Il faudra bien sortir un jour de cette domination occidentale, non seulement au niveau économique mais surtout au niveau de la vision et conception de notre société. Chez nous aussi, il faudra réhabiliter ce qui vient de nos traditions,  pour sortir de l’idée d’une science tout puissante.

José Gualinga, qui représente les Kichwa de Sarayaki en Amazonie équatorienne, nous avertit :

”Le monde regorge de connaissances multiples, très approfondies mais souvent ignorées. Ces systèmes de connaissance traditionnels jouent pourtant un rôle essentiel. Il nous faut sortir de notre ethnocentrisme et de l’ ”occidentalocentrisme” ambiant pour apprendre de ces savoirs’…
Tout au long du processus de modernisation, les peuples indigènes ont souffert. On a violé nos droits, nos libertés. On nous a exclu et aujourd’hui on prend nos savoirs pour en tirer profit. Le système actuel a fait que les entreprises ont des droits, les peuples comme nous, la nature n’en ont pas. La nature est pillée, nos savoirs sont appropriés par d’autres”

Vandana Shiva souligne:

”Aujourd’hui près de 730 brevets sont dans les mains de cinq entreprises, qui privatisent des connaissances traditionnelles. Il faut défendre les savoirs ancestraux comme un bien public. Les peuples doivent pouvoir conserver le droit d’utiliser leurs connaissances”….
http://www.actu-environnement.com/ae/news/manifeste_respect_defense_savoirs_traditionnels_8831.php4

Publié par notre terre Mère

I’m all ranted out for now, so I shall bring this series to a close.  I have hinted at a number of things we, the average consumer, can do to improve the system.  So, to finish off the series, I am posting a list created by a professor of Environmental Studies, Dr. Richard Andrus, which I think is completely reasonable to attain.

For personal health-

1. Eat more whole foods and avoid processed sugars & starch.
2. Avoid factory farmed meat, dairy & eggs wherever possible.
3. Eat modest amounts of grass-fed meat.

For the environment-

1. Avoid factory farmed meat.  They cause massive pollution issues from concentration of nitrates and massive erosion from corn & soybean production for animal feed.
2. Buy local. This cuts back of food miles and helps reduce CO2 emissions.
3. Buy unprocessed food, as processing takes huge amounts of fossil fuels.
4. Avoid any processed drinks that come in a non-reusable container. The only reusable containers available currently are glass beer bottles from Canada. Recyclable does NOT mean reusable. Most recycled containers end up in the landfill.
5. Buy organic, as long as it’s unprocessed.
6. Grow, cook and brew your own.

For everything!

1. Purchase as little food as possible that results in profits for corporations. There are two reasons. One is that by law they are bound to maximize profits for shareholders, which means they are bound to take advantage of human weaknesses that attract us to unhealthy foods. The second reason is that a prime way to increase profits is do whatever you can legally do to externalize the costs of your activities. This results in pollution from agricultural fields, abuse of farm workers. contamination from factory farms, abuse of farm animals,and  huge production of packaging solid waste.

Andrus, Richard, PhD. Some Simple Dietary Suggestions. Binghamton University. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

You walk through the aisles of your local supermarket.  Apples in June.  Watermelons in February.  Oranges in December.  Weird star fruit in….well I don’t actually know if star fruit have a picking season.  So how do we have these fruits and vegetables when it is not time for them to be picked.

Most of our food doesn’t come from the good ol’ USA.  As I previously mentioned, we mainly grow corn.  Most of that is used for biofuels and livestock feed.  So where do we get all this stuff?  Well, where is it warm and rainy all year-round (and cheap to grow)?  Thing South.  We get a vast majority of our produce (when not in season) comes from Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, and Brazil.  If you have time, I suggest you actually go to your local supermarket and ask the manager from where the produce is coming.  99 times out of 100, you will get a blank stare.

As a nation, we have become so disconnected from the very sustenance we need for survival.  Most urbanites think farmer as being synonymous with country bumpkin, redneck, hillbilly, or quaint.  There is a social stigma to be a farmer.  But should those farmers disappear, well, the high and mighty urbanites are in for a world of hurt.  In fact, this may not be as strange as one would think.  Since 1979, 300,000 small farms have disappeared in the United States, and since 1946 the number of people who make their living by farming has been cut in half. Increasingly, large companies like Monsanto and Carghill take over and force farmers out of their land.

Farmers' Numbers Decrease

Back to the food.  So these crops are being grown in countries far away from all of us.  The workers who are spraying the pesticides we previously mentioned, working long hours in the hot sun are probably not being paid very well.  But that is not a problem: we get our watermelons cheap!  The crops are finally picked.  Now what?  The crops are put in an air-conditioned airplane and flown to packaging and distribution centers throughout the United States.  Then, they are shipped in air-conditioned trucks all over the country on our wonderful highway system.  This is hugely energy intensive.  It is estimated that the average American family’s meal has traveled almost 10,000 miles before it reaches the plate (in December, to be fair).   Scientists have clocked energy usage as being 10 calories of fossil fuels for 1 calorie of food.  Talk about inefficient.

The Cosmic Perspective

Perhaps for the purposes of this series the Cosmic Perspective should be retitled to What You Can Do.  Oh well, too late.

If ever there was a simple way to make a difference it is to: buy local and in season!  Simple!

Don’t buy those apples in June or watermelons in February.  Eat what is available in your zone when you plan to eat it.  That might mean doing without some things.  Unfortunately, most Americans are still in the mentality that they want it all and they want it now.  So visit your local farmer’s markets.  Not only will you help support the local economy (that is all the rage), but you will be eating better: better for you and for the environment.  Build a relationship with those great folks who grow your food.  Check out this link to find more links regarding local eating:

http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/LocatingLocal.html

I don’t mean that you have to drop oranges altogether.  I have eaten a star fruit.  Guilty as charged.  But all good things in moderation.  Once in a while is fine, every day is where the problem arises.

In her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver notes,

“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint – virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. . . We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires. Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from the American food custom…We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we’ve sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast, depleted farmland, communities where the big economic engine is crystal meth. We often have the form of liberty but not the substance.”

Time to get back on the horse after a week of midterms.

Nitrogen was the primary limiting nutrient in terrestrial ecosystems.  Nitrogen levels could be increased by using composted organic material, but that took a long period of time and was hard work.  Keep that in mind.  World War II is raging and ammonia is needed to create munitions.  Cue Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.  They came up with the aptly named Haber-Bosch Process which synthetically fixes nitrogen by reacting nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas over an enriched iron catalyst to produce ammonia.  Before this, ammonia was difficult to produce on an industrial scale because atmospheric nitrogen, N2, contains resilient triple bonds. During the process, N2 gas is combined with H2 gas at high pressures and high temperatures.  This reaction takes place in the presence of a catalyst, usually some sort of iron, which lowers the activation energy required to break chemical bonds, allowing the reaction to happen more efficiently.   After all is said and done, we have gaseous ammonia which can be condensed into liquid ammonia.  This, in turn, can be used in munitions.

Haber Bosch Process

Soldiers were coming home after the end of the second World War.  Everybody wants to forget about the staggering losses of life that took place during the War.  But, the chemical companies which supplied chemicals needed for weapons during wartime have a problem.  No war means no sales.  They had to adapt to a new market quickly.  So, they came up with a brilliant idea: they would work to create chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  I bet you didn’t know that chemicals used in wartime could be so easily converted to fertilizers and pesticides (take Agent Orange and DDT, for example).  These chemicals greatly improved our agricultural output.  In fact, the increases in crop yields were so drastic that it is still called the Green Revolution.  Crops were specifically chosen and bred so that they could tolerate high nutrient levels that are not normally present in nature.  The problem is that the Green Revolution was not very green.

One cannot be led to believe that pumping inordinate amounts of  nitrogen fertilizer into the soil is natural.  And since the soil cannot possibly hold all of it, much is lost when irrigation (more on that next time) percolates through the soil, flushing many of the nitrates into streams, rivers, and groundwater.  Oops.  As I mentioned before.  Nitrates from fertilizers often flow into rivers which dump the excess nutrients into bodies of water, creating algal blooms.  The algal blooms don’t have all that much oxygen in the rather warm waters (warm liquids don’t hold gases as well as cold ones (why pop is better cold)), so they die relatively quickly, but not before using up all of the oxygen in the water, creating a dead zone.

The nitrates can also seep into ground water which is then used for drinking, bathing, washing dishes, etc.  Not surprisingly, this is not great for your health.  In fact, excess nitrates have been linked to many diseases, particularly in children, whose small bodies cannot tolerate as many chemicals.  Probably the most horrifying disease is Blue Baby Syndrome, or Methemoglobinemia, which results in decreased oxygen carrying capacity of hemoglobin in babies leading to death or other birth/developmental disorders (similar diseases can be caused by excess nitrates from cesspools of fecal matter from factory farms as described previously).

Pesticides are used extensively.  Most of us use them without a second thought.  But perhaps, we are doing more harm than good.  Imagine you are spraying some pesticides to kill off some Japanese beetles (the little iridescent buggers which eat all of your flower leaves).  You kill off most of them, but some survive.  They have a resistance to the chemical.  Now, these beetles reproduce and pass on their resistance to some of their offspring, so we spray more and more, to kill fewer and fewer beetles.  That is the story since the beginning of time: a process of coevolution between pests and pesticides.  Our response is to either increase the dosage of pesticides, or increase the toxicity of the chemicals, neither of which is good in the long run.  Because of genetic resistance, farmers can pay more and more for pest control programs that become less and less effective.

