Friends Abroad: Vandana Shiva

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LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY. One of the structural evils of our two-party system and our editorial pages is the inherent bias of both towards two.  If not A, then B.  If not Pro, then Con.  If not Left, then Right: one must be one or the other.

But in the real world, no thinking person lives like that.  Labels and diction should never blind us to who our friends are.  And so from my paleoconservative stoop I write today to make a pitch to include an Indian ecofeminist on our front porch.

Vandana Shiva is well worth discussing here.  Like most good people, and for all that she identifies herself with the Left, she cannot truly be pigeonholed politically.  She is bigger than that.  Or, as Chesterton taught us to boast, she is smaller than that.

The daughter of a forest conservator father and a farmer mother, Shiva is an Indian physicist whom in 1984 watched the riots in the Punjab and asked herself, why has the Indian state that benefited most from the Green Revolution become so violent?  Why (as she still says) does agriculture look more like war?

A month later came the Bhopal disaster, and she has never looked back.  She transformed herself from an academic into a farming and environmental activist, and a polemicist on how rightly to live.  Shiva started the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in her mother’s cowshed in Dehradun, and in the years since, she has acted as an advocate for Indian small farmers and an opponent of industrial agriculture, and specifically its pressure to use Bt-infused and herbicide-resistant seeds.  Something of an éminence grise now, she was at the University of Kentucky earlier this month to deliver their second Sustainability Lecture.

Shiva is a believer in local control over local resources for the benefit of the people who live there.  She argues with great clarity about the links between world trade and the destruction of biodiversity and good soil in India, the twisting of words to serve powerful corporations, and the necessity of refusing to allow life itself to be held hostage to a patent and a price tag.  One of her books is entitled Monocultures of the Mind, and no one argues more persuasively about the connection between biodiversity, human cultural diversity, and political freedom.  As she writes in Biopiracy, “Globalization is not the cross-cultural interaction of diverse societies; it is the imposition of a particular culture on all the others.”

She is interested in practical work as well as arguments.  In recent years her organization has trained tens of thousands of Indian farmers–who have needed training to learn to grow, among other things, their traditional dals. For a country with millions of vegetarians and millions more poor, these are essential protein sources and ancient crops.  But as farmers have moved to cash crops, monocultures, and patented seeds, “five thousand years of cultivating memory has been lost in one generation,” she says.

Her Navdanya organization saves and shares seed from over 40 seed banks across India.  It also conducts studies on the productivity of the new patented crop varieties and their effect on soil (see their latest report here).  There is a research farm in Uttranchal, too, where her colleagues are growing hundreds of varieties of edible and medicinal plants.

All of this, plus her books and her cheerful doggedness in debating and campaigning against agribusiness giants and their proponents in international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, has made her a prominent figure worldwide.  But like most true farming advocates, she is interested in the well-being of the land because she is interested in the well-being of the people who live from it.  It was the deaths in the Punjab and at Bhopal that got her started, after all, and she frequently mentions the high rate of suicide among farmers growing Bt cotton (they fall into debt, and then despair).

What does she have to say that applies to the U.S.?  Nearly everything.  The seed companies (Monsanto, Cargill, Syngenta) are the same.  The effects of their seeds on soils are the same.  And the loss of farming knowledge is perhaps an even greater danger in this country, where so few farm children are continuing in their parents’ calling.  Farming demands observation, experience and skill; it is not a menial activity, and not just anybody can do it.  Nor are ag schools taking up the slack—not yet.  The University of Kentucky has a brand-new organic farm (which I have not seen), but all its emphasis up to now has been on agribusiness techniques that demand big equipment, petroleum-based fertilizer, lots of water, and debt.

Among her other virtues, Vandana Shiva is sensitive to the way language affects our thinking about what we do.  At UK she told the audience that we have found ourselves in a place where “we don’t grow food, we grow commodities.”  The result?  “We are trading in nutritionally deficient food loaded with toxins. Food is what organic farmers grow.  The rest is rubbish.”

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Katherine Dalton has worked as a magazine editor, freelance feature writer and book editor.  She started in journalism in college, working at The Yale Literary Magazine during most of its controversial few years as a national magazine of opinion based at Yale.  She then worked briefly at Harper's magazine in New York, and more extensively at Chronicles magazine in Illinois, where she was a contributing editor for many years.  She has has written for various publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and was a contributor to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto.  She lives in her native Kentucky.

8 COMMENTS

  1. Shiva is a believer in local control over local resources for the benefit of the people who live there.

    As succinct a description of the platform of the People’s Party–the most authentically leftist, and simultaneously authentically conservative, populist movement America ever produced–as I’ve ever read. Thanks for the tribute, Katherine. Any friend of Wendell Berry’s ought to be a friend to us all. (And that goes for Bill McKibben too!)

  2. Yes, another chair for the Vermonter, and while we’re at it, since you’re in Kansas, Russell, bring in a third for Wes Jackson at the Land Institute. Good subject for a piece–

  3. Ah yes, Shiva. It’s brought me great enjoyment to watch her go toe to toe with great powers, corporations, goverments, etc, and defeat them. If we survive the insanity of Modernity, she along with Berry, and others will be remembered. they really did stand athwart history, and shouted “stop”!

  4. What I find especially interesting is the intersection of a very “hard sciences” physics background on the one hand with a perspective which seems to respect human traditions.

  5. This is as good a place as any to put in a recommendation for Mike Davis’ indispensable book, “Late Victorian Holocausts.” The world Shiva fights against was set into motion by the forced integration of India and the rest of the “Third World” into the global economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Doing this required the deliberate destruction of ways of life that had worked for communities for centuries, if not longer: local irrigation schemes were undercut in favor of mass engineering projects which, when most needed, epically failed. The sharing of common goods, such as wood, manure and grass for fodder, were made subject to Western ideas of private property. The result was tens of millions dead — a body count the 20the Century’s most infamous tyrants would envy.

    As The Who might put it: meet the new bosses, not that different from the old ones.

  6. …”five thousand years of cultivation memory has been lost in one generation”…….Whee doggies but we have found something to run up the flagpole here now haven’t we? Memory, since history “ended” is indeed lost to us. That Great and Hungry Predator named “Efficiency” has a bottomless appetite for eating memory and leaving us a rather sordid defecation that likes to make up things as we go. At some point, even the most triumphal partisan of everything modern will up and discover that if it were not for something primitive then the modern would never have seen the gloaming of a smoggy day on the Los Angeles Freeway. Perish the thought that we might actually hold a primitive and modern thought in our heads at the same time and not need Ambien.

  7. Thank you, Katherine, for bringing Vandana Shiva to my attention.
    She is a true leader in the mode of Gandhi.

    In her own way she reminds me of the character in the 1957 film
    “Mother India.” Both Ms. Shiva and the film’s leading character were/are passionate in their defense of the small traditional farmer and the ancient cultural ways of India.

    If you’ve missed the film…check it out! 😉 🙂

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