
I always look at it in the point of view of an entangled world of interconnectedness and non-separation.
and a world of little bit of unpredictable outcomes.
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Yes, I must say this is not my area of expertise, but I do find that there is something utterly fundamental in that tiny little bit of uncertainty.
Because if it is not true uncertainty, then the universe means something very different.
And for example, my area of specialty is evolutionary biology, and evolutionary biology is Almost a cosmic joke if there is not uncertainty about the outcomes of interactions.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Anything alive and evolving.
From within, you know, from its own self-organization, has always multiple paths.
And the minute there's multiple possibilities, you never have predictability.
You have possibilities, and possibilities then create the uncertainty and unpredictability, which is the quality of an evolving world.
Yes.
All right.
You have expertise in particle physics, especially entanglement and uncertainty.
That's fascinating.
I'm not sure how far down that road I can go in a discussion, but it is at least there for us.
You have also worked extensively on issues of genetic modification of organisms, GMOs, and you have been an opponent of GMOs.
This is a place where you and I overlap.
I will say I feel a strong pressure amongst scientists to parrot a particular party line.
The party line is humans have been modifying organisms for 10,000 years.
This is nothing special and we shouldn't be overly concerned just because it's being done scientifically now.
And this is, of course, a nonsense position.
The modifications that are being made, A, have not been tested by selection.
In other words, if we compare something that our ancestors may have modified and then we are still using it thousands of years later, we know something about its likely safety profile.
If something was invented 10 minutes ago in a laboratory, we have no idea what its long-term effects are.
What's more, many of the most prominent modifications that have been made to date are really about making organisms ready for a pesticide-heavy environment.
And so really, the idea, the genetic modification is leading people to a false sense of security about pesticides that really they should not have.
I wonder if you would talk us through a deeper understanding of GMOs and where we are now and how you see that fight going.
Well, you know, GMOs and genetic engineering is often called the second green revolution.
And what was the first green revolution?
It was the introduction of chemicals in agriculture in countries like mine, which till then were organic, ecological.
After the wars, there was a lot of buildup of chemicals, which the industry, which had evolved these chemicals to kill people in concentration camps, IG Farben, Standard Oil, Monsanto with Bayer, the same partnerships that we see again in our times.
Well, after the wars, instead of wrapping up their factories, they said, let's rework the chemicals to be agrochemicals.
And now tell the world that you can't have food without these chemicals.
I was forced to look at what the Green Revolution was, because in 1984, Punjab, where I had done my MSc honours in particle physics, it was a prosperous state, it was a peaceful state, it erupted in violence.
Thousands of people were killed in the violence.
And that same year, in 1984, the city of Bhopal had a leak of a pesticide plant, owned by Union Carbide then, by Dow, Now, but Dow has become merged with DuPont and they are now called Corteva.
It sounds so wonderful.
Well, that's what compelled me to look at why are we using these chemicals in agriculture and where did it come from?
And then I realized it came from more.
Rachel Carson wrote about it in her book, Silent Spring, and we're just celebrating 60 years of her writing of it.
Albert Howard wrote about it in his book, The Agricultural Testament.
And so, I dug deeper and deeper and deeper.
Because of that book, I started to get invited to meetings on biotechnology.
And at a particular meeting in 1987 in Geneva, The chemical industry was there and they were now talking about GMOs and patenting.
They said we have to do genetic engineering because it's our only route to claim a patent on seed.
Their objective was not the engineering itself.
Their objective was monopoly ownership over life.
And I realized, you know, I felt this is so wrong.
Seed doesn't get invented in a lab.
Seed is a continuity of evolution, as you know so well.
I also was troubled by the fact that these companies said we'll be four by the turn of the century.
And sure enough, they're four.
And just two of them, Syngenta and Bayer, which is also Bonsanto, now controls 40% of the seed supply of the world.
So in 1987, I decided I was going to save seeds.
And I just started to save seats.
I started to also participate, I was asked by my government to advise them on the biodiversity negotiations which were taking place in the late 90s, which then led to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
And I remember I was at the Earth Summit, and I've written about it in my book, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, that's been published by Chelsea Green.
I talked to every government that was there at Rio in 92.
and talked about what genetic engineering was, and that it would have an impact on biodiversity.
And therefore, a convention on biodiversity should have a clause to look at that impact.
That's science.
