Vandana Shiva: Earth Democracy Movement

"This is immoral. Life is not an invention. Life cannot be a monopoly. 
You cannot sell us the seeds you stole from us, and you cannot charge us 
royalties for the product of nature's intelligence and centuries of 
human innovation."

"We've received our medicinal plants, our seeds, our forests from nature 
through our ancestors; we owe it to them to conserve it for the future. 
We pledge we will never allow their erosion or their theft. We pledge we 
will never accept patenting, genetic modification, or allow our 
biodiversity to be polluted in any form, and we pledge that we will act 
as the peoples of this biodiversity."

Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living 
wealth on which people depend.

There isn't any one coordinated language for this movement, and that's 
the beauty of it.

As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other.

Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. 
Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological 
diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is 
disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

Instead of leaving seeds in the hands of the peasants who co-evolve them 
in partnership with nature, seeds become a monopoly in the hands of five 
or six global corporations. Instead of water belonging to millions of 
local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global 
water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate 
for the few the base of survival of the majority.

When you look at why people were fighting, you find they were fighting 
for their rivers, for fair prices, for a say on when dam waters should 
be released.

More recently there have been clear indicators of how fundamentalism is 
growing out of the economic insecurity of globalization.

we need instead to create virtuous cycles that allow economic democracy 
to feed political democracy, cultural identities, and cultural diversity.

Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name of economic 
growth and economic liberalization, and people don't have enough food to 
eat. Our farmers are being ravished by seed companies, being pushed into 
debt, and committing suicide.

I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the 
bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of 
your own capacities, just that in itself creates new potential.

your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest 
commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You 
want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take 
full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that 
combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take 
on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself 
in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is 
a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each 
other with prescription and demands.

I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace 
fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
+++





Deepening Democracy
By Sarah Ruth van Gelder, YES! Magazine
December 13, 2002
http://www.yesmagazine.org/24democracy/shiva.htm

Vandana Shiva is a physicist and an organic farmer, an instigator of 
India's historic "tree-huggers" movement, and a renowned author. She 
speaks internationally on the perils of globalization, while mobilizing 
fellow citizens to reclaim their rights to life itself.


Sarah Ruth van Gelder: Tell me about the Earth Democracy movement. Where 
did that notion come from, and what form is the movement taking?

Vandana Shiva: The notion comes from a very ancient category in Indian 
thought. Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, 
in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth 
family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the 
non-human - we are a continuum.

When the issue of the patenting of life emerged, for example, there were 
two levels of response from those opposing this practice in India. The 
one level was resistance: "This is immoral. Life is not an invention. 
Life cannot be a monopoly. You cannot sell us the seeds you stole from 
us, and you cannot charge us royalties for the product of nature's 
intelligence and centuries of human innovation."

The second level was the reclaiming of democracy: people claimed the 
right to look after their biodiversity and use it sustainably. This came 
out of discussions among the movements we've been building at the 
grassroots.

I remember one meeting of 200 villagers who had been involved in seed 
saving and seed sharing with Navdanya, the trust that I founded to save 
seeds and promote organic agriculture. These 200 villagers gathered on 
World Environment Day in 1998 and declared sovereignty over their 
biodiversity - not sovereignty to rape and destroy, sovereignty to 
conserve. These 200 villagers, gathered in a high mountain village near 
a tributary of the Ganges, said, "We've received our medicinal plants, 
our seeds, our forests from nature through our ancestors; we owe it to 
them to conserve it for the future. We pledge we will never allow their 
erosion or their theft. We pledge we will never accept patenting, 
genetic modification, or allow our biodiversity to be polluted in any 
form, and we pledge that we will act as the peoples of this biodiversity."

These discussions in villages all over India, in many different 
languages, led to amazing actions. Some wrote letters to Mike Moore, 
director-general of the WTO saying, "We noticed you have passed a law 
called 'Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights.' We also notice that 
under this law you want to monopolize life forms. Unfortunately, these 
are resources over which you have no jurisdiction, and you have 
overstepped your boundaries."

Similar letters went to the prime minister of India: "You are the prime 
minister of this country, but we are the keepers of biodiversity. This 
is not your jurisdiction. You cannot sign away these rights. They were 
not given to you. We never delegated them to you."

But the ones that were the most beautiful were crafted literally under 
the village trees and addressed to Ricetec, Inc., which patented Basmati 
rice, and to the Grace Corporation, which patented the name. The letters 
said, "We've used Basmati for centuries. ... Now we hear you've got a 
patent number for this, and you claim to have invented it. This kind of 
piracy and theft we know happens. There are people who steal in our 
village, and we treat them with understanding. We call them and ask them 
to explain what is the compulsion that led them to steal. So we invite 
you to come to our village and explain to us the compulsion that made 
you steal from us."