Another big problem with these pesticides is that they are nonspecific: they will kill most of the pests, but many of the pest’s natural predators as well!  Not to mention, when the pesticides are sprayed, some of the chemicals will end up in nearby natural areas like forests and streams, which will kill many species in the nearby area, limiting biodiversity.It turns out that pesticide use has not reduced US crop losses to pests, mostly because of genetic resistance and reduction of natural predators.  I am sure we all remember the effects of DDT as presented by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring.

The Cosmic Perspective

Today, 50% of the world’s population is alive thanks to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.  Don’t forget to couple that with the 40% alive thanks to antibiotics.  If the fact that fertilizers and pesticides are destroying the earth didn’t convince you that there is a problem, perhaps you wonder who is spraying these toxic chemicals.  More often than not it is migrant workers who are given little to no protection, causing serious medical conditions.  So what can we do to limit our and the earth’s exposure to pesticides?  Grow some of your own food using organic methods.  Wash and scrub fresh fruits and vegetables.  Eat less meat.  And, if you think that you cannot get around using some sort of pesticides, here are some tips.  Rotate the types of crops and adjust planting times to fool the pests.  Provide homes for pest enemies.  Inplant genetic resistance.  Use pheromones to lure pests into traps or attract natural predators into crop fields.  By changing our habits, if only a little bit, we can make a big difference.

Just wanted to profile two ladies whose books opened my eyes to the issue of water privatization:

Awarded the "alternative nobel" prize in 2005

Maude Barlow:  Rabble rouser, prolific author, and co-founder of The Blue Planet Project which promotes water as a human right.   She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” and attends every single WTO demonstration around the world (or so I read). Maude has written 16 books and the one that I read is, Blue Gold:  The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water.

Awarded the "Alternative Nobel Prize" in 1993

Vandana Shiva:  Progressive scientist, ecofeminist, author and founder of Navdanya, a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds.  She was active in the Chipko movement during the 1970s.  Some years ago, she began raising awareness of how Coca Cola is depleting and polluting water resources in India.   A neo-liberal lobbyist gave Shiva the “Bullshit Award” so we know that she is doing something right!  Shiva wrote Water Wars, which takes a holistic look at water conflicts.

So far on this quest of ours, I have shaken hands with Cincinnati’s elected officials, met Obama’s motorcade on the blockaded streets of Pittsburgh, eaten Skyline with a British diplomat–and now I have met Vandana Shiva, the physicist turned world-famous environmental activist.  I’ve sort of been a fan ever since I started reading her informative book, Water Wars (which I do recommend).

I feel so privileged to have heard her speak tonight at Xavier University about soil–its role in environmental health, in human societies, and how India’s green revolution has senselessly and needlessly destroyed their nation’s soil.  She  also made notes about COP15 in Copenhagen, for which I am grateful as well–she put into plain and simple words the issues that I have been reading about for months and slowly coming to comprehend: the UNFCCC is the only international environmental treaty that the world has (the Kyoto Protocol doesn’t count; the US Senate never ratified it) and the US is making moves to dismantle it.  Carbon trading is the same concept as indulgences were to the Rennaissance-era Catholic church.  And did you know that soil can act as a carbon sink?  I did, but I didn’t realize that well-managed, organically-tended soil could have 200% the capacity as regular.  GOOD TO KNOW since I am currently researching carbon sinks.

Dr. Vandana Shiva was a lively, authoritative and engaging speaker, and the only thing I regret is that it had to come to an end…I think learned more tonight than I did in my Environmental Science classes.

Because I’m turning into an attention whore, I went up and spoke with her after the lecture.  I thanked her for her presence and told her about my role as a youth delegate at Copenhagen–and I got her to sign my very well-loved (read: battered) copy of Water Wars.  I think I’ll put it next to my Sheikh Mohammed photo…or better yet, put it in my suitcase for Copenhagen where I hope to meet her once more!

Too Corny

Corn is a wonderful vegetable.  Admittedly, the stuff we consider corn is actually maize, but I’m not here to argue semantics.  The kernel of maize is a mature ovary of fruit fused with a seed coat.  Corn can be eaten raw, cooked, or ground into flour for bread.  Good stuff this corn.  Perhaps that is why so many Native American cultures used it as the basis for their agricultural system.   However, we decided that there can’t be too much of a good thing.  Too bad that’s not true.

A cornfield

If you drive through the Great Plains states, you will be seeing a ton of cornfields.  In fact, that is probably the only type of farming you will see.  We have turned our central Great Plains into a monoculture, where one crop dominates.  This causes a number of problems.  First, this limits the genetic variability of the crops.  If a blight or fungus decided to mosey its way into a corn field and do some damage, you can bet that the whole system is likely to fail, because now, certain plants that are resistant to this infestation are gone.  It is all the same.  Second, it depletes the soil.  When the early white settlers were moving into the Great Plains, the grass had root systems several feet deep.  There was a huge amount of top soil.  But due to constantly farming the same thing and not rotating crops, we have decreased the topsoil levels to a paltry few inches.  Where did this soil go?  Into the streams.  Where do the streams go?  In that area, all roads may lead to Rome, but all streams head to the Mississippi River.  And where does the Mississippi River go?  Unless you flunked seventh grade social studies, you know that it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.  These sediment deposits disrupt the natural ecosystem of the Gulf.  They also carry with them nitrates from fertilizers (more on that in the next segment), which create huge algal blooms.  The algal blooms don’t have all that much oxygen in the rather warm Gulf stream waters (warm liquids don’t hold gases as well as cold ones (why pop is better cold)), so they die relatively quickly, but not before using up all of the oxygen in the water, creating a dead zone.  This is a continuous cycle of nutrient depletion and algal blooms, creating a large dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi.

And we eat it.  Corn, that is.  Well, perhaps eat is isn’t the best word.  We ingest it in some form.  Corn is convertible into tons of cool food additives, like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, corn starch, corn oil, and many more of your favorite food label regulars.  We find it everywhere.  Why?  (That one question is so important).  It is common because it is cheap.  Why?  One word: subsidy.  Why?  Because big companies love to use corn.  Why?  Aha, now that is the right question.  The corn kernel is essentially a packet of starch that can be broken down and rearranged as all of those additives, sweeteners, and preservatives listed above.  So to keep their costs down, companies need to keep corn cost down.

Brought to you by the letter c: Corn

Not only is corn convertible to foodstuffs, it can be made into, drum roll please… ethanol!  Ethanol amongst the dumbest ideas I ever heard, and to think that I once believed it had potential.  Right now, whether you like it or not, your gas is 10 percent ethanol.  It’s required by law.  Ethanol is a renewable bio-fuel.  It may burn a bit more cleanly than gas, but, depending on which study you read, some scientists claim that you need to put 1.2 calories of corn into the system to get 1 calorie’s worth of ethanol (this depends on what you consider a cost of farming and producing for corn ethanol.  Some analysts believe tractors fall from the sky so they don’t need to be considered in cost analysis).  It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to do the math.

A factory farm dairy feedlot

Cows are grazing animals.  They are supposed to eat grasses.  So when farmers take cows to pasture, they can have some fun, eat some grass, chew some cud, poop some poop (fertilizing the soil so more grass grows) and everybody goes home happy.  Now, cut to the factory farms.  Cows stand with little to no room to move, knee deep in their own feces.  Factory farms use corn to feed all these cows.  But wait, didn’t I just say that cows are supposed to eat grasses?   Corn is not a natural part of their diet, and it completely messes up their digestive system.  So now what are we going to do with all this fecal matter?  Well, the brilliant solution we have come up with is to create giant cesspools of crap.  These, in turn, seep into the ground water and streams, killing those systems, much like nitrates from fertilizers created a dead zone in the Gulf.  Yum.  Good, clean water.  Also, whenever we divert corn to ethanol, or to livestock feed, we divert it from people who need it for food.  And as the amount of corn being grown for food decreases, the prices increase, causing many people to go hungry.  Seems like a system designed to fail!  It gets better.  We use gas with ethanol in it to ship corn from the Plains to the factory farms in the Carolinas and the Dakotas, and then the cows to the processing plant, and then your local supermarket.  Every calorie of commercial food you eat expends almost 10 fossil fuel calories.  Talk about inefficient.

The Cosmic Perspective

But, you say, how can I make a difference?

A feedlot

You have buying power.  The purchases you make directly influence companies and our governmental policies.  Buy grass fed beef instead of factory farm meat if you have the money to do so.  It will have less fat and will taste better!  Or, eat less meat.  I am not asking you to become vegetarians.  In fact, I think vegetarianism is unhealthy (The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Kieth) and often committed to for the wrong reasons.  The clear-cutting of forests to make room for fields for cattle, the environmental impact of slaughterhouses, transportation costs and the sheer amount of methane gas emitted by cattle herds, is damaging to the planet.  Also, eating less meat will positively affect our health in the long run.  The average American obtains 80 percent of their caloric intake from meats, 7 percent from pop and processed foods, and 3 percent from plants.  Is it any surprise that 30 percent of the population is obese, 8 percent have diabetes and 1 in 5 adults have high cholesterol.  400,000 people in the US die from obesity related diseases each year.  Type II diabetes was once thought to be only found in adults.  Now, this generation is set to be the first to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.  We should try to move towards 45-5-50 with regards to our caloric intake.  This will help us lower our cholesterol, blood sugar, and weight.

