LILA: Thank you, Vandana, for agreeing to be in this conversation. Shall we start with the question of growth? Growth in the modern society is usually measured by the quantity of production, material possessions and monetary resources. This has led to a certain idea of ambition and success to take precedence over ideals of conservation, restoration, etc, which have time and again proved to be unsustainable or unequitable. So, when we think about the very idea of growth or ambition that drives growth, what metrics can present an alternative to this measurement?
Vandana Shiva: The first thing is, growth is a biological term. A seed becoming a tree is growth, with the tree staying rooted to where the seed was planted. But in the representations of growth in the financial world today, you see illustrations of plants growing out of coins, and their leaves drawn like currency. This is a misplaced metaphor, and a very recent one because its transplantation has happened only during the [World] Wars.
Two things happened during the War period. One was Hitler mobilised companies like Bayer, BSF and IG Farben to make chemicals to kill people, which we use today as synthetic chemical fertilisers (and fertiliser bombs). Similarly, pesticides are basically gases like Zyklon B that were used in concentration camps to gas people. The second part of war was transforming the concept of growth into that of making money, because governments had to mobilise more money to finance wars. Even today, according to the UN Systems of National Accounts, if you consume what you produce, it is not counted as production. Only if you sell or buy a product is it counted. This system has killed the circular economies of sustenance such as that of nature, women’s work, and local communities.
A second problem emerged with the deregulation of most financial systems across the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So far growth had been created by extracting money from real economies. Now, money could make money in fictitious economies. It has no connection with the real world. The top billionaires today don’t produce anything real. They control platforms, they control your knowledge, and they control your mind – whether it is Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. This system has worked away to make the value of what farmers grow fall to zero.
Then, you continue to take their solution of growth and give it a religious status – “To increase growth you must trash this, you must trash that.” But the idea of limitless growth in a world of ecological limits is an impossibility, and it also reproduces a malfunctioning biological system. The only cell in our body, if we have it, that doesn’t know when to stop growing is cancer, and it kills. So the economy, as it has been reduced to fictitious growth and extractive growth, is a cancer that is killing the planet, killing society, killing livelihoods. The two big crises of our times are the ecological crisis and planetary collapse, and the poverty crisis of large numbers having no means of livelihood and no resources. That just get worse if this artificial construct is what rules the world.
LILA: So how do we then reimagine growth? What are the ways in which we can measure it?
Vandana Shiva: We bring it back to its ecological, biological roots. First, we start to understand limits. All living systems have limits. Cells in our body are decaying and replacing themselves every day. Trees in a forest die, some new ones are born and the forest keeps replenishing to compensate the lost ones. So we need to come to that – the cycle of birth, maintenance and collapse. The trajectory of linear, limitless growth fails to see this. So we need to give primacy to living systems—living societies, living cultures, living minds, living ecosystems — and stop giving primacy to fictions that kill.
LILA: In your book ‘Oneness vs. 1%’ you have said that there are five companies that own most corporations, and are equal to half the wealth of the world. This has given them enough power to decide all policies, control the government, etc. So then what is the motivation for the alignment to shift or how do we bring that alignment or shift?
Vandana Shiva: It will shift from the bottom, it will not shift from the top.
Right now there is a deep congruence of power. See, people forget that fascism began with Mussolini, and Hitler picked it up from him. In his essay, Mussolini wrote that fascism is the convergence of economic and political power. All democratic societies are grounded in people, and have processes that ensure the economic benefit of all. But when economic and political power become one, which is the reality of our time, then it is built into the nature of the “one percent” to consolidate this power. The result is fewer billionaires controlling more and more of our everyday lives and the planet, and fewer people in politics close to the “one percent”, who are kept in place by the tricks being played.
LILA: Do you see any shift happening on the ground?
Vandana Shiva: Huge! There are many movements finding real solutions to climate change – not just building solar farms and wind farms, but actually shifting the way we do agriculture (which is responsible for a significant chunk of greenhouse gas emissions), ensuring there is more public transport, etc. In ‘Earth Democracy’, I have talked about how democracy is a living system. Everything living grows from the ground. Drones can drop bombs from the top down. Dictatorships can impose decisions from the top down. But life grows from the bottom.
