International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva

hi we just wanted to stand by start by acknowledging the land we are on the native and the indigenous people of Massachusetts and the Wampanoag tribe good evening everyone and welcome to the International Women's week 2020 keynote lecture my name is Fiona Kenney these are my co-chairs of women in design our student group here this is Chelsea Kilburn and this is Vaishnava Shukla we're thrilled to be here with you this evening and we'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our student group this week and our programming for it and our keynote speaker tonight so women in design for those of you who don't know is a student-run organization here at the Harvard Graduate School of Design committed to advancing gender equity in and through design led by women but open to all wid works to make the design fields more equitable and open in light of the historic under-representation of women in recognized leadership roles as well as designs critical need for diversity collaboration care and Rees entering marginalized voices part of that involves working to increase the visibility of and transform conditions around female identifying designers and to incorporate their experiences and knowledge into our education here at the GSD women in design organizes around three core objectives nurturing a supportive community of care on campus creating opportunities for students personal and professional development and public advocacy for systemic change towards gender equity so International Women's Day first celebrated in 1911 is now acknowledged globally and belongs collectively to groups around the world as a day recognizing the social economic cultural and political achievements of women since 2017 women in design has extended this annual event into a week-long opportunity for community collaboration and criticality wid gathers members of the Harvard GSD community and beyond to cultivate new ways of thinking about gender design and community events during this week take many formats and scales in the past we've hosted everything from lectures to walking tours to film screenings and withes 4th annual International Women's week convenes this week March 2nd to 8th 2020 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design so when considering the theme for this year's International Women's week ourselves reflecting upon the qualities wood has extended towards us in our past years with the group I speak personally but I think we can all agree that women InDesign wood has offered as a space of comfort and encouragement feelings that all too quickly dissipate in the face of deadlines intense class loads and the demands that we put upon ourselves so in 2020 International Women's week takes the theme of kinship as its focus we might think of kinship as the connections between people or to borrow from Anthropologie a body of managed social interactions or an extended family in a sense we found this quality within wood but in global moments of social and environmental crisis leaning into an enacting kinship can become a radical act we seek to check in with each other to recognize the contributions of those historically rendered invisible by and in the design disciplines and to celebrate the connections women have between and for each other we additionally aim to further push this idea of kinship to encompass a feeling of responsibility to the environment and to other species meaningful thoughtful interactions with the more than human are essential to the sustaining of life and the development of a more equitable world processes that we believe both are and will be affected by design it is our hope that this consideration of kinship can facilitate a decentering of the human a stance we all too often embrace as designers and now I'd like to thank many people for helping us plan and and like this this whole week this week it's a celebration this week of celebration would not have been possible without the amazing and generous time and support of so many groups so we just want to give an enormous thanks to our fellow student groups including a ASU Modena film GSD and the group at 40k gallery we'd also like to thank the folks at the Office of Diversity inclusion and belonging the Francis Loeb Library the Lakshmi matal and Families South Asia Institute the Alumni council Career Services Student Services in the Office of Public Programs with a huge shout out to Pakistan page for all of their work and we have a special things for Dean writing in the office of the Dean thank you also to all the Wynn members who have made this possible a huge shout out to our team leads and members all these groups have made our programming possible and I would just like to take a moment to extend the invitation to those of you who have not had yet the chance to see our programming for the week yesterday we've had the pleasure of hearing professor Elizabeth Hoover of Brown University speak to the power of food sovereignty and heritage seeds in Native American communities and tomorrow we will host a breakfast conversation with globally recognized Thai landscape architect Katja Gong Burcham among other events happening this week but tonight we thank you again for joining us and Piper for our keynote speaker who invites me we will now introduce dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a physicist and completed her PhD from the University of Western Ontario she subsequently switched to interdisciplinary research in science technology and environmental policy at the instant Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore in 1982 she founded an independent Institute the Research Foundation fought for science technology and ecology at the foothill of Himalaya in Dehradun dedicated to addressing the most significant ecological and social issues of her times in close partnership with local communities and social movements in 1991 she founded navdanya a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of leaving resources especially native seeds and the promotion of organic farming and fair trade the Time magazine has credited dr. Shiva as an environmental hero and Forbes has recognized her as one of the seven most powerful women in the world dr. Shiva has received honorary doctorates from University of Paris University of Oslo Connecticut College University of Guelph among her many awards are the alternative Nobel Prize Right Livelihood award order of the golden Ark global 500 award by the UN or its the international award then an owner grant for peace by Yoko Ono Sydney Peace Prize and the Midori prize for biodiversity personally speaking I have been fortunate to hear dr. Shiva deliver a lecture at SAP Sept University in 2015 while I was still in my final year of undergraduate architecture her powerful and poignant work relating to seed freedom resource extraction and most interestingly the interweaving relationship between nature and women as a part of the ecofeminism discourse resonates with projects and issues being taken up here at the GSD and across Harvard before we invite dr. Shiva we have a little snippet from her upcoming documentary for all of you to watch [Music] food is a weapon they said when you sell real weapons and arms you control our knees when you control food you control society when you control seat you control life it just so happens that throughout history in every culture it's women who kept the seed [Music] some horn in the Himalayan forest and non separation from nature was quite clearly a lesson we had a classroom out in those forests I chose as a young child