Vandana Shiva, one of the show's most popular guests, returns to discuss Agroecology and Feudalism with RFK Jr.
To support the cause, visit Navdanya - https://www.navdanya.org/
Her new book, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Solutions for Hunger and Poverty is available here: https://smile.amazon.com/Agroecology-Regenerative-Agriculture-Sustainable-Solutions/dp/090779193X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=8PERDYGUJWAK&keywords=agroecology+and+regenerative+agriculture&qid=1660263949&sprefix=agroecolo%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1
I'm very, very happy that my guest today is one of my great heroes, Dr.
Vandana Shiva, who is the author, a physicist, an ecologist, an advocate of biodiversity, conservation, and farmers' rights, probably the most influential international voice for Local agriculture, democratic agriculture, for independent stewardship of the soils and against the commodification of agriculture and of nature by large corporations.
Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture and women's rights.
Created fundamental cultural shifts in how the world views these issues.
Dr.
Shiva founded Navdanya, which is her organization which promotes agroecology, seed freedom, and a vision of Earth democracy, seeking justice for Earth and for all living beings.
She has authored more than 20 books, including Reclaiming the Commons, Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth.
She is a member of the Scientific Committee on Foundation Ideas, and she has received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an honor known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.
And Dana's most recent book is Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture.
And it's a synthesis of more than three decades of interdisciplinary research and practice, and it provides evidence-based solutions to some of the world's most pressing crises in global ecology and agriculture and public health.
Welcome back to the podcast, Anna.
Hi, Bobby.
So tell us what drove you to write yet another book.
Well, there was one that came out just before that, which is a compilation of all the movements that are finding out what Bill Gates is doing, which is called Philanthrocapitalism, from the same publisher.
And that's a movement book, The People Fighting Solar Engineering, Dimming the Sun.
As a way to solve the climate problem, fake food, control over health, all issues that you deal with.
The privatization of agriculture and the monopolization of all the agricultural land on Earth, which we're seeing more and more of, and which Gates is driving.
And also, one thing you didn't just mention is the Eradication of farmworkers and replacing them with robots, which Gates sounds conspiratorial, but he actually has companies that he is developing with Apple and with other large social technology companies to have robots on our farm fields rather than farmers.
Well, two of his favorite dystopian visions, Farming Without Farmers, which is his one agriculture for the world.
Actually, just around the time when the COVID was striking, he launched Gates Ag One, one agriculture for the world.
And you can't do one agriculture for the world through biodiversity with different climates.
You can only do it through total industrialization, mechanization, robotization.
The second thing that he's very fond of saying is food without farms.
And that's where his idea of fake food...
Now, Navdanya, for those of your listeners who don't know, means nine seeds.
It also means the new gift.
And I started this when I found the corporations who were bringing out the poisons and the chemicals now wanted to own the seed, wanted to promote GMOs in order to take a patent.
And then they wanted an international treaty.
The GAT and the WTO to force this on the world.
I happened to be at a meeting where they were talking about this, 1987.
And that's when I said, no, the seed must be saved.
And we cannot allow the poison cartel to be the owners of life and take royalties from the farmers.
This particular book, as you mentioned, is the synthesis of my work that began in 1984.
You know, my background is in agriculture.
I grew up on my mother's farm.
But that was fun.
It was play.
But the study of what is agriculture was forced on me, literally, by two terrible events in India in 1984.
One was the land where the so-called Green Revolution, which merely means chemical farming, industrial agriculture, was imposed on India in 1966, the land of Punjab, which means the land of five rivers.
And let me just interrupt you for a second.
The Green Revolution was a brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was a way to supplant local subsistence, traditional agriculture with chemically-based agriculture, heavy-duty pesticides, heavy-duty carbon-based fertilizers, big machinery, etc., with the claim that we're going to feed the world.
It has been taken over since...
The Gates Foundation, which has pushed people into starvation with these methods of bringing in Kraft food and McDonald's and Cargill and these big corporations that he has invested in,
and Monsanto, of course, where he is one of the biggest investors, to create supply chains and to force those governments to force upon their people to Chemically based agriculture that enrich corporations in which he personally is invested.