In our country, local governments were killed long ago (during the Emergency) and it’s never been brought back. But look around the world! A village up in the Alps has banned pesticides through a referendum. Their Mayor came to us after the referendum, and we launched a global movement for poison free zones with organic communities from the Himalaya. The then CM of Sikkim made his state 100% organic, and the Mayor of Mals was made an Ambassador of the World Expo in Milan on Food; there is a whole new movement that has emerged out of the 2015 Milan Pact. Cities are taking charge of food. They’re saying, “you five corporations are poisoning our food, controlling the trade and feeding us junk. This is not the way our citizens are going to eat in the future. We’re going to create local markets; we’re going to create local gardens; we will eat fresh.” And that shift is huge! Wherever it gets noticed, of course, the system comes attacking. Two mayors I know have been attacked, even though in Europe they have the Principle of Subsidiarity where a decision must be made at the smallest level where it can be made.
LILA: World over we are seeing a sort of breakdown of democracy. Many countries are now led by almost-fascist governments and leaders. What kind of movements or actions can strengthen local governments again?
Vandana Shiva: The first thing is not to absorb the logic of division. Stay bonded across diversity. Without solidarity there will be no regeneration. Earlier, we had the luxury to organise along silos. Women could organise a women’s movement, indifferent to what was happening to the Dalits. Dalits could organise a Dalit movement, indifferent to what was happening to knowledge. Globalisation has broken decentralised power and it has created an economic system which is controlling the political system, in order to keep society divided. Silos at this point are an outdated organising form. We must first recognise that we are citizens of the Earth. Only when we have solidarity with other beings will we have the courage to have solidarity with other human beings.
LILA: One could doubt how solidarity and diversity may go together. What is your take on this?
Vandana Shiva: Anthropocentrism was a very big part of the industrial age. The superiority of humans, and within the superiority of humans, the superiority of the rich, the superiority of men over women. All of these subtexts were built into Anthropocentrism. This assignment of superiority to a group or race is not solidarity. We continue to fall victim to such Imperial programmes. They ‘divide and rule’ today not by circulating pamphlets, but by using Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. How are they able to do that? It is happening all over the world at this time. Why are we creating a National Citizenship Register exactly at the time that Trump is targeting migrants; exactly at the time where fascist parties are emerging in Europe on the citizenship issue? How is it that Cambridge Analytica can create a Brexit discourse?
So, to deal with this period, the first is we have got to enlarge our hearts, and not allow colonisation and emptying of our minds by the surveillance capitalists. Most importantly, we don’t allow ‘divide and rule’ to set in. We stay connected with nature, and we stay connected as societies. We remain cognisant, with diversity as our rule. When Babur came, he wrote “Diversity is the Hindustan way.” We have got to remember that.
LILA: There is a huge population that has already bought into this narrative of divisive politics, or at least don’t care for its detrimental consequences. Is there a way to respond to that? How do we bring such polarised minds into a conversation?
Vandana Shiva: Through truth and authenticity. Because no matter what, a manipulated message has a short life. Rooted truth lives forever. That’s why Gandhi’s satyagraha is still a relevant thought. A rebellion coming from truth is what he called Satyagraha. So first is truth, never give up on that.
The second is remaining rooted in our civilisation. Right from the beginning, my rootedness in ecology has come from the ordinary people of this country. I learnt the biology of the seeds from books, but I learnt the culture of the seeds from peasants; it is sacred. We have so many ceremonies around it – we have makti, we have ugadi, and so many more. So I talk bio-diversity, but I also talk about ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’, which means we are all one family. We have a legacy. Let us not look at the short-term power of manipulation that has been given by limitless money and technologies. These are passing phases of our evolutionary history. Let us stay rooted in timeless truth and our timeless civilisation.
LILA: As we talk about cultural diversity and the different ways that people approach the ecological issue… does it make sense to have a universal response to climate change, given the specific contexts – cultural, social or even ecological? What are the levels where we can find solutions for the environment?
