Shiva Freedom

[Bartie Spalitto]

For over 40 years, the author, philosopher and activist has championed biodiversity, the integrity of living resources and the voices of women and farmers around the world through her writing, lectures and grassroots organizing efforts. A lightning rod in the fight against GMOs and seed patents, her tireless battle for seed freedom has garnered more than her fair share of adversaries and allies. But despite the criticism, Vandana Shiva remains an unwavering force for freedom.

Another illusion treats corporations as persons, and they have power to take away the freedom of the seed. They have power to take away the freedom of the farmer, and they have power to take away the freedom of the women. They have power to take away the freedom of the bees and the butterflies. That is now defined as freedom of speech. It has become the freedom to annihilate.

The same worldview is also a big contributor to climate emissions. My book Soil Not Oil tracked how 50% of greenhouse gases come from an oil-based, poison-based, globalized food system. If we want to find answers to the climate catastrophe, the sixth mass extinction, hunger, and the fact that a large amount of chronic diseases today are from the same war industry, then we have to make peace with the seed and, through the seed, make peace with the earth.

When you eat, there is consciousness of how the food was grown. Did it regenerate biodiversity or did it destroy it? Poison-free eating becomes an obligation to protect the earth: Eating as an ecological act, eating as a spiritual act, eating as a recognition of the Dharma of life.

Yes, hand in hand with globalization. My last question for you is really a call to action to our readership. How do aesthetics and creativity contribute to your vision for an Earth Democracy?

Humanity stands at an evolutionary crossroads. We can either choose to continue to walk towards our extinction on the path shaped by the 1 per cent over the last 500 years, or we can choose to sow the seeds of the future as members of the earth community, with a consciousness and conviction that extinction is not inevitable. (148)

The book can be read as a powerful critique of the currently influential ideology of neoliberalism and the mode of reason it privileges, yet the term itself and any explicit discussion of its meanings are rarely explicit in the book. Indeed, one wonders if the authors consider it a useful category and focus for radical thinking and change in the future. They argue:

[The] pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our minds and bodies as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to the diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. (179)

Oneness would be a welcome addition to upper-level high school and lower-level college courses, especially in environmental, sustainability, or technology studies programs. It would serve well as both a compliment and critique of ecological economics and environmental economics. Its coverage of financialization, concentration, and corporate control would serve sociology or politics classes on markets and political economy. It will satisfy readers interested in a global perspective on the relationship between wealth inequality and concentration of power on the one hand, and human freedom and ecological diversity on the other.

Kate Clark is the Director of the Environment and Sustainability undergraduate program at Western Colorado University in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where she also teaches in sociology and the Master of Environmental Management program. She studies social movements, environmental justice, and electricity policy.

Trained in physics and philosophy, Vandana Shiva is renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods. She co-founded Navdanya, which promotes seed saving and organic farming and has more than 70,000 farmer-members.

van Gelder: The prevailing worldview separates humans from the natural world, and it has had terrible effects. How are people healing this separation, and how are seeds part of that work?

I believe overcoming the separation is a longing much deeper than the recent rise of ecological awareness. The healing is coming from reclaiming our oneness with the web of life, with the universe itself.

Shiva: Life is self-organized. Self-organized systems evolve in diversity. You are not identical to me, because each of us has evolved in freedom. The self-organizing capacity of life is expressed in diversity. Diversity of culture, diversity of humans, diversity of seeds.

We did not begin with big grants and big offices. Starting from a cow shed in Dehra Dun and extending a garage in Bangalore, later, we deepened our relationships with local communities and our understanding of local ecosystems.

Making connections between the erosion of biological and cultural diversity, whether violence ethnic or religious, and between centralised governance, has been an important preoccupation for me in recent times as region after region seems to slip into irreversible and violent civil strife.

Not till diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. If production continues to be based on the logic of uniformity and homogenisation, women, Third World people and nature will continue to be marginalised and displaced, and vicious cycles of violence will engulf more and more communities.

For us, protecting native seeds is more than conservation of raw material for the biotechnology industry. The diverse seeds now being pushed to extinction carry within them seed of other ways of thinking about nature, and other ways of producing for our needs. Uniformity and diversity are not just patterns of land use, they are ways of thinking and ways of living.

Conservation of diversity is, above all, the commitment to let alternatives flourish in society and nature, in economic systems and in knowledge systems. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times. It is a survival imperative, and the precondition for the freedom of all, the big and the small.

The recipient of the Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz Sustainability Award 2021, Dr. Vandana Shiva, visited TU Dresden on 27 June 2022 on her way to the award ceremony in Chemnitz. Together with guests of the Saxon Carl-von-Carlowitz-Gesellschaft e.V. she came to learn more about the university's activities in the sustainability field and to exchange insights with the local actors.

Dr. Vandana Shiva has already been awarded many times for her commitment to environmental protection and women's rights. In addition to receiving the Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz Sustainability Prize 2021, she is also the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award 1993. Furthermore, Vandana Shiva is a founding member of the World Future Council and a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. In her work, she combines gender justice with ecology and criticism of globalization.

The event in the festive hall of the Rectorate started after a welcome and the opportunity for lunch with a contribution by Prof. Dr. Uta Berger. In her function as Scientific Director of the Centre for International Postgraduate Studies for Environmental Management (CIPSEM), Prof. Berger explained how young decision-makers from the Global South learn from and with each other in continuing education courses to contribute even more to a sustainability transition in their positions.

Afterward, Dr. Dieter Fsslein, Chairman of the Saxon Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz Society e.V. for the Promotion of Sustainability, explained how Hans Carl von Carlowitz first formulated the principles of sustainability as early as the beginning of the 18th century. The triangle of sustainability he described, consisting of ecological balance, economic security, and social justice, is still valid today.

In her kick-start speech, Dr. Vandana Shiva emphasized that all our efforts to achieve more sustainability are built on the thoughts and actions of many individuals and societies. Prof. Dr. Edeltraud Gnther continued to present the objective and some of the activities of PRISMA, the Center for Sustainability Assessment and Policy at TU Dresden. Finally, the holder of the newly established Hans Carl von Carlowitz Junior Professorship for Sustainability Assessment and Policy at the Faculty of Economics, JProf. Dr. Samanthi Dijkstra-Silva, reported on her plan to specifically address in her research on sustainability assessment what inhibits or encourages individuals to contribute to more sustainability in their personal and professional contexts.

In her research, Dr. Vandana Shiva has also dealt intensively with sustainable agriculture, considering the situation in her home country India. In the subsequent discussion with the guests, among them the current participants of the CIPSEM courses as well as members of UNU-FLORES, Dr. Shiva once again emphasized the role of individual actors in the effort for more sustainability. For example, smallholder farmers, who cultivate land with low environmental costs while at the same time protecting biodiversity, have collectively great and large-scale significance for the transformation of society and need appropriate political representation. Here she sees one of the great democratic challenges of our time.

Dr. Vandana Shiva's comments on the increasing insecurity in our time were particularly remarkable. She sees uncertainty as an inseparable part of life, always representing an opportunity and potentially more freedom. Accepting this uncertainty as something natural increases personal resilience in the face of politically or economically instrumentalized fear. She encouraged the young decision-makers in the room to find new and creative ways to combine self-care with the care for others and our planet.

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