to do physics even though the schools I went to didn't operate because for me physics was about understanding how the world works so at the end of it I did a PhD in foundations of quantum theory and it's quantum theory that taught me how to make connections because of my book I got invited to a biotech meeting where I realize what the industry wanted to do with the scene which is to take control of the seed through pattern changes that's when I started I took a commitment to to start saving seeds but I also realize it's not enough to talk anymore what to do it can't wait for governments and corporations to make the shift people must [Applause] a GMO forced on people without a label is a criminal act Monsanto is proud to be the industry leader in agricultural innovation Monsanto sneaked into the budget law a clause that no court could ever rule against it we're committed to helping farmers double yields by 2030 GMOs haven't produced more there's only one way ecological farm small farms and yet we get the propaganda without GMOs people will starve without chemicals people it stop [Music] we have enough innovation and technologies to grow more food without killing our farts you have to throw the light of disclosure in order to break these secret bonds between manipulated officials manipulated GMOs and manipulated science [Music] miss Gandhi seven social sense politics with our principles wealth without word pleasure without conscious worship without sacrifice if I hadn't felt imperative to come back to India both to answer the puzzle of the disconnect between big size and big poverty as well as just the surge to get back I didn't know how it but to give back [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] no lady for me why did she drive you nuts [Music] please join me in welcoming dr. Vandana Shiva for this year's International Women's week he not lecture [Applause] thank you so much to the wonderful young women of the Graduate School of Design for organizing a whole week to celebrate women spa and most importantly to celebrate it at a time where the world needs it desperately we're living through times when life on Earth itself is threatened I have a new book out called oneness versus the 1% a bit of that film shared about my background and you know it's an amazing thinking that the design isn't just in the obvious field of design even science is about design because the way you design the world in your mind is the way you relate to it in the real world and when you design it as dead matter just to be exploited you will exploit it when you design it without any understanding of limits you will violate the planetary limits when you design it with deep recognition of interconnectedness you will nurture those relationships and this basic recognition is what I drew from my learnings in quantum theory that nonlocality non-separation interconnectedness that is the nature of reality but we have a design in the paradigm of mechanistic thought which didn't evolve it was imposed that mechanistic thought is based first on the assumption that we are separate from nature and nature is constituted of discrete particles separate from each other who can only relate through violence through force through action by contact in the quantum world there is no separate bility my thesis was on nonlocality in quantum theory everything is interconnected they are no fixed essentialized qualities that have been built into the way people are looked at nature is looked at potential is the defining quality in the quantum world the fixed immutable particles that cannot change need force and the kind of force that's now being applied through chemicals even through the genetic manipulation where the idea is that a gene is not in relationship with the whole genome and the complexity of living organisms and it's in not in relationship with all the organisms it relates to a gene is an atom in fact the word originally used for genes was atoms of biological determinism we look at the history quantum theory is based on the size function the potential and because it's about potential it's also about uncertainty the mechanical world is based on a false illusion of determinate nough certainty and in the quantum world we know we cannot get rid of uncertainty the uncertainty principle of eisenberg - this is linked to the fourth principle no excluded middle no duality no either/or in the quantum world it's and in the mechanistic world you can either be a wave or a particle in the quantum world you have potential to be both and they're complementary this is Bohr's complementary principle and what I evolved in my mind in those years of training my mind out of mechanistic thought into quantum thought is the way all indigenous people have thought all indigenous cultures are based on relationship on kinship as being part of the earth part of what's happening right now is fires in Australia and more and more people are realizing that the Aboriginal people had systems of management based on fires and they weren't bush people they were gardeners of 40,000 years and they could keep living with that same land over thousands and thousands of centuries because they sent those saw themselves as part of the earth I just read a poem Mother Earth by an Aboriginal poet I belong to this land it runs through my veins is the earth in my bones it's the feeling I get when I return to my place it's deep down inside me it's my mother earth space whether it's Pachamama is the organizing principle of the andean cultures or india with thousands of names what I love about India is we can always give 100 names the Ganga has hundreds of named ionic is here and she's worked so much on the Ganga but even the feminine has so many names boom Eva Sundra Bluth we you can choose whichever expression you prefer because when you realize that the world is one interconnected whole you also realize that what appears different is actually different expressions of an interconnected reality that's the ecological principles I learned from my very early days of activism in the 70s from an amazing movement of women and I'd like to honor them I'd like to express my gratitude because I say over into the University of Western Ontario to learn the foundations of quantum theory deeply but I went to the University of Chipko where women who'd never been to school by my professors because they lift the forest they knew more biodiversity than any expert and long before the international community started to develop the language of ecological functions and services of nature the slogans of Chipko said and I remember this so clearly women came out with lanterns during the day and the police was there and the officers were there and they said you stupid women can't you see the Sun is out you don't need lanterns and they said no it's not for the Sun it's for you because you seem to imagine that these forests are timber mines but these forests are our mothers and they give us soil water in pure air and then there was a flood in 1978 and the World Bank had to wake up to the fact yes the forest had watershed functions and our government then made a policy responding to the Chipko women to say logging in the high altitudes commercial logging would stop but the discussion on air went on is enough stupid things how can they think tea trees have anything to do with air when the basic photosynthetic reality is that the carbon dioxide we breathe out is what only green plants can convert to oxygen and make it I now this is part of the climate work except that again instead of saying forests perform this function and are the lungs of the earth