Vandana Shiva: The planet is multi-layered, and the man-made sickness of the planet is anthropocentric in an elitist way. The elite have singular problems and singular solutions. Bill Gates talks about one agriculture across the world. You can’t have the same agriculture in the Himalayas and in Kerala; they are different ecosystems. One history, one education—that kind of concentrated power echoes a lot in our political discourse these days.
We do need internationalism like never before. But internationalism is not an authoritarian imposition of one distorted mindset or authority on the rest. We have international institutions like the United Nations whose members are the countries; all it needs is a little deepening of their democratic system. We need strong national systems that are democratic, and strong societies with many cultures. In this country every 100 miles the food is different, the language, the accent is different, the clothing is different. Whose one uniformity will we impose? It will destroy the country. So we need everything from the tiniest of the microbes to the planet as a whole and all levels of governance in between.
LILA: You have been working with farmers and other communities to bring about local level solutions. What is the scale at which this work needs to happen, in order to be transformational across the planet?
Vandana Shiva: See, we work within our capacities. My capacity to think is quite wild but my team’s capacity to be in villages and trainings is limited physically by resources and the number of people. But my vision and my commitment is that by the year 2030, which is also the year of the Sustainable Development Goals, we make India a ‘jaivik bharat’. A ‘jaivik bharat’ for me means, no child should be hungry, because this land is so fertile. We’ve done a book called ‘Health Per Acre’, where we measure nutrition. We have the capacity to produce healthy food for the entire country, but we are starving 25% of India with bad food and creating diseases for the remaining 75%. This is not a food system, I call it a war system.
And it’s only because of globalisation and the entry of what I call the poison cartel, which is controlling our seed, and wanting to control the future through this nonsensical zero budget farming. It’s a corporate plan, which got into India through Andhra and has now been brought into the budget. They want drones in the sky, they want no farmers, they want tractors instead of bullocks, they want to grow crops for export and import golden rice for our eating.
We have built a movement to prevent these genocidal, ecocidal plans. I am committed to continue the resistance for the Earth and its rights, and for people and their rights. So, if ecocide is an attack on the Earth, resistance from the Earth is a resistance to ecocide. If genocide is the killing of people in the name of progress and growth, then the rights of human beings to their food, to their water, to their land, to their livelihoods is the resistance to that genocidal system. Farmers are committing suicide; it is part of a genocidal system. Shutting your eyes to the worst tragedies of our times is not a governance solution. It is playing to the tune of those who are committing the genocide. So I am dedicated to a ‘jaivik bharat’.
We want hope and creativity to grow among the children. So we’ve set our target. We might be limited but with networks we can. Given that we’ve got a government that does mouth ‘chemical-free’, we will hold it to its truth. ‘Chemical free’ doesn’t mean Monsanto. A GMO pesticide-producing plant doesn’t mean ‘pesticide free’. My commitment in life is—speak the truth, live the truth and never give up hope.
LILA: When we look at the Green Revolution in Punjab…
Vandana Shiva: Anti-Green Revolution…. That was forced on us.
LILA: The movement’s founder Norman Borlaug was celebrated and given the Nobel Prize and even today a lot of people believe that this is a solution to many of our problems. But when we look at the sort of famines we are facing, the farmer suicides that are happening, the food shortage that is ironically happening in a country like India, how do we assess the balance between immediate returns of certain steps that are taken while keeping in mind the long-term consequences?
Vandana Shiva: Okay, the narrative around Norman Borlaug was that he deserved the Nobel peace prize… But let us look at this. Punjab was erupting in ‘84. Why? I was working for the United Nations University and I did this research. The first thing is that Norman Borlaug wasn’t talking about feeding the world, he was talking about chemicals and farming. He said, if I was a Member of Parliament, I would jump every two minutes saying, “Fertiliser, give me fertiliser!”
The main thing that Borlaug did was making dwarf varieties. Our tall varieties were always bred for organic matter, fodder, and human food. But if you apply chemicals to these tall varieties, they collapse. So, it is for the chemicals that he changed the plant. In the process he got rid of the organic matter that goes back to the soil and the fodder for the animals. I’ve done calculations for Punjab. It increased rice and wheat but overall food production went down. It increased commodities but not the food, which is why you have hunger because you weren’t growing food.
