You are mostly referred to as a critic of globalization, the founder of eco-feminism and foremost an activist. How would you describe yourself?
Vandana Shiva, born in the Himalaya, grew up in the forest, studied physics. I’ve dedicated my life to service of the Earth.
In your film, “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva”, you are saying that “activism is now an ocean”. What does activism mean to you, and how has activism changed over the past decades?
For me, activism is acting according to the truth. You know, you have thought for justice and care for the earth. I believe that we have obligations and observe our existence on this planet at a time of huge plunder. It’s not a position we can live with, so we have to engage, we have to act. My own inspiration to think of ways to face the Monsantos of the world when they wanted to own all the seed went back to activism of our freedom movement.
A lot of it was inspiration from Gandhi. So in that sense, over a century, the grounds of activism have stayed the same. And they are perennial grounds, truth, nonviolence, solidarity. Civil society has changed, activism has not. There‘s a lot of money being spent to prevent us from acting. To turn society and organizations into extensions of the corporate empire. Particularly in areas related to climate change, biodiversity, where the polluters continue to pollute, the destroyers continue to destroy and now they have come up with things like carbon offsets, biodiversity offsets. A lot of NGOs are playing a very big role in this greenwashing. But I don‘t see that as activism. Activism is always about transformation in society, as part of society. As a collective good.
What role does science play in activism?
Science means to know. I‘m a scientist, I am trained in science, in physics, and did a PhD in the foundations of quantum theory. And for me, knowledge is foundational to life. What goes in the name of science today as a social privilege structure, which is what I call patriarchy, is what was created in the 17th century with the Bacons, who wanted to subjugate nature, create a masculine birth of time. People like Descartes, who said there‘s nothing like life, everything is a machine, we are all disembodied minds and some don‘t even have minds. That is not science, because there is no knowledge to it. Bacon brought the systems of torture that he used to implement to crush the peasant revolt on the enclosures of the commons against the women and the witch hunts. He turned that inquisition into a scientific method. And that‘s not science. You don‘t torture nature to know how she works. You respect her. You have reverence for her, you observe her, you try to co-create with her. So the role of real science in activism is to know the real laws of nature.
Do you think we are getting closer? Are we on a path of science transforming into something that works in accordance to what you just said? How do you see the development?
We‘re living in a very divided world. I‘ve written a whole book on oneness versus one percent. There‘s a world of the one percent. There is a Capital „S“ - science as a privileged structure - that what we see as propaganda is science. And to me, that‘s not science and that‘s the reason, for 50 years, I have challenged propaganda purporting as science. GMOs will feed the world, chemicals feed the world, new GMOs are not GMOs. To me, these untruths are the opposite of what science should be. On the other hand, while the dominant science is becoming more and more ignorant about how nature works, we are having more respect for indigenous cultures and their knowledges and sciences. And there‘s a burst of energy in the independent scientific community which is not singing to the tune of money.
The emergence of the science of life is growing by leaps and bounds. Just in a foreword to a book on the new science of life by a civilization that every organism is sentient, every organism is intelligent. Every species has a system of a civilization in the sense it organizes its food, it organizes its habitat, its housing, its culture, its relationships. Intelligence and civilization is not exclusive to humans, and therefore, the new sciences are combining with the ancient sciences that have allowed us to live on this planet without harming her. It‘s very exciting because it‘s undoing all the ignorance that goes with the mechanistic philosophy, which assumes nature‘s dead. If you assume nature‘s dead, you won‘t look for her life. To look for her life, you have to first recognize that nature‘s living.
You traveled a lot and met initiatives and people from all around the world. What do you think can people here learn from initiatives and communities in India or in South America and the other way around?
The inspiration I had to be a physicist, came from Einstein- who was a gift to the world from Germany and Switzerland. Quantum theory is a leap in our imagination beyond mechanistic science. We‘ve assumed that technologies are only for extraction, exploitation, domination. But nature has her technologies. Indigenous people have their technologies that are nonviolent. What we need is a technology transfer from indigenous cultures that have found for 60,000 years, 40,000 years, 10,000 years to know how to do good farming, because right now there is an attempt being created to destroy farming across the board, assuming that industrial agriculture and factory farms are the only way to farm.
There is a 20, 30 year mistake and it‘s totally localized. So if you want to shift, to see how we relate to animals in a different way is to go to the pastoralists. We‘ve got to go to cultures who live with animals as family and where biodiversity of plants and animals go together. A two way flow. But there is no place in this two way flow for sciences and technologies whose only purpose is domination and owning the earth. That we don‘t have to spread. We have to shrink its space.
In your film you say that “the farmers are the last free persons on the planet”. What do you mean by that and why is subsistence farming of such a big importance, in your opinion?