there's now an attempt to trade in the ecological functions besides the destruction of the last lungs and the last levers it breaks my heart to see what's happening to the Amazon for some more GM soya some more meat and it's not just the biodiversity of the Amazon that's being exterminated the indigenous cultures are being exterminated continuing a five hundred year legacy of extermination of the local the indigenous the diverse the world views of the earth as living herself is now recognized in science James Lovelock talked about the Gaia hypothesis that he was he was a NASA scientist and he realized that the earth organizes her temperatures she organizes her climate and as I see the disruption of her organizing capacity is the instability that is now leading to temperature increases untimely rainfall all that we talk of as climate change I refer to it as climate chaos this climate change means there'll be a linear line of increase in temperature and there are people who write the climate skeptics the climate deniers say Oh that'll be fine because they'll be able to swim in the winter in the Nordic countries well actually if only they knew the sauna in Finland they get out of the sauna and jump into the frozen lake anyway they don't need warm temperature to swim but we don't have a linear line we have extreme events unpredictable uncertain we have hailstorm in the peak of summer we have floods and deserts and we have warming and melting of the snows and ice of the world it's happening in the Arctic it's happening in Antarctic but it's happening in the third Pole my region the Himalaya we did a study and a book a lab a short film on climate change at the third Pole and it's interesting because working with the communities they tell you you know this glacier was 25 meters thick it's now 2 feet and yet because at the Copenhagen summit attempt of denial was made suddenly the scientists started to talk about oh there's no retreat of gracious again they've come back to the fact that yes we might see the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers which means that half of humanity which depends on the waters of the Himalaya for their drinking water and the irrigation half of humanity will be deprived of water we haven't even started to imagine the countries dependent on the glacial melt having to live it out it no one has imagined what the disappearance of the perennial Ganga and conversion into a seasonal stream will mean for one third of India that is in the kinetic basin but not only are the diverse species interconnected the beauty of it is they are self organized I think one of the problems with the mechanistic paradigm and the mechanistic design in the mind projected onto the world is that it as you that the only change can be external and it can only be through violence but every cell every micro every being is autonomous and autopoietic self-organizing free dynamic and evolving but not isolated in its autonomy and it's self-organization it's interconnected and non-separable when you shift to self-organization and organization from within you realize that you can have interconnectedness and autonomy together a problem with the reductionist worldview scientists from at michurina and Varela have identified all living systems at autopoietic organized from within machines on the other hand a low poetic systems assembled and controlled externally one of the most dramatic ontological shifts of our time is redefining living organism specially seeds as machines invented by corporations and this is guided this illusion of seeds as machines and inventions and therefore patentable is what has guided my life since 1987 when I first heard this I said this is madness and yet this madness gets repeated as science and this madness then becomes international intellectual property law and this madness is then even tried to be imposed in bilateral talks because I woke up to this oily long before the WTO came I was able to work with my government we had different governments then it was the 80s we had different Parliament's - I could work with our ambassador in the GATT and we could change the GATT which earlier the draft at Monsanto had brought was parties had to patent seeds and living resources this was changed to parties can exclude from patentability plants and animals and for seats they could create suture nourish system so I went back to India started to work with our government in Parliament we passed laws I was invited there was no one else talking about it so they asked me to help draft the laws we managed to get in our past and law a clause plants animals and seeds are not human inventions it's a simple recognition of kinship in law but plants animals and seeds are part of our extended family of life I call it the earth family the problem is the word family has become so abused because of patriarchal readings and patriarchal domination but a family means Pynchon and when the whole world is your family then every tree every blade of grass every microbe the elephant the big cats and every one of diversity in human cultures are human colors and it's very strange because till colonialism everyone knew their people of different colors but it wasn't a problem it was diversity and it racism was born out of capturing blacks from Africa as slaves and bringing them to work in the cotton fields and in the sugarcane plantations and that's where racism was born exactly the same process that led to the idea that indigenous people weren't fully human and the same process led to the idea of women being like the earth inert dead matter or at best reproductive machines I remember this must be about 25 years ago I had been invited to a keynote in one of the five colleges and I was looking through the archives to get a sense of how this college came to be and in the archival material there these debates that if women start to study their brains will grow and therefore the uterus will shrink that's how mechanical thinking was and it still is unfortunately because mechanistic thought is based on separation disconnection and essentialism and it defines women as purely reproductive machines it defines people of color as inferior and it defines indigenous people as not having any human capacity it defines diversity of humanity into nature which is now just dead matter to be conquered to be owned this birth of capitalist patriarchy comes out of the 500 years of colonialism which morphed into the 300 years of fossil fuel-based industrialism and we're living in the continuity of both when I was trying to make sense of why is it that women were rising to protect the forest to protect the rivers and that's when I wrote my book stayin alive I realized that it wasn't by accident that we think mechanically about the world we've designed our paradigms to declare war against the earth Francis Bacon is called the father of modern science and according to him the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom that violence is what gets the secrets of nature out he actually went on to he wrote a book called a masculine birth of time where he has defined knowledge that comes through participation and co-creation and recognizing the life in nature he defined that as effeminate and the masculine birth of time was basically a knowledge based on separation it's out of this thinking that the Royal Society was born and and as the Royal Society says bacon promised to create a blessed race of heroes and Superman and they're still trying to chase their dream every illusion of superiority comes from that sense of we are blessed race of heroes and be with the chosen ones