So, we managed to introduce an Article 19.3 in the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The United Nations realized that I was about the only one in civil society Talking about this, so they asked me to help with an expert group to frame a convention on biosafety, which is the science of assessing the impact of genetically engineered organisms on the environment and biodiversity, on public health, and now it also includes the socioeconomic conditions of farmers.
Well, we managed to get a Cartagena protocol.
Of course, the corporations weren't happy.
Because every time, you know, there was a rotating, revolving door between the US government and Monsanto.
And one time it'd be a government representative, next time it would be Monsanto.
And because I'd seen all this in continuity, you know, I was always there to challenge them.
For example, they introduced Roundup Ready seeds as a brilliant invention that prevents the weeds from stealing the sunshine.
The sun shines in such abundance for all life on earth.
And at least in my ecology, there is nothing like a weed.
It is just mismanagement of good farming.
You know, in good farming, there are no pests and there are no weeds.
There are lots of insects and lots of plant diversity.
And we have a huge movement in India with the peasant women of bringing back the wild, uncultivated crops, particularly in these times of climate havoc.
You know, when a storm can wipe out your Cultivated crop.
But all those greens are still surviving.
And that's what has happened again and again after climate disasters.
So, the biosafety law was put in place.
In India, we already had a law.
And Monsanto came to India illegally in 1998.
With arrogance, put their announcement in newspapers.
I rang up my Ministry of Environment.
I said, did you give them approval?
Because we had a law.
I asked the Ministry of Agriculture.
I said, did you give an approval?
Because they too were supposed to test seeds.
Neither of them had even heard about Monsanto or BT Cotton.
So, I filed a case against Monsanto and the government for sleeping.
I said, you are supposed to prevent this kind of unregulated entry.
And that case actually is still going on, but we managed to delay the commercialization.
So when you ask me, what do I think about genetically modified organisms?
On the ethical, cosmological level, it basically means God move over.
We will now pretend to be creators.
The second thing I found over time with my research, and I've written about it in my book, Oneness vs. 1%, which has also been published by Chelsea Green, I realized that the same thinking that had created the chemical industry in the first place, big pharma, big chemicals, the collaboration of Rockefeller through Standard Oil and IG Farben, the cartel in Germany,
Actually, when the Nazis moved to the United States, a whole new discipline was born.
And it's written about in a brilliant book based on the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation.
The book is called The Molecular Vision of Life, how biology was reduced to determinant molecules.
At that time, they didn't even have the gene, but they said molecules, atoms of determination.
Or basically inferiority of women, of colored people, people with black hair, you know, because it was treating the human beings as blonde with blue eyes and men.
Well, that book by Lily Kay shows you how it isn't the case that this reductionist biology evolved in a scientific way through democratic debates.
Among scientists, molecular biology was imposed by the very same people who imposed chemicals on the world.
So, you know, the chemicals were the first generation and genetically engineered organisms were the second generation.
And just like chemical pesticides have failed to control pests and chemical fertilizers have actually destroyed soil fertility rather than help with soil fertility, The number of pests that have grown with the use of chemical pesticides is huge.
Thousands of percent more pests today.
But with genetic engineering, initially, you know, they were going to save the world.
They were going to plant food on the moon.
They were going to grow food in the Sahara.
They were going to grow food on toxic dumps because GMOs would do everything.
And at the end of that propaganda, they just had two traits.
The traits you talked about.
Traits to have more chemicals.
Roundup resistant.
Crops are designed to sell more roundup.
Look at the data in the United States.
Huge percentages of increase of roundup.
And the BT toxin crops were supposed to control pests.
What is the result after this 30 year experiment?
Roundup ready crops have created super weeds and BT toxin crops have created super pests.
They have failed as a technology.
They are bad science because the science of living systems is complex.
About interaction.
It is not about molecules of determination.
And it has gone very wrong.
But the tragedy is that because GMOs are related to patents, patent monopolies have allowed the poison makers to become the seed controllers of the world.
And that is the dangerous thing, that they are interested in selling more toxics.
They're interested in spreading more cancer.
They're interested in killing more biodiversity.
They will not, on their own, without a huge democratic revolt, Respond to the needs of the earth and the needs of people.
I have just this evening been with the environment minister of Mexico in a conference.
And Mexico, as you might know, has said we will phase out glyphosate and we will not allow GMO corn.
They are being hugely pressurized, including by the corn growers of You know, of the US, who are actually extensions of what I call the Poison Cartel.
When I called them the Poison Cartel, I said, what do they make poisons?
How do they organize democratically?
