Saving The Ecosystem

Saving the Ecosystem
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Talking Environment: Vandana Shiva in Conversation

with Ramin Jahanbegloo
Ramin Jahanbegloo and Vandana Shiva
Print publication date: 2013

Print ISBN-13: 9780198091776
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198091776.001.0001

Ramin Jahanbegloo
Vandana Shiva
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198091776.003.0005
Abstract and Keywords
In this section, Vandana Shiva talks about her book Staying Alive, which tackles three
levels of exclusions of knowledge in terms of reductionist scienceontological,
epistemological, and sociological. She discusses how capitalism, through patriarchal
activity, promotes gender inequality, and how feminism could be revived as a means to
prevent propagation of maldevelopment that also creates inequality between the sexes.
Vandana argues that privatization also leads to maldevelopment, citing the privatization of
nature and water as an example. She explains the concept of earth democracy and how
globalization has changed the context of agricultural production and distribution. She
laments how peasants and farmers could no longer defend their livelihood because they
are brought under book when they initiate a protest even by democratic means.
Furthermore, Vandana talks about how industrial patents and intellectual property rights
Page 1 of 13
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2015.
All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a
monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: University of
Toronto Libraries; date: 19 September 2015
have resulted in market distortion and government sanction monopoly, technology

transfer, and her campaign against monocultures and globalization. Finally, she explains
how chemical pesticides represent science but also profit and violence.
Keywords: Vandana Shiva, staying alive, globalization, maldevelopment, earth democracy, gender
inequality, privatization, patents, chemical pesticides, nature
Staying Alive
RJ: Let us talk about your book Staying Alive. In this book you discuss the theme of
other exclusions of knowledge in terms of reductionist science, and these exclusions,
according to you, are threefold: ontological, epistemological, and sociological. Could you
explain these three levels in more detail?
VS: At the ontological level, the exclusion of other forms of knowledge by reduction of
science implies not even addressing entire domains that should be addressed because
the reduction of science cannot address them. For instance, the entire system of self-
organizing that the human body has or the ecosystem or the planet has, as what exists as
ontology, is just pushed aside. One of the facts about reductionism is that it assumes that
only things that can be measured exist. You cannot measure a relationship; a relationship
can only be experienced. Its measure is a living form, and the minute you destroy it, it is
dead. At the epistemological level of inclusion, reductionism, by elevating fragmentation
and the mechanistic view, basically takes everything that is rich and diverse out of the
system. For example, ecologists are not being trained any more. If you look at new
departments, the people (p.68) associated with the so-called life sciences today are
basically bio-technologists. It is a techno-science and all the streams of knowledge that
you need with all their methods of knowing are being removed from the landscape. So the
parts of the world that need to be known get erased, the methods of knowing get erased,
and finally, sociologically it leads to an exclusion because I believe that every being has
intelligence, that intelligence generates knowledge, and that knowledge is significant and
must be counted. So if I turn around and say breeding is only that which is done by
people sitting in laboratories with equipment, I am saying that the woman breeder who is
giving me these amazing seeds is not a breeder. I am excluding her sociologically, which
implies that a majority of the worlds knowledge is also the knowledge creators get
excluded. Last year, I generated a new manifesto called the Manifesto of Knowledge
Sovereignty, which was basically articulating that we are going through a deep
knowledge crisis and the knowledge we need will not come from those pretending to be
the Mr Know-alls of our times with fragmented minds and monocultures of the mind.
They are going to come from a recognition of the knowledge sovereignties of all, and
bringing back each of these sovereignties, be it peasants knowledge or the working-class
knowledge or even the knowledge of the child in all his innocence of what makes life good,
secure and comfortable. The flourishing of all these categories of knowledge in a
knowledge democracy is actually our bridge to the future. Contemporary societies would
never recognize that indigenous communities have knowledge because it is not
quantifiable. In fact, they have more knowledge than others. I remember while I was
sitting in tribal areas and tribals jumping up and saying, Oh there is that kind of game in
that part of the forest, as they heard some animal sound in the forest or while sitting on
Page 2 of 13
the beach with fishermen, the latter could make out the exact location in the sea where
particular (p.69) shoal populations and their specific sizes could be found by just
observing the colour of the water. Where can you find this type of quantifiable
knowledge?
RJ: Many years ago in France, I read an African writer saying that each time an elderly
dies in an African tribe, it is as if a library has burnt down.
VS: The opposite of that was claimed by Macaulay, who said, All the knowledge and all the
Sanskrit and Arabic text is not even worth one shelf of a British library. That was the kind
of arrogance, which is endangering our indigenous wisdom.
The Polarization of Gender