Absolutely.
When you and I eat green agriculture, we know what it means, but a lot of people don't.
You know, Rockefeller launched it in India.
For Africa, it was Rockefeller with Gates who jointly launched it.
And it was really about pushing GMO seeds, privatizing the seed supply, making seed saving illegal.
That's what they're doing everywhere.
We've had to fight this through, we call it the non-cooperation.
We will not accept laws.
That allow it to be claimed that seed is an invention that criminalized the most sacred duty of saving seed and sharing seed.
But, you know, Punjab 66, chemicals introduced.
They always talked about we'll feed the world.
But rice and wheat, you know, they aren't food alone.
We have to have our dals and our pulses.
We have to have our oilseeds.
We have to have our vegetables, our fruits, all that disappeared.
Punjab was forced into slivery of Green Revolution rice and wheat varieties with lots of chemical use, lots of water use.
Nobody talked about the water.
Ten times more water use.
And in this book that had just come out in the US, I have a NASA graph Of how Punjab, the land of five rivers, Punj means five, Ab means waters.
The most prosperous land of the most prosperous farmers and abundant water is today a red zone.
They're running out of water.
The farmers are in debt.
The soil is dying.
And that's why farmers rose in 84.
And they blockaded.
They didn't just blockade the government.
They said, we're going to block the trains.
You're forcing us to live in slavery.
A language that's coming out of farmers of Italy, farmers of Holland, that this system is a system of slavery.
That same year, a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide, Leaked in the city of Bhopal.
So that year I started to go.
And my work on agriculture is from 1984 onwards.
Both the ecological work, the agroecology, the regenerative farming, and all the data that has been generated in the lives of real farmers, our work shows that the more you enrich biodiversity, you intensify biodiversity rather than toxics and chemicals, you actually have more nutrition.
When you have more nutrition, You can actually have twice the nutritive value grown on the land, for example, for India, by conserving biodiversity, not by creating monocultures.
So one of my early awakenings was, I said, why do they not see the richness of Of the thousands of crops we grow, the 200,000 rice varieties we grow, what is this monoculture of the mind?
So from that time onwards, I then realize it has impact on health, something we share in common.
It has an impact on farmers' livelihoods.
The fact that small farmers are disappearing everywhere is because of the design of the system.
But now it was a side effect earlier.
Now it's a deliberate design with the World Economic Forums and the Bill Gates and the Dutch farmers' protest.
Are in fact a response to punishing the farmers for what they were forced to do.
Use more chemicals, do more factory farming.
What we need around the world is a five-year, not build back better, but grow more life.
And we need partners everywhere in every field, including the conventional farmers.
I think ecological farmers, regenerative farmers must join hands with anyone who's on the land because anyone who's on the land can start taking care of the land.
And not participate in the destructive war-like activities.
And today when the farmers are being told you have to disappear, ecological agriculture is the way to not go extinct.
You mentioned about the difference between food and nutrition.
And what we don't understand in America is because we are the breadbasket of the world and we have all of these hundreds of tons and thousands of tons of corn.
And wheat and sorghum and barley and soy, but the plants themselves are devoid of nutrients.
And so people can now fill their stomach and still be malnourished because the chemicals rob the minerals and the vitamins from the food that we're eating.
We're eating food that is impoverished nutritionally.
And that's been something that you've been focused on.
Yeah, it's basically a commodity production system to produce nutritionally empty stuff.
It is not food.
It's not worthy of being called food because food nourishes us.
Food is the currency of life.
It comes from the soil to the plants and feeds us and feeds 100 trillion gut microbiomes.
But this toxic commodity production is nutritionally empty and just in wait to be put on a container ship.
And the second deceit in this system is that 80% of the corn and soya is not even for human food.
40% is for biofuel and 40% is for animal feed.
And this is a very big reason for people being deprived of food.
So we need to create a food system that takes care of the health Of the soil, health of the plants, health of the animals, health of the farmers, and health of the people who eat.