But it costs so much.

Well, thanks to those nice government subsidies, corn fed beef and corn products can be sold cheaply.  If the actual cost of those corn products was displayed in the supermarket, people would never buy them.  Think of all the water, fertilizers, pesticides, energy, and man hours went into making those foods.  I think that may be worth a bit more that what the supermarkets are saying it is worth.  Not to mention the environmental costs!

Think about it.

]]> http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/10/22/farmers-markets-for-seed-savers/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:40:19 +0000 macleans.ca http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/10/22/farmers-markets-for-seed-savers/ http://gheimraetinsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/vandana-shiva-leben-ohne-erdol/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:16:32 +0000 geheimraetin http://gheimraetinsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/vandana-shiva-leben-ohne-erdol/

Kultur der würdevollen Arbeit
Die verschiedenen Krisen dieser Zeit sind menschengemacht. Um ihnen wirksam zu begegnen, braucht es neben greifenden Massnahmen vor allem ein Umdenken. «Die Erde, nicht das Erdöl gibt den Rahmen ab, in dem wir die drohende ökologische Katastrophe und menschliche Brutalisierung in eine Chance umwandeln können, unsere Menschlichkeit und unsere Zukunft zurückgewinnen».

Die indische Physikerin und Philosophin, Vandana Shiva stellt ihr neues Buch in Zürich vor, am Sonntag, 1. November, 16.30 Uhr, in der Kanzlei, Kanzleistrasse 56 (Nähe Helvetiaplatz). 21|10|09

Buchrezension auf gaiamedia.org

It has been a while since my last official series on this blog.  I have been reading several books and watching several films on this subject.  Food is an important facet of our existence, for obvious reasons.  And yet, for some strange reason, few of us know from where the things we put into our body come.  A little disclaimer first: I am not a nutritionist, I am simply a concerned citizen who wants people to start asking some very important questions.  There are many people who know much more about this subject than I do, and fortunately for you, they have written extensively about their knowledge.  If you are interested in this series, I suggest you read the writings of Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappe, Barbara Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, and/or Vandana Shiva.  So without any further ado, I present: A Strange System: Food.

The Stage is Set

When you picture a farm, what do you see?  Probably chickens and chicks pecking around for seeds underfoot, cows sitting in a pasture, contentedly mooing, perhaps a farmer, chewing a piece of straw, of course, checking to see if there are any weeds choking out his corn crop.  This is the typical, idyllic scene we all grew up with, and like most things we grew up with, it is largely dead wrong.

We live in a time when food production has shifted from the hands of farming families to agribusiness conglomerates.  Businesses most of us don’t even know exist, like Monsanto and Cargill.  The whole food system revolves around these players.  The web they weave is so thick and tangled that I almost don’t know where to start.  But perhaps, I should begin with the beginning.

When humans were first evolving on the African Savannah, we had appetites similar to those we have today.  The appetite was developed to encourage people to eat what they needed.  The African Savannah had plenty of grazing animals for us to kill and eat.  This gives us our proteins, minerals, and some vitamins.  There are also plenty of edible roots, nuts, and plants which provide us with fiber, oils, and more minerals and vitamins.  However, there was a problem.  Humans need some fat to survive, and grazing animals, which eat grass (more on that later), don’t have too much of that.  It was also rather difficult to find salt and sugar.  So, if you found something with salts or sugars, evolution encouraged us to gorge ourselves.  And so, we spent our formative years as a collective species discovering new ways to provide our communities with food.  We learned how to hunt more efficiently; how to gather edible plants.

Fast forward to about 11,000 BC.  Scientists are pretty sure that humans learned how to domesticate certain plant species at this point in time.  Annuals like peas and wheat were being domesticated in area of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.  There, the dry-summer allowed for a long growing period and variety of elevations led to a great number of plant species being domesticated.

Skip to the next scene when, about 1000 years later, in 10,000 BC., animals like the sheep and goat were being domesticated.  Pigs, cows, and chickens followed in the subsequent millenia.

The domestication of plants and animals was probably the single most important event in the evolution of civilization. Slowly but surely, as we began to farm, humans shifted from being hunter-gatherers to a settled agricultural society.

Ancient Agriculture

Through the Middle Ages, everyone seemed to either have a farm or know a local farmer who could produce food for them.  Farming methods were being fine tuned.  Farmers in drier regions developed hydraulic irrigation systems.   People explored the reasons why farming different crops worked better in one place than another.  They expanded the number of species of plants being grown.  Crop rotation was developed.  The Chinese developed a moldboard plow which helped till the soil leading to better crop yields.  Things were on the up and up, but progress was relatively slow.

Once again, we step into our little time machine and zoom to 17th century England.  The Agricultural Revolution is about to begin.  One of the first big changes was enclosure.  Before this point in time, most agricultural systems worked in an open field system.  Each farmer grew subsistence levels of crops and fed their livestock on tracts of land nobody really owned.  Then, come the 17th century, wealthy farmers began buying up the land.  This led to most farmers losing their land.  Mechanical advancements came soon after.  Jethro Tull, the inventor, not the band, invented a seed drill: a mechanical seeder which distributed seeds evenly and efficiently across a plot of land.  This was much faster than spreading seeds by hand.  Joseph Folijambe invented the Rotherham plow in 1730, the first commercially available iron plough in Europe.  In 1786, Andrew Meikle invented a threshing machine.  When steam engines came out on the market in the 1850’s, they were quickly put to use for plowing and digging in agricultural settings.  Excellent news.   Food production skyrocketed, and with it, population.

The English Agricultural Revolution

We have one more stop for today.  Let’s travel to the United States around 1920.  Scientists have identified nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus as the main factors behind plant growth.  So to max out crop yields, they create synthetic fertilizers leading to more intensive agriculture.  Vitamins and antibiotics are discovered.  This allowed livestock to be raised inside, reducing their exposure to the harsh side of Mother Nature.  They could be fed these antibiotics allowing for livestock to be grown in concentrated areas without the risk of spreading disease.  They also grew larger and faster.  After World War II, everybody just wanted to kick back.  But the chemical companies have a problem.  They just spent the last six years producing chemicals to be used in the war.  No war means no sales, so they convert their factories to produce synthetic pesticides.  An interstate highway system is constructed allowing for food to be distributed all across the country.  Oil is plentiful and cheap, so it’s all systems go.  Agricultural production across the world doubled four times between 1820 and 1975 to feed a global population of one billion human beings in 1800 and 6.5 billion in 2002. Oddly enough, during this same time, the number of farmers actually farming dropped.  Well, the stage is set.  We’ll return to the second act in our next installment.

Prior to Dr. Vandana Shiva’s speech, a reception was held at Angela Hubler’s house. Whatever. Here are some photos of people conversing with an internationally renowned scholar and activist holding several doctorates in hard-science disciplines. Bonus: you get to see the inside of Angela Hubler’s house. Or maybe it’s Tim Dayton’s house, depending on who pays the bills. Which might be Angela – she might make more money, being a department head and all – or it might be Tim, whose testosterone should by all all rights entitle him to 26% more moola per year than his wife.

Navdanya, en Inde, est un réseau de gardiens des semences et de producteurs biologiques réparties dans 16 Etats de l’Inde.

Depuis 20 ans, Navdanya a contribué à l’installation de 54 banques de semences communautaires dans plusieurs pays d’Inde, formé plus de 500.000 agriculteurs à la souveraineté de leurs semences et de leur alimentation, à l’agriculture durable. Elle a aidé à l’installation la plus importante de marketing direct du commerce équitable biologique dans le pays.

Navdanya a également mis en place un centre d’apprentissage, l’École de la semence (Bija Vidyapeeth) au sujet de la conservation de la biodiversité et de l’agriculture biologique dans Doon Valley, Uttaranchal, en Inde du Nord.

Navdanya est activement impliqué dans le rajeunissement de la connaissance et la culture autochtones. Elle a créé une prise de conscience sur la dangerosité du génie génétique, a défendu le savoir faire des gens contre la bio-piraterie et le droit à l’alimentation,  face à la mondialisation et au changement climatique.

Navdanya est un mouvement centré sur les femmes dont le but est la protection de la diversité biologique et culturelle.

plus sur www.navdanya.org

 La troisième édition du Festival de Films ALIMENTERRE du 16 octobre au 30 novembre, présente de nombreux documentaires dans plusieurs villes de France, dont celui-ci, sur le thème de la bio piraterie:

Les pirates du vivant :

Le film « Les pirates du vivant » de Marie-Monique Robin, a reçu le Grand prix du Figra (Festival international du grand reportage d’actualité et du documentaire de société), le 26 mars 2006, au Touquet.

Les Etats-Unis soutiennent, par leur système de brevets accordés sans contrôle, le pillage des ressources des pays du Sud. L’office européen des brevets n’est pas non plus innocent. Mais les pays du Sud, qui sont les victimes du pillage, organisent leur résistance, au Mexique, en Inde en passant par la forêt amazonienne, enquête sur cette piraterie d’un nouveau genre.

plus surhttp://www.cfsi.asso.fr/netkali/CFSI.aspx?idDoc=270:

publié par notre Terre Mère

Physicienne, épistémologue, écologiste, écrivain, docteur en philosophie des sciences, féministe… Y aurait-il une limite à la générosité de cette femme indienne ?

Vandana Shiva est une des figures les plus connues des écologistes et des alter mondialistes.

