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Jan. 4, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:11:32
“They Want To WIPE OUT Farmers!” Vandana Shiva On Protests & Globalist Takeover - STAY FREE #278
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand 2024.
Sorry for the bruises on my face.
We are, after all, engaged in a war, a war for freedom, and we could have no greater teacher and leader than Vandana Shiva.
If you don't know about Vandana Shiva yet, she is a person that's bold enough To go full-on against globalist, corporatist aggressors.
She knows how to tie together a variety of complex ideas.
She's able to explain that when the legacy media says, oh, these people are racist, it's a complete smokescreen.
She is a galvanizing leader and a fantastic teacher.
You should watch her documentary, The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, at vandanashivamovie.com to learn more.
Today we talk, incredibly, about the ability to find sovereignty in the seed, sovereignty in the individual, sovereignty in the community, and how globalism is really truly about tyranny.
We talk about oneness versus the 1%.
In particular, how even when climate change is being used to legitimize authoritarian, excuse me, globalist measures, they neglect to mention that 1% of the world's population generates 66% of its Pollution!
We talk about the monopolization of seeds and we talk about, importantly, the victories that can be attained against global corporatists.
Over the course of this conversation, a vision is sketched out about how your individual awakening is a vital part of the global opposition movement.
She talks about the language that we use, ways that we can unite That will terrify the opposition.
Now, the first part of this conversation will be available on YouTube.
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You'll notice that I ask questions from Kay Cotois and a number of other people during the chat.
That's because they joined us live on Locals.
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Battles for your individual freedom, battles for your loved ones, battles for your nations, battle for the world itself or herself or himself depends how you regard our planet.
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It's worth it, I tell you that, to join conversations like this and to have the opportunity to be educated live by people like Vandana Shiva.
Before we go to Vandana, oh, oh, what about it guys?
It's available now.
Now let's go straight away to a woman that I regard as a world teacher and perhaps I should just spend the rest of my life finding ways to bring Vandana Shiva to as many people As possible.
Certainly there would be a bloody value in it.
Thank you for joining me today.
Vandana Shiva.
Vandana, it's been, since we've last spoken, I feel that there's been further protest in the agricultural world, more and more observable attempts to control food sources.
The Netherlands, one of the second largest producers of food in the world, as I understand, it seems like deliberately having its capacity to farm managed down.
Can you tell me, what do you think is the broader goal in managing the world's ability to produce and control their own food sources?
You know, ever since industrial agriculture began, and industrial agriculture began with the fossil age, age of oil, because every chemical in industrial farming is a fossil chemical, so many people are mobilizing on oil, don't realize that they're eating oil.
And when you put agrochemicals to work based on oil, you're basically depending on energy slaves.
And you have to get rid of the farmers.
So the profits that are linked to industrial farming, which are profits of big ag, big poison, big oil, farmers are an obstruction for them.
And I remember when I started to work on the globalization of agriculture, you know, the W.O.2 Treaty Agriculture Agreement, and there was a court of a secretary of agriculture in those days who said, you've got to squeeze the farmer off the land.
Brought a toothpaste tube with me.
You've got to squeeze the farmer off the land like you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube.
So that's how they've always viewed farmers.
And industrial agriculture, just like they see insects as nuisance to spray insecticide, they see farmers working on the land as an obstruction to their profits, because their market is displacing farmers with chemicals and machines.
This has progressed much more in the current times.
What we are witnessing today is they're not just wanting less farmers on the land, They want no farmers on the land.
The slogan is farming without farmers, food without farms.
What does that add up to?
Basically, the next step of industrial farming, which is a combination of fossil fuels, chemicals, and now the digital technologies, drones, I mean, they want drones to pick your apples.
Look at the amount of energy this will use.
You know, Emery Lovins did a calculation that if we take the energy slaves into account, the population of this planet is 3.5 trillion.
We keep worrying about the 8 billion.
But the real population is of the energy slaves, which means the fossil fuel industry.
And what does food without farms mean?
That we will not grow food that we can eat.
There'll still be large-scale agriculture.
And as Bayer has said, these openings are wonderful for us because we're the only ones who grow raw crops that can be managed by machinery to produce the raw materials for lab food.
Amino acids, proteins, food disappears.
Raw materials stays.
And of course the pretence, the terribly unscientific pretenses, this is a solution to climate change.
No, it'll make the climate problem worse because 50% of the emissions come from an industrial food system.
Hyper-industrialization will mean there'll be more emissions.
It seems that this move towards globalism is being met with a rise of nationalism and populism and a simultaneous and ongoing vehement condemnation of nationalism as necessarily racist, anti-immigrant, As retrograde, one of the things I'm observing, and even in your answer to the first question, when you outline the scale and ambition of the project to beyond industrialize agriculture, to technologize agriculture, so that it's entirely out of the hands of humanity, entirely beyond the reach of people,
It seems that this will have to be opposed by a movement that is able to consolidate what seems to be at the moment a number of competing and indeed combative interests.
In some of the countries that are being most affected by the issues that you described, notably the Netherlands, there are agricultural movements.
There is an agricultural movement in Germany.
Both of these are described by the legacy media as being racist and nationalist and it seems to me to a degree understandable that nationalism would be part of a response to globalism and anti-establishmentism but for in order to have a successful There's going to be a degree of, if not inclusivity, certainly alliance that's not been precedented before, or has never happened before, excuse me.