the Royal Society inspired by Bacon's philosophy was clearly scenes by its organizers as a masculine project in 1916 64 and that period you know poor Bo Columbus actually was not coming to this continent he didn't even know it existed he was coming to my land and that's why all indigenous people in all their diversity are called Indians it's just that the land came in the way and what he had been given was called a letter patent and I found this out when I was trying to look for the roots of the patent word patents since when does it exist it only now relates to invention but the letter patent was an open letter of declaration and it was basically a hand-me-down from God to the Pope to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to Columbus basically said go conquer any land where we don't rule and take it over on our behalf and it went on to talk about it evolved later a year later into the papal bull by Pope Alexander that you have to civilize the barbarians and if it means exterminating them exterminate them exactly the same kind of letter patent is what brought together 300 merchant adventurers as it's called to form the first corporation the East India Company the rural India and ruled as part of the world the Boston Tea Party was part of that period it gave rise to the idea that if land wasn't occupied through conquest it was empty and it did empty out 90% of the indigenous populations of America so terra nullius as a legal idea led to the design which led to the violence against indigenous people and and it's interesting that you know because I grew up as an innocent physicist I didn't read the classics till I was mature and had been through life and you know you can't understand how is it that these are called classics the bacons idea of science as domination and separation is called science because it's not knowledge knowledge is true know your relationships how is it that a lock can say the indigenous people of this land can't have property because they don't improve the land because their oxen roam free so freedom for other species was treated as proof of inferiority an extermination of the Bison then became the design Hobbs who could not imagine democracy a self-organized communities writes this classic which is still the basis of the way states want to run through centralized control and expanding by the day through the new toxic mixture that isn't so new because it was their hundred years ago the mixture of seeking economic power through tools of fascism inspired by bacon was Robert Boyle I learned about Boyle's equation that more you compress a gas the less volume it takes but he wasn't that innocent because we now think of science and religion as opposing categories but they were one in that period Robert Boyle was a director of the East India Company but he was also the governor of the New England company the company that ruled this part and he says he explicitly declared his intention of ridding the New England Indians whose land we stand on of their ridiculous notions about the workings of nature he attacked the perception of nature as a kind of goddess and argued that the veneration where with men I imbued for what they call nature has been a discouraging impediment to the Empire of man over inferior creatures of God this is basically saying there is no earth family because it has declared other species as inferior species creatures and therefore because the indigenous people take care of other species they too are an inferior culture and when he died he left a will to defend Christian religion against those he considered notorious infidels namely atheists pagans those who believe nature is living and treati a sacred and Jews and Muslims I didn't realize Muslims were all red that long ago part of a problem so in the 60s and the 70s the use at that time they didn't call it physics they call it natural philosophy but natural philosophy and a fundamentalist Christianity became part of the extermination it became part of one colonizing mission and this then got accelerated a century ago with the oil but two centuries ago before with coal and fossil industrialism is everyone recognizes the main driver of climate change because what you're basically doing is extracting 600 million years of nature's work to take what she had buried underground and fossilized into coal into gas into oil extracted and run the industrial machine way beyond the recycling capacity of the earth and not only are you pumping so much the Earth's own capacity of recycling the living carbon recycling the living nitrogen is there but when you pump out every year 20 million years of her work on fossilisation and turning it into dead carbon you're also simultaneously destroying the capacity of reabsorption you're destroying the forests you're destroying the soils you're destroying the farmers my work over the last thirty since 84 I started to work on agriculture because of the Punjab violence and the death of thousands of people in the city of Bhopal when a pesticide plant leaked and Union Carbide which owned the plant is now owned by Dow which is merged with DuPont and there was a poster I remember at that time where it says Dow has a hand in India's future and it's supposed to that you can look for and it's a beaker from a lab pouring a red liquid on a farmer with a bullock we know it had a very bloody hand in India's future and it is what woke me up to the violence in agriculture I started to look I said what is this design where did it come from why do we farm in this waste that has to kill thousands 30,000 were killed in the Punjab violence 1984 we've been having violence in Delhi right now and everyone is talking about the violence of 1984 because the violence that began in Punjab then led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and out of that the killings of six in Delhi everyone is talking about 1984 again I don't know how or well make that year for his book I realized while doing my work for the United Nations University for which I was working on a program on conflicts over resources I said this conflicts here and I think it has to do with resources and doesn't have anything to do with religion I'd like to investigate and I did and I wrote a book called the violence of the green revolution that the University of Kentucky a press has published and I realized that the chemicals we use as progress in science are actually chemicals that were developed first originally for Hitler's labs by G Farben the cartel that is still the one running agriculture right now they've become a cartel again because buyer has been bought by has bought Monsanto Dow and DuPont have merged and Syngenta has merged with Kim China and then there's BFF BSF you might have been following the cases in this country BASF and Monsanto have had rulings on the dike Amba drift which is you know it's roundup Hughes led to roundup resistance so Dyke amber was then used for killing the weeds but it drifts and a peach farmer got a two hundred thirty five million dollar ruling recently but three farmers before that got cancer rulings victories and cancer cases last time I talked to lawyers there were more than 80,000 cases in this country of cancer victims because of the use of roundup and here again is evidence that what we do to the earth what we do to the land what we do to biodiversity eventually comes back to us there is no separation even the chemical fertilizers did not come from a science for feeding the world it came from the explosive factories and ammunition factories Hitler and it's basically a process of fixing nitrogen at very high temperature by burning