Le pot de terre contre le pot de fer:

Elle défend brillament  l’agriculture paysanne et biologique face à la politique d’expansion sans limite des multinationales agro-alimentaires. Elle éduque les paysans de son pays, l’Inde, au sujet des effets pervers du génie génétique.

Sa lutte contre le brevetage du vivant et la bio piraterie, est un signe de résistance des plus forts.

La bio piraterie, c’est un concept moderne  de “vol en col blanc” :  l’appropriation par les firmes agrochimiques transnationales des ressources universelles, notamment les semences, que tout être humain avait depuis toujours eu le droit d’échanger. Astucieux, il fallait y penser…

Plus sur : www.navdanya.org/

publié notre Terre Mère

Navdanya a débuté comme un programme de la Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), une initiative de recherche participative fondée par la chercheuse environnementaliste de renommée mondiale, Dr. Vandana Shiva, afin de fournir une orientation et un soutien à l’activisme écologique.

Navdanya est né d’une recherche pour l’agriculture non-violente, qui protège la biodiversité, la Terre et nos petits agriculteurs. L’objectif principal du programme de conservation de la biodiversité Navdanya est de soutenir les agriculteurs locaux, de sauver et de conserver la culture de plantes qui sont poussées à l’extinction et de les rendre disponibles à travers le marketing direct.

 Navdanya a sa propre banque de semences et de propagation sur une ferme biologique  de 20 acres dans Uttrakhand, au nord de l’Inde.

plus sur www.navdanya.org

publié par notre Terre Mère

[Despite the fact that Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned author and activist, there was no media coverage of her talk in Grand Rapids last night. This is in contrast to last week’s visit by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who also addressed environmental issues.]

Internationally known activist and author Vandana Shiva spoke at Fountain Street Church last night to a crowd of over 500 people. The title of her talk was Food Security in Women’s Hands. Shiva is the author of numerous books on environmentalism and feminism. Her most recent books are Earth Democracy and Soil, Not Oil.

Shiva began her talk by stating, “Freedom begins with freedom for nature…….for all beings. And that freedom means living free of fear and free of hunger.” “The issue of human hunger,” Shiva said, “is at a critical point in human history, where 1 billion people are in permanent state of hunger and another 2 billion people suffering from poor diets.” Her analysis of why the food global food system is unjust is informed by her feminist critique of power. Shiva feels that as long as “womanly hand of Gaia or your mother” has been caring for food, it has never ruined our bodies. Once food became a commodity and came under the control of systems of power, hunger and poor diet expanded.

Shiva also asserted that in nature everything is food or is someone else’s food. There is no imbalance and nothing is wasted. But now, new studies are showing that the current food system leads to tremendous waste. She looks at the example of how animals are raised for meat to underscore this system of waste. “Animals were meant to eat grass, not grains,” Shiva said. “Now humans are competing with animals for grains.” So much energy and resources are used to feed livestock instead of feeding people. Feeding cows grains for example makes us all less healthy and the structure of animal feed operations means that concentrated amounts of animal waste is now a major source of water pollution. This contrasts drastically with traditional Indian culture, which sees cow dung as sacred. Shiva even said that there is a festival for cow dung on October 17^th in India.

“In a womanly world there has never been a scarcity of a permanent kind. Nature provides abundance. If you live within nature’s abundance, there would never be anyone in need. In fact, it is a sacred duty to save seeds.” Seed saving was a major theme of Shiva’s presentation. She stressed that seed saving is an ancient practice and was/is a way of preserving both diversity and the future. However, there is a war against seed diversity and Shiva called out Monsanto as a major culprit, since Monsanto has been genetically modifying seeds an attempting to patent seeds around the world.

Shiva said the patenting of seeds is just another form of colonization. She pointed out that the word patent has a long history within colonization. “The letter that Columbus brought when he arrived in the Americas was called a Patent, it was an open letter for colonization, because it said that the King of Spain could now claim the land because Columbus carried this letter.” Today the word patents continue this same type of colonization, where now the products of the land are commodities and have been given legal ownership to corporations.

Continuing on this theme of colonialism Shiva then cites then several European thinkers who supported colonization. She mentioned a phrase they used repeatedly, terra nullius, Latin for “an empty land” or “land devoid of anything.” Many European thinkers believed that the Americas were not really populated, since Native people where not seen as fully human. However, the larger problem was that the land was not being used to make money and therefore devoid of value.

She calls the economy of what indigenous people of the Americas and all around the world practiced an “economy of abundance” where you only use what you need. This contrasted radically with the European notions of capital and wealth.

Shiva stressed that the shifts in food that are taking place today are radical and are affecting all of us. She believes that food should stay in the hands of women in order to avoid catastrophe. “The monoculture of the mind will not tolerate food diversity, but women have always practiced biodiversity.”

One example of monoculture is where plants that have not been made into commodities are now called weeds. “There was nothing like a weed in traditional societies. Everything had a purpose, a use.” Most greens are uncultivated foods, but when monoculture controls the food, you must have a war on biodiversity. One example of this warfare is the Monsanto created herbicide RoundUp. Shiva also pointed out that pesticides were originally designed to kill people during warfare, but the chemical companies figured out a way to convince governments that this chemical weapon could now be used to kill “weed.”

Dr. Shiva said that the “Green Revolution” was supposed to help bring more food to the world, but what happened was that multinational corporations became wealthier and the only foods that increased in production were rice and wheat, which are not sufficient for a healthy diet.

Shiva says that our current food system is unsustainable. She said that since a large percentage of the unsustainability is the fact that most foods travel long distances before they are consumed. Our dependence on fossil fuels in this current food system is a major source of globalized greenhouse gases. What the activist/author said we need to do is to reclaim localized food systems.

Localism is a big part of the current struggle in India, where farmers are battling companies like Monsanto and Coca-Cola. When Monsanto was recently brought to court in India over their attempts to control seed stock they made it clear that they had every right to charge people what they want since they owned the intellectual property rights of seeds. Some communities in India have fought this and won.

“With these monocultures of the mind,” Shiva said, “We end up having a war against food, the land, climate, water and our bodies. It is time to take back the seeds, which will be our bodies. We have to take back the seed for diversity and because the type of seeds they are now creating have no life. Feminists have marched to take back the night, but we need to take back more than the night, we need to take back the world. Women are at the forefront of this movement and need to be acknowledged as the leaders in our future. As long as we have a masculinized approach to food production we will have no future. When we have just a few companies controlling most of the food production, we have a totalitarian food system, a food dictatorship. What we need is a food revolution, which begins with the seed and in the kitchens of the world.”

Dr. Vandana Shiva was in Grand Rapids today to speak at an event hosted by the West Michigan Women’s Studies Council. GRIID had the opportunity to speak with her and ask her about the role of women in food security, the importance of reclaiming the commons, her seed saving project called Navdanya, climate justice, and Green Capitalism. 

The interview is in 2 parts.

post-thanksgiving roll. 

today was supposed to be day 2 of the series on s/heroes. however, I have had to make last minute changes to the presentation. This series is interrupted for me to rewrite the stories with no names. i consider it an exercise in growth. but i’m saddened  at my (imposed) self censorship. That I can’t just talk freely about my comrades en sistren. because it’s still not safe for us. but then again it is. because we have done what we need to make it safe for ourselves. though let me make clear that when I say I yam angry. that is strategic and political. I yam actually not FEELING  angry, I mean who would I get anrgy at? my friends and family that are concerned about their safety? I can not be angry at them. I can say I’m angry at the world. But no one has necessarily done anything (yet) in reaction to this blog. at least I don’t think so. So my use of the word, is political.

It is to transform the fear and reality of unsafe spaces. to acknowledge the anger of fear for our lives. to take on the battle for others who are not even allowed to express that anger, who can do nothing other than nurse those wounds, or worse yet, die.

but there are many of us who are still here. we are the survivors. en I yam not angry anymore. I have been angry many times before. I will still willfully carry that tag of the mad black woman. the strong black woman. but i am neither of these things. I have been blessed with love and luck. I write these stories, because I can, because I want to, en because I think it’s necessary.

I believe in the uses of anger, the power to transform with fiya. It is also true dat fiya fi burn. and it is deadly to be  consumed by it. we need all the elements in our growth. fiya, wota, earth, air.

and, in another prelude to that future post, (the one that I mentioned earlier), a retraction…..

let me say again, that this blog is political. it is strategically rooted in the personal.

I, molisa nyakale. write about me, en my work, en my personal life.

en yet, this blog is not about me at all. it is about resistance to all forms of imperialism and rebuilding healthy, loving, sustainable communities. it is about strategising with comrades. about equipping ourselves with the neccsary resources. this is a work of love.

 this blog is that extra/visible contra/diction.

 i tell you the details of so’ en so’….but I don’t gossip.

it is about season 2 of the q werd. queer/trans afrikan lives in tdot.

but that’s a story I’ll tell you another moon. today.

i’ll dedicate to el hajj malik shabazz instead.ase.

and i give thanks for (my other) teachers like, angela davis, assata shakur, audre lorde,  audrey mbugua, amilcar cabral, bell hooks, cornel west, d’bi young.anitAfrika, dionne brand, edward said, ernesto che guevara, frantz fanon, kwame nkrumah, kwame ture, mwalimu nyerere, muthoni wanyeki, nalo hopkinson, notisha  massaquoi, pouline kimani, staceyannchin,  vandana shiva, walter rodney king  en wangari maathai…en more

i give thanks for our ancestors, our elders, and our youth.

i give thanks for the power of (u) people. (and for hanifah walidah and olive demetrius)

i give thanks for none on record.

they are re/building our archives.

they are re/inscribing our existence, en our afrikan decsent,

they have some jood stories. go listen to them.

and listen to this piece of malcolm’s.