No, as a cartel, behind the scenes, manipulating governments.
So, GMOs have totally failed, and now trying to pretend that the new generations of GMOs through gene editing will be more successful is even more of an error.
Because, you know, life is not a Microsoft Word program where you can cut and paste.
That is such a wrong conception.
The tragedy is the power of big money and monopoly connected to control over science and connected to control over media and public relations, that is what allows the lie that GMOs feed the world to be repeatedly told and believed by ordinary people who don't look closely at what's really going on.
So, I'd like to unpack a number of themes in what you've said.
One of the concerns that I have is that biology is so complex that even those of us who understand it comparatively well, because we've spent our lifetimes studying it, are just at the very edge of comprehension.
There is so much unknown in biology that it is effectively inevitable that It will upend your plans, you know, no matter how carefully you've laid them out because of the dynamics in play.
The problem though, is that we have Nations and laws that are not up to the challenge of addressing that complexity.
The only conceivable way that you could do it is to set a precautionary standard and have people who are completely immune from financial corruption evaluating the hazards, known and unknown, that are contained in any given proposal.
And because industry stands to lose so much financially, if the public exerts control in its own interest, what they've done is they've unhooked the apparatus that would do that evaluation.
Our universities do not function as far as I can tell.
Science is an afterthought.
It's a marketing ploy more than it is a method, right?
I don't see that method being applied inside of universities very much anymore.
What I see is technology being portrayed as science and this is a very Well, I wonder what you will tell me, but I must say, as many successes as there have been in waking people to, for example, the dangers of glyphosate,
Overall, I think people sense that technology marches on and that the present is constantly revealing new breakthroughs that are marvelous.
That attitude applied to biological modifications is a recipe for disaster and there's just no meaningful breaking force.
You know, I mentioned the biosafety laws.
Now, most countries put them in place.
Europe has it.
That's why Europe has not been overtaken by GMOs, except the imported GMO soya for animal feed, but not food.
India, outside that one GMO BT cotton, which also entered illegally, there has been no second crop.
They tried a BT eggplant, and we rose against it, and our government held public hearings, and I think it's the first time in world history that there were public hearings around a vegetable, and the vegetable won, and Monsanto lost, and there was a moratorium put on the introduction of the eggplant.
They're trying very hard to put a GMO mustard, and they haven't yet managed.
On the issue of glyphosate, so many governments want to ban it, but every time a step is taken, the ministers involved are sacrificed.
The Minister of Mexico, who introduced that decree, his house was broken into.
And he said, this is costing my life.
Nicolas Hulot, who was the environment minister, said to the president, I will work one for one year, but if you don't ban glyphosate, I will leave.
And he had to leave because they didn't ban glyphosate.
So, you're so right that Corporations and industry find tools, find tools of manipulation, find tools that facilitate their monopoly, and they push those tools as science.
But the tools are not working to deliver on what they're supposed to.
The example of Roundup Ready crops creating super weeds.
So now you have dicamba and you have other herbicides causing havoc.
The United States is the only country that doesn't have a GMO regulatory system.
It doesn't have a regulatory system.
And why do you think that is?
Well, I remember so clearly, you know, because I'd worked so hard with governments who introduced Article 19.3.
President Bush Senior refused to sign the Convention on Biological Diversity.
He said, I will not have my 50 billion dollar industry sunk through regulation.
So, he came back and then his vice president, if I remember, was a Dan Quayle, who could not Spelled potato, if I remember right.
But he Created the whole system of what they call substantial equivalence.
They said, pretend, pretend that a GMO is like its parent, and therefore you don't have to look, you don't have to see, because it's all natural.
So, you know, substantial equivalence was introduced into the United States system to basically say, we'll never look, we'll never find.
And then, of course, a parallel move was taking place in the universities, where public universities were told, you're no more public.
You will now have to raise your money and you'll have to do it by working for corporations.
You'll have to do work to bring them intellectual property rights and that turned the universities into basically intellectual slaves of the corporate world.
That's where science disappeared and propaganda substituted it.
I agree with this and you know in some sense Evolutionarily speaking, you get whatever creatures the niche will support, and the economic environment surrounding university research effectively guaranteed that it would become subordinate to corporate power.
But because that was not the original intent of university science, people have a hard time understanding how corrupt it has become.
Even people involved in it don't realize the extent to which their conclusions are foregone, because were they to run afoul of corporate power, they would find themselves defunded.