The same companies that pushed the chemicals are now pushing the GMOs and they are now pushing the next step of zero budget farming. Now it is surveillance and digital technologies joining with the financial world, joining with biotechnology, because they want to make the seed a surveillance issue. We have been fighting since 1987 to keep the seeds free and are going to keep fighting. There’s a lie that’s spread that you bring technology, and everything will be fine. If you look at Punjab as the lab for the Green Revolution, you see the result of that experiment. With all the stories told for giving the Nobel Peace Prize, why was it the place where violence first erupted among farmers? Why is it the place where all the water is dead, the soil is dead? Where you have the highest number of farmer suicides and a large number of youths have become drug addicts? That is the result of the green revolution.
So we have to look at that experiment as a scientific issue. It is a failed experiment. The GMO BT cotton is now failing to control the pests; it is failing to benefit the farmer. Monsanto has made huge money out of it and made it a monopoly and they would love to fool our government and have our government fool the people in order to get to the next level.
After 32 years of doing this work with communities across the country, having done the research and having built the farm and the Earth University where we teach all of this, I can say very confidently that India can be hunger free, malnutrition free, suicide free – a prosperous land. And our prosperity today goes hand in hand with our freedom. I call this the third freedom. The first was 1857 when Muslims and Hindus fought together against the British. Our 1947 freedom was with the rupture of India into India and Pakistan and the killings of the partition, and my own mother was trapped on the other side. The third independence movement must be a movement of healing the Earth and healing a broken society. And that is freedom.
LILA: You have a lot of influence of Gandhi’s work. What are the lessons that you draw from the way he progressed with the satyagraha…
Vandana Shiva: Swaraj. The first is swaraj. You must be self-organised. As community, as localities, as a nation. No word is more powerful than swaraj. I do a lot of work on self-organisation as a principle through which life and living systems are organised, and swaraj as the political organising principle that Gandhi left with us. In my view, when five corporations control most aspects of our lives, including the technologies for communication, our thoughts in that communication become the raw material. At such a time self-organising, or swaraj, is the most powerful tool.
The second is Swadeshi. When the British split Bengal into East and West Bengal, its people started a movement in 1905 for boycott of foreign goods, called Swadeshi. Gandhi picked up the term Swadeshi and made it bigger with the Quit India Movement. The essence of this movement was set by the Bengalis, who said we will not be ruled by these fellows who divide us.
The third word for me is very powerful, the power of truth, satyagraha. And I would add now, especially with what is now happening, two other words – sanmati, the right thinking, as well as sarvodaya, unto the last. Because the last is being left behind. Forgotten.
LILA: Do you see possibilities of realising these in our times?
Vandana Shiva: I see the impossibility of dictatorship being sustained. Therefore, I see the possibility in anything else. Give me in history a lesson of which dictator and which bad ruler could carry on and on… there’s a time in which they come and there’s a time in which they go. If you were in Hitler’s Germany, I’m sure people would’ve been thinking, “Oh my god, this will last forever.” But it didn’t last forever.
Coercion cannot last because coercion is externally imposed… The only thing that can last is that which organises growth from within, which is swaraj. That can last forever. Its nature’s logic. And nature’s logic is perennial. It doesn’t mean the same plant will live forever. It does mean the seed of that plant will live forever and regain itself.
LILA: Since we are talking about Gandhi’s ideas and how they can help us today, and also there is the Earth University, can you tell me about the educational governance methodologies or the systems of pedagogy that you have implemented?
Vandana Shiva: Gandhi envisaged a ‘nai talim‘, which basically meant learning by doing. Our learning at the Earth University is learning by doing. At Sabarmati, they showed me in their archives a saree Gandhi had woven for Kasturba. We do organic cotton in Vidharbha and we go to Gandhi ashrams in Wardha. So I took a picture of the saree and had it made. This is a copy of the actual, in which there’s an in-thread with gold. It is difficult to do that. He did that by hand. Even the hemming was by his hand. So that’s what I’m saying, you can either shrink your brain and your heart according to the plan of the emperor and the empire. Or you can let your heart and your conscience expand to its full potential. These are times where our potential has to be the guiding force, not the determination of the other.