fossil fuels and for one liter of diesel you need two liters of no for one one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer you need two liters of diesel and the graph of nitrogen fertilizer continues to grow but does nitrogen fertilizer help improve the soil it doesn't we've just done a study after 20 years being on a farm and basically the top of soil ecologists of India did the study for us of the continuous changes in soil if land they studied five years farmers who had been cultivating through chemical means including applying nitrogen fertilizer and farmers who had been doing organic farming in do mali organic farming reduced soil organic matter which is carbon by 14 percent in organic it went up up to 99 percent nitrogen went down 22% in the nitrogen synthetic nitrogen applied fields but it went up a hundred percent in fields where we applied nothing outside but we allowed the soil organisms to make the nitrogen earthworms make nitrogen bacteria make nitrogen there are millions and billions of soil organisms that are producing soil fertility zinc down 37% in the chemical soils up 14% in the organic soils I had a doctor visit me from Australia she looked at this data she said I now understand why half of the teenagers in Australia who come to me for treatment have depression she says I do their bare in chemistry they all have zinc deficiency and now I understand why it's beginning it's beginning with industrial farming magnesium 17% down the giving kids very strong psychiatric drugs for attention deficit disorder they call it just lack of candy magnesium it's increased 14% in organic soils so the health of the planet and our health is one health the health of the planet is both the amazing capacity of the earth to regulate a climate systems and we disrupt those regulatory processes you basically do what the problem of diabetes is diabetes is called a metabolic disease I call climate change the planetary metabolic disease pumping too much carbon dioxide too much nitrogen oxide nitrogen fertilizers emit nitrous oxide which is 300 times more lethal for climate instability and most of the methane is coming either from animals factory farms you know that's why they stink when you go past a careful you get a stink OH the huge dumps of garbage you should become methane factories the sources of of greenhouse gases I wrote a book called soil not oil I'm very happy to leave these books that have carried for the library at School of Design I'd written this books on a toil that rrally that they were showing in Copenhagen this was 19 2009 and that's when I said why aren't they looking at the soil and at that point my assessment was about 45% of the greenhouse gases come from a system of producing food that's fully based on fossil fuels and chemicals derived from fossil fuels the petrochemical industry is a fossil fuel industry the figures now are the production is contributing 11 to 15 percent of greenhouse gases land-use change and deforestation it sounds very tame but it's basically chopping the Amazon and the rain forests of Indonesia for palm oil it's 15 to 20 percent processing transport packaging retail is 20 percent and at the end of it you get degraded food that gives you chronic diseases it's not food anymore I see you've turned food into anti food this food is supposed to nourish you and then waste itself 2 to 4% on the other hand as I shared those figures with you we have a system if we co-create with a living earth and get out of this trap that the earth is inert and Gent and we are a conquerors and we re-establish the recognition that we are part of the earth and as participants in her processes we can practice non-violently and in this non-violence lies the hope for the future all the data is showing that at the rate at which we have been recycling carbon and nitrogen on our farm if the whole world farmed through biodiversity whole world farmed organically we could actually reverse climate change and we'd have good food and we'd have livelihoods and we'd have peaceful societies because what the biodiversity is doing is pulling out that excess carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide from the atmosphere through the plants and putting it back where it belongs in the soil this is a living earth solution it's the denial of the life of the earth and her capacities to create to heal to recycle that has allowed an illusion of conquest but a system that's gone crazy is not a system in which you are in charge I mean the idea of conquest has given us this world this new little being this brought panic to everyone and in the title of the economy says and it's going global we're supposed to stay local only the big players were supposed to be global how can these nasty pests him viruses go global it throws the system into disarray because when you discard the life of the other it could be a microbe you in fact create a recipe for disorder no wall will prevent this moving walls can't prevent people from moving with the violence you know this morning when I got up I picked up the Boston Globe and it had an interesting picture it's written by two faculty of Harvard from Sutton Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School so I guess it's very respectable it's basically talking about the bedrock of our relationship of the two big democracies is the respect for humanity and human rights and democracy well the picture itself is a lot but here I my heart skipped a beat because the scarves they are wearing have actually made been made by navdanya the movement I started let me tell you the story two leaders of violence are wearing nonviolent scars I it's not I didn't give them the gift but I hope it'll seep some non-violence into them so I started to save seeds 87 onwards to defend the integrity of the seed the diversity of the seed the freedom of the farmers to save and exchange seeds and initially we just save seeds of foods food crops because that's where the biggest assault was but then suicide started in the cotton area and basically in a very very rapid period I won't go into too much detail but 99% of the cotton became bt cotton owned and controlled by Monsanto who locked Indian companies into licensing arrangement got the farmers to give up their seeds through something called seed replacement and there was a monopoly that's when I started saving cotton seeds and then we started to work with farmers to do organic cotton and then I started to work with the cardi ashrams to spin and weave cotton navdanya which means nine seats and my folder has just by chance I'm carrying this folder you know this design was actually taught to me by a tribal person in Tamil Nadu who explained to me I thought I was educated in interconnectedness I was out on seed saving trip and he had nine crops in his field and I counted because you know after Punjab I would count crops if I saw anything more than a monoculture I would get very excited and I saw nine crops I said why are your growing nine crops and he says yes laughs Danya and then he explained to me I mean people think if you haven't been to Harvard University you don't know and here was this tribal in a remote forest giving me this lesson of how the nine planets in the cosmos the nine crops in the field and the balance in our body is one continuum of balance and harmony and if he disrupts that balance he's destroying the health of his family he's destroying the earth and even the cosmic balance so when I wanted to save seeds I started the seed saving movement it got the name navdanya much later because of the inspiration of a tribal but the inspiration for me initially