But, well, there are a couple places that I think would be worth going.
One, I think we would be remiss if we did not at least mention that COVID is in some sense The greatest argument against genetically modified organisms that one could possibly imagine, that the evidence, which is now, in my opinion, quite overwhelming, that this virus was enhanced and modified in a laboratory, presumably the laboratory in Wuhan,
It means that this is a kinetically modified organism.
And one thing it has done is it has demonstrated that you are playing with a kind of biological power that, you know, we are able to enhance the infectivity, but we are not able to manage control once the virus has escaped.
So, you know, as strange as it sounds, I think really the battle over COVID and the battle over genetically modified organisms are one story.
Yes.
Yes, because life is a continuum and the laws of life are a continuum, whether it's viruses or bacteria or seeds and plants or human beings.
And now that the Lancet Commission on the Origins of COVID and Jeffrey Sachs, who's the chair, has come out so clearly Saying it was a lab escape.
It wasn't a market.
It wasn't a wet market.
I think you're getting very conservative groups recognizing that this was genetically engineered and it's an escape.
And there needs to be accountability.
Accountability of those who funded this totally reckless research, because it is biological warfare.
It's a tool of biological warfare to try and actually design viruses that harm.
You don't do it in a society where you don't want to cause harm.
To deliberately want to use the tools of biological manipulation to cause harm is biological warfare.
And I think so much is now coming out of the very tight little group, you know, which is running all this, faking the science, taking public money and siphoning out for anti-people research.
And I think it should be a wake-up call for how How life and biological systems have to be kept in the commons of the common good, not become tools for harming other countries, people, and then, of course, having no control and no systems of bringing it back.
Because there is, in GMOs, once it's released, there's nothing like a recall.
At least let's decide you can ban it.
With the GMO, once it's out, it's out.
So, I think between the failure of the seed GMOs and the high cost of the virus GMO, it is time for society as a whole to take stock of how do we want to govern ourselves.
Will we allow a tiny clique of profiteers To run the show.
Will they be beyond accountability and we'll still call it democracy?
Democracy is when people lead.
It is not when crooks lead.
In fact, the COVID story makes all of this so clear because You know, there was a ban on gain-of-function research in the United States, and Anthony Fauci circumvented it.
The reason that the research was happening in Wuhan was that he offshored it to circumvent a democratic ban because certain people were properly alarmed by the hazard of the enhancements that were being proposed.
So it is a story that reveals, as you say, a tiny clique of people held the fate of the world in their hands.
And not only did they unleash a Terrible virus, one that I believe actually, you know, the argument for the research was that it was in danger, that a closely related virus was in danger of leaping to humans at any time and we needed to come to understand it so that we could counteract it.
And so there the implication is that we didn't understand it well enough, soon enough, but we might have prevented it, which is of course nonsense.
I think it was very unlikely to jump that gap without human help.
We provided that help, and then...
For reasons that, you know, at best were about corporate greed.
We botched the response where it might have been controlled in the early days.
We might have actually been able to prevent a permanent endemic state for the virus.
We failed to do it and, you know, what a calamity!
I don't know how much damage has already been done economically.
I know that the estimates of loss of life are something like 6 million already.
But with a virus that is now apparently going to be a permanent fellow traveler of humanity, the costs are literally incalculable.
And we can't continue, even if it was simple hubris that resulted in this, we cannot have humanity subjected to this level of disaster as the result of the hubris of a tiny number of people.
You're so right, Fred, so right, yes.
That said, it is inconceivable to me, having spent many, several decades now, thinking about the structure of governance, it is almost inconceivable to me that The necessary structures could be
Empowered to put control back where it belongs and to establish some sort of reasonable precaution about these technologies that I think it was at one time possible, but our systems have been so corrupted by these forces.
It's just hard for me to imagine how we even get there.
I'm hoping you'll tell me you see a way.
No, we have to see a way.
We have to see a way because You know, the fact that there is a system of control and irresponsibility and limitless greed, we have to find new ways to organize, to regenerate the power of the people, which is the only power in democracy.
This change will not come from the top.
It will not come because suddenly a brilliant new president sees it all clearly.
Because sadly, politics is now so married to corporations.
You know, what we really have is a corporate state everywhere.
And the corporate state will not bring the changes to regulate the corporations.
So we need much more of solidarity among people and across countries.
And I can say this much, that every time we've organized across borders, when we've organized beyond silos, people's power has had effect, you know.