OUR HISTORY WAS DESTROYED BY SLAVERY

Author and activist Vandana Shiva is speaking this Tuesday (October 13), 7pm at Fountain Street Church. The West Michigan Women’s Studies Council is hosting Dr. Shiva for a free lecture. The topic of her talk is “Women and Food Security.”

In recognition of her visit and in light of the upcoming Copenhagen talks on global climate justice, we wanted to reprint a recent essay by Vandana Shiva entitled, “The Poor Are Burdened Twice.”

The science of climate change is now clear, but the politics is very muddy. Historically, the major polluters were the rich, industrialised countries, so it made sense that they should pay the highest price. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in December 1997, set binding targets for these countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 per cent on average against 1990 levels by 2012. But by 2007, America’s greenhouse-gas levels were 16 per cent higher than 1990 levels. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which was passed in June, commits the US to reduce emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, yet this is just 4 per cent below 1990 levels.

The Kyoto Protocol also allows industrialised countries to trade their allocation of carbon emissions, and to invest in carbon mitigation projects 
in developing countries in exchange for Certified Emission Reduction Units, which they can use to meet reduction targets. But emissions trading, or offsetting, is not in fact a mechanism to reduce emissions. As the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, has pointed out, the emissions offset in the American act would allow “business as usual” growth in US emissions until 2030, “leading one to wonder: where’s the ‘cap’ in ‘cap and trade’?”.

Such schemes are more about privatising the atmosphere than about preventing climate change; the emissions rights established by the Kyoto Protocol are several times higher than the levels needed to prevent a 2°C rise in global temperatures. Allocations for the UK, for example, added up to 736 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over three years, meaning no reduction commitments. And emissions rights generate super profits for polluters.

The Emissions Trading Scheme granted allowances of 10 per cent more than 2005 emission levels. This translated to 150 million tonnes of surplus carbon credits, which at 2005 prices translates into profits of more than $1bn.

Carbon trading uses the resources of poorer people and poorer regions as “offsets” for richer countries: it is between 50 and 200 times cheaper to plant trees in poor countries to absorb CO2 than it is to reduce emissions at source. In other words, the burden of “clean-up” falls on the poor. From a market perspective, this might appear efficient, but in terms of energy justice, it is perverse to burden the poor twice – first with the impact of CO2 pollution in the form of climate disasters and then with offsetting the pollution of the rich.

In a globalised economy, addressing pollution by setting emissions levels for each country is inappropriate for two reasons. First, not all the citizens of a country contribute to pollution. As a result of China becoming the world’s factory, its CO2 emissions outstrip those of the US, putting it in first place worldwide. In 2006, China produced 6.1 billion tonnes of CO2; the US produced 5.75 billion tonnes. But in the US, emissions were 19 tonnes of CO2 per capita, compared with 4.6 tonnes in China. And much of China’s CO2 could be counted as US emissions, because China is producing goods for US companies that America will consume. Wal-Mart, for example, procures most of what it sells from China.

Similarly, while only 2.13 per cent of the world’s emissions emanate from the UK’s domestic economy, CO2 is created on the UK’s behalf in China, India, Africa and elsewhere. The global carbon footprint of UK companies is not known, but estimates suggest that emissions associated with worldwide consumption of the top 100 UK products accounts for between 12 and 15 per cent of the world total.

Thanks to industrialisation, the rural poor in China and India are losing out on their land and livelihood. To count them as polluters is doubly criminal. When global firms outsource to China or India, they need to be responsible for the pollution they carry overseas.

Regulating by carbon trading is like fiddling as Rome burns. Governments and the UN should impose a carbon tax on corporations, both for production – wherever their facilities are located – and for transport, which the Kyoto Protocol does not account for directly. Incentives for renewable energy are also essential. We face a stark choice: we can destroy the conditions for human life on the planet by clinging to “free-market” fundamentalism, or we can secure our future by bringing commerce within the laws of ecological sustainability and social justice.

Vandana Shiva’nın, BGST Yayınları tarafından yayımlanan kitabı Yeryüzü Demokrasisi*, hem kadim, hem de modern toplulukların yarın için esin verici pratiklerinden hareketle, rehber bir dünya görüşü ileri sürüyor. Yeryüzü Demokrasisi (YD) hem geçmiş, hem yaşayan hem de gelecekte var olacak yaşayan ekonomiler, demokrasiler ve kültürler üzerinde yükselen bir gezegen vizyonu özelliği taşıyor. Bu vizyona göre, gıda ve su gibi, yaşamak için elzem olan en temel kaynakların dahi geniş insan topluluklarından koparıldığı, çalındığı ve devletler eliyle büyük şirketlere devredildiği günümüzde, yarınımızı geri kazanacak hak ve demokrasi mücadelesinin de bu en temel kaynakların savunusu üzerinden şekillenmesi gerekiyor. Bir tür olarak, diğer türlerle birlikte devamımızı savunan, tüm çeşitliliğiyle birlikte yerelden başlayıp, ortak insanlığımızın bilinciyle evrensele ulaşan YD, bir program değil, fakat gezegen kardeşliğini temel alan bir gelecek perspektifi sunuyor.

YD’yi anlayabilmek için, onu cisimleştiren üç sacayağına, yaşayan ekonomi, demokrasi ve kültürlere değinmemiz gerekiyor.

Yaşayan ekonomiler, yeryüzü kaynaklarının, yeterli rızk yaratmak üzere hakkaniyetle, diğer türlerin haklarını ve ekosistemin sınırlarını ihlal etmeden paylaşıldığı süreçlerdir. Günümüzde, dünya nüfusunun üçte ikisini oluşturan, rızkını doğanın sağladığı kaynaklardan dolaysız bir şekilde temin eden küçük köylülerin ve kırsal toplulukların ekonomisi, yaşayan ekonomilerdir. Yaşayan ekonomiler sadece kırsal olanla, doğrudan doğanın sunduğu kaynaklara dayalı faaliyetlerle sınırlı değildir. Ekonomik demokrasiyi, öz-yönetimi, demokratik katılımı temel alan, insanların rızk kazanmalarına ve hakkaniyetle paylaşmalarına hizmet eden tüm ekonomik evreni içermektedir. Buna göre, sadece geleneksel bilgiye dayalı tarımsal üretim yapan, tohumun, suyun ve bakım onarım işlerinin paylaşımında pazarın ve bürokratik kontrolün dışındaki mekanizmalara başvuran köylüler değil; rızkını temin etmek üzere evinde üretim yapan, ürünlerini pazara sunarken dayanışma ve hakkaniyet gözeten, şirketlere ve hiyerarşik denetim mekanizmalarına teslim olmayan kentli kadınlar da bu yaşayan ekonomik evrenin bir parçasıdır.

Yaşayan ekonomiler yaşayan demokrasilerden ayrı düşünülemez. Yaşayan demokrasiler, yeryüzünde yaşamı korumak, barışı ve adaleti güçlendirmek üzere temel özgürlüklerin iadesini talep edeceğimiz, temel haklarımızı savunacağımız, ortak sorumluluklarımızı ve görevlerimizi yerine getireceğimiz tüm evrendir. Şirket ve devlet partilerinin seçkinlerini belirli aralıklarla meclise yolladığımız, onları geri çağıramadığımız, aleyhimize pişkinlikle alınan kararları yalnızca seyretmek durumunda kaldığımız temsili demokrasiden farklı olarak, tüm halkın yaratıcı fikir ve enerjisini temel alan, adem-i merkeziyetçi, katılımcı karar ve yönetim mekanizmaları hakkındadır. Buna göre, örneğin geleneksel bilginin, tohum ve su kaynaklarının paylaşımında meclis yapılarını, bu meclislerin tesis ettiği kural ve uygulamaları temel alan kültürler, yaşayan demokratik evrenin bir parçasıdır. Keza, su hizmetlerinin özelleştirilmesine, su, orman, gen kaynakları üzerinde şirket kontrolüne karşı demokratik direniş örgütleyen, bu kaynakların kontrolünü öz-yönetimci mekanizmalara devreden hareketler de bu yaşayan demokratik evrenin içinde yer almaktadır.

Peki, yaşayan demokrasiler üzerinde yükselmeyen bir yaşayan demokrasi olabilir mi? İnsan topluluklarının ve türlerin çeşitliliğine saygı göstermeyen, dilsel, dinsel, cinsel, etnik çeşitlilikleri, farklı ritüel ve inanışları, bilgiye ulaşmanın farklı biçimlerini dikkate almayan bir yaşayan demokrasi olabilir mi? Bu soruların yanıtı hayırdır ve yaşayan demokrasiler ve yaşayan kültürler arasındaki zorunlu bağa işaret etmektedir. Yaşayan demokrasileri inşa eden topluluklar, rızk ve erk sahibi olmanın verdiği özgüvenle, kendi yerel çeşitliliklerini yansıtan pozitif kimlikler inşa ederler. Bu çeşitli kimlikler bir diğerini yadsımadığı için, ortak insani değerlerimiz altında buluşarak, gezegen bireyleri olarak hem karşılıklı hem de diğer türlerle bağlılığımızı temel alan evrensel bir kimlik inşa ederler. Yaşayan kültürler, çeşitliliği, yerel olanı, rızk ve erk sahibi birey ve toplulukların ürettiği pozitif kimlikleri temel alır ve asla parçalanmışlık, kopukluk ve gettolaşma anlamına gelmez. Aksine, çeşitliliklerin ortak insanlığımız ve diğer türlerle kardeşliğimiz altında buluşmasıdır.