RJ: I would like to know more about the polarization of gender in terms of its purported
role in helping our society emerge as a dominant powerful force. In what way does
industrial and corporate capitalism need this patriarchal activity of modern science for the
polarization of gender?
VS: The first level wherein society needs this polarization is in our understanding of what
it is to be human because the human being, I am told, has to be white and male with his
own wealth, and the really progressive human being is believed to be one who allows that
class and that gender to control the rest of society. Over the past twenty years, we have
seen that the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of early capitalism led to the
emergence of the capitalist patriarchs. Today, however, post-globalization, it is the
corporation that has become the embodiment of capitalist patriarchy on a global scale.
This naturalizes both the domination of and exploitation perpetrated by these
corporations, while also naturalizing the disenfranchisement of the rest. People are thus
forced to accept the situation just as racism was accepted as the norm till recently.
(p.70) Capital patriarchy also naturalizes the subjugation of women and even more
significantly of the feminist alternative. Basically, it seems to say that it is natural and
acceptable for people to get rid of their future women children through female foeticide,
and that it is fine if women are not getting enough to eat. It allows us to accept injustice
and violence because it naturalizes their domination as the right order of things. It is the
same as maldevelopment, which also creates a division between the masculine and the
feminine.
RJ: How can the feminine principle be revived in order to prevent propagation of this
maldevelopment?
VS: The feminine principles that I wrote about were hugely misunderstood by narrow
reductionist feminists, who thought that they were some kind of little things that you fix
about yourself but the feminine principle is actually nothing less than the universal
creative energy of Shakti. How can we recover it? By opening ourselves to it. It does not
have to be created. It is there and we have just blocked it out because we have turned
our eye to the sources of capitalist patriarchy as the source of everything we get. We get
food because there is Cargill, we get seed because there is a Monsanto, we get jeans
Page 3 of 13
because there is Walmart, and we are constantly made to believe that the source of
everything is the power of capitalist patriarchy. But the minute we start recognizing that
the power to create lies in the source of the energy of the Earth, we can have that power,
we can be self-makers, and we can be creators of Swadeshi. We are subjects, we are
sovereigns, and we can become our self-rulers and create our Swaraj. The minute we
remove those blinkers, that is the point of recovery, and the most important issue really
is finding ways of mapping the feminine principle to Gandhis various principles. It is not an
accident that Gandhi used to say daily, Make me more womanly. For him, compassion at
the (p.71) everyday level was symbolized by the recovery of the feminine principle.
Going Beyond Capitalist Patriarchy

