Vandana Shiva – Leading ecofeminist and anti-globalization activist | Thinking Existenz (3/10)

foreign [Music] movement which was started by The Peasant women of my region who basically said you will have to kill us before you kill the tree and that's why the action of hugging to protect the tree because they said the forest gave us everything they give us the water they give us the fuel they give us the fodder they give us the food because the fertilizer from the forest is what created Manya in the fields which are all organic um they give us our medicine they give us our spiritual Roots these are our mother goddesses and your destruction of these forests is leading to landslides we're having to walk longer for water so they knew exactly the science of ecological destruction at that time the biggest forces seem to be government and that too at the regional level there was nothing bigger than that the federal government didn't interfere there were no Global corporations and so the highest power local contractors local government and dealing with them was the strongest movement and we dealt with it and in 1981 the forests were protected and logging was banned in the higher Himalaya for ecological reasons there was no way at that point I could have imagined that 30 years later the world would have become a as commercially integrated and therefore spiritually and culturally fragmented as as it has become that human beings could start to get as brutalized as they've been both those who are victims of this very exploitative system as well as those who perpetuate it because you have to be brutalized in order to try and accumulate other people's share of resources and of course there was no way to imagine that the political instability economic instability that we are watching at National level country after country Greece Island Spain Italy Portugal America which continues to pretend it's fine but is also highly unstable um no the the strongest imagination couldn't have taken me there [Music] 500 years ago um European Kings and Queens thought we can send out our Merchant adventurers uh arise in a very fundamentalist religious thought was used to justify this Conquest the 1492 papal bull and uh Pirates were sent all over the world and was justified in the name of civilization civil civilizing the uncivilized um and the papal bull said go out and Conquer lands that are not ruled by white Christian princes so of course the wives were only in Europe and everything else was non-white and that meant all of the world um what's happening today is a recolonization in a number of ways just as that colonization was driven by power and violence and greed today's colonization is driven by power violence and there was a legal juridical concept created to justify it all it was called teranolius The Empty Earth the empty land wherever you went if there were human beings just deny their Humanity the aboriginals of Australia are not aboriginals the Indians are not really fully Indians they're more like dogs and the the books of that time in the first colonialism where actually Indians are shown with heads of dogs um and because we did yoga and we did all these things then obviously we just couldn't be normal human beings there was something very Twisted about us um today the both the empty Earth in terms of land but also empty life in terms of biodiversity living resources are being colonized and one reason I started the movement nathania in 1987 was that's the time just fortunately I was invited to a meeting on biotechnology the new emerging Technologies to modify living resources and the entire chemical industry which was becoming the life sciences industry as they call themselves talked about how they had to create a whole new system through patenting which is ownership of life and to do that they had to do genetic engineering to claim they're now inventors and creators of New Life and third they had to remove any restriction in terms of markets investment laws and they had shaped then what is called the Uruguay round of gas which became the World Trade Organization they wrote the laws as they've said we were the patient the diagnostician and physician all went in one we uh defined a problem and their problem was that farmers were saving seed now to me having spent my life in childhood with biodiversity with my parents my early youth as a student with chipko defending biodiversity to later in life be told this biodiversity is our property was such an obscene idea such a violent idea that's when I decided this is what I was going to defend life in its diversity by whatever means it I could seek inspiration from I said there's only two ways that you can claim to own life either steal from nature and deny Nature's creativity or steal from cultures that have evolved and come to know that they're trees like the name as a director Indica which are tremendous for controlling pests uh or the seeds that the farmers have evolved India used to have 200 000 rice varieties and we named this process of appropriation and new colonization biopiracy we knew this would happen but it actually started to happen 1994 was the first biopiracy patent I came across in 1984 I'd started a campaign called Nomo bhopal's plantainim because in India in a city called Bhopal we'd had a leak from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide on 2nd of December and that night the gas leak killed 3 000 people and the toxic damage has killed 30 000 people and I said but we don't need these killer weapons in agriculture when