And that's what this book is all about, our 35 years of work, to show that not only is it doable, it's not something we're inventing.
After all, farming is the oldest profession.
And people forget that places like Australia, the Aboriginal people were farmers.
You know, I was given a beautiful book when I did the talk at the Sydney Opera House.
It's called The Greatest Estate on Earth.
60,000 years of farming experience.
India, 10,000 years of farming experience.
Albert Howard was sent by the British to improve agriculture.
And he arrived and said, these soils are so fertile.
And there are lots of insects, but there are no pests.
So I'm going to make the pest and the peasant my professor.
As a result of that, he wrote his book, The Agricultural Testament, which became the foundation of organic farming, with Rodale publishing it in America, Eve Balfour publishing it in England.
And the organic movement was really a result of finding out that there are better ways to farm.
You don't have to have chemically doused fields.
You don't have to have monocultures.
You don't have to have dead soils.
You don't have to have nutritionally empty foods.
It is possible to do a better agriculture.
And that's the agriculture they want us to not just be blind to, but erase forever.
And this period, you know, I think this set, the great reset of 2030, I think our big 2030 vision, and I'm going to be doing a meeting with all the Indian movements, about how by 2030 we build on the movements we've already built, to regenerate biodiversity, to replenish water on our farm.
We have 70 feet more water, higher level of water, because we grew organic, we conserved the soil organic matter.
Soil organic matter makes the water a sponge.
The soil is sponge.
There's more infiltration.
There's less use by plants.
Amazing.
1% organic matter.
It creates 160,000 liters in a hectare of soil.
That's the biggest dam.
I mean, you are all river keepers.
We have to start becoming soil keepers and water keepers in the soil.
And that is what real agriculture is all about.
And they would like to take away the land from the farmers, punishing them for what they were forced to do, use chemicals, push animals into factory farms.
To get rid of them.
And our movement is to have more and more land custodians.
You know, like you have river stewards and river keepers.
We need land keepers.
Farmers have to be land keepers and health providers.
That's their most important job.
Yeah, and you talked about the Dutch farmers and that revolution, which has been kind of distorted and covered up by the press.
And it's really a revolution against Bill Gates's vision that the only way to solve the climate crisis It's through these big geoengineering processes and by getting farmers off the farm and stopping people from pursuing their economic self-interest.
And it's a fixed game.
As you say, it was rigged.
The problem was created, imposed upon them, and now they're being punished for it.
One of the things that you also talk about is that the way to solve the climate crisis and the overload of carbon in the atmosphere, the principal way is by restoring our soils.
Absolutely.
So, you know, I wrote in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit on Climate, I realized that all the talk in the The climate discussion was about consumptive energy, you know, energy that we use to drive our cars to heat our homes.
And agriculture was being totally neglected.
So I added up the figures then, and this work has been built up much more since that time, that about 14% emissions come from an industrial farming system.
You know, the nitrogen fertilizers that lead to nitrous oxide, heavy machinery.
If I look at the machinery in the Midwest or Brazil, It doesn't look like farming.
It looks like warfare.
Another 20% is destroying the forests because now you've got commodities and there's never enough of commodities.
If I'm growing food on my farm, I know exactly how much that land will produce.
I know how much my family will eat and I know what I should sell.
But when it's a commodity with a global use of biofuel, animal feed, the Amazon is being torn down.
And the destruction of forests by agribusiness is another 20%.
And then you have a 20% by taking good food and turning it into junk.
Shipping it thousands of miles, we call it food miles, packaging it, processing it.
75% chronic diseases are linked to ultra-processed food.
There's so much research on that.
And then because this is a system based on uniformity and long-distance transport, you have massive waste.
That's 4%.
Add it all together, it's more than 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, if you...
Get rid of all of this.
It's so easy.
You don't have to use chemicals in agriculture.
You get rid of the 14%.
You don't have to chop down forests.
You can have trees on your farms.
My father, a forester, used to tell me there were more trees on the farms of Uttar Pradesh where he served.
Than in the forest, because we farmed like the forest with the forest.
So you get rid of that 20%.
