Resisting the hurricane of globalization seems impossible in a world that advances in genetic modification in agriculture, in the consolidation of intensive crops and in processed food, but Vandana Shiva, the great activist of biodiversity and ecofeminism, seems to have accomplished.
Full of energy, owner of a smile that has not lost intensity and a conviction that defies the most virulent criticism, this woman born in the Indian city of Dehradun 69 years ago continues with all vigor her fight for the diversity of seeds against monocultures, for the role of women in the economy, for water, against agricultural patents and for a concept that she defends as a banner for new stormy times: the sense of belonging.
belonging
.
An idea that in his speech encompasses much more than the fact of being part of a club, since it includes something as immaterial as the community, the collective, authenticity and family in a broad sense.
Very spacious.
To enter the universe of Vandana Shiva is to travel very far, to origins related to the wake of Gandhi and her form of non-violent resistance that she has used against the massive felling of trees in her Himalayan region in the seventies or against mining wild extractive in the eighties.
The somewhat mystical way of talking about it and the discourse of love for the earth as a connected whole, of which we humans are a part of, generates suspicion and enormous criticism, especially from the affected industry.
But the truth is that her clear and early voice against Monsanto, the large corporation of pesticides and genetically modified organisms, now owned by Bayer, has resonated in the legal cases of tens of thousands of people for cancers related to exposure to their products.
Bayer agreed in 2020 to pay 11.
And the truth is also that Vandana Shiva studied Physics and Philosophy, two disciplines as disparate as they are complementary that have allowed her to combine that mix of values and numbers in her causes.
What has science given you and what has philosophy given you?
I chose physics when I was very young, inspired by Einstein because I read his short essays on science and social responsibility.
I had gone to schools where they didn't teach science, but I looked for good teachers to train me and I got a scholarship to go to university.
I studied Particle Physics and that led me to the world of quantum physics.
I wanted to understand it better, I started to find out and I discovered that everything I wanted, the great minds of the foundations of quantum theory from all over the world, were at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada.
And there I went to do Philosophy and do my doctorate.
And now I'll tell you what all this has given me: quantum physics is about connection at a distance, about how things hit each other without physically pushing each other.
There are so many ways to stay connected!
We speak in the center of Palma de Mallorca, where Vandana Shiva participates in the Xtant forum for activism and thinking about sustainability, and through the window she points out the surroundings of forests, urban planning and the sea that penetrates a few meters from us.
“Physics also taught me to work with numbers, with systems, with processes, to know how things evolve, how they interconnect with each other.
And I began to discover that the numbers were being misused."
He gives the example of eucalyptus trees: cutting down native forests to plant eucalyptus trees in their place was considered a high-yield activity.
“But this new plantation does not carry out any of the functions of the forest: the functions of water, of humus.
It does not contribute anything positive to the soil for water or agriculture.
And I found out that the supposed high performance was a miscalculation because it doesn't take into account the whole system.
That is why my training in physics gave me a structure to understand the impact of genetically modified things on biodiversity and on our intestines”.
And philosophy?
What did philosophy give you?
I needed to do a second interdisciplinary training because the fundamentals of quantum physics also raise philosophical questions: what is ontology? What exists in the world?
The whole question of indeterminism, prediction...
Vandana Shiva, photographed in MallorcaVanessa Montero
Returning from Canada, he joined the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, dedicated to public health, science and energy systems.
And his first big victory was a study on some limestone mines that he did for the Ministry of the Environment in 1982 and that led to their closure.
“We were able to show that the limestone in the mountains generated water and that the economy of water was much more important than the economy of extraction to make cement and find raw materials.
We were able to compare the two economies: leaving the limestone does not seem to create an economy because you are not extracting.
But that limestone is creating water, water creating agriculture and agriculture creating livelihoods, while the other way two companies took the profits but left us without water and caused landslides and floods.
Our study led to the Supreme Court closing it because our Constitution says that every citizen has the right to live, and the State has the duty to protect them.
That mining project destroyed the water supply and, therefore, the right to life.
It was the first time that the right to a stable and sustainable ecosystem was translated into human rights.
The mines were closed.
From there he took the leap to raise his own foundation.
“I realized the power of a single study.
If he had been able to save something so important, how much more could he do independently.”
He gave up his monthly salary and listened to his mother, who offered him the family farm.
And in 1982 he created the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.
"From my mother's stables," she recalls.