Yaşayan ekonomiler, demokrasiler ve kültürler birbirini besler ve birlikte YD’yi kurarlar.

YD, klasik liberal, özgürlükçü sol ve anarşizan geleneğin kadim meselelerini, Hindistani kültürlerin şiddetten kaçınma felsefesini, Gandici antiemperyalizmi ve aşağıdan küreselleşme hareketlerinin son on ila yirmi yıllık birikimini bir gezegen bilinci altında bir araya getiriyor. Sürdürülebilir bir gezegen, adil bir yaşam ve kalıcı bir barış perspektifi sunan YD, bizleri ekonomik demokrasiyi inşa etmek, bunun için demokratik öz-yönetim kapasitemizi geliştirmek, diğer birey, topluluk ve türlerle barışık olmak, insanın ve doğanın çeşitliliğine karşı saygı göstermek gibi pek çok ödevle baş başa bırakıyor.

Yeryüzü Demokrasisi’ni okuyanlar, benim yukarıdaki değinmelerime ilaveten pek çok bilgi ve olguyla karşılaşacak, ve YD’ye dair kendi görüşlerini oluşturacaklar. YD’nin bakış açısıyla ekonomi, demokrasi ve kültür gibi konulara bir iki yazı ile değinmeye devam edeceğim. Fakat bu yazıyı bitirirken, YD’nin probleminin yalnızca şirketlerle değil, genel anlamda iktidarla ilgili olduğunun altını çizmek istiyorum. YD’nin insanları davet ettiği mücadele yalnızca şirketlere karşı değil, aynı zamanda içimizdeki, yerelimizdeki ve topluluğumuzdaki hiyerarşilere de karşıdır. YD bizleri, yaşamın her alanında, her türlü üretim faaliyetinde –mal, bilgi, kültür, sanat üretiminde– ve haklar mücadelesinin içerisinde, alternatif mülkiyet modelleri, geri besleme ilişkilerine dayalı katılımcı karar mekanizmaları, bireysel-grupsal farklılıkları tehdit değil zenginlik olarak gören ilişki kalıpları kurmaya davet ediyor.

for Hilary, A., and Daria – and, always, BFP

About once a week, my friend Hilary and I walk a 45-minute loop in the mountains above Hollywood. We curve, midway, on this brief flat stretch between uphill and down.

Last week Hilary was out of town and I walked there especially early one morning, alone, to get some exercise, quiet, and air before starting a day I knew would be difficult. I took the uphill part fast, wanting to drop deep into physicality, to pull down from and out of my hectic head by pushing hard, getting my heart rate up, breathing heavily enough to hear it.

But when I got to the flat midway curve, I realized the physical exertion hadn’t cleared my head yet, and I thought about how often Hilary and I pass these trees while talking about difficult and draining things. Sometimes these are very personal things (our little microdramas). But so often it is capitalism and climate change, climate change and capitalism, over and over and over, looping around and around and around.

So on the downhill half of the loop last week, I was thinking about how consistently we pair those two things. More after the jump.

Obviously climate change is related to a global economic system that is based on cheap oil and endless expansion. (The former spinning out to carbon emissions, the latter to hyperconsumption/disposability/waste; the two connecting at continual extraction of natural resources as if they are not limited, usually from the homelands of people who don’t profit but instead suffer illness, displacement, war, and more as a result of that extraction, and a false notion of the “cheap” movement of goods and people across great distances, etc., etc.).

And certainly many people are talking about the connections between the environment and economics — from scary missing-the-point conversations about “greening capitalism” to Van Jones’s work to connect environmental justice to economic justice by creating “green jobs” that “lift people out of poverty” while fighting global warming.

I think the connections between capitalism and climate change, environmental and economic justice, are deeper than that. But then, yeah, as anyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes is well aware, I think a whole lot of problems trace back to capitalism.

Which brings me to another walk, on another mountain, with another friend.

A few months ago in the hills north of San Francisco, my friend A. pulled me aside during a group gathering and asked if I was up for taking a little walk with her. There was something she wanted to talk to me about. I had no idea what that something might be, but I like A., and I am always up for a walk in the mountains, and so we were off. It was afternoon and the sun was brightly bouncing off a gold-brushy hillside as we skim-talked about this and that for a few minutes before A. let me know why she’d asked me to take this walk with her: She wanted to ask me about capitalism.

I smiled. I’d thought maybe she was having issues with a co-organizer or a struggle with her family that she wanted to talk through. But no. She wanted to ask this big, honest, amazing question, because she’d noticed that a lot of the people we both organize with whose ideas she respects identify strongly as “anticapitalists,” and she felt like she didn’t have a strong enough understanding of what capitalism really is to truly know why I and so many of our mutual friends identify strongly with challenging it, and whether she might also identify with that. The afternoon was gorgeous and I was smiling and wondering hard how to answer her question.

I think I know what you mean, I told her. I talked about how I went through a period of reading all kinds of “anticapitalist literature,” from very theoretical essays about things like “precarity” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest to an anthology called The Anti-Capitalism Reader, which I thought would finally make it all clear to me, but then it didn’t quite. I told her I started doing all this reading because it had felt really, really unclear. I mean, it was clear that we didn’t live in a just economic system if the legal system involved city-government officials and one property owner in a decision about the future of land that was feeding hundreds of people, but those hundreds of people, who were actually using the land and growing food on it, were not invited to participate in decision-making about it (see: South Central Farm, LA, 2006). It was clear that something was fucked up if some people could profit off other people’s housing and health care without having any meaningful stake in the quality or stability of that housing or health care. It was clear that something was wrong with a few people making a lot of money off the labor of many people, while many of those many people struggled to buy food. But could I explain clearly and certainly that all of those things are related to — let alone integral to – capitalism?

I kept reading articles and books (in the scattershot autodidact fashion in which I tend to try and learn things), hoping that at some point it would all cohere. And I kept feeling like narratives of economic injustice (i.e., what’s wrong) were really clear, but I didn’t exactly need books to tell me that, and explanations of how economies work were really obscure and unclear, yet their authors kept claiming that the people calling for justice just don’t grasp “how things really work,” and I kept feeling like I didn’t have the time to try and seriously grapple with Marx, and, wait–

I remembered this really lucid definition of capitalism I’d just heard in a workshop. I pulled my notebook out of my pocket and read it to A. Hmph. It didn’t sound so lucid anymore. I mean, it did, kind of, but a lot of other things needed explaining first for it to make sense. (Over time all of these pieces of explanation and information, from not only books but also news stories and people and experience, had piled into knowledge, some degree of understanding.)

So, yeah, it’s hard. I told A. how in the midst of this years-long project of trying to really “understand capitalism” by reading about it, I started feeling really frustrated with most of the texts I could find, and just with the fact that economics and economic theory is often obscure and abstract, when what we’re talking about, at bottom, is really simple and concrete: food, shelter, distribution of resources. Part of that, I think, is the absurdly abstract and disconnected kind of advanced capitalism we’ve been living in–and that is lately revealing its absurdity and monstrosity quite clearly, as bets on disconnected bets on disconnected bets turn into widespread foreclosures and layoffs, &c. It’s a system that is grossly divorced from the real and concrete. And I think that disconnect makes it easier for people benefiting from it to claim that people fighting for economic justice, by focusing on concrete issues like housing and food, are naive idealists who “just don’t get it.”

I was veering off again. We were out on this clear day with this clear view and I wanted to say one clear thing to A. about why, even in the face of all the complexity and obscurity of economic theory and bla bla bla, yes, I will absolutely identify as, and work and live as, “anticapitalist.”

I think individualism alone justifies resistance to capitalism, I told her. Even if I can’t succinctly explain all the tricky-abstract-insidious ways it works, the most basic (and of-the-dominant-culture) dictionary definition tells me that capitalism is founded on the notion of individual, or private, property–that is, individual/private ownership, and individual/private profit–and competition among individuals within a “free market.” It’s based on a sense of individuals as separate, atomized, and in competition for the basic stuff of life. It doesn’t value cooperation, community, sharing; it fails to see connections between parts; it places basic sustenance in the hands of this abstraction, “the market.”

There are a million and one other clear things I could say about why I think capitalism is a devastating system that needs to be replaced, but individualism is one foundational one that A. and I were able to get to in a 30-minute walk before we had to meet other people for lunch.

Some other things that feel clear about capitalism that I didn’t get to that day: It structurally privileges people who own equipment or land over people who create things by working with that equipment or land. It does not recognize costs that are not immediately financial (e.g., long-term environmental impact). It is extraordinarily short-sighted and narrow, reducing a complex, interrelated world of systems to a financial bottom line. The only success it knows is endless expansion; it doesn’t value depth, conservation … In the U.S. version it will measure money spent to lock people in cages, or cancer, or anything, as growth (i.e., success).

The connection between climate change and capitalism is not just that the environment is hurt by free-market capitalism’s imperative of endless growth, or industrial capitalism’s dependence on cheap oil. Those connections are real, but there is a better connection between environment and economics. The natural world offers promising models of alternative systems, other ways–ways that are rooted, local, biodiverse, sustainable; ways that value difference and interconnectedness, patience, relationship.