RJ: Do you think that this misunderstanding stems from the fact that people, especially in
Western societies, do not know much about Gandhi and Indian philosophy, which is why
they perhaps do not understand very well when you talk about feminine principles. Do
you think this might be the result of their lack of understanding?
VS: Yes, that is very true, and the other reason for it is that a few centuries of capitalist
patriarchal thought have made it the thought of the women. It has even become the
thought of feminists and within that framework, they are trying to work for their
emancipation but they are not seeking emancipation from that framework of capitalist
patriarchy.
RJ: Let us talk about the privatization policies, the concept of which is very close to
maldevelopment. For example, you talked about the privatization of nature and water.
How does one privatize nature?
VS: You can privatize nature by saying that it is your property and you can label it as
your property in the manner of capitalist patriarchy in the same way that Locke had said,
The property is the creation of the mixing of my labour with nature but not all of labour
and then by creating a distinction between the labour of the horse, the women and the
server, who does not count, and the spiritual labour of the capitalist patriarch, which
comes from an unexplained source; that mixing allows the creation of the division of
property. If the peasant does not want to sell his land, the State has the authority to sell it
under the name of development. So in 1894, we had the colonial (p.72) land acquisition
that is used in todays globalized India by corporations as the State claims that it has no
role in the process. Yet, the corporations get the State to acquire the land for them. This
is an example of privatization. What makes me angry is the fact that Delhi celebrates the
day the British colonized it but not the thousand years when various reigns were here
and the vibrant city that was the main reason why the British came here in the first place.
Twenty years ago, the Yamuna used to be a living river but as the city has grown, it has
become a dead river, absorbing all the industrial and urban waste. Consequently, the
Tehri dam was built in Uttarakhand by taking the water there and a company called Suez,
which is the worlds biggest water privatizer, was slated to be given the contract with the
World Bank exerting pressure to sell the water as a commodity. We know very clearly
that we are paying taxes for the maintenance of this public good. But they wanted to fix
prices that were ten times higher, basically making water a commodity to be sold at
Page 4 of 13
exorbitant prices. We fought this scheme of things, stopped the privatization of water and
the contract going into Suezs hands. Of course, the main characteristic of these
corporations is that they do not lie low forever, they try to find another way out, and we
know we have to keep up our efforts to prevent them from taking a hold over our
resources just as I believe that the patenting of seeds is akin to the privatization of seeds.
What Is Earth Democracy?

RJ: How did you come up with the idea of Earth democracy, which is one of your key
concepts?
VS: This idea emanated from two streams. One was the fact that we had been working on
saving seeds and biodiversity, we were promoting organic farming and we were dealing
with individual farmers. At a certain point during our endeavours, it (p.73) became
clear that until the entire community senses that this is a common responsibility in a
larger context, there would always be the individual farmer struggling against all the
other farmers in the neighbourhood who were resorting to chemical spraying. So we
collected two hundred villagers and discussed this issue at the community level under
the auspices of a Panchayat. We also created the Jan Panchayat and out of it came living
democracy. The idea of living democracy then turned to the larger idea of Earth
democracy, which did not just constitute living democracy but was the pillar of a living
economy and of living cultures. I was compelled to articulate all these efforts. We were
creating living economies by fostering the development of an agriculture that would not
force the farmer into committing suicide. But we really succeeded after the advent of the
WTO. We were repeatedly told that the anti-globalization movement, which we started,
knows what it is against but it does not know what it is for. But I always argued during
these debates that we know what we are for, that is why we know what we are against.
The against does not come first, the for comes before it.
I remember that during one such debate I started articulating this point. I said that we
dont want the world to become a supermarket of five corporations. We want this planet
to be a beautiful home of 300 species and six billion people, with all of them enjoying a
sense of real well-being. We have a more lasting philosophy, which is relevant both in
todays context as well as in the context of ancient concepts like Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.
That is how the philosophy of our movement really came together.
RJ: When we talk about Earth democracy, we also need to put forth the idea of
development, and not just corporate development but also self-organization, which is not
an extremity-driven process.
(p.74) VS: There was a group of people among us who realized that development is one
of the biggest conceptual intellectual scams of our times, so we decided to create a
collective development dictionary at that time. Sadly, many of the people who were part of
this project are not among us any more. The word development is, however, a word
taken from biology, which is what happens when a little embryo in a seed becomes a tree
or in a human being becomes an adult. It is self-generated and self-organized, and in
societies, development should occur in the same way in which a community decides what
Page 5 of 13
our next stage should be, thereby symbolizing a constant evolution from within in a self-
organized way on the basis of Swadeshi. In 1948, Robert McNamara announced that we
need development. Basically, what he was saying was that former colonies, which had just
got independence, should not be able to exercise a self-reliant, self-generated idea of
where they wanted to go next. They should be told what their next stage should be and
that it has to be driven by the same logic that created colonialism when money flew in
from colonies to the colonizer except that now the colonizer needs a new form. This
emerged in the form of the unholy trinity of the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), with these three constituents becoming mega patriarchs. They jointly
worked out a convenient way of keeping the money flowing. They arrived at a system
whereby for every dollar that the World Bank lends, three dollars go back to them, and in
order to achieve this, they tell us, How can you do organic farming? It is primitive, use
pesticides instead. How can you have your own seeds? Get into debt, let your farmers
die, allow trillions of dollars to flow out as royalty to rich corporations. In the process,
they are creating and nurturing a system whereby ecosystems lose all their resources,
and communities lose everything, all the wealth (p.75) they have created, resulting in an
ecological crisis, a poverty crisis, and debt at both the ecological and social levels, but in
the process they have achieved development. It is these measures that have led to a
very severe crisis not just in the Third World where structural adjustment is being
imposed but also in Europe where countries have been forced into debt. Since these
countries cannot pay back their debts, they are being told to give up their jobs and their
social security because the interest of the Shylocks (the World Bank and IMF) matters
more than the lives of the people in these nations. Giving up the ecological idea of
development for this colonizing idea of development has become genocide in our times
and it has to be given up if we are to save ourselves. We can get new inspirations from
biology for dealing with this crisis but I think that we also need to draw a lot of inspiration
from Gandhi.
The Seed Globalization