I wonder what you feel about the current populist movements, both that are explicitly connected to farming and beyond farming.
And indeed, what type of alliances are going to be required if something on this scale is to be opposed?
Well first Russell, actually the big global media will cover protests in Netherlands and they'll cover the protests.
In Germany.
But there are protests everywhere.
Because farmers are being squeezed everywhere by the same group of companies.
The same Monsanto's and Bayer's wanting to control seed and push chemicals.
The same Cargill's and Conagra's wanting to destroy local farming to create their markets with subsidies they collect from all governments to make high-cost production cheap and allow dumping to take place and undercut local production.
And the third, to destroy local artisanal processing, which creates healthy food with under-processed food, which is the root of so much disease today.
And that's the junk food industry, the Pepsis, the Cokes and the Nestles.
Those are the three that wrote the agreements of WTO that have created the situation today, on which Bill Gates is now riding.
You know, he is, in effect, Doing exactly what Monsanto did, but he's doing it with the help of acceleration and concentration of technologies.
So we must recognize there are farmers' movements everywhere.
Many don't get covered.
Kenya, you know, they held Mr. Gates at bay.
He went there and said, I've eaten GMOs forever.
I've eaten GMO bread all my life.
There isn't GMO bread in the world.
GMO wheat doesn't get commercial.
You know, just slide his way through.
And the peasants are still fighting and they've received protection from the courts to say you cannot import GMOs.
I don't use the word populism.
It's very much the big media's word.
When we started to fight globalization, which is corporate globalization, our basic You know, commitment was to protect sovereignty at every level.
The movement, especially from the South, but it's also in the North, is the movement of food sovereignty.
Food sovereignty means you must be free to grow your food, you must be free to grow it in ways that's good for the planet and good for people, and you must be free to eat healthy food.
The food sovereignty movement is both about localization, and national sovereignty, because if you don't have democratic systems under your control to make decisions, whether you'll get GMOs or not get GMOs, whether you'll ban a pesticide or a roundup or not ban a roundup, when you have no sovereignty, you basically have handed over all power to corporate control
And both with the nature of the corporations, the kind of things they produce, and the way they behave, I have called this phenomenon food fascism.
Because when you take all freedoms of the people away, And you do it for profits.
That is fascism.
So, sovereignty is an absolutely vital element.
And sovereignty is not about states alone.
Sovereignty is about people.
Sovereignty is about communities.
Sovereignty is about the seed being sovereign to itself.
That cow being sovereign to itself and being allowed to live.
About the planet as a whole being sovereign.
It's about freedom.
And, you know, the reason I am able to resist this nonsense is because, like, I've just come from a week in the village communities we work with, and they were celebrating their harvest festivals.
And I get regenerated watching how the seed itself is the goddess in these communities.
It's the seed they worship.
They know their food begins in the seed.
Caring for the seed is their duty.
They will fight for the freedom of the seed and their freedom to protect the seed.
But the beauty they bring to all of this, the celebration and joy that they bring to all of this, there's no divisions between nature and humans.
There's no division between The sacred buffet.
Everything is sacred.
And I think that sacredness of seed and food and life lived in alignment with the larger laws is basically what is being crushed and what communities are holding on to.
And I think when you said what kind of alliance, the alliance has to be An alliance that respects the rights of the earth and respects the rights of those who produce food in accordance with the rights of the earth.
And if they've been forced to farm in different ways, well, give them a chance.
Instead of putting 50% of European tax money at the service of the corporation, put it at the service of farmers wanting to make a transition to do ecological agriculture, build local food economies.
And it has to be an alliance of All citizens, who everyone eats, there's nobody who doesn't eat, there's no species that doesn't eat.
Eating is part of living and eating in ways that's good for your health and the health of the planet.
We bring that together, we bring the health movement together that's recognizing that ultra-processed food and poisons in our food is the center of chronic disease epidemic, the ecological movement.
The farmers' movement and the freedom movement, that's a very powerful movement.
It's just that we need to create our own communication systems like you have, but communication not just in platforms, but communication in terms of the ability to understand each other.
I think we should just never use the words the dominant system uses.
I don't think we should call our movements populism.
We should use our movements, deep earth movements, deep human movements, deep movements that are spiritual, deep movements that recognize we are one humanity on one planet and our universal values are much deeper than the globalist greed values who only think for themselves and are willing to wipe out all the species on the planet, wipe out the last farmer and wipe out the last person by denying them food.
It's very beautiful to hear that the principle of sovereignty can be pursued to the level of the seed.
This great emblem of potential.
The seed as that which is not yet manifest.
The seed as nature's blueprint.
It's very interesting to hear that a war is taking place at the level of patenting an attempt to own the intelligence of nature as compounded in the seed.
It's interesting to hear, Vandana, that there is no actual distinction between that which is sacrosanct or sacred and that which is material and profane.
In practice, when you have communities that are naturally celebrating their harvest, which I suppose must be the celebration of mutual endeavor, The requirement that the earth will return what we have given in faith back to us, that it suggests a necessary relationship of ecological respect that doesn't even need to be conceptualized in the manner that we would ordinarily suggest.