was Gandhi because I said if we had a cotton Empire of cotton that took people from Africa made them slaves took the land of the indigenous people pushed 60 million of my people to famine to death due to famine I said what will be the violence of this Empire over life and I took lessons from him of how do you deal with an empire he pulled out the spinning wheel and said as long as we make our own cloth we will be free in a way that Boston Tea Party was also a little attempt of some kind and no it's mutated into another kind of Boston Tea Party but so I said the spinning wheel of today I thought very hard what would it be for the Empire of a life and I focused on the seed I didn't know anything about what to do with the seed the design came to me from the spinning wheel and from there I started the work we've created more than 140 community seed banks including seed banks that have seeds that can tolerate salt and on an amazing response to hurricanes and cyclones as part of climate change we've been able to build back agriculture along the coastal communities of the Bay of Bengal flood tolerant Rice's they're not being invented by Bill and Melinda it's foundation they've been co-evolved over millennia with co-creation between peasants and the earth it there has to be brilliant swear one grass can contribute to 200-thousand rice varieties that's what India involved just as much as one wild plant could give you the thousands of corn varieties in Mexico and even better the amazing systems of diversity in cultivation navdanya for us in Mexico and throughout the Americas the three sisters you never grow corn alone you grow it always with squash and beans and then they are a complete system nourishing each other that mutuality is what is sustainability that mutuality is not just maintaining the health of the earth it's also maintaining our health because we have externalized others so much we forget that the biodiversity in the soil gives us more nutrition gives us healthier plants in industrial societies foods have lost 60% of their nourishment you're eating nutritionally empty food and our work is showing that with biodiversity with organic with native seeds which have far more nourishment we can actually feed two times India's population through conservation that's the other polarity that if you conserve you can't develop but develop what development is a biological ecological term which basically talks of evolution from within a seed becomes a plant that's development you were a fetus you are developed you're a developed fetus that is development but if you are bullied and trashed that's not development and fossil fuel yard stick has become the measure of development years ago you know I've thrown into dealing with the World Bank unbelievable those were the times were India had no plastic and no pesticides and we were declared underdeveloped because we weren't using plastics and pesticides and now India's drowning under plastic waste and our peasants are dying with pesticide poisoning we've done an assessment that every year three 1.3 trillion dollars of damage to human beings and nature is taking place because of chemicals in farming the book is called wealth per acre measuring nutrition per acre we created a health per acre to say what matters really is the nourishment of the food it isn't the weight of a nutritionally empty toxic commodity and part of what has surprised me so much in my long now long journey in agriculture is how we could be taken for a ride by total constructions the construction of yield which only measures what leaves the land not what quality it is know what state does it lead the landing where is good agriculture is culture of the land and should be the production of nourishing food and regenerating the earth as our work in navdanya is showing that farming has to be an act of gratitude to the earth thank you for giving us what you give us and we give you back a part of what you have blessed us with and interestingly our work is showing that the more you give to the earth and in community the more you have the extractive logic that came out of conquest is based on the need to take away everything from the last being and the last person and giving them is treated as a loss but all ecological teaching teaches us the more soil water or water you give to this organic matter you give to the soil the more water you have the more nutrients you have the more food you have but that mechanistic idea that's blocking our ability to make the shift is at the end of it centered on an arrogance of of a monopoly on creativity a monopoly on intelligence the assumption that's been created whether it be the Descartes or the bacons or the Boyles they all work on the assumption that privileged rich men are the only ones who have a mind women don't nature definitely doesn't and the other beings are just there to be exploited remember in debates have had with patenting in the European Parliament this person who was who owned this protein pharmaceutical industry that company is gone you know I would write a book one day of how many bad ideas I saw died in my lifetime and the good ones continue to renew themselves and he said you know he basically had genetically engineered a sheep with human genes in it and his argument was that in the milk of the sheep there'd be human home proteins and the mammary gland of the sheep would be the new pharmaceutical factory and for him the sheep were furry little factories walking on the hillsides it is his the tracy was the first sheep but then they had to clone her and then they made dolly poor dolly is now in a museum the idea of the monopoly of destructive power as intelligence is a negation of the creative power of the universe the creative power of plants as Michael mother has said on plants only in refusing to treat intelligence as an exception in the order of life and the evolutionary process will we gain admission into the uncharted terrain of plant thinking j.c.bose an amazing physicists from my country did work on plant thinking on plants as sentient beings he was among the founders of electromagnetism but he'd used his electromagnetic experiments to see how plants respond to violence and non-violence to good music and to yelling and he could measure the amazing generosity of the world is based on on the recognition of the creativity throughout creation I mean creation comes from creativity doesn't it it's supposed to be but somehow creation went dead somewhere along the way in this and it didn't happen overnight centuries of construction were taking but I didn't complete my story on the scarves let me come back to it so last year I had to give the Gandhi lecture at the cybermat theorem where they're sitting which is Gandhi's first ashram in M the bath very City and while they were showing me the archives I saw this amazing design a facade and it had been hand span and hand woven by Gandhi for his wife Kostova so I asked the ashram I said we should reproduce this for Gandhi's 150th anniversary and they gave us the permission so with the farmers growing organic cotton with the Gandhi Ashram in silver gram we hand weaving a hands big spinning these curves and of course they asked for some so we send them 30 two of them are there and I can see well let Gandhi bless you and let there be with this yeah of the of women's day let me be a transition to nonviolent thinking to nonviolent action and to humility that we need so desperately a humility that will come from this these microbes that are putting the fear in us as one of the amazing you know gen geneticists James Shapiro has written he has