You don't have to ship food thousands of miles, local food systems, and you don't have to ultra-process it, artisanal processing, good processing, and that gets rid of another 20%.
And because it's local circular economies, you get rid of 4% of the waste.
But you're doing more than that.
You're doing two additional things to draw down the...
Accumulated CO2 and then N2O. The carbon dioxide that's accumulated, there are only two ways you can recycle it.
You can create all kinds of carbon secreting machines.
They will not recycle your carbon.
The green leaf, the brilliance of the photosynthesis of the green leaf, is the conversion of the sun's energy given in abundance to absorb carbon dioxide.
And turn that carbon dioxide through the mechanism of the plant's life into carbohydrates, which my dear friend Andre Liu has called the molecule of life.
That's what gives us food.
That's what gives us fiber.
And in addition to that, our breath, our oxygen.
Now, that is where the solution lies.
Our planet was a carbon dioxide rich planet.
We were 90% carbon dioxide.
And then the earth brought the microorganisms, then the plant, increased the photosynthesis, And cooled the planet down to 13 degrees centigrade.
It's raising again, because not only are we using fossil fuels, we are destroying the biodiversity that would recycle it.
And the Earth became a carbon-rich planet.
That is in the capacity of biodiversity.
We just have to learn those lessons from the Earth, the biosphere, and replicate it in our agriculture.
And the more we do that, the more carbon there is in the soil.
The research of many organizations doing regenerative agriculture, organic farming, is showing that you can literally sequester up to 120 gigatons of carbon.
Basically, what you need is about 30.
But you can go much more as you enrich the soil.
I call it giving back to the earth what came from her.
That's what organic farming for me is.
An act of gratitude to say, thank you.
You gave all this organic matter.
You gave all this biomass.
Here's a little bit.
And she will then produce the mycorrhizae.
She will produce the earthworms.
And she will produce the nutrition.
And she will create health.
And the data is showing that increase in mycorrhizal fungi increases photosynthesis fivefold.
That's the true way of increasing productivity.
So we can store more carbon in biodiversity and biomass.
And store more carbon in the soil.
We will have more food.
For this, we need more people to take care of the land, so we need more farmers, not less farmers.
This will give us healthy food and biodiverse food, so we'll get rid of all the health bills from chronic diseases.
Let me ask you one other thing.
You know, I could talk to you for weeks, and we have when we're together.
But these podcasts do better when they're shorter, so I'm going to try to restrict myself.
But I want to talk about one other issue.
Many of the people who listen to this podcast have been following the gain-of-function studies.
In Wuhan, in Ukraine, and all over the world.
And these efforts by Peter Dezak and Tony Fauci and Michael Callahan and USAID to inventory all the microbes on Earth, all the viruses in the world, in order to create a global archive.
And then they began doing gain-of-function studies on them so that they can patent them and enrich the pharmaceutical companies.
This is a very, very close parallel to what Bill Gates did with the global seed inventories.
And as you know, back in, I think, the 60s and the 70s, we created the United Nations and other global bodies created, I believe, seven seed banks.
No, no, 25.
- 25. - Seven major ones, 25 all over the world because they saw the seeds because of monoculture were disappearing in these heritage seeds which had been developed through 60,000 years of agriculture that were brilliantly adopted to local water, to local climate, et cetera, were being eradicated.
So there was a global effort to say, this is valuable.
We need to inventory and bank these, and seeds can last for hundreds of years in those seed banks.
But then Bill Gates came, and those seed banks needed money.
He supplied the money.
He got control of them.
And now he essentially controls all of the seed banks in the world, and his scientists are now altering those genomes slightly.
So that they can patent those seeds and really own the life force of global agriculture to privatize the knowledge of 60,000 years of agriculture and turn it into a new financial asset that can be banked, that can support the financial industry.
Please, I know that's a big question, but talk about how that works.
Yeah.
So, you know, Navdanya, as I mentioned, started when the corporations wanted to patent and own the seed.
And I said, no way.
Seed is self-organizing.
Seed is the heritage of thousands of years of farmers' innovation.