I like too that you, excuse me, attack The language that we use, that we accept the language of the oppressor.
Given that what you appear to be talking about is new forms of colonialism and tyranny, as an Indian, I wonder, do you feel That the successes of the Indian Revolution can somehow be deployed in this new form of oppression?
Or would you say that within the Indian Revolution were the kind of challenges that we now face in so much as a new elite class was able to take over India in perhaps the way that the British had previously governed India?
I wonder, given that what you appear to be telling us is that there is a need for a unified, decentralized movement of the world's people that requires connection to the land, connection to one another, connection to the food, and the lived experience of that which is sacred.
That's what it seems that you described to me in that Harvest Festival.
And because there is a requirement, as you said towards the end of your answer, for good communication.
For good communication.
And you also included in your answer that there are many protests that we never hear about.
And I think you said that there are Kenyan farming movements that oppose the attempts by Bill Gates or whatever foundation Bill Gates was deploying to impose GM techniques and technologies on agriculture there.
But because it's not reported on, we don't even have that picture.
Because we use the language of the oppressor, we use their framing inadvertently.
So I wonder if within these various Movements that at present may feel atomized, there is the potential in the way that you described is being naturally realized in the village where a harvest festival is an acknowledgement of the sovereignty of the seed, the sovereignty of the individual, the sovereignty of the community.
I wonder if there are principles here that can be replicated and do they require Do they require new models, Vandana?
Or are these models already around us and simply not being used?
And indeed, again, to oppose figures like Bill Gates, who appears to have a truly globalist, colonialist project, whether it's the acquisition of farmland in the United States, his various medical projects that he's involved with, his agricultural projects in India and across Africa, appear to suggest a truly global project and of course he is obviously not
alone in that.
I suppose what you're saying is that through individual connection and sovereignty
there is the possibility for opposition, for meaningful opposition, but it seems to me
sometimes to be very fractured. I think a lot of people will say, well the Netherlands are
having this problem, Germany are having this problem, Sri Lankans are having this problem.
It's it seems very difficult to Suggest a global solution because they've even co-opted.
You know you use the phrase corporate globalism But there does need to be a type of globalist response doesn't there and even that sounds like it might be complicated We are going to have to leave YouTube.
Why?
Because free speech is not hate speech.
Free speech is the ability to discuss ideas that will by their nature be an antithesis, an antidote to the interests of the powerful.
We're going to be talking about how we can attack The corporatism, the global corporatism, spearheaded by the likes of Bill Gates, shielded and veiled by the likes of the WEF.
How agricultural movements from Iowa to Sri Lanka have more in common than that which divides them and that we must find ways to have a decentralized but unified attack against the forces of corporate globalism.
If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description.
If you're watching us on Facebook, wherever you're watching us in the world, click the link in the description to see the rest of this fantastic conversation with a woman that is changing the world, with a teacher that can bring out the best in all of us.
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Yeah, we definitely need a much more universal sense of who we are, you know, that we are part of a beautiful Earth.
We are members of an Earth family, that we are human.
All of us, no matter who we are, we are human.
We eat food.
We become other species' food.
We drink water.
You're drinking water.
We all drink water.
And these basic issues connect us to our earthiness.
We've been made to look down on being of the earth.
The earth was made passive.
She was made dead.
And then anything that belongs to the earth was made to look like it's inferior.
And anything that was imposed was imposed as superior.
Except that when you impose toxic chemicals and pesticides and Roundup, it's not a better place to be, either for nature or humans.
When you create non-renewable seed, it's not a better place to be.
Now, when I attended a meeting, 1987, After having done my study on Punjab, because the Green Revolution was first introduced in Punjab in India, because the most prosperous part of India in the world.
And it's Bill Gates who's taken the alliance for the Green Revolution to Africa, but the Green Revolution destroyed the most prosperous part of India.
And in 97, I was called to this meeting where the industry laid out its agenda of patenting seed.
And said, this will be our future profits.
And we'll be five companies controlling all seeds of the world.
And we can only do this when we make it illegal for farmers to save seeds.
And I said, whatever you're speaking is so wrong at every level.
At the ethical, ecological, scientific level.
Because you don't make seed.
You don't invent seeds.
Seeds are not a machine.
So that's the first ontological lie.
Second, saving seeds is a human duty of being of the earth.
And every culture, you see, people have died, but they've never destroyed the seed.
When people have migrated, they've taken seeds with them.
That's how the world has got all the different crops.
And I said, how can you forbid farmers from saving seeds?
I'm going to dedicate my life to seed freedom, freedom of the seed to renew because your profits come from making seed non-renewable, and of the farmer to save and exchange seed.
And because we were at that time, you know, our parliament, Listened.
Our governments listened.
The government asked me to write a law on farmers' rights, and we wrote a law on farmers' rights.
A law that threw out Pepsi's claim that all potato for the future was theirs.
And they sued Indian farmers for 40 million rupees.
Four Indian farmers were sued for 40 million.
And I sent my book on the issue of patenting and this law on farmers' rights, Article 39, that farmers' right to save, exchange, Develop, sell, seeds can never be taken away because it's the first breeder.
I sent it to the lawyers and judges who were fighting the case.
And Pepsi's case had to be dismissed.
They could not sue.
And the other law, which is even more important, the patent law.