These communities started in years past by saving locally bred seeds and 
saving biodiversity. Now they are seeking self-governance over food 
systems, water systems, and biodiversity systems.

If you think of the fact that corporate globalization is really about an 
aggressive privatization of the water, biodiversity, and food systems of 
the Earth, when these communities declare sovereignty and act on that 
sovereignty, they have developed a powerful response to globalization. 
Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living 
wealth on which people depend.

Is the same language being used elsewhere to counter corporate 
globalization?

There is, I think, a spontaneous resurgence of thinking that centers on 
protection of life, celebrating life, enjoying life as both our highest 
duty and our most powerful form of resistance against a violent and 
brutal system that globalizes not just trade, but fascism, and denies 
civil liberties and freedoms.

There isn't any one coordinated language for this movement, and that's 
the beauty of it. The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first 
experience of a rainbow politics - a successful pluralistic politics, 
without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty 
that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have 
different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy 
and living economies and that it will include both taking personal 
responsibility to make change and being part of national and 
international movements for change.

You've written about four types of insecurities - ecological, economic, 
cultural, and political - and how each results in violence. Could you 
say something about why you consider each of these forms of insecurity?

The ecological crisis is a severe form of insecurity, especially in 
conditions of poverty when rivers are polluted and you have no clean 
drinking water, when groundwater is exhausted and you're forced to 
migrate. There couldn't be a deeper insecurity than this. Many conflicts 
within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting 
resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from 
where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources 
of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against 
each other.

Many people assume that scarcity has always been part of the human 
condition and that scarcity is closely related to population increases.

In my 25 years of work on resource and environmental issues, one thing I 
have learned is that different parts of the planet are endowed in 
different ways. There may be little rainfall in the deserts of 
Rajasthan, but the culture of Rajasthan evolved to manage that amount of 
rainfall, and they have developed miraculous technologies for harvesting 
and storing what rain they get. They have sophisticated underground 
storage systems and water-harvesting systems so that not a drop is 
wasted. These technologies still sustain cities like Jodhpur and Jaipur. 
They have enough drinking water because they've developed a conservation 
culture, and they grow crops that don't need much water. The moment you 
think the desert of Rajasthan should be growing rice paddy or cotton, 
you create scarcity.

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments - that is diversity. 
Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. 
Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological 
diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is 
disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

There is no society in which you've had so-called population explosions 
as long as societies have lived within the context of their rights to 
the resources and the ability to conserve those resources for the 
future. Just look at two situations. In England, the population 
explosion started with the enclosures of the commons - when peasants 
were uprooted from the land and had to depend on selling their labor. In 
India, 1800 is the watershed for the consolidation of colonial regimes. 
For centuries before 1800 our population had been stable. When you 
depend on the land, you know there are five people who can be supported. 
You work your society out so you have five. When you are selling your 
labor power on an uncertain basis, in an unstable wage market, you know 
that having ten is better than having five. So dispossession from the 
Earth's natural wealth is at the root of instability and population growth.

So economic insecurity is actually created?

Instead of leaving seeds in the hands of the peasants who co-evolve them 
in partnership with nature, seeds become a monopoly in the hands of five 
or six global corporations. Instead of water belonging to millions of 
local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global 
water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate 
for the few the base of survival of the majority. The 80 percent who are 
dispossessed of the wealth of nature move into economic insecurity, 
because their livelihood as peasants, as fishermen, as farmers, as 
tribals, as forest dwellers, all depend on having the fisheries, the 
land, the forest, to make a living. When those rights are taken away, 
they become economic refugees - they become disposable people.

This economic model rested on the assumption that the favored 20 percent 
would gain security as a result of these policies. But recent events on 
Wall Street show us that this model creates economic insecurity both for 
the 80 percent who rely on natural wealth and for the 20 percent who 
rely on virtual wealth, because virtual money is a construct, and that 
construct can disappear as easily as it is created.

Either way, economic insecurity is the legacy of a finance-driven, 
capital-driven, corporate-driven economic model that is destroying our 
natural capital and the resilience of local economies.

The third type of insecurity is cultural. You've made a connection 
between globalization and the rise of nationalist violence and 
right-wing repression. What kind of evidence have you seen that there 
are links?

Well I'm a physicist, not a social scientist. But as a citizen of India, 
I have had to suffer the violence and brutality that comes with rising 
fundamentalism, and I've asked myself how a society that is the cradle 
of peace, the land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the 
most volatile societies in the world.