So when the Green Revolution was launched, all the seeds of the world were put in these seed banks.
And then what was introduced to the farmers were these chemically bred plants.
Varieties which were called high-yielding, but they're only high-yielding in terms of the grain that goes as a commodity.
They're low-yielding in terms of the total biomass.
We've done lots of studies on this.
They're low-yielding in terms of nutrition, and they're low output when you measure the whole ecosystem, all the production you can have with biodiversity.
You're right.
Two years ago, three years ago, When the public funding was going into a crunch, Bill Gates would just give a million here and 50,000 here, and he had the rights to all the seats in these amazing seat banks, which is the heritage of the world.
But he has gone much further.
Because of his trying to control the world through his digital empire, he is trying to bypass the laws that have been put in place so that companies and countries take permission when they take seed from a country or a farmer.
And there's something called a seed treaty in the FAO. Now, when I do breeding, I know this is my seed.
These are its qualities.
These are its traits.
This is called the passport data in the seed banks.
Mr.
Gates wants to own the seed by bypassing the international obligations and doing digital genome mapping.
You know, computers can read a genome.
There is no knowledge in it.
And he's done this again and again.
And, you know, because we've saved seeds, and many of these seeds were salt-tolerant, which when the cyclones hit, because we'd saved them, we could distribute them to the farmers, flood-tolerant.
He claims to have invented, through his foundation, the flood-tolerant seeds by calling it the sub-G. No, he just stole seeds from Indian farmers and then did some breeding.
But the trait of salt tolerance and the trait of flood tolerance is in breeding and innovation of farmers over thousands of years.
So not only is he trying to turn this into a financial asset, he is literally a biopirate.
And talk about how the financial community, the Blackstones of the world, the Goldman Sachs, profit from basically privatizing nature and turning it into a financial asset upon which they can borrow.
And please tell us about that.
So I saw Bill Gates trot around the stage with heads of state in the Paris Cop on Climate.
And I said something has shifted.
Heads of state used to be heads of state.
And now a billionaire is bigger than the heads of state, and he's telling them what to do.
So that's when I wrote the book Oneness Versus 1%, which has been published by Chelsea Green.
In 2008, when the Wall Street collapsed, These asset management funds, which is the billionaire money, the rich people's money, they weren't big.
I think it was less than a trillion for BlackRock and around that much or a little less for Vanguard.
So when we did this book, Oneness vs.
1%, That's the time when buyer bought out Monsanto.
So we wanted to do the arithmetic.
We said, okay, who has more money?
How did the buyer buy Monsanto?
And then we found that buyer Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, take any company, the big pharma, take anybody.
The top 75% investments are by these financial asset management funds.
For them, the world is only financial assets, which they gamble on.
Speculate on and increase the risks to have their returns.
Last year, just before the Glasgow summit, The financial world and Rockefeller Foundation again, all the time, they pop up again and again.
They just cooked up.
And that, to me, is the tragedy of the way the world is being governed.
One or two people gang together in a little room, World Economic Forum, and just say, this is what's going to be the constitution of the world, free trade.
That's what Mr.
as the Claude Schorke said for the WTO.
You know, Rockefeller and New York Stock Exchange get together and say, now we're going to create natural asset companies which will own nature.
Now, one would think, okay, they're just taking it one step beyond, you know, private property and land, trying to privatize seed, privatize water.
But it's worse because the same system has pushed countries into debt, like they pushed farmers into debt.
In India, the BT cotton area, you know, is the highest rate of suicides India has lost 400,000 farmers to suicide, most of which are in the GMO cotton belt.
And our farmers who've left BT cotton using native seed, doing ecological agriculture, are earning two times more.
So it isn't that ecological agriculture doesn't reward the farmer.
It, of course, rewards the earth.
This new natural asset company, for example, there are all kinds of treaties being written.
Every country is in debt.
We are really slipping into a big debt crisis.
And all it takes is just like Bill Gates went with the one million and said, the seed bank is mine.
The Black Rocks and the Vanguards and the asset management companies can go to an indebted company and say, okay, yeah, give us your forests and your mountains.