RJ: In what ways has globalization changed the context of agricultural production and
distribution?
VS: This is the most dramatic change that has taken place around the world but of course,
in India, it is more evident because we have the largest population of farmers. We are still
an agricultural society, not by accident but by policy as Gandhi called India the land of
village republics. Every policy made in post-colonial India was designed to make life in the
villages livable and dignified. Attempts were made to prevent the creation of a big gulf
between the city and the village. Thus, there has been resilience in the country, and we
have successfully been feeding our 1.2 billion people. Our diversity has remained strong
because we have not adopted industrial methods. We did have the Green Revolution and
the consequent damage perpetrated by it but that was all over (p.76) the country. What
globalization has done is that it has firstly commodified the seed, which means that cotton,
the first crop, has become part of the global seed economy and the cost of seeds has
jumped up enormously by 8 to 10 per cent, propelling farmers into huge debts and
Page 6 of 13
causing them to commit suicide. This is unprecedented in India because it personifies a

resilient culture. I have watched farmers get flooded out of their homes, then come back
next year and rebuild their houses. Even after facing successive droughts for three
years, they come back and start again. So, hitherto no tragedy was big enough for them
to give up, yet the tragedy unleashed by globalization has been so big that they are
giving up and there are two reasons for this. One reason is the fact that they really think
that they are going to do better and be millionaires with the advent of globalization. All
advertisements claim that they would become millionaires, especially with television
shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which has been replicated on Indian television,
they have started feeling that they can do better in life, but when they dont, they feel
ashamed and frustrated. The farmers who are the most devastated are those who used
to be more prosperous earlier and have been reduced to poverty because the
corporations go after the more prosperous ones. They dont go to the poor areas but to
places like cotton farms. Cotton farmers in India never had a hard time in the past, but
today, they are the ones who are getting tricked by corporations, and facing debts and
separation from their lands as creditors have been claiming land in lieu of their debts. This
is different from public lending because that never created the issue of debt and farmers
could deal with the public system. The new credit system for the privatization of seed
results from a private system linked to the seed company that is pushing the seed. These
companies are the new moneylenders, who have changed the farmers role; the latter
are no longer farmers or (p.77) producers but have instead become consumers of
their seeds. They are no longer the part of a community, so individual farmers, thinking
that they would benefit from the deal, sign away their lands and the very next day itself,
lose their land. This new economy of globalization is dangerous because every failure is a
failure of people, it is a failure for nature, and a success for the companies. Once I was
sitting with the hybrid official of an organization, and I asked him where he was going. He
asked me the same question, and I said that I was going because of my connection with
farming because I work on ecology, and he said that he was also going because of his
connection with farming because his company was selling hybrid seeds. I said that hybrid
seeds would not survive the drought, to which he replied that they would just sell more
seeds. He said that for his company, seed failure does not mean market failure and the
same case applies for the indebted farmers because the seed agent claims that the seed
pushes the farmer into debt. It is an economy that means a constant upward movement
of all wealth and all resources to the top, and at the top are the five corporations dealing
in seeds, five in food, and five in retail, thereby generating a group of wealthy people in
society who still constitute a minority, as this prosperity is not meant for society as a
whole.
The second reason why globalization has unleashed a tragedy is the fact that India had
become self-sufficient and self-reliant in food and had succeeded in doing away with
severe malnutrition. Today, however, globalization has pushed us back to where we
were during British colonial rule. Every fourth Indian is hungry and every second child is
wasted. The third reason is that globalization has led to such a massive transfer of
resources from rural areas to speculators that land itself is now under threat. The final
reason is that it has changed food from being food to a commodity. Indian cuisines are
Page 7 of 13
among the most sophisticated (p.78) and diverse foods in the world; from South to
West to East, Indian foods are very different from each other, and yet very nutritious.
Even the poor eating their local food got sufficient nutrition. But now we have been made
to believe that good food comes out of packages, that good food is Lays Chips and Coca-
Cola, which were thrown out of India in 1977. So our children are growing up on junk
food; the level of obesity among kids in our society, which was just 7 per cent in 1995,
jumped up to 11 per cent in 2005, and last year [2011] it touched a whopping 25 per
cent. Even people in slums are getting diabetes because they are not eating a balanced
diet any more, and diabetes is no longer a rich mans disease. India has emerged to be
the capital of hunger in the world, the place where the maximum number of farmers
suicides take place, and worse, it is emerging as a capital of diabetes including diabetes
among children. This is because the entire food system, which is supposed to ensure our
health, has been devastated and because it is being marketed through the colonial mode
of selling inferior stuff by telling us, Your food is not good enough. Thus, people are
jumping on to the bandwagon of foreign packaged food brands, with only one drastic
consequence: disease and starvation.
RJ: You have also mentioned that peasants and farmers can no longer defend their
livelihood because when they start a protest democratically, they get arrested.
VS: There are two factors on the basis of which all democratic modes are forcing
corrections in the system. The first one is because they have been fragmented. They
were made to believe that they are like individual consumers but they are not organizing
as strongly as they showed. Also, when they are organizing for lands or food rights, then
there is only one response from the State, and that is guns and bullets. Bullets have
become the face of globalization.
(p.79) Fighting the Industrial Patents