We said we don't invent the seed.
We don't invent plants.
We don't invent life.
We modify it.
But if I bring a brick into my building and then claim this brick has made this building, I'm the owner, I'm the architect, and you pay me rents?
Who would accept someone to take that claim?
But we do it on the basis of living systems.
So when I briefed Parliament, our Parliament wrote a clause, Article 3J.
Plants, animals and seeds are not human inventions, therefore they cannot be patented.
So in spite of all its efforts, Monsanto has not managed to patent seeds in India.
They can manage a lab technique.
But the lab technique is not what goes to the field of a farmer.
The lab technique stays in the lab.
What goes to the field of a farmer is a seed.
Because that's what farmers grow.
And the attempt of industry has been to make seed non-renewable.
Our work in Navdanya is to keep the renewability evolution of the seed constantly at work.
Every time there's a cycle, the farmers Now, because we've created community seed banks, are able to share seeds that are salt tolerant or flood tolerant.
Now, if we hadn't done that at that time and saved the seeds as common, the disaster would have wiped out the farmers and then they couldn't build back because they wouldn't have the money.
to buy the patented seed.
So seed patents is just one more step of the illusion of creation.
I always say, you know, between patents and GMOs, their intention is really, God, move over.
You know, we are the creators.
And now we're going to work to make the world respect us as the newborns.
And all other sacred must go.
All other integrity must disappear.
All other self-organization must be wiped out.
You said, what does the Indian freedom movement tell us?
I mean, when I heard about them owning all the seed of the world, I said, how do we deal with this?
And my mind went back to our freedom movement, that Gandhi pulled out the spinning wheel.
So I said, the spinning wheel of today will be the seed.
And the second thing he did was, and if they impose unjust law, just say no.
A no from the deepest conscience is the most democratic act, the deepest act of freedom.
And he called it satyagraha, satyap truth, agraha, the force of truth, the power of truth.
So in my book, Oneness versus 1%, Which really was written about Bill Gates taking over the UN system, at that point the Paris Climate Treaty, and he's just taken over the Food and Agriculture Declaration of the recent COP in Dubai.
After they'd all worked, he walks up on the stage, typically that's what he does, walks up on the stage, says here's this much money and now I'll run the show.
And you know, my mind at each of these points goes to how do we deal with this kind of Undemocratic, absolute, unaccountable power.
And the three lessons from the Freedom Movement that I've learned, which are relevant today, everywhere.
Even more relevant because of the technological control.
First is self-organization.
You know, it's the principle of how nature works, how nature stays free.
It's been called autopoiesis.
You know, the self-making, the poetry written by nature herself.
And in our language, Gandhi defined it as swaraj, self-rule, ruling over yourself.
So nature does that, self-organizes in nature's law, and it's the law of free societies.
Swadeshi, self-making.
The day we think we've got to buy what we need to live and become consumers, we've lost freedom.
And that's what they're seeking, that even for food now, all of us will have to buy lab food and get sicker.
But for them, it's wonderful because big food, big ag, big tech are all one.
All the crack rocks, all man-guards.
And so for us, for them, a very sick population is a very profitable population.
You know, in my hometown in Bali, near our farm, farms are disappearing, but three giant Hospitals have come up because everyone's falling sick.
I mean, just because growth is counted not in terms of how well you are.
Growth is counted in terms of how much profits can be generated.
So sick people generate profits and healthy people don't.
Good food makes healthy people.
So wipe off the good food and make fake food everywhere.
And the third principle, as I mentioned, is Satyagraha.
To never give up your ability to discriminate between truth and untruth.
And to never give up your freedom to say no to the untruth and to the wrong things.
And that freedom no one can take away.
Especially if you are not attached to anything.
They'll take away my home.
Don't be attached to your home.
They'll take away my money.
So what?
They can't take your... ...call away.
It's very interesting to me, Vandana, how quickly a conversation with you that can be about something very particular, like popular agricultural movements and its global connotation, or the immorality and illegality of patenting seeds, become about very deep principles, like the sanctity of truth, And non-attachment, a willingness to let go of the various, speaking for myself, idols that a man or a person, a woman, can accumulate over a life.
The ways I found myself binded, bound to the world through obligation and attachment and fear.
When you talk about the victories against Pepsi and the potential victories that can occur through stating that nature and animals and seeds are not human creations, when you point out that That there is a kind of almost unimaginable malfeasance alluded to at the heart of the globalist project to replace God, to replace God as the originator, to replace God as the indigenous condition and as the proprietor of almost the proprietor of the unmanifest, which is even beyond even many conceptions of God.
It seems to me that even these Quite particular issues require of us a quite Personal a deep personal understanding of who we are and what we want and my
question to you is that it seems sometimes that you have had success in India, the successes
that you described in your last answer in preventing the corporations being able to
own seeds, being able to sue farmers. But because the relationships between the state
and corporations and the movement of globalism are so powerfully entwined, it seems now that
that you have people moralizing.
Like, for example, when we began our conversation, we were talking about they will say that these farmer movements are racists.