we have things like name to control pests without any damage ten years later I find company called Grace has taken a patent along with the U.S department of Agriculture to say we are the inventors of me I said was my grandmother sleeping was my mother who used neem in our clothing and our grain bins not having the knowledge that this is wonderful did the farmers who'd been using this not have that knowledge so I decided to challenge that bat and build a huge campaign collected a hundred thousand signatures of peasants of traditional medicine people of activists and took those signatures to the European patent office joined with two other women the head of the greens of Europe and the head of the international organic movement and we challenged the biggest superpower and one of the biggest chemical companies it took us 11 years but we won that case and then we had in 98 the case of the patenting of basmatina Basmati means the queen of Aroma um it's a rice my Valley Dune Valley is very famous for dehraduni basmatis the highest quality Basmati and a Texas company called rice Tech and they think you had Tech behind a name and suddenly you're the inventor they claim to have invented the rice the plant the aroma the cooking of rice everything we took that challenge on in this case I fought it through the Supreme Court of India and through a movement in the U.S against the U.S patent office and we told the U.S patent office if you don't revoke this patent and strike you down we will have to rename you the U.S piracy and theft office because call the U.S patent and trademark office and it works and they struck down Muslims and then a little later we find an ancient Indian wheat has been patented by Monsanto Indian weeds have very low gluten most westerners now have gluten allergy because the wheat has been so super bred for mechanical baking for industrial production and all of that has led to increase of the gluten called content leading to allergies someone Santa said wonderful Market all of the gluten allergy people we can sell biscuits to everything so they patented the wheat plant it's low gluten content Dough made from it biscuits frame from made from it any product made from it and we challenge that too and have that patent revoked the two other groups and clusters of mega mega mega biopiracy cases right now uh one is the appropriation of all the Indian medicine we started to track and we found 9 000 patents on everything you'd be using our daily life and then because of climate change there is a grabbing of climate resilient crops Farmers have bred if you go to Rajasthan the desert area or any other part of India Farmers have very strong drought tolerant varieties now the companies are taking patents on drought tolerance our Coastline has had wonderful salt tolerant Rices and when we had orisa cyclone in the 90s we saved these Rices and distributed them so farmers could do agriculture again because the Cyclone means water comes from the sea and your land is trans salty and then you can't do agriculture but if you have salt tolerant prices you can and our farmers who grew these Rices then donated two trucks of seed to the tsunami victims in Tamil Nadu who could then bounce back to do agriculture and now the companies are claiming we have invented salt tolerance we have beautiful Rises that grow 18 feet tall in the flood waters of the Ganges and flood tolerance is another thing they're patenting so climate resilience they claim is their invention and as if they're doing it through genetic engineering they're doing it just through piracy and that has been an old way of colonization thank you the pattern of growth that has been defined as growth to create the capital accumulation that has been typical of our times has failed in the countries where it was created it would be not very smart to imagine that a model that failed in the countries of its birth would suddenly succeed in countries where it had been transported in terms of sustainability yes for a few years in a highly unstable world we will see that as the West declines economically um and you are saying Europe come begging to China for a bailout for the euro uh because countries like China have such huge surpluses they will play a financial economic role of power at the international level and in that sense the unequal power of the north dominating the South the West dominating the East will be changed a little but because the model is based on liquid iniquity essentially and non-sustainability in a very intrinsic way these countries China and India by over exploiting their resources and creating massive dispossession of their people will create both ecological and economic and political instability domestically so and we're already seeing that India and China as more important players internationally G20 brick countries all of that and yet Within thousands of revolts a hundred thousand land protests in China every year in India I would say a similar amount now if one third of India is not governed by the rising State and those areas are expanding because the process through which you've created this growth is so unjust that people are rebelling and Beyond a point military force can't control that kind of rebellion and definitely Beyond a point an artificial nine percent growth can't bring back your Rivers can't bring back your food so if you look at India today high growth rate but the capital of hunger every fourth Indian is hungry every second child in India is wasted which basically means half of India's future has been