RJ: You say that the industrial patents allow us not to make any products but just to be
consumers, so in your book Patents: Myth and Reality, you say that the intellectual
property rights have changed many things essentially because of market distortion and
government sanction monopoly.
VS: Earlier, there actually used to be new patents invented by people. But what has
happened with WTO is that patents are being granted for anything under the sun. This
includes things like living material like seeds. No corporation makes a seed. The seed
makes itself, so the claim that I have invented it is a wrong claim, but in industry if I have
invented a particular kind of machine, then only another industry can make that machine
and it is all right for the first machine maker to say, I will give you a licence to make this
but you pay me the royalty because you are collecting the royalty from another wealthy
group. But when you take the seed and you say that this is a patent and that intellectual
property rights would apply on it, you are now collecting royalty not from another
industry as a competitor but from a farmer. The farmer does not have that kind of money
to pay you royalty and he is locked in debt, which is why this situation is leading to
farmers suicides. The suicides among farmers in India are thus related to the debt
created by turning seeds into a patentable property. This is a legal problem because
Page 8 of 13
since you have not invented this, how can you claim that it is an invention, and if you have
not invented it, how come the government recognizes it as an invention? Thus, the
governments are partly involved in this theft. It is ethically wrong because that is life and
these are living things. You need to respect them and their integrity for their intrinsic
worth, and you cannot turn them into your property. The reason why it is wrong is
because it is leading to this massive transfer of resources that the poor (p.80) dont
have and that the companies which are today patenting seeds are the companies that
brought us war chemicals and since those companies have no knowledge about how life
works, where do they go when they want to patent a salt-tolerant seed or a melon which
doesnt get a particular virus? They take the material from traditional farmers, and this is
what I have called biopiracy, wherein you take the collective wealth of a society, call it
your patent invention, and then sell it back to that very society whose collective invention
it was, and ask the latter to pay royalty. The British did this during colonialism and now
unfortunately, America is leading the way in perpetrating this new form of colonialism,
with the entire patenting of life forms.
There was a very interesting article in the Forbes magazine some time ago showing that
in everything else, the US is facing a trade deficit. There is only one thing on which it is
actually running surpluses, and that is in seeds and agri-business because here, they
collect royalties. It is not that Americans are collecting royalties; Monsanto collects the
royalties and so it is not just the corporations that are pushing it. They get governments
to push it as well. I remember that when I fought for the intellectual property treaty in
WTO, which then became the reason for my starting Navdanya seed-saving, Monsantos
representative gave a speech, saying that a seed is patentable, and that we were
behaving as the patient and diagnostician and physician all rolled into one. They defined
the problem, which according to them was that farmers save seeds. At Navdanya,
however, our pledge is that seed-saving is our duty. Contrary to what Monsanto is
propagating, saving seeds is not a crime and we will not recognize it as a crime.
Biopiracy patents not only deny the innovation of indigenous knowledge but at the same
time, as you said, as an ideology, it kills the idea of creativity as well because it converts it
into (p.81) a marketed commodity. We have watched that when faculty members and
university professors tell us to make our living through patents, that involves signing up
deals with companies. If I as a scientist have signed up a deal with a company to earn my
laboratorys expenses and salary, I will not share my new findings with my students or
my colleagues because it has to be patented, so I hide my knowledge from the very
people with whom I should be sharing it, and in a way I am stifling the future of creativity.
This stifles creativity because all creativity is a collective enterprise, just like crops grow
out of pollination. The fruits of knowledge grow out of the pollination of ideas. Pollination