One incident that contributed to my understanding of these links was the 
violence that erupted in the Punjab in the 1980s. As the magic of the 
Green Revolution started to disappear, as subsidies were removed and an 
artificial system of prosperity started to decay, the Punjab became the 
birthplace for anger and discontent. When you look at why people were 
fighting, you find they were fighting for their rivers, for fair prices, 
for a say on when dam waters should be released. None of this was 
decided locally or regionally - it was all decided from the capital, 
Delhi. So the discontent was against centralized regimes in which people 
had no share in shaping their future.

More recently there have been clear indicators of how fundamentalism is 
growing out of the economic insecurity of globalization. Let me just 
give you two examples. In the late 1990s, because of the pressures of 
globalization, onion prices went up from 2 rupees to 100 rupees. The 
ruling party lost what became known as "the onion elections" of 1998 
because they allowed this price increase. The opposition parties used 
the onion as the symbol of their fight against globalization, and they 
won in every state. Immediately after that we saw a round of 
fundamentalist violence.

In Gujarat, we had another set of regional elections, and the WTO, 
agriculture, and farmers' survival were the major issues. Farmers said 
they were being destroyed by globalization policies, and they voted the 
ruling party out of power. Immediately after that the fundamentalist 
wave erupted, the genocide and warmongering started, and while public 
attention focused on the violence, the globalization agenda was pushed 
further.

As decision making is centralized away from local communities to 
national governments - and ultimately to corporate board rooms, 
financial markets, institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO - 
representative democracy loses its base in economic democracy. As local 
and national governments lose control over economic resources and 
priorities, elected leaders can no longer build a political base by 
championing programs responsive to family and community needs.

Political demagogues of the far right emerge to fill the void by 
channeling the anger and insecurity created by empire's program of 
scarcity, injustice, and exclusion into an us-versus-them politics that 
blames particular national, racial, culture, or religious groups. The 
rise of the LePens in France, the Fortuyns in Netherlands, Haiders in 
Austria, and the Narendra Modis in India is a result. So there is a 
strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics of hate that 
justifies policies of domination and exclusion. So long as people's 
attention is focused on fear and hatred of foreigners or members of a 
particular religious group, such as Muslims, they are distracted from 
organizing to deal with the system of institutional domination and 
exploitation that is the real source of their insecurity.

That certainly sounds like what is happening in the United States also.

Absolutely. It's a vicious cycle, and we need instead to create virtuous 
cycles that allow economic democracy to feed political democracy, 
cultural identities, and cultural diversity.

It comes back to deepening of democracy. What we have at this moment is 
democracy reduced to the rule of lies - lies in the way the popular will 
is being counted, as we saw in Florida in 2000, and lies in the way the 
people's wealth is being counted, as we see in today's accounting 
scandals. That false wealth is influencing who will rule - it's all just 
too false now.

Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name of economic 
growth and economic liberalization, and people don't have enough food to 
eat. Our farmers are being ravished by seed companies, being pushed into 
debt, and committing suicide. This system is going to cost lives even in 
the US, where people don't know how they'll pay for their health or 
retirement.

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy - to bring 
decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to 
where people are and to where they can take responsibility. If a river 
is flowing through some communities, those communities should have the 
power and the responsibility to decide how the water is used and whether 
it is to be polluted. The state has no business giving to Coca-Cola the 
groundwater of a valley in Kerala, resulting in rich farmland going 
totally dry. Communities need to take back sovereignty and delegate 
trusteeship to the state only as appropriate.

What we have now is a regime of absolute rights in the hands of 
corporations with zero responsibility for the environmental and social 
devastation and the political instabilities they are creating. If we 
want to reactivate and rejuvenate democracy, we have to bring back the 
economic content.

Let me wrap up with a personal question. Every time I've heard you speak 
or met you, you've had so much energy, not only intellectual energy, but 
personal or spiritual energy. I'm just wondering, what keeps you so alive?

Well, it's always a mystery, because you don't know why you get depleted 
or recharged. But, this much I know. I do not allow myself to be 
overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe 
that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of 
what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own 
capacities, just that in itself creates new potential.

And I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our 
culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those 
are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your 
commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment 
with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to 
lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full 
responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that 
combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take 
on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself 
in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is 
a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each 
other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a 
celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with 
fearlessness and joy.

Vandana Shiva's books include "Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and 
Profit," "Stolen Harvest, the Hijacking of the Global Food Supply," and 
many others. This interview was reprinted from Yes! A Journal of 
Positive Futures, PO Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. 
Subscriptions: 800/937-4451.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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