The recognition that farmers are the last free persons came to me when I had organized a rally of 500,000 farmers against GATT and globalization and WTO, which was trying to reduce food to a commodity and so-called free trade, meant that all the seeds go to the Monsantos of the world - now Bayer. All the trade goes to the Cargills of the world, all the processing goes to the Nestles and the Pepsis of the world. And as I watched this ocean, farmers swinging the shawls, saying: We will never accept patents on seeds, we will stay free. I realize the only sector where direct co-creation and co-production with nature is a possibility is farming. For everything else you go to mine metal somewhere, take it to a factory somewhere else. Even electric cars, you mine lithium all over the world, destroy the earth, process it somewhere else. Leave it for the huge footprint of pollution that you don‘t want to look at, don‘t want to count. Let the earth and let the people bear the burden.
So freedom for me is working with the earth, sustaining society and doing it with a free spirit. No one telling you: grow the GMO crop or disappear, which is what the message in Europe right now is - let the farmers disappear with violence. And that‘s why I feel today is a time where every young person, whether they are from a farming background or not, to say, even if it‘s in one square foot of land, I will be a farmer. I will not go extinct.
Regarding our topic of coexistence, what is your perspective, how do you perceive coexistence?
I see coexistence as much deeper than just two things, separately existing. I see the symbiosis as an active, conscious, caring of the other to whom we are related and they too care for you. Let me just give you two examples.
The trees are very different from us, but we breathe because of the tree and we must take care of the tree so that the tree can breathe and we can breathe. In the soil, that‘s organic, trillions of organisms, the soil fungi is going eight miles away to pick up the nutrients and bring it to the plant. And the plant is giving it food, its carbohydrates.
Both of them are giving to each other. And out of that symbiosis and mutuality grows life. That is what, for me, coexistence is.
So it‘s kind of the opposite of what our system right now does on a big scale?
When we look at the system that has been created, imposed, it is not based on coexistence, it’s based on intolerance. It‘s based on what I have called the monoculture of the mind, Anthropocentrism is just for us. It‘s just for us. But nature, even today, works on the principles of diversity and symbiosis. So it‘s not that nature stops doing this work. We just have to remember that we are part of nature and we can live on those principles.
People in our age often struggle with a hard feeling when they see all the multiple crises that the world is facing at the moment, how do you stay hopeful and motivated to fight?
The expressions of the crisis might be multiple. The symptoms might be diverse, but there is one crisis. The crisis of separation, the crisis of illusion that we are separate from nature and nature is inert and dead and we are masters and we can fix nature who‘s deficient, she doesn‘t know how to do things right.
Where does climate change come from?
Forgetting that the Earth has created the climate, the Earth has regulated temperature and thinking that we can beat the Earth in energy management by burning 600 million years of fossil fuel and we have more energy, we have limitless energy. No, it‘s the opposite. Limitless energy comes from living systems which are constantly growing with negative entropy. Fossil fuel is not just limited, but it is destroying the conditions of limitless energy in the plant, in the soil, in the biodiversity of the planet as a whole. And that‘s why we need to start seeing the interconnectedness of the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis. When you ask me how do I keep resisting? For me, resistance is a derived activity. I resist. I mean, that‘s why constantly being described as an anti-globalization activist is part of the propaganda to put me in a certain box.
I‘m a passionate lover of the earth and life. When I see corporations wanting to own the seed and destroy biodiversity, I resist the corporations to defend the seed and the farmer‘s freedom. It‘s a consequence of my commitment to a living, self-organized, autonomous nature, free in her evolutionary potential, and the freedom of human beings to be free with nature.
Our freedom today will not be as humans alone, human freedom is totally linked to the freedom of other species. Not by again trying new mastery and saying: Oh, I‘ll save the planet and climate by killing every animal, destroying and uprooting every farmer. No, that‘s not freedom. Just like life is interconnected, freedom is interconnected.
Freedom comes from expanding the space of all beings. And that is ecological space. That‘s the space they need to live. I bore my energies to both understanding why things are going wrong, but engaging in living the right way. For me, every seed we‘ve saved is a place of hope. It grows, gives you a harvest, it gives you abundance. You can eat some of the food, you can share some of the seeds, and you have seeds to grow next year. Organic.
I was just saving seeds. I did not expect we‘d have six times more pollinators than the forest. We were just saving seeds. I did not realize we’d have 360% more mycorrhizal fungi in the soil who are doing the work of making the soil living. So just being part of the earth, living our daily lifes - I get hope from the earth.
What would you want to tell people who right now feel powerless or who don‘t know how to act, where to start and what to do?