said bacteria sentient beings they possess many cognitive computational and evolutionary capacities studies show that bacteria utilized sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of higher plants and animals to meet their basic needs this remarkable series of observation requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings and this becomes more and more important as the destruction of our health and the destruction of the planet self makes us realize that creativity is the way life organizes itself and when we mess up there's one step ahead so Roundup Ready crops gave us roundup resistant sea beads that's evolution plants evolved BT toxic crops gave us super pests that can't be controlled by Bt toxin and the more we dismantle divided their analysis that are showing how I've done this for agriculture but the more you destroy diversity the easier it is for a pest or a disease to move through a system and as we destroy the diversity of our forests and a ecosystems the tiniest of microbes that evolves and mutates can start shifting to unpredictable places and that mobility is something we didn't imagine we didn't plan and we don't recognize it's that shift that we need also because today the chronic disease the communicable diseases agree but the chronic diseases which are affecting everyone with industrial foods they are showing the link between the biodiversity outside the biodiversity in the soil and the biodiversity of our gut microbiome we have a forest within us trillions of microbes in our gut the gut is being called the second brain we are only 10 percent human cells the rest belong to other species it's time to put away the arrogance that some humans are above other humans and those other humans are superior to other species that's anthropocentrism let's say bye bye to grace ISM to sexism to anthropocentrism and celebrate the earth with the recognition that the earth is alive women actually brilliant and all people have rights [Applause] thank you [Applause] happy Women's Day and and so you know long ago when I wrote this book stayin alive some young men would come to me why are you against us I said why I'm not against you I'm just talking about the feminine principle in all of us and Gandhi had a daily prayer he said which go on is three-member now which is make me more womanly make me come more compassionate make me more caring about life around me [Applause] I think we have time for some questions you have this super-awesome students around we request you to kind of just start with the question not have any comments please and just keep it super brief thank you hi I'm Joe Navarro I'm Brazilian I'm sorry that we are now unfortunately interconnected by having to deal with far-right lunatics such as boo scenario and modi we hope our next interconnectedness goes towards something else otherwise the album Amazon you keep burning but I want to ask you about other powerful a monopolistic actors the big tech companies that we are we are also feed record recalling the art code that you wrote about top investors of Facebook being the same as Monsanto as well as Bill Gates relations to the company can have some common comments about how do you see the role of big tax big tech companies such as Amazon Google Facebook Microsoft and the climate cows and how do you see their narratives such as Jeff Bezos creating the earth fund Google saying that their maps AI and big data will help per se the Amazon and what do we do considering that much of our social movements are building and are being built using those technologies as well thank you yeah so you know these companies having that much worse than the individuals having the kind of trillion-dollar wealth is all post WTO because what's called globalization was deregulated Commerce that's what it was and the first meeting of WTO was deregulating software trade that's what shot up Microsoft big issues right now I've just been in Calcutta where I launched a new initiative between navdanya zorg anak farmers and hawkers you know street vendors because 40% of the street vending was destroyed in the last two years by Amazon and Walmart in India so we have to create tighter circular economies based on solidarity to counter these I call them the extractive economies that's what the colonizers did that's what the fossil fuel economy did it's an extractive system but this system too is an extractive system and it is a rent collection system East India Company came and the maid made money said this land is ours and now you pay us the rent and you starve to death because we'll take so much higher rains it's called Lagaan that you won't be able to feed yourself exactly the issue on the seed patenting which we have resisted but behind the scene royalties are collected illegally and in India in us I did a calculation American farmers are paying 10 billion annually in terms of Technology fees and royalty parents bank payments unseen 60% of the seed is in the hands of the four Giants it's interesting that suddenly Tech has developed its own vocabulary and it's not that we didn't have technologies before it's just that we saw their men's means as tools that we use according to our choice for the first time in human history technology in the hands of the billionaires becomes the new civilizing mission for Humanity I know this because there was a decision 2016 to make cash illegal in India it was called D monetization all the poor people lost their livelihoods C but it was assumed that everyone would use digital I noticed the vegetable vendors that come to our street still use cash and the cash economy has bounced back because it is a people's economy the illusions about the big technology firms is they create they extract they don't create anything that you know software programmers create the platforms that they use even Bill Gates didn't really write his basic program it was some professor - math professors in Dartmouth College who did the basic program they posited themselves as inventors when basically we've done a new report it's because Bill Gates announced a new project called AG one you know all agriculture will be one agriculture controlled by him where does he set up the office of Ag one in Mussoorie women centers headquarters but we watch what's going on in India and we pieced it together so basically he's financing a lot of data mining from farmers which will then be packaged back as big data and sold back to the farmers but this is exactly what happened in your 2016 elections Facebook sold data to Cambridge analytical Cambridge analytical analyzed the Facebook exchanges on the basis of four hates hate of women hate of blacks hate of migrants hate of Muslims and the entire election was done on political ads based on those hates so as the Newsweek said when it did the story for the first time we have an artificial intelligent president so when you think of why are the kind of leaders that we have getting created it's very important to remember that in these 25 years of corporate deregulation of Commerce you basically have a lot of money in the hands of very few people and they then are the ones investing in all the companies the companies are not independent companies anymore they are basically billionaire money managed by the investment funds like Blackrock and Vanguard etc they also know that everywhere people on the streets just look at this year show me a country where they weren't protests Chile Beirut Hong Kong everywhere so how do you deal with the rising demand for a change we threw out laced in their company in 1857 the crown took over they established a policy called divide