It was being said that the World Trade Organization, which was pushing the patent issue, which was putting the GMO issue on the world, They had called it the Constitution of the World, that now onwards the world will be one global market and national governments won't matter.
National democracies and assemblies won't matter.
Parliaments won't matter.
And we organized.
And we organized as IFG.
And, you know, we organized in Seattle.
We had planned about 5,000 people will come.
More than 30,000 people came and this topped the WTO.
Now, of course, after that, the military response has become much worse.
And now the surveillance technologies are playing the role of the police.
So how do we deal with unaccountable power?
That's where, for me, the lessons of our freedom movement in India become so important.
The British Empire controlled 85% of the territories of the world.
And they got their control through controlling the textile industry and cotton.
And they grabbed the land of the indigenous people in the Americas.
They caught the Africans, made them slaves to grow the cotton and be cotton pickers.
And then they turned their factories in Manchester and Lancashire to be the dumpers of fabric all over the world, destroying local textile economies.
So what did Gandhi do?
He did three things.
He said, we've got to govern ourselves.
And he called it Swaraj.
And if you look at that period, in every country, there was movements for home rule.
Including, I've been in Hawaii to stop the GMOs.
And they had a home rule movement.
It was people in the home rule movement that were fighting GMOs.
So we've got to govern ourselves.
And governing ourselves means we've got to learn to have the governing systems within us.
Yeah, that means we have to know what being human is about.
We have to know what the power of a conscious human being is.
And when many conscious human beings work together, that is the kind of power that brings change.
The second is, we have to learn to reclaim our economies.
Just because at that time only England made the textiles to dump, Well, Gandhi said, I'm going to spin cloth.
And the whole country started to spin cloth.
And I took inspiration from the spinning wheel.
See, today's spinning wheel is the seed.
That time, the British Empire was around cotton.
Today, the empire is over life.
And where is life?
In the seed.
So, save your seeds.
We've created 150 community seed banks in India.
We managed to pass laws that say seeds and plants and animals are not human inventions.
Absolutely accurate scientific biology and ethical recognition that we are an earth family.
Growing your food, having community.
I notice behind you is, I think, a kitchen.
Yes.
Yes.
And I think food, growing your food and cooking your food is the most revolutionary act in today's time because food is what is being controlled.
From the seed, to earlier junk food, but now Mr. Gates wants fake food and he wants to convert agriculture into a raw material supply of carbohydrates and protein for totally lab-made food.
And Bayer has said, oh, all this will create bigger markets for us and we'll have bigger farms, we'll be using more glyphosate, using more fertilizers, which will then worsen the ecological problem.
The third, which is the most important and to me the most powerful, The idea of satyagraha.
Satya is truth.
Agraha is the force of truth.
Now, when you know the truth, then the force of truth is to not obey untruth, to not participate in it, to detach yourself from it.
So if you want to detach from GMOs, what do we do?
Grow non-GMO food.
Create communities and food economies.
And they're growing.
They're growing hugely.
They're growing very, very fast.
We need to do the same with health.
To have a deeper awareness of what is health.
You know, the word immunity was being made illegal during the COVID crisis, as if there's nothing like an immunity in a living system, as if plants don't have their resilience, as if human beings don't have their resilience.
And there was an attempt to make it look like we're all empty containers waiting for the toxics to be poured into us.
So, Satyagraha in our times is to understand the untruth, Well, I certainly hope you're right.
and live it with compassionate courage, live it with deep, deep, deep consciousness, and live it with the recognition that truth will always win in the long run. - Well, I certainly hope you're right.
It does bring me to a kind of an awkward topic, but I think you're the right person to discuss it with.
You mentioned the WTO protests, which of course at the time I had sympathy for.
I later participated in the Occupy Rebellion.
Because I had great sympathy for it.
I watched that one from the inside descend into a kind of anarchist madness, right?
Just an utterly useless kind of a protest, counterproductive in fact.
And that has only gotten worse in the U.S.
and seemingly it has spread to at least other parts of the West.
And I guess the question is this.
I've been proudly a member of the left for my whole life.
I still consider myself a liberal.
In fact, I say that I'm a reluctant radical.
I know that only radical change can save us, but I know how dangerous radical change is, and so I'm not happy that we have to face radical change.
But I don't recognize A left that I can be part of.
I feel like at best there are people on the left who still make sense, who are isolated from each other and largely rejected by the mainstream self-identified liberal movement.
That is a tremendous obstacle to the kind of awakening and the recapture of power that you're talking about.