There are very sort of moral and righteous journalists in my country that will say this is why the farmers movement is wrong and they use kind of very moral arguments and there are sort of there are what i would say they're like one of the questions we've got from someone on our chat are like you know from someone called sandy snoot on our chat what are your thoughts on the save the soil movement that has the ominous backing of the wef and and i'd love your answer to that question as well as The wider phenomenon of NGOs and righteous media and the state itself claiming to be pursuing a righteous and moral path while apparently acting on behalf of the interests that, by your reckoning, have an intention, whether conscious or not, and I'd love your thoughts on whether it's conscious or not,
there seems to be about as evil as I could imagine. The annihilation and the replacement of God.
So what do you think about sort of agencies and groups like the WEF and these various globalist
organizations that crop up to legitimize what appear to be projects of centralization,
touching upon the Save the Soil movement and the various other apparently ecologically sound
movements that seem to be advancing globalist interests under a veil of righteousness?
You know, I actually wrote a book called Soil Not Oil in the lead up to the Copenhagen Climate
Summit because I realized that everyone was looking towards the atmosphere and how many
parts per million of CO2 there are. And no one was looking to the plants and the soils that allow us
to heal the earth and It's part of the self-organization of Gaia to cool the planet.
The Earth brought the temperature down from 290 degrees that it used to be to 13 degrees centigrade through her power of photosynthesis.
She brought the CO2 down.
Through photosynthesis, you take the carbon dioxide and the sun and you give humans and other species food and oxygen.
I mean, isn't that a miracle?
And that brought the carbon dioxide down from 98% to 0.03%.
Now if we follow that route and we see the earth as teacher and say we will follow the laws of ecology, we will follow the laws of the earth, the first thing we have to do is the earth is alive, the earth is intelligent, the earth is sacred.
The second thing you do is shrink the human arrogance and anthropocentrism.
Because we have started to think that till we are present, nothing happens, no?
Till we intervene and make GMOs, there's no seed.
Till we do these horrible carbon absorption, carbon dioxide machines, we shall have more emissions, you know?
to absorb the CO2.
And talking about farmers' protests, the big farmers' protests in America, in Iowa, is against the pipelines of CO2 being carried to bury it somewhere in the ground where it might be safe, because it can become very explosive.
Farmers of Iowa are resisting these pipelines.
They're resisting the false solutions.
So the reason there are some NGOs and some voices who are louder and are heard more is because they are playing the message of the masters.
And what's the dominant message of the masters today?
A. We'll play God and nature must be extinguished totally forever.
The second, all this we will do, we'll turn our pollution into the future markets and the future profits.
Geoengineering, genetic engineering, fake food, lab food.
We will criminalize nature like we've tried to criminalize farmers for saving seeds.
Now we will criminalize the farmers for being, for existing, for growing food, and we'll criminalize the poor cow.
Ms.
Bill Gates said, the problem is the cow has four stomachs.
Well, Mr. Gates, all herbivores have four stomachs because they eat roughage.
And this planet was just full of Herbie was roaming, the bison roamed the plains of America.
We didn't have a methane problem.
Your methane problem is the way you treat your animals.
It's not the animal that's the problem.
But they want to criminalize the existence of the animal.
They want to criminalize the existence of an insect.
They want to criminalize the insect of a plant, which is why Roundup is used.
And sadly, There are enough people with too little experience, too little exposure to pluralistic reality, too little reverence for either the earth or the people who work the land.
And they then start echoing.
What the big players want to say.
So what the big players are basically trying to say is stop farmers, have lab food, let the buyers grow the raw material for lab food.
And I've just finished my latest book.
It's called Climate Change and the Future of Food.
How Our climate change and the pollution problem is a problem of the one percent.
You know, they emit two thirds of the emissions.
And they're now turning to fake food, which is the next step of taking food sovereignty away from us.
The solution and both aspects are so wrong.
And you know what the literature is now showing, the scientists are working, they say, get rid of the cow.
And have lab-fake food, fake meat, and this will reduce emissions and it's a solution to climate change.
No.
What the cows emit is in the biogenic cycle.
It's part of the cycle of life.
And all cycles of life close.
They recycle.
It's the artificial systems that don't have an ability to recycle.
So the land that will be used for lab food will be five times more.
Five times more feedstock you'll have to produce.
And so you'll destroy the land more.
And worse, you'll have 25 times more emissions that will pollute the atmosphere.
So we are in a moment where anything can be cooked up and be called science.
And the best scientists can be censored and shut down.
And the best experiences of humanity To grow food with love, to relate to other species with care, to let this planet flourish with diversity, cultural and biological.
They would like to silence it.
And our work is, in whatever space we have, to keep living the real life, eating the real food, growing the real food, and at least in our communities, to talk to each other.
Let the global loudspeaker be with them.
Our local conversations must be for real and for truth.
Vandana, the climate change issue in the western media sphere is a very divisive one indeed, with many on what this culture currently calls the left regarding it as the most significant issue of our time.
Many of the same globalist interests that we are discussing with regard to food sovereignty ...appear to be proposing that a reduction in the freedoms of individuals is the solution to the climate change problem.
As you pointed out in your last answer, two-thirds of carbon emissions are caused by 1% of the population.
What is, and on the other side of the argument, a lot of people believe that climate change isn't real, it's due to natural cycles of the earth, anthropomorphic, or genic, excuse me, climate change isn't a problem.