written off so our Waters disappearing land is disappearing the very sustenance base that has kept the civilization going and India and China are two of the longest surviving civilizations of the world the other historical civilizations are gone if they've survived it's because of two things one we respected the Earth we used very little and we knew how to defeat Define a good life without defining it as the exploitation of the Earth today we are being told you put the bill the environmental bill and that is causing a huge burden on both India's resources people and the growth in my view is a negative growth if you take into account what people have lost and what Nature has lost after all what is climate change but self-destruct of the civilization what is species Extinction water exhaustion toxic pollution but self-destructive civilization we're seeing it in front of eyes and as far as bodily Comforts is concerned all these claims all will produce more food through toxic chemicals or we'll do genetic engineering and have more food what do we have a billion people hungry and two billion obeys an obese person is not bodily comfortable a hungry person is not bodily comfortable look at shelter look at the number of homeless people no Society of the world has had homelessness you pick a bit of straw pick a bit of bamboos maybe some Stones you've got your little heart look at the homelessness in America today look at the street dwellers in India everything which claimed to provide a home has created homelessness which claimed to provide food has created hunger which claimed to provide an employment has created unemployment so it's a material failure and of course it cause and failure and the reason is inability think of our spiritual evolution and therefore to go for very very narrow growth which fails is two things one it's based on Greed the greed of those who push it and the greed they take trigger in those who consume it they need a consumer Society to push all this useless products these toxic plastic culture and people think they're living better by getting three trashy dresses or five bad shoes that give vain five days compared to nice strong shoes that are a good leather Craftsman can make for you that can go on for 10 years or sorry is here I mean these hand woven sarees are Timeless some of them are from my mother's time they never go out of fashion they never have the kind of giveaway um clothing you have to be in fashion if it's purple this year how can you wear orange and so obsolescence is bred into our very way of thinking and we just turn into dumb stupid consumers becoming part of it and that's how the society is able to numb our spiritual dimensions second thing is that globalization actually turned greed and competition into human creeds competition is written into the World Trade Organization rules and greed is written into the mechanisms of making profits at any cost which is what corporations exist for in putting the corporations and their logic up there Humanity down there making profiteering and greed a higher value than sharing conserving evolving growing spiritually individually as well as societally that has basically meant that what we have created a truncated human beings truncated human beings who are not happy who are miserable and that's why look at the amount of Prozac being used to keep this high growth economy going um we'll just have to find other ways hello foreign basically what we see is a recent Trend a few hundred years old where the world was shaped into a masculine project very consciously knowledge was redefined as masculine by people like bacon Francis Bacon economy was redefined in terms of that which can be traded and commercially profited from is economy if you cook food for your children if you get water for your home if you look after an old parent that's not work it's not productive it's not contributing to the economy it's when you buy what you need and sell what you produce then growth takes place um so on the one hand we got in science very mechanistic reductionist dominant form of knowledge and in economy this idea that production begins with the market and for the market which erased totally Nature's intelligence and her tremendous creative force in pollination in managing the hydrological cycle in renewing soil fertility no matter where you look so much work is going on bees buzzing water moving droplets going from the Indian Ocean as a little drop in Portugal um all of this amazing creativity production reproduction regeneration and women who are the biggest Workforce on the planet the biggest productive force on the planet the biggest contributors to Care on the planet their work was suddenly not work women don't work um what women bring to the multiple crisis we face as a result of that narrow mechanistic thought and this highly alienated artificial economic system which began with making Capital real and reality Andrea which began with giving corporations personhood and made real people non-persons that whole process is now reaching its maturity and the economic collapse we see all over the place is one result of it ecological collapse climate catastrophes species extinctions between three to three hundred species disappearing per day man himself has become the biggest force on the planet but under this capitalist patriarchal mode he's become a destructive force women want to be a force but a creative force a peaceful force a non-violent Force and what they bring is other ways of knowing that were subjugated ecological