We need a left to articulate a vision of how the world might function that isn't either utopian or an excuse for some other kind of authoritarian Nonsense.
So maybe you see something different from India, but is there a left?
Well, you know, we have one state where there's a left governing and I would in a few days have been there to address the left.
But I, you know, I have a course to teach at the Earth University and I want to tell your listeners, you know, we learn how to make change from nature.
We learn how to make change from biodiversity, because they are changing all the time in very radical ways.
You know, for me, one of the most inspiring things is in the middle of a cement, a plant will come out.
And that is the kind of resilience and creativity we need to know that if a plant can go through the concrete, we too can go through the concrete of
Authoritarianism, concrete of total corporate power, which is now becoming even worse, as I've written in my book, Oneness vs. Worth a Percent, because the corporations are now owned by big money, you know, across the Syngentas, Coca-Colas, Apples, all of them.
Most of their investment is from the asset management funds, which holds all the big money, the Black Rocks and the Vanguards.
They are driving the show.
So when you ask about the left, to me the left is about justice, What did Marx talk about?
Surplus accumulation.
What is surplus accumulation?
Extracting the rewards that should return to society.
If they were coming back to society, all societies would be prosperous.
There would be no hunger, there would be no poverty, there would be no unemployment.
But most people forget that the early thinkers and writers were always talking ecology.
The metabolic rift.
The founder of organic chemistry, Levy, who is always cited as the person who helped us build chemical fertilizers.
No, he disowned them.
I recently wrote a foreword to a book of his, published in 1887 or something in German, and they've just brought out an English version, and they asked me to write the foreword.
So, I read the English version.
It's called The Law of Recycling.
And he's talking about how all of nature is about recycling.
There's nothing like extraction.
He's the one who first used the term metabolic rift, that there's a metabolic rift taking place between humans and nature, between the country and the town.
And Marx picked it up from there, the metabolic rift, the separation.
That's what it means.
Not only does it mean that You are separate, but because you are getting separate, the umbilical cord that maintains the metabolism of society, of ecosystems, of organisms, that starts to collapse.
So, I think if today we have to have growing space, for the left to realize that ecological movements that have justice in them, They are trying to do what all movements of justice have done.
Second, to me, reclaiming the commons is the left today.
And the reclaiming commons movement has to grow, not only because people want it, but it will become necessary to survive.
When your energy is taken away, as it's being done in Europe, when your food is taken away, How will you survive?
You've got to get together and reclaim the commons.
And I think the idea of Occupy was powerful.
If the organizing capacity was weak, and also the FBI got into it.
But, you know, the fact that some attempts fail doesn't mean the idea and the principle should be given up.
Well, but I agree.
I mean, there, there's a reason that I still basically, even if I found that I was the only person still speaking left principles, I wouldn't change my belief that they are the correct ones.
But what I see is, um, an abandonment of the The path.
In some sense, the left succeeded.
It took many ideas that were once radical and they became mainstream.
These were ideas that were about justice and about a wise view of ecology, right?
These things became bedrock in the West, such that they are now defended by conservatives, interestingly.
And the self-proclaimed left has now, instead of looking at the West as having the correct idea about a productive, vibrant, sustainable society that distributes its productivity fairly, which does not mean evenly, but fairly, Right?
Instead of seeing it as a flawed prototype, seeing it as a system that fails to live up to certain values that it espouses, the left here, at least in the U.S., is now attacking that system as if its flaws invalidate it.
And I don't know how we recover from that.
I think what we have is a prototype that's very good and fixing its flaws ought to be a priority.
But attacking it is going to result in a system, it's going to be a reversion to the mean.
We're going to have a system that's much less fair.
And I don't know how to wake the left to that danger.
Well, you know, I think part of our challenge really is, and taking evolution seriously, is new forms of the left will emerge which will not be labeled as left, but will carry within them the principles.
And I think that new diversity is where we have to look for.
Yes.
You know, because, you know, what was really, what was WTO, what was globalization?
Globalization was the corporations stay in America, but they outsource their production.
So the ordinary people of America lost out in every way.
And that's where the disenfranchisement then shifts people to substituting Their right to work, their right to have food, their right to have shelter, their right to have community, all that then gets substituted by manufactured negative identity.
And that is what is now leading to the divide and rule That is infecting every society in a serious way.
So, to me, the left today has to be about uniting people around their common humanity, connected with diversity.