LILA: You have had a very diverse engagement with thought and knowledge in your own research, from quantum theory to biotechnology. Can you tell me about this diverse engagement?
Vandana Shiva: But at one level it’s all the same. I decided to delve deep into quantum theory and went into my PhD for it, even though I was doing a PhD in particle physics because it was fascinating for me as a worldview. And mechanical physics was very inadequate to explain this complex world of ours. It’s the training that I had in quantum theory which allows me to understand the seed and fight Monsanto. It allows me to understand fascism and find ways of resistance. First is potential, there’s nothing fixed. All fundamentals create essentialisms. The Monsanto fundamentalism is – native seeds are primitive, GMO seeds are a miracle. Miracle seeds is a term that Borlaug used too. Essentialised Indian seeds come to be perceived as inferior varieties, primitive grade, so wipe it all out. In resistance, we celebrate them as the foods of the future.
Second is, in the mechanistic controlling universe, everything is separate. And because you are isolated from each other I can control you. Non-separability was the subject of my thesis. Non-separability is the way I do my ecology, non-separability is the way I maintain solidarity in society in times of the worst propaganda. If the world is in flux, and it’s not a deterministic world, certainty is a wrong qualifier. Uncertainty is the given. Within that uncertainty you must enhance your best potential.
LILA: From your own personal engagement with knowledge and these lessons that you’ve been able to draw because of such a diverse engagement, can you share some thoughts on a methodology or an idea of education in the country today that can help change…?
Vandana Shiva: Today we have created an educational system in which we are preparing cogs in a machine which is already getting rid of that cog. By the time you prepare that student with their 20 years of education to be a cog in this machine, that machine has already morphed to make you redundant. And if you just look at the way artificial intelligence and robotics is displacing the works, that are the only jobs that are seen as something to do, you are basically preparing people for redundancy.
This year’s not only 150 years of Gandhi, it’s 100 years of International Labour Organisation, which got incorporated as the first UN agency on the rights of labour. And I’ve done a lot of writing this year and a lot of talks at ILO and UN on the issue of work. If these rubber barons realise their dream of driverless cars which will have to be made compulsory to make it work, will all these people around here have jobs? With driverless tractors, why do you need a farmer? They are already planning farming without farmers! So given that your education system is on a linear trajectory which is already saying we won’t need you 5 years from now, whether or not you love this trajectory, if you’re smart you will wake up to it. So for me, education has to be what its original meaning is—Educare. Cultivate the values and skills of living. And it’s not the case that economies that were dedicated to life did not take care of people. After all, Aristotle clearly defined economia as the art of living and chrematistics as the art of money making. We have confused chrematistics with economy. We’ve turned growth into a worship and the reason for totalitarian governance. All of it is totally linked. We have to come back to economia and I feel very very hopeful about this because I am constantly getting young people who work today in the Silicon Valley of India, in Bangalore. They have lots of money, and heaps of boredom. Because the money doesn’t translate into the cultivation of your mind. The external indicator of more money and the creative satisfaction of your inner intelligence unfolding are two different ontological realities. We have merged the two because of the money fundamentals. We have to separate them again and come to the real values. And we have to educate ourselves for those values, which is what educare was. Everywhere we should have nai talim. Young people call me, “Come and give us a talk on slow fashion.” Let’s bring the tailors back, let’s bring the dyers back. And what are the nai talim of today? When Gandhi started it, the issue was people being laid waste by an empire and pushed into poverty. Today, the planet is being laid waste. Society is being laid waste. Our cultures are being laid waste. So nai talim today has to be all the skills, values, knowledge of how to take care of the Earth. That’s what our Earth University is about. It has to be about how to develop your social intelligence and cooperative intelligence to be able to work in solidarity to create economy. Economy isn’t for money, to generate money. Economy is to live life, for life.