And here's the money to pay your debt.
And because we are in a deep crisis, this kind of new enslavement will increase unless we rise up and say nature's not for sale.
That's what I wrote.
I said Mother Earth is not for sale.
That's what we said at Seattle when we stopped the WTO. Our world is not for sale.
You know what they're imagining to make, you know, in a crumbling world where there's cost of living marches everywhere, where people aren't being able to pay for food and rent?
They're talking about an economy of financial assets under their control of $4,000 trillion.
And a lot of that is just from privatizing nature.
And, you know, they privatized the seeds.
Now they're going to privatize the viruses, which are, you know, USAID and NIH and the big financial companies that are going to own them.
And we're becoming serfs on our own land.
We're being pushed off the land and it's a new form of serfdom.
It's a new form of feudalism.
It's the system that in our country, we had the revolution in 1776 to escape European feudalism.
And now we're having these An aristocracy of billionaires, a plutocracy of billionaires, aligned with the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies, who are pushing the world and middle class, eradicating the middle class, creating these huge gaps in wealth that create this global aristocracy, and the rest of us become serfs on our own land, to the extent that we own any land.
And as the great researcher and Klaus Schaub said, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
But then he's saying overnight, you know, India was not a land of automobiles.
We've been forced to become an automobile culture.
And now you can't go anywhere without a traffic jam.
No matter how many super highways they build, we are constantly running out of space.
Now, overnight, the World Economic Forum says no private ownership of cars.
Well, say that after you have created a public system of transport, You can't shut down the options you forced on people.
It's more than becoming serfs.
When the slaves were there, the entire cotton empire of the United States required the slaves.
They needed to keep the slaves alive.
This new slavery is it wants to disclose off and displace, and they say it in so many words, the majority of people.
They don't need them.
And that's why I always say the extinction crisis is not just about other species.
It is about us as human beings, not just as a species being, but with our humanity, you know.
When COVID stuck, I mean, it's amazing.
That period was a period of such rapid consolidation, you know, patents on vaccines, patents on On the SARS virus, but also a patent in Microsoft's hand on humans as users of machines and the algorithm in their machines will judge our value and assign us a cryptocurrency exactly like the social credit system of the United States.
And one of the other really troubling things for me is we did all this work on soil We talked about how important it was to enrich the soil carbon because chemical agriculture had destroyed soil carbon.
Now, exactly this work is being hijacked.
So Mr.
Gates, in his book, How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe, says net zero is the solution, which means I will not stop my pollution.
I'll keep flying my private jets, but I need your land as my offset.
And the whole gland grab is both controlling the raw material for the lab food industry.
Bayer has said it.
When the plant-based economy becomes bigger, our farms will become bigger.
We will be preparing, growing carbohydrates and protein.
No more food.
It's the end of food, end of farmers.
Worse, they're basically actually talking about a system where people are not needed.
That's the dystopia.
And, you know, the people in Silicon Valley are jumping onto fake food.
They are, of course, controlling all the discourse, all the discourse of what is knowledge, especially since I respond to crises that have huge implications for nature and huge implications for humanity.
I find it fascinating that the mainstream media It has not a word about the human crisis that we are living through.
It doesn't have a word about the alternatives that people are building all over the world.
It has not a word about the connections between soil and plants and our food or food and health and food and freedom.
You know, let me ask you something else that I think is troubling both you and me, because we both came out of an environmental movement.
And a lot of the mainstream environmental movement today, you know, the big groups that were always on the side of the poor, that were on the side of working people and, you know, the majority of people...
Many of them are kind of hypnotized by Gates' vision and his supposed commitment to climate change when he talks about it is palaver.
And they're missing some of these really important developments that are occurring with the privatization, with the emergence of climate change.
The dominance by this alliance between large corporations and the military industrial complex, the intelligence agencies and the big media, those have become the enemy of humanity.
And a lot of our friends in the environmental movement are missing that.
Well, you know, when I left academics in 1982, before that my mother had said, anytime you want to leave an institutional job, the cow shed is waiting for you.