Don‘t think about yourself and the world as you‘re part of the destroyers, the greedy as the center of the world. They‘re like a cancer in the world because only cancer cells don‘t know when to stop growing. These are entities that don‘t know when to stop growing. But they are so dominant, people think of the world through them and think of their power, and then think of our powerlessness. Return to the earth in your imagination. Just remember that you are part of the Earth. And as earth beings, all kinds of new powers and potential come to you. The first potential is that the Earth is a creative force and working with her, we can be creators. And that‘s where power comes from. Put your hand in the soil sow a seed, you feel powerful, not in a destructive, dominating way, with power over others, but in a creative, nonviolent way of power to be, power to evolve, power to coevolve.
The second, to overcome powerlessness is to remember that you have creativity, you have intelligence. You have a beautiful body. Our bodies have not been made to look like the inert burdens that must be gotten rid of and substituted by energy slaves, which is a fossil fuel empire. No, every cell of our body is creative. We‘ve made our hands redundant. Now we use a thumb on a smartphone. The poor thumb. My daily thinking is how to enlarge our ecological minds, to think in more relational ways, how to enlarge our heart‘s compassion, to include every being in the circle of compassion, and how to enlarge the capacity of these beautiful hands to be creative, to be doers not to be redundant waste.
I studied about Indigenous communities and their way of creating technologies. For example, the living bridges of the community of the Khasi in India. It was amazing for me to see the symbiosis they do with nature and how much they see themselves as part of nature. How can we relearn this connection?
First, Indigenous people live the way they do because they learn from nature and that nature is living. So we have to learn from indigenous people. The technologies of ecological agriculture have lasted thousands of years and are constantly evolving. The technology of constantly renewing the fertility of the soil. Because what industrial agriculture has given us is dead soils. It first imagined the soil is dead, then it actually killed it. So we have to turn to the communities to learn. My mother had a farm and I‘ve grown up knowing what good farming is like, but everything I‘ve done over the last 40 years in agriculture has been learning from nature and learning from communities.
We‘ve always been made to feel that only the experts know. But this much I can tell you when agriculture is concerned, people trained in industrial agriculture don‘t know how nature works, don‘t know how a plant grows, don‘t know how the soil creates its own web. So you have to turn to every place and every community, including communities of nature, to be our teachers for this transition.
Do you have an anecdote to share that makes people hopeful, something of your experiences in your life?
Well, for me, what sparks hope is the fact that I heard these corporations say: all seed will belong to us, every seed will be a GMO by the year 2000, every seed will be patented. I took on the challenge of defending the freedom of the seed, freedom of the farmers to save and exchange seed, which is a foundational freedom, freedom of indigenous people, to their knowledge. Not only are not all seeds GMO, not only are not all seeds in Monsantos and Bayers hands, but the community seed banks are growing. And that‘s so exciting because once a community is free of dependence on the corporation, then you can start doing the agriculture that works for the Earth. I feel very proud that we were able to take on corporations which said we‘ve invented the need for pest control. U.S. government and W.R. Grace came to Munich, and we challenged the US government and Grace, collected 100,000 signatures of Indian communities. 100,000 Indians challenged the most powerful government in that time, one of the biggest corporations. It took us 15 years, but we defeated the superpower, and we did it because we had truth on our side. We had friendship to work together and these are stories that remind us constantly that you don‘t have to be big to take on big giants. You have to be truthful.
What I see is that the ecological fight is also an anti-capitalist fight and I wonder how to make other people who are in this anti-capitalist fight, join the ecological revolution or the transformation movement. How do you think we can organize, that also workers or students and all the people who are struggling with the current system understand that it‘s actually just one fight?
What‘s called capitalism really is the system that was formalized as a result of colonialism. It‘s an extractive system. It‘s a system of enclosures of the commons. It created private property in land. We didn‘t have that before. Same logic is creating private property in the seed. Same logic is trying to create private property in our food. So the plunder of nature, the disappearance of biodiversity and the extractive logic on which capitalism is based are the same process. Even more importantly, capitalism is based on a construct. The word capital in Latin means heads of cattle. That used to be the wealth. But now capital is a construct, and it‘s increasingly becoming fictitious. Digital finance capital even more removed construct from real life. But this limitless greed has the power to make us feel that it‘s creating wealth and that it‘s natural for billionaires to have the kind of wealth they do. It‘s natural for corporations to become as big as they are. None of it is natural. It‘s a very, very violent, extractive, warlike phenomena.
For people to realize that we don‘t have to be ruled by capital, there are other currencies of the world: there is currency of friendship, there is currency of being able to work with our bodies and hands, there is currency of water, of food - that these are the currencies we must grow to create the economies that are the economies of life and allow us to practice the art of living.
The very strong degrowth movement, which has challenged the idea of growth, which only measures how much you can destroy nature to turn into cash, how much you can extract from society to turn into money. Degrowth is one way, the ecology movement and the anti-capitalist movement become one movement so that you stop growing profits for a few and start growing life for the common good.