involves more than one person and if you are not part of a community, no new idea will
blossom. You would not be able to build on the past, so we have a brilliant system for
harvesting current collective knowledge of universities and public institutions and historic
knowledge of society. Ten years down the line, the tree of creativity would have nothing
to nourish it because it would have run out of water and nutrients, and it would have
made people forget that they can be creative and have made universities forget that
Page 9 of 13
creativity is a public good, that knowledge is a public good.
Knowledge as a Public Good

RJ: Therefore, it would be wrong to talk about technology transfer because we are
talking about the exploitation of the South by the North, not technology transfer.
VS: Yes, and technology transfer has now become a joke because what is collected in
terms of royalty payments is so huge as compared to the little amount of money that is
sent as aid. For example, I have just come back from Bihar, where I learnt that every
state government is being pressurized to use government money to buy the seeds of
multinationals, which are patented, (p.82) and then to distribute them. Why is the
Government of India doing this? Because it is being pressurized by the US to do so. And
why is the US pressurizing the Indian government? Because they have written a new
global Food Security Act, which basically commits them to distribute these patented
seeds. Therefore, US aid would only be given to countries that accept seeds which
ensure the flow of royalties back to them. In case of every loan granted by the World
Bank, every dollar of aid given by the Bank generates three dollars of business. Now with
the new patented seeds, I would imagine that one dollar of aid would mean ten dollars of
business. So, technology transfer has become a joke in the context of intellectual property
rights over living material, and even if you extend it to medicine. The two basic needs of
people are food and medicine. In case of food, they are destroying it with the patenting of
seeds, while in the case of medicine, they are basically saying that even with old medicine,
they should have the right to patent it. As regards traditional medicine, I have a report
documenting 9,000 patents on Indias medicinal plants. So we are looking at piracy in both
healthcare and food production, as also a transfer of all knowledge and all wealth
associated with that knowledge to the North, which never generated the knowledge,
creating a new form of property from those patents and that knowledge which the South
has never known. This is what I earlier called the monoculture of the mind. When I first
framed this term, it was really based on the fact that by thinking in only one way, we were
creating monocultures of trees, crops, etc. But now I would say that we are cultivating
monocultures in every field. We are refusing to believe that people can think for the sake
of thinking. The creativity itself is a source of satisfaction. For me, writing my next book
offers just such a pleasure. It is not because I am going to make money out of it. In fact, I
am going to lose money because I support collective publishing houses (p.83) and for
me publishing is thus a losing enterprise. The idea that people want to share, the
monoculture of the mind, makes greed the only human trade. The monoculture of the
mind makes the market the only social space, thereby closing down every other space.
So, it is the monoculture of what it means to be human and the monoculture of the mind
says that human beings are money-making, profit-making greedy machines. It is a
monoculture of what is knowledge. It is only that which can serve profit, because
increasingly rich knowledge based in holistic search has to get fragmented and
misappropriated. It is thus a monoculture of the soul and the heart, and of a very deadly
kind.
RJ: Do you think that you have succeeded in fighting against these monocultures? And if
Page 10 of 13
so, up to what point do you think you have succeeded?
VS: Since I knew what we are fighting against from the very beginning, I knew that as long
as the heart is free of that greed, the mind is free of monoculture, and each seed is free
of patents, we have already won. It is a fact that the monoculture of the mind signifies the
rule of darkness, decay and death, and when you are in a dark room, even a tiny light
makes a difference. It is not the size of the lamp, it is just the fact that light defeats
darkness. So we see our work as that tiny light.
Anti-globalization and Public Awareness