“This is how I became what I am: I continued with science, but I don't see thought as something separate from action.
Thinking and doing is part of the same human process.
And my activism and my science are part of a life process of responsibility, of total knowledge of what is happening in the world and of what you can do.
A life in which you take responsibility for your actions.”
You are an ecofeminist.
Many feminists fear that environmentalism undermines the causes of feminism by uniting the flags.
It's a risk?
If you think of women as constituting small parts: here the feminist part, here the ecology part, and if she becomes an ecologist, feminism will fall..., you have a very Cartesian and mechanical way of thinking.
Women are human beings, but above that we are beings of the Earth.
And we have lived for 400 or 500 years the devaluation of women.
Descartes made the body disappear and considered thought as the activity of privileged men who defined the world as a machine.
Bacon said that nature had to be enslaved and tortured to give us its secrets.
All this thinking separated humans from nature and turned women into matter to be dominated and exploited.
Therefore, separating women from the rest is a false choice, it is a reductionist, Cartesian separation,
and that's where the problems start.
The problem of patriarchy and the problem of ecological destruction are totally interconnected.
And the potential for regeneration is ecofeminism, the recognition that the same worldview that subjugates nature also subjugates woman as a passive object.
Separation and hierarchy are part of the problem.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
The problem of patriarchy and the problem of ecological destruction are totally interconnected.
And the potential for regeneration is ecofeminism, the recognition that the same worldview that subjugates nature also subjugates woman as a passive object.
Separation and hierarchy are part of the problem.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
The problem of patriarchy and the problem of ecological destruction are totally interconnected.
And the potential for regeneration is ecofeminism, the recognition that the same worldview that subjugates nature also subjugates woman as a passive object.
Separation and hierarchy are part of the problem.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
the recognition that the same worldview that subjugates nature also subjugates woman as a passive object.
Separation and hierarchy are part of the problem.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
the recognition that the same worldview that subjugates nature also subjugates woman as a passive object.
Separation and hierarchy are part of the problem.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
Those who make big profits from destroying nature tell you that you can't think about the environment because jobs are lost.
They always put employment against ecology.
But a system that denies the land as something alive continues to be a colonization of the land, of women and men.
The other risk they attribute to it is pushing women back into old caregiving roles.
In the seventies, the women of my region protected the trees in the Chipko movement, which means to embrace.
Other women defended the rivers from large dams.
My sisters from Chipko also took care of the agriculture and the children, especially since the men had emigrated.
That real economy was left to women on the basis of the denial of that sector.
Because today's economy is based on making money.
Aristotle said that economics is the art of living.
The art of making money is criminal.
And that is what we have done, that we have confused the art of making money with economics.
And it's not economics.
It is diseconomy.
The true economy is the art of living that women have sustained.
Everyone has to take care of the care.
But since we women have always done it,
Vandana Shiva, photographed in MallorcaVanessa Montero
Do you think women govern better than men?
When women work with the values of a relationship with the land, they govern better.
You are a champion of the fight against genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Are you against all of them, including those that have been modified to cope with droughts or low temperatures?
I am a scientist and I want to see the systems in their relationship with everything.
I didn't exactly choose agriculture, to which I have dedicated my life.
But in 1984 I was forced to because in Punjab, where the Green Revolution had been introduced, a lot of people died from pesticides.
After Bhopal and the Punjab I asked myself: where do these chemicals come from?
And I met Hitler, at a time when a group of companies had developed chemicals to kill people in concentration camps.
They were now using chemicals and changing thinking about agriculture and food.
I understood then that you cannot look at an isolated pimple.
You have to look at what it requires in terms of energy in the plants and the soil.
My opinion is very simple: we have an evaluation framework.
The impact on biodiversity and public health must be evaluated.
It is a legal obligation and that is my attitude towards GMOs, including the new ones.
And how can science help agriculture?
Science can help by being science.
Science means knowing, and knowing means that if you have a seed, you have to know exactly how it relates to the soil, to bees and to pollinators.
It is not about putting a poisonous gene with toxin and letting the soil organisms die.
Farmers are the ultimate experts.
They have faced the drought and have selected their grains, which are the ones that best cope with it.
That's science.
Science means knowing, and knowing means that if you have a seed, you have to know exactly how it relates to the soil, to bees and to pollinators.
It is not about putting a poisonous gene with toxin and letting the soil organisms die.
Farmers are the ultimate experts.
They have faced the drought and have selected their grains, which are the ones that best cope with it.