So I wonder, I wonder, with this issue of climate change, which appears to be on one side being utilised to restrict the freedom of individual people, to legitimise, I would say, measures of restraint and to limit sovereignty and to legitimise, as you say, new forms of agriculture that again deny sovereignty to ordinary people and farmers in particular,
How must we conduct the conversation around climate change?
How do we respect the earth?
How do we address the idea of...
Anthropogenic climate change.
How do we create new spaces of unity in the currently divided public sphere?
And it seems from what you just said that you believe it to be vital that all of us learn to have a relationship with the land and a relationship with food.
This is a truly revolutionary idea because it seems that the vision of progress that we are granted is a purely technological one in alignment with the types of colonialism that we've discussed for the first part of our conversation.
And many people will see it as atavistic, nostalgic, arcane.
To consider growing our own food, connecting to the land, a denial of progress, as if progress too is a form of God, a natural unfolding of a true intention.
So can you give us some clear guidance on climate change, some insight into how it is used by You know, let's call it for simplicity's sake, both sides of the political and public sphere.
I'm referring to kind of, you know, the kind of country that I live in, America, etc.
And yeah, and how can we overcome that division and respond to it?
Well, you know, I, right from, you know, I was present and active in Rio at the Earth Summit, where the climate treaty was written and The Biodiversity Treaty was written and both are related because, you know, the planet and a biosphere is what regulates the atmosphere and the climate.
Because it's the power of the biosphere with its power of photosynthesis that really recycles and produces our basic needs and also is able to hold the climate in regulation.
Now, just like junk food, has created a huge epidemic of chronic diseases, which are increasingly being identified by the medical community as metabolic diseases, which have the same cause, but they have different symptoms.
So, you know, you get obesity, you have diabetes, you have heart problems, you have blood pressure, but they're all symptoms of the damage done to your body by a diet that's not meant to be a human food.
It's disturbing the metabolism, the ability of your body to manage itself and regulate itself for health.
In my view, the whole issue of chemicals farming based on fossil fuels and fossil fuels themselves, not fossil fuels outside, If you look at these maps they do of planetary boundaries, what are the three ruptures?
Nitrogen.
Why do we have a nitrogen rupture?
Because we're using nitrogen fertilizers, which emits a greenhouse gas 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
Total silence on it.
Nobody talks about it.
Because that means addressing the nitrogen problem, not from the farmer's end, but from the industry end.
The second is biodiversity disappearance.
The same processes that are leading to emissions, high emissions, 50% come from food system that's based on chemicals and fossil fuels, but that same system is making the species disappear.
90% species disappearance is because of an industrial agriculture model.
Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and monocultures.
Why do we have monocultures of soya bean in the Amazon?
Why do we have monocultures of palm oil in the rainforest of Indonesia?
So the symptoms of our relationship gone wrong is climate change and biodiversity.
Both are symptoms.
But a third element of that is actually, I would add, the human element.
Treating human beings as dispensable.
But we are part of the Earth family.
So, so much of what's gone wrong in the climate debate is assuming that people are the problem.
Not the industry, not the corporations, not the pollution, but people are the problem.
Restrict them more.
But that is what a dictatorial system is.
But it would also be wrong to deny that there is pollution.
That the 1% polluting tooth hurts, that should be the conversation.
Our conversation should be about pollution and injustice.
Because just as the climate dictators are denying life, the deniers are also denying life.
Many of the good scientists have looked at geological time.
And they look at geology.
There are hardly any who work at living systems.
And to address both extremes, we have to turn to living systems and say, we are living on a living Earth.
And here are the living solutions which will make our lives better, which will increase our freedoms in times of closure, to face these climate colonizers and imperialists, and in addition to that, enhance life on earth for other species too.
The Navdanya work shows we have more species on our farm, we grow more food, we have more freedom because we use our own seeds, and that's the conversation we need.
That we have to expand our freedom in partnership with other species within the limits that the earth sets for us, but not the artificial fake narratives and false solutions of those who have caused the problem.
It seems like there are many institutions that could be valuable that, you know, one would require or it could be useful to have various global bodies that are able to pass on recommendations, that are able to aggregate studies and pass on findings.
But what seems to have happened is that these global bodies typically have been co-opted by Corporate globalists, so the recommendations are always beneficial to the kind of institutions that are responsible for generating the pollution and always make recommendations that inhibit and reduce the freedom of ordinary people.
It seems like, in a sense, I've heard it said before, that many of the organs of a post-revolutionary world are already present, that the media is already present, that the communications miracle has already taken place, and that the information is available, and many of the ideals are available, but at the top there is a kind of A kind of a malfeasant intention that is difficult to overcome.
One of the questions that we have from our community, Kay Kotwas, with all the money and power in the world, what do billionaires like Bill Gates actually want?
What are they striving for?
And when earlier on you were saying that they seem to, you know, unconsciously or otherwise, want to replace God, I wonder what you feel about that.
I wonder what you feel the intentions are.
I wonder if you consider them to be conscious agents, or whether you consider there to be some sort of systemic inertia that has taken hold.
I think it's a combination of inertia, but an inertia that's pushing you on the same path, but accelerating and expanding.
All the wrong direction.
You know, Einstein has said, a clear sign of insanity is to do the same thing again and again, expecting a different outcome.