But wait. While I love noting connections between things, I’m wary of facile connection-making. And I’m really skeptical of nature metaphors. Every time I’m tempted to envision an economic system like a permaculture garden, I’m also nervous about the ways different nature metaphors have been used to support unjust systems. Rebecca Solnit has written insightful critiques of nature photography and the landscape-art tropes that reinforce ideas of the “virginal” and “untouched” as beautiful (see As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art). And many, many people have used Darwin’s natural science to validate free-market capitalism as “natural,” what with its competition, survival of the fittest, and all that–isn’t nature a kind of free market in which the strongest survive?

And yet, wary as I am of connecting environment to economy via facile nature metaphors, I want very much to say here that there is a reason I keep talking environment, economy, economy, environment as I walk mountain paths at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century with thoughtful people I love.

We don’t need metaphor, really. The connection between climate change and capitalism is very literal and concrete. I think of Vandana Shiva’s call for a soil-based economy to replace our oil-based one in an important new book recently published by South End Press, Soil Not Oil. It’s a vision that is at once huge and complex, and simple and already here.

A soil-based economy means staying rooted in the local (as distinct from the sprawl that is global capitalism/imperialism), means using resources in such a way that they will last, means an economy that is about concrete things like food and land created and cared for in community (as distinct from an economy that is about abstract profits on packaged debts and atomized-as-if-disconnected-and-consequenceless global movement). A soil-based economy is a deep one (h/t Bill McKibben), a rooted one, a connected one. It is, at least in Shiva’s vision, a just one. It is, instead of colonial/imperial sprawl and non-consensual resource extraction from other people’s homeland for distant, disconnected profits (see Al Gedick’s Dirty Gold: Indigenous Alliances to End Global Resource Colonialism, another important new South End Press title), caring in a lasting way for the near, and minding connections.

It is a way of dealing with resources and life other than mining people’s homelands in Africa and South America to benefit U.S. and Canadian corporations, and it is also no more wealthy kids playing domestic colonizer in Brooklyn, displacing “immigrants whose countries are being raped by your parents’ retirement fund,” as Danny Hoch puts it in Taking Over, his show on gentrification.

BFP and I have been talking a lot about “movement” as a positive thing, but there are many kinds of movement. There is the kind of cheap-oil-based, colonial/imperial movement of goods and money all over the world; there is the displacing movement of privileged kids into newly hip neighborhoods; there is sanctioned movement, and there is blocked and punished movement.

There are also many ways of walking.

I’m starting to feel drained and sad about, ugh, fucking capitalism, again, and so I want to bring in another kind of walk, and another friend.

One of the people I’ve been walking with most regularly for the last few years is my friend and collaborator Daria. We don’t often walk together in the sense I’ve been talking about (erect on two feet, one step linearly after the other). Rather, Daria and I walk a winding sort of path that has lots of offshoots, and we’re usually seated while we do it. As friends and as coeditors/copublishers of make/shift, we usually walk together while seated over meals and meetings and conversations and many different kinds of work as we collaborate in our little shared corners of social-justice movement. And amid a beautiful and transformative friendship in which almost every conversation bounces between a slew of seemingly disparate topics that are each and all addressed within a context of shared political vision, and amid meetings about magazine distribution and editing and planning events and a whole fuckload more, we talk a lot about economics.

Over what turned out to be the most expensive drinks I’ve ever paid for (oops and ironically), we insisted there has to be a better way than capitalism and explored organizing strategies we’d heard of or participated in. Carpooling to make/shift events, we’ve many times talked about how personal money choices relate to a politics of economic justice. And last week over dinner at my place, we talked about unemployment rates and the economic stimulus package and how it is maybe the best that could possibly happen within this system and how this system is so limited and I said, for the gazillionth time, something about how there is no real way out of this climate-change problem that doesn’t involve a serious change in economic system.

And yet we’re living in a culture where most people don’t want to get real about the seriousness of climate change, and even more people don’t want to even begin to question capitalism. So I was sitting across the table from someone with whom I’ve been engaged in serious, hopeful, deep, committed social-justice work for years. We do this work together after-hours, on top of demanding jobs, on top of other relationships, and just life, because we believe in it, because we think we have a responsibility to, because we are hopeful, because so many things, and yet-

it’s hard to have real hope that this society will even begin to move beyond capitalism–even for the sake of its own survival. We’re looking at each other and sitting with this sense of futility, this hopelessness amid the hope that is the basis of all the social-change-minded walking we do together. And it’s not that our sustaining hope is a naive hope or a simplistic hope. But we do need some kind of hope to keep doing it, and so what do we do with this moment, when we are looking at each other across the dinner table and saying, at the same time: this economic system is simply (literally) not sustainable, and it is very hard to seriously envision this society shifting to a different structure.

?

I have to have faith in the local, I tell her. I have to put hope there. I have to question my own search for the leftist econ-theory expert who will clearly and finally explain this damagingly obscure economic system, abstract to the point of mystification of causes and consequences, disconnected from bodies and food and soil as part of its method. I have to stop searching for that ultimate expert theorist, and also for the one who has a grand vision of the way out of all this. I, we, have to remember that, as Vandana Shiva notes, village farmers in India already know the way out for their communities. It is not a new vision but something that exists already, that they’re struggling to save. Many of us are building ways out in our own communities: local time banks; food and cooking and childcare co-ops; community gardens.

Yes, it is really hard sometimes to believe that all this will somehow add up to a shift, to a world that operates really differently from the one we’re living in under globalized capitalism. But the only way that even might come to pass is lots of different, community-specific ways — each of us participating in social-change movement in our various, community-rooted, imperfect, flexible, and shifting ways.

Resisting capitalism is something that happens on personal levels, yes (see the ideas and stories at the wonderful Web project Enough). But it is really something that demands collaboration for structural change. We have to create and protect all kinds of different ways of relating and being and moving in the world that center love and life, and that can last.

“Nature” has been used as a defense for a violent, predatory economic system that is designed to benefit a few at the expense of many. I think social Darwinism is a flawed and dangerous metaphor. Yet there is a real and important connection between the environment and economics. The latter system is a social one that has to deal with a natural one–not a personified natural world whose violences and competitions are extracted out of context and highlighted to justify human violences and greed, but a literal natural world of finite resources that need to be cared for, and that we can choose to hoard and fight over or to share.

“We need another relationship, and that relationship has to be one, not of owning, not of private property, but one of caring, of giving, of responsibility. And this is a life-and-death matter, learning how to be citizens of the earth, not just consumers in a global marketplace,” Vandana Shiva says in the documentary The Shape of Water by Kum-Kum Bhavnani.

I am grateful as can be for the awesome people I am walking alongside as we try to create our own communities’ versions of something like that. Right down beneath these hills, in a manic bustle laid over a desert, are the communities I’m connected to, and regularly walking through.

(Photos by David Rothbaum)

Già. Oramai sono evidenti i segnali che il sistema-mondo ci manda: abbiamo bisogno di “imparare a stare al mondo”. Questo il titolo della due giorni (18 e 19 settembre) organizzata da Regione Emilia-Romagna e Comune di Bologna sulla promozione di stili di vita sani e sostenibili (vedi). Con anche un convegno – “Economia e sostenibilità: la chiave per lo sviluppo futuro” – tenutosi oggi con la partecipazione di Vandana Shiva, scienziata, attivista politica radicale ed ambientalista indiana.

Il tutto si inserisce, a sua volta, nella Settimana Europea della Mobilità Sostenibile (16-22 settembre). Imparare a stare al mondo significa oggi sia adottare stili di vita e comportamenti compatibili con gli equilibri del pianeta, sia promuovere un’economia ambientalmente (e socialmente) compatibile. Il convegno ha offerto informazioni sulle politiche regionali. Politiche di incentivazione del risparmio energetico, di promozione di nuove fonti energetiche (oggi i pannelli fotovoltaici installati in Emilia-Romagna consentono di produrre energia per 80 MW), di nuove strategie di “insediamenti industriali” (non si dovrà procedere oltre rispetto alle attuali 1.300 zone industriali/artigianali diffuse in regione, ma piuttosto concentrare gli insediamenti industriali in Aree Produttive Ecologicamente Attrezzate – APEA). Politiche di incremento dell’uso di acque di superficie (non di falda!) per l’irrigazione dei campi. Politiche di incremento della raccolta differenziata (a Vignola siamo al di sotto della media regionale!) e del riciclaggio dei rifiuti. Su questi fronti anche gli enti locali possono fare tanto. Lo ha testimoniato il Comune di Correggio che ha presentato l’esperienza di EnCor Srl, una società interamente pubblica incaricata di realizzare una serie di micro-centrali a cogenerazione che alimentano una rete cittadina di teleriscaldamento (vedi; sulle politiche energetiche del Comune di Correggio vedi il video su YouTube). Ma c’è anche il tema del cambiamento del comportamento dei cittadini, ovvero dell’innovazione sociale. Su molti fronti occorre promuovere maggiore consapevolezza, una nuova cultura, nuovi comportamenti. Confidare che questo lavoro sia fatto “in automatico” dalla crisi economica in atto è un errore grossolano. La situazione di crisi e la conseguente difficoltà economica, più o meno acuta, che essa genera sulle famiglie non garantisce alcun effetto automatico. Se l’attuale congiuntura lascerà un segno duraturo sugli stili di vita e sui comportamenti degli abitanti del pianeta, almeno per la parte occidentale, dipenderà infatti dalla politica, tanto a livello nazionale, quanto a livello locale (vedi).