holistic relational and their kind of knowledge is now being totally validated by the best of science all the work I did in quantum theory when my life as a physicist was still active was about non-locality non-separability you can't chop up the world into pieces all the work that women have done on an economics of care is now having to come real either you'll have 80 unemployment under a finance centered corporate centered economy or you'd say no that's not the economy the economy is maintaining life on Earth ensuring we take care of all species on the planet we protect the resources of this very generous Earth who will provide us forever as long as we see ourselves as part of her and most importantly we need an economics of cooperation between people this competition is killing us and competition again comes out of that militarized masculinist thinking which has been a short-term Distortion in our sense of what it means to be human violence is not a human indicator it's an indicator of high in humanity greed and accumulation is not a measure of our Humanity sharing and caring is and those are the values women are bringing in a different way to shape a world other than that shaped by the convergence of patriarchy with capitalism [Music] theater one of the things I have learned is to spend a lot of energy working with people their goodness creating solidarity and of course the Miracle at every point of Life unfolding daily life where you can trample on grass and it bounces back where you can put a seed into the soil and it sprouts out that miracle is such a powerful inspiration to me and the beauty that it brings with it the beauty and people the beauty in the rugged face of a peasant woman who has pride in a forest water a seed and a determination that this is my life and I Won't Let Go and of course knowing how bad things are is part of what my head analyzes and I always say you know given that I had education in English degrees in physics I know how to speak English the language of domination and I know how to add numbers another language of domination and so I don't get dominated and I'm able to deal with the lies I can you know add two and two and it should be four and I won't create 20 out of it and once Monsanto does I can take them on um I do it also by not taking myself too seriously knowing that I'm a little speck and it is my duty to do certain things as our Gita our beautiful beautiful text says you've got to engage in the right action it is not yours to determine its outcome and so that Detachment with engagement the ability to pour yourself passionately into an issue and yet remove yourself dispassionately in terms of what happens to it um has helped me deal with some of the most ferocious powers of our times my parents taught me never to be Fearless they said follow your conscience you'll never have to be afraid I look into the future and I look at it in my very Quantum theoretical way that's highly uncertain there are two possibilities the possibility of carrying on on the path that we are with crazy scientists wanting to do geoengineering they first mess up the planet with climate change and they say now we'll fix it and the resource grab and land grab attached with all of that uh can push us put us on a fast forward to Extinction in which case I'm confident that the Earth will carry on we as a species will go but because in India we believe in reincarnation human species Extinction is not the end of life you're just one the worms and microbes and everything else is one of us and the second option is a rapid change in consciousness a rapid change in Who We Are now that is a majority shift because most women don't believe in this grabbing they don't have the opportunity anyway most of the disenfranchised 95 9 percent are shaping another world want another world they want non-violence they want sharing they want other ways of political organizing economic organizing and that tectonic shift that's taking place is under the popular pyramid Shifting the base and when change happens very rapidly we could be in another place as a species our age has been called the anthropocene age where Humanity has been such a destructive force on the planet its climate is decided by our actions of the species that is decided by action the state of water is decided by our action the fertility of salts is decided by action we can carry on there and then we don't exist or we can change it to the creative anthropocene energized by a feminine energy the energy of non-western spiritual civilizations the energy of indigenous people the energy of the earth herself and her diversity to basically recognize that we are one interval for life and we can continue to have a future if we just recognize that one simple fact that we are not owners conquerors dominators of the Earth part of the Earth [Applause] [Applause] foreign

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Keywords: Philisophy, ecology, environmental issues, global warming, gandhi, eco activist, India, pollution, third world, environmental activist, earth, nature, biodiversity, activism, friday for future, climate crisis, climatic change, women scientist, women activist, human and nature, The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, himalaya, Earth democracy, food sovereignty, anti-globalisation, ecofeminist, mass extinction, ecological collapse, global economy, ted talk, interview, environment, greta thumberg, talk

Id: 3TyMozNaChA

Length: 31min 43sec (1903 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022