Now, we know that forgetting that the world Earth is living and treating it like a machine, the mechanistic worldview, forgetting that the world Earth is sacred, the universe is sacred, and treating everything as mere objects to be exploited, all of that forgetting is the playing God.
And at this point, it has reached its total peak, because the playing God is not just trying to displace God, it's trying to displace every aspect of a living Earth, from the seed to the Earth's capacity herself, and human beings too.
You know, what is this project of Silicon Valley, you know, the Cartesian project of Silicon, transhumanism?
We've got to enhance the human being by making them disappear into a machine.
That's the crudest kind of thinking that you can have because just like a seed didn't get improved by making it a GMO, it got polluted.
Taking away the autonomy of the human being as a conscious actor and turning them into raw material for data And data management and algorithms is, you know, again, that thing of, of, of fear, of fear from fear of others who are free and alive.
You know, I think a lot of it just because money gets made, of course, profits and money and control is a big part of it, but it's more than control.
It is also fear of others who are free and alive.
And that's why the constant attack on freedom and the constant attack on life.
So our freedom then is stay free and stay alive, you know, and therefore keep the conditions that give us life and give us freedom alive.
That's the freedom project.
to your our own personal freedom must be cultivated. Vandana, after I experienced a lot of
attacks recently in the media, I felt to a degree there was a necessary humbling. I felt that there
were lessons that could be learned but definitely this aspect of you know particularly with regard
to attachment, caring what other people think of me.
Of course, even lessons about putting myself in a position to be vulnerable to such attacks with my years of promiscuity and selfishness, even if I never transgressed in the way that I was accused of.
I wonder, on a personal and human level, how do you propose that I ought respond to those kind of attacks?
What can I learn?
Where can I find strength?
How can I move forward?
What do I take from an experience of that nature?
How do I maintain my integrity and my authenticity, my certainty in what I'm doing?
What can I learn from it?
Well, I think our integrity comes both from the deep consciousness that we are integral beings, but we're integral beings.
Integrated with other beings and therefore respect for all others becomes key.
Our integrity rests on respecting their integrity.
And the vulnerability just becomes a teacher of where your resilience lies.
I think we are at the end of a mechanistic, atomistic age.
Mechanistic in terms of the mechanical philosophy, but atomistic that we are all separate individuals, you know, unto ourselves.
And I think the next step of human evolution, of deepening our integrity and deepening our autonomy, will be a deeper awareness of our interconnectedness.
Yes.
And constantly respecting those relationships.
Yes.
In the community that you are a part of, which I know has a sort of an academic component and that you run courses, and we discussed before the courses that you run on Gandhi, can you tell us a little bit more about the principles under which that community is run?
And is it, are you already in practice Living in the type of community that you appear to be saying will be the solution, the antithesis and antidote to globalism, sovereign communities, we've connected with the self-sustaining sovereign communities that are integrated in the way that you just outlined.
Yeah, so you know, like I said earlier, one of the problems has always been, since colonialism, of of this illusion that we are always the creators and the inventors.
And part of my strength comes from the communities that are, you know, that exist.
The communities I spent the last week with.
And to learn from them and to learn from their principles.
But the Navdanya community, the farm and the courses and the Earth University that we run, yes, it runs on those principles.
You know, I wouldn't be the kind of free person I am if there wasn't a community.
Because communities sustain themselves.
Communities work together in corporations.
Communities are mutual.
Communities have no hierarchies.
Hierarchies are created in anatomized systems with superiority and impurity built into it.
So, for me, freedom means self-organization.
Self-organization with respect for each other.
Respect for nature, respect for the land, respect for the seed, and respect for the other human members of the community.
That is freedom.
Because that's where, together, you can mutually do amazing work.
Do you think then that leadership in a community like that with those values is based on, well, obviously consent and exemplification?
Is that the type of leadership that is offered in a community that is non-hierarchical?
Well, consent is related to external interventions, you know?
But just like a seed becomes a plant through its own capacity to be a self-organized and to be community with the soil organisms that are in the soil, with the mycorrhizae in the soil, each of them, through their intelligence, and I am absolutely convinced all life is The soil organisms are intelligent, the plants are intelligent, animals are intelligent, the bees are intelligent, and there's so much new research being done on this.
But they don't have to, you know, it's not like, here's a decision, let's make it, let's talk about it.
Each of them is giving their best with intelligence.
So the mycorrhizal fungus pulls out all the toxics.
It's just the right amount of minerals that that plant needs.
Not more, not less.
And the plant gives it the food, the carbohydrates.
This combination of mutuality and symbiosis, which is intelligence at work.
I mean, that's what's missing because we are spending too much time assuming that we live in an atomized world and therefore we live in a disorganized world.
You know, together we are the idea that we do not know how to live together in harmony.
And for that, we must turn to nature.
We must turn to the soil organisms.
We must turn to our gut microbiome.
And so, you know, they know how to live in harmony.
And they know how to be considerate to each other, to give to each other, to care for each other.
So more than consent, I would say cooperation.
I would say compassion.
Do you think that we have continually imposed metaphors on natural processes that advance ideas of atomization and dominion?
Even the ideas from Darwin that were most popularized and most celebrated seem to indicate that ideas like competition were significant.
Elsewhere, you There's the common idea that nature is about a kind of brutality and about like a sort of a carnivorous ongoing war.