Diversity is not an obstruction to unity, and unity is not uniformity.
So, organizing through our diversities for the common good, for the common good of the planet, for the common good of society, and Overcoming both this new polarization that is economic of the 1% and the 99% and the manufactured polarities in society so that people are unable to work together, think together, live together.
Transcending that is the project of the left today.
It should be.
I would refer back to an earlier point of yours, which I think is not well understood by most people, which is that when you have control over, for example, the seeds that produce a large fraction of the food that is consumed by people, you have a tremendous amount of power over them, whether
You know, as long as the seeds are planted, that power is not evident, but those who control those seeds have a lever that is well beyond what the, you know, the demons of the 20th century had dreamed of, really.
Absolutely, absolutely, which is precisely why I started the movement of Dhania, about which I've talked in my book on the biodiversity of movements in Terra Viva.
The beginning with one seed, you can reclaim your freedom and the commons.
And I mentioned the 150 community seed banks.
Those community seed banks have helped farmers jump back after a cyclone.
In the drought years, the drought-resistant crops have allowed farmers to have food.
So, you know, from my own life, saving a seed is saving the freedom, saving the potential of creating abundance, and saving the power To share.
That, to me, is thinking of the left.
The ability to share rather than the ability to monopolize.
Because there's an extractive economy that takes and takes and takes.
And there's a solidarity economy, an economy of care that I call, an economy that takes everyone into account, every species into account.
And at least from my work, I have seen Everyone does better.
We grow more food.
Farmers' incomes come up.
The ecosystems thrive.
On our farm, we have six times more butterflies than in the forest.
Our water levels have come up 70 feet by not exploiting the water, but giving water back to the soil.
So saving a seed, a little seed, I think that is very, very powerful.
And no matter what the laws in which country, I think everyone should do two things.
Save a seed, grow it in your windowsill, even if you don't have a garden.
Just take one pot and one plant, because it re-establishes your relationship.
And through that re-established relationship, you have a different sense of who you are and what the world is.
And the second, if you can, grow a garden.
I quite like this for multiple reasons.
I mean, not only is there the demonstration of power and the reconnection with something ancient in the growing of a seed, but there's also, you know, if you just stop to think about what it means, you know, that you have this little object, maybe like a little pebble,
And that somehow it contains the necessary information to extract from the soil and from the air, the materials necessary.
And it has the information to build this, you know, a miraculous, a tree, right?
A tree from thin air that, that is, you know, a miracle except in one regard, which is that we have some understanding of how it works.
Some understanding, but you know, I think it's amazing that most people probably spend their entire life, from birth to death, and they never spend five minutes thinking about what it means that that seed contains information sufficient to cause a tree to happen on its own without intervention, right?
That's an amazing thing.
And, you know, maybe that's part of what you're saying about reconnection.
Yeah, reconnection and recognizing the potential, you know.
Bohm, a quantum physicist with whom I would have worked, but I worked with his student, he talked about the implicate order, you know, the order within that unfolds, yeah, and he was of course talking about quantum phenomena, but in that seed is the implicate order of the tree.
It's all in there, yeah, and that And that power is the power of life and living systems.
I'm just working on a new manuscript and I realised that there's so much connection between quantum thinking and evolutionary thinking, the power of the seed.
Schrodinger, the quantum physicist, inspired by Indian thought, Started to look more deeply at living systems.
And he has a little book called, What is Life?
And he says, life, unlike machines, you know, machines create entropy.
The more they grow, the more entropy you have.
Living systems reverse entropy because they create organized order.
You know, Mr. Gates has just talked about GMOs as magical seeds.
No, that's not the magical part.
The power of the seed to become the crop, to become the tree, that is the true molding of life.
Shooting a gene in blindness, editing genes in ignorance, that is not magic.
It's ignorance.
It's ignorance and it is also such a woeful misrepresentation.
The fact is, even those with this power to edit genes, or to splice them in, Do not have the knowledge to write any useful gene.
They couldn't write a single one.
They don't speak the language.
And so, okay, you've done something impressive.
You've taken a gene from here and you've put it in that organism that it didn't exist in.
I get it.
But the fraction of the wonder of that seed that is actually the result of the editing is essentially zero.
And the idea that this is your seed because you edited that gene in is preposterous on its face if you understand the genetic underpinnings of what it is to be a seed.
makes no sense.
But I fear that people just can't grasp it.
can't grasp it.
That they don't realize that what is being taken from them is their world.