And my office, where I'm sitting now, the Research Foundation, is my mother's cows.
There used to be cows in this place when we were children.
And my mother reminded me that to do good work, you need good commitment, you need passion.
And she said, here's the cow shed, never chased the money.
She gave me freedom, you know, so I didn't have to look for rents, I didn't have to look for office space.
I think what has happened to a large part of the very big environmental NGOs, They are so addicted to very large funding.
And in this world of impoverishment, the only people who have large money are the billionaires.
So one has to be creative in order to mobilize the resources outside the billionaire trap.
Because I've watched, I've been part of the biodiversity movement and the climate movement since 1992 when we wrote the treaties.
But I've seen how the climate movement has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk narrower and narrower.
First, they forgot everything about the phenomena of climate disturbance.
I call it the metabolic disorder of the planet.
Just like junk food gives us metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity, when you give junk a diet of energy, which doesn't belong to the Earth's cycles with fossil fuels, you're going to have a metabolic disorder.
And I think the two things missing in the bigger organizations, I won't call them movements, because when something runs on money, it is not linked to the grassroots.
It's not linked to people's power.
It's not linked to ethics.
It's not linked to justice.
There's so much talk on science, including during the COVID, so much talk on science, climate, but I find the basic science of how did the Earth cool herself and what can we learn from the Earth to cool her now?
Those questions are never asked.
You know, we just lost the guy of thesis as the guy of thesis, NASA scientist.
James Lovelock.
Lovelock, right.
James Lovelock.
He worked with Lynn Margolis and said this amazing self-regulatory system of the biosphere and the atmosphere.
This is a living organism.
The earth is a living organism.
And we are not raising our consciousness enough.
If we did, the farmers, the indigenous people, the people who need work and could work on the land, all of them come together.
And the second is, there's a looking down on the grassroots.
There's an hierarchy that has crept in.
You know, the bigger your organization, somehow you're superior, just like all illusions of superiority.
And for me, any organization...
The power it has is the power to challenge dominant concepts that are the root of destruction, dominant patterns of production and consumption, and find better ways to commit yourself to do it.
And it's not build back better.
Build back better is about concrete.
Build back better is about bridges.
And build back better is about buildings.
We need to turn to life in our abundance.
And Dana Sheeva, please get her new book, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture, and tell us, tell our listeners how they can support you, Vandana.
Well, they can support us by supporting Navdanya, and we have an organization in the U.S., the 501c3, called Friends of Navdanya.
Friends of Navdanya, if you look for it, you'll be able to find their website, and you'll be able to find...
How to make contributions.
And another way you can support, not just us, but be part of the movement, is come join us for the courses.
You know, our biodiversity farm is a miracle of nature.
We followed nature.
We didn't try to dictate to her.
We didn't come with prescriptions and said, this is how we'll do it.
We learned by watching and observing.
And on this farm, you can see how everything that I've written about in this book actually works, how soils come alive.
How biodiversity, part of it, you grow.
And then so much grows more because you're not spraying glyphosate.
You know, glyphosate is an ecocide.
It kills life.
And you taste the lovely food that comes from, you know, that taste comes from the soil organisms.
We don't create taste.
The soil organisms create taste.
So we would welcome you to Navdania.
And navdania.org is the website where you can find out the courses that we offer.
We are offering one in October called Return to Earth.
How do you work with the earth to address all the existential crisis with this?
You better spell Nartanya.
N-A-V-D-A-N-Y-A. Nav can mean nine.
Dan can mean rain.
Or nav can be new, and dan can be the gift.
So we basically see Navdanya as both a protector of biodiversity, but also the new gift of the recovery of the commons.
Because the roots of Navdanya are in the fight against patenting life.
So sharing living systems, sharing seeds, creating community seed banks, sharing knowledge, sharing ways of living on this beautiful planet.
And we have to make a commitment that by 2030 we will not go to extinction.
Thank you very much, Vandanya Shiva.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bobby.
You're the best.
My biography will be coming out in September.
Okay.
So we'll do it.
It's called Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements.