Latterly, some say that there's a kind of a degree of revivalist apocalyptism in the environmental movement where nature is conveyed as very fragile, vulnerable on the precipice of destruction.
Beyond nature, the earth, the Gaia say the earth is a goddess.
I wonder what you think it tells us about our kind and our consciousness, that rather than models of symbiosis, spontaneous cooperation, full autonomy, integrity, non-hierarchical systems of self-realization and cooperation, the models we impose are either models of violent fragility or Competitive brutality.
You sort of mentioned Hobbes and I wonder what other narratives and academic or theoretical myths we've imposed upon nature to legitimize power structures.
Russell, you know, every big idea person which is what has become the dominant ways of thinking of our time.
Actually, there were a small group of people, just like today the 1% is a tiny clique, a very small number.
At that time too, it was the beginning of colonialism, it was defining economy as colonial commerce, it was defining You know, society is chaotic.
It was defining the earth as a machine.
All this was happening by a small group.
So if you think of it, here's Darwin talking about competition, and here's Adam Smith, father of modern science, of modern economics, talking about scarcity.
Now the two go together.
You're blind to the abundance of the earth and nature, and the ability of of nature to constantly renew itself, multiply, share.
And you define the world as scarcity.
You have created scarcity through colonialism.
And then you define the relationships in nature, as well as in human society, as those of competing for scarce resources.
And this infiltrates at every level.
But not only is nature alive, but nature multiplies, you know?
For me, the miracle of the seed is the seed can give you a rice plant, a corn plant, it can give you a tree, you know?
A tiny, tiny seed of a ficus can give you this giant ficus.
And it's all in that little seed.
And how did it do it?
It did it because the patterns are in its intelligence and in its unfolding.
You know my basic training was quantum theory and David Bohm you know always talked about enfoldment of the quanta that the quanta unfolds but It's potential is unfolded.
The same is for nature.
The potential to become the expressions that are there.
But this then means instead of competition, cooperation.
Instead of constant mutual aggression, symbiosis.
We are fortunate that now there is a new biology emerging which is much more resonant to the way indigenous people live related to nature and there's a new convergence that's taking place.
It's not in the Guardian and it's not in the BBC.
It's not anywhere there but for me it's very very exciting.
I can go to a village one day, next day read a book by someone who's talked about the intelligence of nature.
And they're saying the same thing in different languages.
So, those dominant metaphors are really outmoded.
They just don't allow us to make sense of the world we're in.
And they don't allow us to be guides, to regenerate the Earth, to overcome this panic that has been created.
Yes, we should take seriously our ecological responsibilities.
But it does not mean we again interpret the Earth as so helpless.
You know?
Because so much of the panic is, oh, the Earth will die.
Earth won't die.
That's too powerful.
And because I live in the subcontinent which has the worst disasters, 20,000 people dead in the super cyclone in Rurisat, 1999.
20,000 people dead in 2013 in the disasters in my home region.
250 people dead two years ago.
These disasters are for real.
We can't deny them.
And the disasters are a result of messing up the Earth's metabolism.
Yeah?
And creating a total uh you know destabilized earth system we have to take that seriously but then to take it seriously we have to then take power back from those who are causing this damage and give power back to the earth by working with her in service you know it's our time not to pretend to be god or on the other hand to be totally powerless but to reclaim our true creativity as part of the earth
And as co-creators working in humility, knowing we're a very small part, do the right thing.
As co-creators working in humility do the right thing to be able to handle the apparent paradox of our personal connection to this great power, this aliveness, this capacity for multiplication and manifestation from a position of humility not dominion.
I see now that what's been mobilized is an ideology to entirely extract divinity from these processes and to claim for the rational, the material and the personal, that which is divine.
And I suppose that's in a sense a kind of, yes, a global heresy, a heresy against nature.
Vandana, thank you so much for, as always, being able to weld together such complex, diverse, opposing ideas and finding always the confluence and the hope, because I can see how as an individual now I can participate in this by allowing myself to become a conduit for higher forces, by challenging my own integrity, my own willingness, To be vulnerable and to act authentically.
My own willingness to let go of attachment.
I can participate in this symbiotic miracle.
Some people are putting quotes in the chat of things you've said in this conversation.
I like the one about compassion.
Can you grab that one for me?
Vandana, thank you so much for helping me.
I value your time and your teaching always.
Thank you.
To you and every one of your listeners, a wonderful season, holiday season, and a wonderful new year.
I love you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Vandana Shiva.
Well, that was a fantastic conversation.
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I want to welcome on board the Ark, What better way to start 2024 with a very, very popular guest, Greg Gutfeld.
I'm very excited to be here.
Thank you for trusting us with the great movement that you have created.
Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different,
episode one with Greg Gutfeld.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
What better way to start 2024 with a very, very popular guest, Greg Gutfeld.
So I'm very excited to be here.
I love you, Russell.
Yeah!
I'd like to take this opportunity to unreservedly apologize to you.
You don't look like an anus.
I can't even remember why I was chitting on you, even though we've had a checkered past.
We're talking about how media is used to legitimize censorship and control.
There's a lot to talk about.
Is it true that you repressed, suppressed the lab leak theory, even though you yourself suspected that it might be true?
Entertainment media will make sure you get punished if you veer off the Kimmel Colbert plantation.
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