RJ: How do you think the rich citizens of other countries react to what you are doing?
Are they really aware of how their money is being spent by the corporations?
VS: Since globalization, which I have defined as corporate rule, has also created a crisis
for the citizens of the North, for the first time they are waking up to the fact that this
system does not (p.84) just work against the South, and the poor. It is also working
against them. Earlier, the wealthy used to think that there are only a few poor people and
that they (the wealthy) actually constitute the majority and now that same group is coining
the slogan that they are among the 99 per cent who are not part of the 1 per cent that is
gaining at the cost of everyone else. I dont think they have an understanding of how they
are being used to support this edification because when you are part of an exploiting
class, you dont have to know how exploitation works. One or two people can perpetrate
the exploitation and the rest enjoy the fruits but when you are the victim of exploitation,
you understand what exploitation is. So the South has always known more about how the
world economy functions. The North has never known the IMF and now the IMF is
knocking at their door; we always knew what IMF is. The North did not know what the
power of corporations is. So I think for the first time, people of the North are giving up
their love affair with corporations because all of America was built on the idea that what is
good for General Motors is good for America and for all trade unions. Everyone used to
say that if General Motors grows, we will all be better off. But now they are realizing that
they are not better off but are actually losing. The farmers are losing, the young people
are losing and they are suddenly finding out that they are caught in an economy whereby
even they are excluded. I think we understand it better because we have been the
victims for a longer time. We have a historic experience. All this will only change when they
become part of global community working for the common good, the future and the
planet. So the solution has to be political as well as ethical. The problem cannot be solved
by saying that I am going to drive a hybrid, which would save our future. No it needs
more than that. We need collective organization.
(p.85) Tools of Violence