They live in a world of plants that reproduce themselves and animals that reproduce themselves and they're being handed some sort of technologically modified version and they don't realize what they're giving up.
You know, I just have at the Navdanya Farm, I have a group of visitors who've come from around the world who are seed savers and they've come to interact with Navdanya and I think all of us could become seed savers, learn from the seed, learn the power of the seed, you know?
That if we start thinking of ourselves as seeds, we realize we have a lot of power.
If the seed can become a tree, if we think of ourselves as seeds, we can have the kind of power that is needed to make the change we need to see.
I would add to that.
Evolution has taken an expedient route in a couple of ways that have not served us well in modern times.
One of them is That it caused us to be focused on ourselves as individuals, because our ancestors only had a certain amount of ability to affect things.
There was no reason to understand one's descendants 10 generations down the road, because there was no ability to affect their world one way or the other.
One could only affect things very locally, which created this Focus on the self, but what we really are.
is a very temporary conscious custodian of something much more longstanding and durable.
And we can screw it up in a single generation, but our job really is to keep the experiment going as long as possible to deliver the experience that we have of life to as many descendants as can
Experience it and to deliver it to them, not just the fact of life, but to deliver them a healthy planet on which to live out their lives, to deliver them a system that frees them to do with their life something meaningful.
And we are Because we are so obsessed with our current selves, because we are obsessed with ourselves as individuals, we don't really have a relationship with our obligation to the future.
And I'm troubled by the fact that it is Increasingly.
I mean, even things like light pollution cause us not to have the reminder in the night sky of what place we actually hold in the universe.
Right?
And I think this is getting to be a harder and harder job.
The technology is just, it's everywhere you look.
And so we are losing touch with what we really, how we got here.
You know, I wrote a book with a fellow eco-feminist, Maria Mies, and she has a chapter in it called From the Individual to the Dividual, because not only have we been fragmented from the ecological web of life, but from the social community of life, in thinking artificially about us as little atoms,
In an alien universe, when we are inter-beings, when we are entangled socially, generationally, we are entangled ecologically.
Actually, cultures like mine, cultures like the First Nations in North America, always talked about the seventh generation.
We must think of the seventh generation to come.
And every act of ours should make their possibilities better.
And that's one reason society's thinking in the seventh generation didn't go around trashing the planet.
It's when you don't think of the species next door, your next generation, your neighbor, Which is the kind of selfish, egoistic self that's being created.
And then a fragmented self, you know?
I mean, I feel sad to see young people not know how to do anything beyond their computers.
That's why I encourage them to come learn farming.
Put your hands in the soil.
Learn you are part of the soil.
Learn that those soil organisms shape you.
And that brings a new humility.
And it brings a new power.
I think what's being bred today is a new inferiority.
And from that new inferiority, a huge aggression against others.
If we remember that the word humus is the word for soil.
The word human is derived from humus.
And the word humility is derived from the same humus.
So we are soil.
We are seed.
We are soil.
And that is how we take our power back and extend, like the mycorrhizal fungi, our networks to create the new economy, the new democracy, the new cultures that are needed.
Well, interesting.
I know you have to go.
It's very late where you are.
Very late.
I would point out that there is something interesting also.
Your point about soil is well taken.
I'm not a believer that the universe sends messages, but if it were to try to send a message through COVID, it sent a pretty strong indication of the importance of the soil and our politically broken order because Ivermectin comes from soil.
It is the product of a soil organism and in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, very large state as I understand it, almost as large as the United States is, they ignored the international order, allowed people to use Ivermectin and had spectacular success at driving back COVID, you know, with a soil organism.
So There is a powerful indication in this of where we really are in the universe, how much power we actually have, and where it comes from, and where the false versions of it are.
In any case, I resonate strongly with your message about reconnecting with the soil, saving seeds, planting seeds, and pondering the meaning of their growth.
And I wish you luck in that campaign.
Thank you so much, Brett.
Lovely meeting you.
Lovely meeting you.
Can you tell our audience where they can find you and where they can find your new book?
Well, the book, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, has been published by Chelsea Green.
So if you go to Chelsea Green, you'll be able to find out how to get it.
I'm sure it'll be in bookstores soon.
To contact me, you can write at vandana.shiva at gmail.com.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, it's been a real pleasure.
And don't miss out the fact that the movement Navdanya, we offer courses of returning to the Earth, becoming part of a living system.
And you can go to Navdanya Earth University to get more details.