and rule and then they started to divide Hindus and Muslims because Hindus and Muslims had stood together to defend their land their livelihoods their freedom it took from 1857 to about 1924 all kinds of means senses fake identity because you know people in India would say I'm a Hindu and Muslim because they they go to mosques and they'd go to temples and when they'd be asked who are you they'd say I'm a gardener I'm a blacksmith for them the religious part was very very secondary their occupation was their main identity the place where they came of the community they came from and this took so long this is what led to our partition and that partition is still being played out it's an incomplete project so divide and rule becomes a necessity for the 1% to continue to hold on to power and if you notice everyone I mean this is something some of the graduate students should do what are the economic policies being pushed while people are divided because that's really the agenda and none of them none of them make their own decisions I watched the coup against Lula how is it that they are such clones of each other because the past that actually govern have put them in place because they know they will do the job and our work now is that's why this meeting on kinship is so important this your team is so important we have to remember we are one humanity we are part of one earth and whatever we do we will not let this basic recognition divide us either from the earth or from each other and together we are strong it's my reading in my experience that we've misunderstood Gandhi that we look at him and think about political non-violence but he was also talking about economic non-violence and kadhi cloth was a second income for small farmers the constructive program was about building up an economic and a social basis the idea of Swadeshi which I understand is local production it was what he called the heart of satyagraha soul force and it see I I do a solar Swadeshi I have a small solar light that's my bike light and Swadeshi and eaton nonviolent economics were not part of the American civil rights non-violence are not part of our vocabulary for non-violence in the United States I'm wondering what you can tell us about how we reintegrate those ideas into our systems today so you know this book oneness versus the 1% my last chapter is precisely on the three principles that Gandhi put into practice for not just political non-violence but economic system because his response really was from an empire that was based on violence and he wanted to shape economies based on non-violence because they were going to be the basis of freedom and it's quite amazing to me go to save a gram you see everything that you need in human society he was experimenting with in terms of producing at the local level so he had three key terms the first was Swaraj self-rule but it also means self-organizing the power to organize yourself individually your community not in isolation but in relationship Swadeshi off the place and local living economies are an imperative if we don't move there we are going to see more and more people on the streets we're going to see more and more people hungry look at the number of people who are hungry in this country I was in California and the students were saying half of the students in the Universities are hungry and so they were working out systems to get food to the students who can't feed themselves because the costs of the cafeterias are too high and then of course a theory which for Gandhi was the force of truth and Gandhi interestingly practiced this first in 1906 when this divide and rule and apartheid was being put in place apartheid hadn't been named apartheid then it was only named as a system in 1948 but in 1906 the British wanted to turn Indians in South Africa into second-class citizens so they wrote an Indian Act and Indians had to carry had to register on race and they had to carry their identities all the time and a lot of what's happening right now in India around this identity issue is related to that history of the cetera but most importantly any police officer could enter your house at any time and demand your papers you couldn't trade locally you couldn't practice professions and so the people said we would rather die then obey these laws and Gandhi led that such a great says first set theory and I've written about it in a blog it's available on the navdanya dot org website I've called it in the present context gardens of growing gardens of diversity weaving Garland's of love because our national anthem of which we only sing the first bearer in the third Paris says people came from around the world and became part of our culture and we volve Garland's of love this refusal to cooperate with unjust law is what Gandhi calls her taker as a duty as a duty of truth he was inspired by Thoreau who'd refused to pay the poll tax here against the slave system he inspired Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement is very much inspired by Gandhi but it is when King started to take up the economic justice and economic equality issues that's when he was assassinated because the parties you can talk in very sweet ways about civil liberties but you don't touch economic justice and the economy is for me it's a double violence because the origin of the word the meaning of the word economy comes from boycotts our home the historian totally aname is economía the art of living and when you turn the art of living into the art of money-making which Aristotle called chromaticities then you have to practice violence against the earth and violence against others destroy their livelihoods destroy their freedoms take away their resources so the violence is multiple and I look into the future I say why are we building detention centers everywhere in India along the border of Mexico because I feel that if we don't activate our sense of interconnectedness with all life with all people if we don't start sowing the seeds of what I have called earth democracy we are going to see 99% people as disposable especially with the tech working on artificial intelligence to make sure all the mechanical work is man made redundant whether it being radiography or law whatever mechanical work will be substituted and if that's the case 99% people are disposed so you can either share this beautiful planet with love and abundance and sustainability or say it's all mine every bit of land every seed every mind because what's being mined is our mind now and there's a brilliant retired professor of Harvard who's done a very important book for our times it's called surveillance capitalism in which he has talked about we are the new raw material and so in this context we are the disposable people to and if we don't defend the freedoms of all species and the freedoms of all human beings we could see we're down 20 within 20 30 years a level of disposability built into the structures that human humanity will not be able to respond to so this is the time to make oneness and interconnectedness as one humanity on one planet the political project of our times [Applause] unfortunately we don't have any more time for questions but thank you all again for coming and if you are interested please feel free to join us for any of our other upcoming events for International Women's week we hope to celebrate and and yeah bring kinship to the school and to continue discussing this so please join us thank you [Applause]

Channel: Harvard GSD

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Length: 89min 53sec (5393 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020