RJ: Could we go back to this idea of seeds and pesticides because you write about it in
many of your books. I find it very interesting that you talk about the new seeds and you
say that new seeds need new pesticides, so we enter a cycle and these chemical
pesticides are chosen because somehow they form a strong link between science,
violence, and profit.
Page 11 of 13
VS: Todays pesticides are yesterdays war chemicals, and back then they were made for
profit and they are still making them for profit. They were designed as tools of violence
but the corporations that got used to their profit said that the use of these chemicals
should be continued and so they used it in agriculture. The pesticides and knowledge as
violence are connected in a way that you can now spray without knowing how these
pesticides are impacting the environment and different species. You have no knowledge
of what you are killing. In addition, the pest that you are killing has an intelligence, and
when you spray that chemical on the pest, it is going to evolve and mutate and become
resistant, so all that pesticides have done is create resistance in pests and give us more
pests. Also they have destroyed our beneficial species. Our beetles, spiders, frogs and all
the species that kept pests under control are all gone and pushed to extinction because
of pesticides. The year 2012 signifies fifty years since the writing of the book Silence
Spring by Rachel Carson, wherein she woke up to find a world in which the spring was
silent, the birds did not sing any more and birds were dying because of the use of
pesticides. The same company that brought the pesticides realized that if they manipulate
the seeds to become a pesticide factory or to be tolerant to a high dose of pesticides,
then not only could they keep selling their chemicals but they would also have ownership
over the seeds which they could patent. It has been fifteen years since they have (p.86)
been selling us these genetically modified crops. The pesticides producing plants like the
BT crops have created super pests. In the US, the root beer has become resistant; you
cannot control it so you get more toxic genes and a larger number of pests. The
herbicide resistance is even worse; it was meant to make seeds and plants resistant to
the harvest of the company. In America, fifteen million acres have been overtaken by
super weeds that cannot be controlled by any round-up and now Monsanto is asking
farmers to spray Agent Orange that was sprayed in Vietnam, so the chemicals which
were used in war are coming into our food circle. This signifies that violence and warfare
is the first idea for killing pests, while the second idea is that you do not have to know
what you are doing and you do not have to be responsible for it.
Two of the biggest tragedies resulting from the use of pesticides have been seen in India.
Firstly, the leak of the pesticide plants in Bhopal in 1984, and until today the victims have
not had justice. Secondly, in Kerala a pesticide called Endo-sulfan has led to the death of
1000 people, while about 9000 people have been rendered severely sick as they cannot
walk, some have lost their eyesight, in others, the tongue is growing bigger to the point
where the person starts choking. All kinds of new sicknesses and deformities are being
caused by the use of this pesticide, and corporations have never taken responsibility for
what these chemicals have done to these victims. The industry is still trying to block the
ban against Endo-sulfan, which we have managed to achieve through the Supreme Court.
So violence is present at every level; from the beginning to the end. Yet, we know that
there has been always the tradition of non-violence among farmers who controlled pests.
What is pest? A pest is one species that has grown too big as a population. And why has it
grown to such a big population? Because an imbalance has been introduced in the
system, so in fact, pests are indicators of a poor (p.87) farming system. In a biodiverse
system, where different plants are fed upon by different species, you never have pests
because they all control each other through the pestpredator balance. When you have
Page 12 of 13
diversity, you dont have pests. When you have monoculture, you have pests;
monocultures breed pests, and when they breed pests, then you foster another
monoculture. That is why it does not work and it is a failed instrument. We have used
ecological balance as our first strategy of non-violent pest control and the second
strategy of temperature change was a bit different, in which we used ash and hundreds
of plants to make botanical pesticides. That is why when the Bhopal tragedy occurred, I
went down there and started a campaign called No more Bhopal, plant a neem, and all
around the country I would teach farmers to use neem instead of pesticides. Ten years
later, I find neem being patented. We fought for eleven years against biopiracy and we
won the case against the US Government and W.R. Grace, so the indigenous traditions
that first defined us as being superstitious for using neem have now patented it. The
irony is the fact that the same industry which gave us pesticides now wants to own our
indigenous method of non-violent pest control.
Access brought to you by: University of Toronto Libraries
Page 13 of 13

Saving The Ecosystem

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Saving The Ecosystem

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Saving the Ecosystem

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Talking Environment: Vandana Shiva in Conversation

Print publication date: 2013

Saving the Ecosystem

Abstract and Keywords

have resulted in market distortion and government sanction monopoly, technology

The Polarization of Gender

Going Beyond Capitalist Patriarchy

What Is Earth Democracy?

The Seed Globalization

causing them to commit suicide. This is unprecedented in India because it personifies a

(p.79) Fighting the Industrial Patents

creativity is a public good, that knowledge is a public good.

Knowledge as a Public Good

so, up to what point do you think you have succeeded?

Anti-globalization and Public Awareness

(p.85) Tools of Violence

Access brought to you by: University of Toronto Libraries

You might also like