Vandana Shiva, Sala Borsa, Bologna (foto del 18 settembre 2009)

Dalla politica, certo. Ma quest’ultima è indubbiamente sospinta anche da movimenti sociali che oggi si muovono su scala globale (ed al contempo locale) – e di cui Vandana Shiva è un’esponente di primo piano (vedi su WikiPedia). Conservare gli equilibri ecologici necessari per la sopravvivenza del pianeta; difendere i diritti umani fondamentali come quello all’acqua, al cibo, alla salute, all’istruzione, al lavoro; resistere alla spinta alla privatizzazione di questi ed altri “beni comuni” (es. la resistenza alla brevettabilità del patrimonio genetico di piante ed animali); la salvaguardia della biodiversità e delle produzioni locali, culturalmente intrecciate con la storia dei territori – questi sono i principali fronti del suo impegno (vedi). Anche tramite l’esercizio di una critica radicale ad un “turbocapitalismo” che sradica produzioni locali, esclude produttori e consumatori più deboli, livella ed omogeneizza le produzioni senza sensibilità per gli effetti ambientali e sociali a livello locale (vedi). Molte delle battaglie condotte da Vandana Shiva si comprendono bene sullo sfondo della realtà di paesi “in via di sviluppo” (a cui possiamo comunque dare un contributo, seppur minimo, tramite il commercio equo e solidale: vedi). Ma nel suo messaggio vi sono parti che toccano anche la nostra realtà. Così quando afferma che debbono essere privilegiati sistemi economici che si fondano su “economie locali” Vandana Shiva tocca un tema rilevante anche per il nostro paese, per questa regione, per questo territorio. Lo ricordava, sempre al convegno, l’assessore regionale all’agricoltura Tiberio Rabboni quando osservava che le politiche agricole regionali hanno come obiettivo la valorizzazione delle produzioni locali, ovvero produzioni rispettose di tradizione, biodiversità, territorio. Certo che i risultati sin qui raggiunti – (solo) il 9% della superfie agricola della regione è costituita da produzioni biologiche, un altro 20% da produzioni “a lotta integrata” – evidenziano che lo sforzo sin qui fatto deve essere fortemente potenziato.

I dati sul consumo di acqua di rubinetto: i cittadini che consumano solo quella sono il 33% nel 2008

Così è anche quando invita a de-mercificare alcuni beni comuni, a sottrarli alla logica “commerciale” e “consumistica” – è il caso dell’acqua, ma anche dell’alimentazione. Un mercato che ha troppo campo libero nel formare l’orientamento ai consumi (e nel distribuire i “titoli di accesso” ai beni). Il consumo dell’acqua lo evidenzia e giustamente è divenuto oggetto di iniziative riprese e rilanciate anche nel corso dell’evento bolognese (es. con HERA che ha presentato, prima a livello nazionale, il Report 2008 sulla qualità dell’acqua potabile: vedi). Oggi 1 cittadino su 3 consuma acqua di rubinetto (era 1 su 5 nel 2006). Lo stesso vale per il consumo di cibo e per l’alimentazione: le nostre diete ed il nostro stile di vita producono una quantità crescente di persone sovrappeso od obese, spesso sin dall’infanzia. Ma da altre parti sul pianeta persiste la fame. E, sempre da noi, una parte stabile della produzione alimentare viene “sprecata”, ovvero finisce nei rifiuti, spesso prima ancora di approdare nei frigoriferi dei privati cittadini – come ha ricordato Andrea Segré, preside della Facoltà di Agraria dell’Università di Bologna ed ideatore del Last Minute Market (vedi).

Andrea Segré, preside della Facoltà di Agraria dell'Università di Bologna e ideatore del Last Minute Market

Reti sociali e reti comunicative collegano tra loro gruppi e temi tra locale e globale. In questa circolazione di idee, sensibilità e pratiche le istituzioni (tra cui gli enti locali) ed i movimenti, i gruppi di cittadini – minoranze attive – hanno un ruolo importante. Tra i due “soggetti” – istituzioni e gruppi di cittadini – può innescarsi un gioco virtuoso. Spesso le sollecitazioni provengono da gruppi di cittadini che hanno maturato una sensibilità più forte verso queste tematiche. Ma altrettanto spesso solo istituzioni aperte ed intelligenti possono garantire continuità d’azione ed adeguate risorse affinché le pratiche innovative, i nuovi comportamenti, si diffondano e si radichino nel “costume” di ampie parti della popolazione. Anche il nostro territorio ha bisogno di maggiore dinamismo su questo fronte. Sarebbe intelligente utilizzare l’attuale congiuntura – una crisi economica che produce più attenzione a quantità e qualità dei consumi – per promuovere maggiore consapevolezza su queste tematiche e sostenere l’adozione di comportamenti più coerenti con lo stare al mondo, con maggiore equità e rispetto per l’ambiente (ovvero per il futuro dei nostri figli).

Por Vandana Shiva*

Nova Déli, setembro/2009 – A privatização dos recursos da terra é uma receita para a escassez e a desertificação, para a violência contra as mulheres, para a fome e, como ocorre na Índia, para o suicídio dos camponeses. Até algum tempo atrás, a água e a biodiversidade na Índia eram bens comuns utilizados pelas mulheres. Este é o sistema que está sendo ameaçado pela privatização.

O cuidado com o solo durante gerações é parte de uma cultura segundo a qual os seres humanos têm a terra em custódia e a reconhecem como uma mãe que nutre a humanidade. Um bom uso agrícola melhora o solo e fabrica húmus, que é o ponto mais importante da fertilização da terra. Quando a terra é transformada em uma mercadoria, o solo pode desaparecer na imaginação e na realidade.

Um anúncio da construtora e imobiliária EMAAR-MDG, com sede em Dubai, que se propõe “fazer uma nova Índia”, diz: “Onde agora há campo haverá casas, centros comerciais, clubes de golfe”. O que se esquece é que onde há campos existe um solo, cultivos, populações e camponeses, especialmente mulheres agricultoras, que na Índia são a maior parte das pessoas que trabalham no campo.

Quando o solo dá lugar ao concreto e os casarios se convertem em selvas de pedra, as comunidades dão lugar às corporações empresariais e aos consumidores, e as mulheres como produtoras às mulheres como sexo disponível. A conversão da terra em mercadoria vai de mãos dadas com o uso e abuso da química na agricultura. A Índia gasta anualmente US$ 2 bilhões em subsídios para fertilizantes químicos. No solo vivente são introduzidos insumos externos como os fertilizantes sintéticos, que com o tempo destroem os processos pelos quais se cria a fertilidade da terra.

As mulheres são especialistas no uso de insumos internos na agricultura, já que trabalham com os produtos da própria terra para fertilizar o solo. Insumos externos não fazem falta. Os materiais orgânicos são reciclados e convertidos em compostagem, ou seja, fertilizante orgânico, enquanto os cultivos de leguminosas fixam o nitrogênio na terra.

O outro insumo externo na agricultura é constituído pelas sementes compradas. Na medida em que as sementes se convertem em propriedade das corporações, estas criam sementes “não renováveis” de modo a forçar os agricultores a comprá-las todos os anos. As dívidas nas quais incorrem para comprar sementes e outros insumos externos constituem a principal razão para a epidemia de suicídios de fazendeiros, que por sua vez deixam as viúvas endividadas e sem terra. Os agroquímicos contaminam a terra e nossos corpos, enquanto as sementes “não renováveis” das corporações agroindustriais atentam contra a biodiversidade e a liberdade dos camponeses.

O acesso às sementes está sendo obstruído por leis que tornam ilegal o manejo, por parte dos camponeses, das sementes como um bem comum, e dão ao Estado o poder de conceder licenças às variedades, o que obriga os produtores a buscar a aprovação do Estado por meio do registro das patentes. O pretexto é o controle da qualidade, mas os critérios usados para concessão das licenças, na realidade, negam aos camponeses o direito de utilizar suas próprias sementes tradicionais, forçando-os a adquirir as sementes das corporações agroindustriais.

O governo da Índia procurou introduzir tal lei na forma da Seed Act 2004. Porém, realizamos uma ampla e bem-sucedida campanha de não cooperação e declaramos que guardar sementes era um dever e não um crime, assim como continuaríamos guardando e compartilhando nossas sementes e defendendo a biodiversidade.

No caso da biodiversidade, o encurralamento dos bens comuns biológicos está ocorrendo por causa das patentes. As patentes sobre biodiversidade constituem o centro do artigo 27.3 do Acordo sobre Direitos de Propriedade Intelectual Relacionados com o Comércio da Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC). Um problema associado com as patentes é o da biopirataria praticada pelas corporações, que pirateiam e patenteiam o conhecimento indígena e a biodiversidade, como acontece no caso de patentes sobre o trigo, o arroz basmati e outras espécies vegetais autóctones da Índia, como neem e haldi.

Desde que uma patente concede um direito exclusivo para usar, produzir, vender os produtos patenteados e processá-los, as patentes sobre a biodiversidade e as sementes de fato impedem o uso e o acesso às sementes como bem comum. Uma agricultura estável pode se basear na vigência dos direitos, fundamentalmente dos direitos dos camponeses e do povo, não os das corporações privadas.

* Vandana Shiva é bióloga, ambientalista e escritora.

http://envolverde.ig.com.br/materia.php?cod=62475&edt=1