That's science.
Science means knowing, and knowing means that if you have a seed, you have to know exactly how it relates to the soil, to bees and to pollinators.
It is not about putting a poisonous gene with toxin and letting the soil organisms die.
Farmers are the ultimate experts.
They have faced the drought and have selected their grains, which are the ones that best cope with it.
That's science.
A science that does not come from laboratories.
Science that comes only from laboratories has become the new threat to life on Earth.
Food is the currency of life and how you treat the soil decides the quality of your food.
You cannot separate the soil from your health, from the biodiversity of the soil and that of our intestines.
The gut is like a second brain.
We now know that ultra-processed food is responsible for skyrocketing chronic diseases linked to the bad industrial diet.
That's science, and yet humanity is blindly moving toward lab-made food.
And you can manipulate government policy, but you can't fool the 100 trillion microbes in our guts.
We are going to have a health disaster of an unimaginable magnitude if fake food continues.
Science means to investigate, but to investigate with transparency.
And food is too important to be left in the hands of 10 billionaires to be the next source of their profits.
Do you feel that you have won a specific battle among all the ones you have fought?
We have stopped Monsanto in that case because achieving a biosafety protocol was already a victory.
But I don't see them as battles.
I see my life guided by a search for truth and correct action.
And the mere fact that I was able to tell the Monsantos of the world that you cannot invent seeds, that you are not God, that genetically modified organisms are not God, that you are not the creators of the world, that was already a victory.
Has globalization failed?
Yes, we saw it during the covid catastrophe.
The rules of globalization are written by corporations.
I've spent a lot of time working on a farm deal that was written by Cargill, the world's largest grain trader, or on intellectual property rights written by Monsanto.
They are judge and jury.
They have written WTO rules and given us a world that spawns disease or failed genetic modification technologies.
Glyphosate resistant grains were supposed to control weeds and we have super weeds.
A toxin was supposed to control pests and we have super pests.
The seed is life in continuity, in evolution, not a patent.
They are centuries and millennia of contribution from our grandmothers, from the soil, from the sun.
But Monsanto's seeds create dependency,
and if they raise the price for farmers, they go into debt.
And in India, although they were not allowed to have patents, Monsanto did collect duties and taxes from farmers and raised the price.
Four hundred thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide.
Not allowing farmers to have seeds has become a crime.
And now with climate change we face disaster.
The farmer becomes a climate refugee.
Patents are crimes against farmers and crimes against the future.
And now with climate change we face disaster.
The farmer becomes a climate refugee.
Patents are crimes against farmers and crimes against the future.
And now with climate change we face disaster.
The farmer becomes a climate refugee.
Patents are crimes against farmers and crimes against the future.
Vandana Shiva, photographed in MallorcaVanessa Montero
What is biodiversity for you?
Biodiversity is life, not the result of the exploitation of resources.
It is not an entry in the financial markets or a number.
The diversity of species is a relationship between living beings.
Biodiversity generates plants.
The plant is biodiversity, food that we can eat.
We are walking biodiversity.
And membership?
What is it for you?
Belonging means that you know who you are, your relationships, what makes you feel at home, and for me it means knowing that we are part of the earth family.
Of course, we have mothers and fathers, relatives, children.
But that is not the limit of our family.
We are the family of the earth.
You can't exclude trees, without them we wouldn't have oxygen.
Therefore, belonging means knowing our ecological place in the web of life.
It means that the Earth is our home.
And taking care of it is the real economy.
This is the daughter of a forestry agent who taught him to love trees while walking through the forest and a school inspector who became a refugee after the partition of India and Pakistan.
“My mother refused to sing me English nursery rhymes because they are all about death: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pile of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after...”, sings Shiva the song that ends in fall and fracture.
“That's why my mother wrote her own stories about forests.
That is how we learned that each tree gives you food, directly or indirectly”.
From both, she says, she learned simplicity and also to live without fear.
“My father used to say that when your conscience guides you, there is no power in the world to fear.
And also the power of sharing.
He said that if you use more,
you will have less to share.
And if you use less and with simplicity, you will have more to share.
They lived their lives with open arms for everyone.”
Shiva and his two brothers still live in the family home and every day of the confinement he has thanked his mother for the lychees and mangoes she planted.
“Every morning birds and butterflies came, and I thanked my mother for making a home for so many living things.”
She, he concludes, is just trying to follow her lead.
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