Living the Contradiction

India’s Vandana Shiva delves into patriarchy and capitalism, the earth and the environment, and the mysteries of life

Andrew Lodge Volunteer Staff

Over the past 20 years, Vandana Shiva has developed an international reputation for her stand on issues surrounding the environment, genetic engineering, women’s rights and a host of other matters related to social justice. Born and raised in India, Shiva has nurtured and maintained deep and spiritual ties to the natural world around her, all the while excelling in the halls of academia in the fields of physics and ecology. Her first PhD thesis was entitled “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory,” obtained from none other than the University of Western Ontario. She has since taught at many universities around the world. Vandana Shiva is currently involved in a number of grassroots movements throughout India, and has authored numerous books, the most recent being Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace. She recently spoke with the Manitoban on the phone from India.

Andrew Lodge: I was wondering if you could talk about the main influences in your childhood that brought you to this point in your life.

Vandana Shiva: My parents were a very big influence. My father was a conservator of forests, which means he was a senior government official in charge of protecting forests. Therefore, I spent a lot of time in the forest areas and that literally meant growing up in some of the best wilderness in this country and best wilderness anywhere. This made me have a love for biodiversity.

My mother, who was a highly educated person, became a displaced person after the partition [of India in 1947] and opted to become a farmer and not take on a government position. So I literally grew up between forests and farms, with parents who encouraged us to search for our path and our way in life, but who also set an example in simplicity and in sharing, and I think that’s what I inherited from them.

Now, do you see yourself as part of a global movement or is it something that is more centered and focused on India?

Well, my first love is of course for my own country and my own people, and most of my work is done in India, but I see myself very much as part of a global movement for two reasons. One: I do participate in building the movements internationally, such as movements to expose how crooked the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) were in the first place. I think the movement that we started in 1994 when Marrakesh was signed — the movement that created Seattle, Cancun and Hong Kong — is a very strongly organized global movement and I feel very much a part of it.

Secondly, I also think I am part of a global movement because I believe that no matter where you are, whether you’re in a rich country or a poor country today, whether you’re white or black or brown, I think people are seeking another form of organizing society, of organizing economy. The current model is bad for the poor, but it’s not bringing satisfaction to the rich either. The non-sustainability is obvious. The injustice in it is obvious. And that global search for an alternative I feel very much a part of.

Here in the West, often our view of India, perhaps incorrectly, is that the position of women is very poor. This is how many see it. Yet you apparently see women at the forefront of the struggle when you talk about it. How do you explain that? Is this contradiction shaped by our incorrect view here in the West?

I think that life itself is a contradiction and everything is a contradiction [laughs]. That includes the status of women in India, as is the status of women in Canada, as is the status of women in the United States. There are all kinds of contradictions. But it’s true that Western media has picked on dimensions of the oppression of women and has rarely connected this cultural and social exclusion with economic phenomena.

I see women in India as playing a leadership role in the economy as it is — we are the food providers, 70 per cent of the work on farms is done by women. One of my early reports for the United Nations showed that most farmers in India are women, and to the extent that women are productive, they have a certain status in society, they’re able to shape certain agendas.

It is not an accident that in the high mountains — the first movement I became part of, the Chipko movement, the movement to hug trees — was started by the women and because the women are the ones who relate to the forest and provide for society. I think the blind spot of the West is not seeing how intervention of economic models that emerge in the West end up being the worst form of violence against women [in India]. In my most recent book, which is called Earth Democracy, I have traced how, as Indian society is modeled on the commodified society of the West, as development models of the West are imposed, as women are therefore pushed out of productive roles, pushed out of the economy, they lose value and they become de-valued.

In the meantime, of course, patriarchy doesn’t disappear, but capitalist patriarchy — the globally organized patriarchy — in a way hybridizes with local patriarchy, traditional patriarchy, and creates an extremely toxic form of patriarchal femicide, as I would call it. The devaluation of women ends up meaning people don’t want to have girls anymore. If you don’t need people on the land, if you don’t need farmers, if you don’t need people because water is now a commodity to be sold by global corporations, it means that every 10 years we are losing five to 10 million women who are not being allowed to be born.

Female feticide is not an ancient culture of this country; it’s a 20-year-old phenomenon. And the 20-year-old phenomenon is most virulent in states that are the most advanced economically. It’s most virulent in the states where education is bringing values that basically say that everything is a commodity, including women. I think those contradictions have to be looked at a little more closely. I try and do that. I try and understand my society, our culture. I try and understand how that culture in a way mutates with the worst of a globalized culture of greed, which is all that globalization is, and how that globalized culture of greed is becoming a major threat to the very survival of women. I think these things need to be taken up.

A few moments ago, you spoke of belonging to a global movement, but when you use the term “globalization” are you using it primarily in an economic sense?

When I use the term globalization, I am referring to the dominant way in which it’s used. It’s used for an economic model, economic globalization driven by global corporations implemented by global institutions. The globalization of people’s movements is a globalization of solidarity — it’s extremely different.

Right. As we see right now going on at the World Social Forum in Caracas — that’s globalization in a sense as well.

Yeah. I mean that’s exactly why the World Social Forum was called the World Social Forum, to counter the values of the World Economic Forum [in Davos], which is the economic globalization phenomenon. Who meets in Davos? The corporations.

You’re well known as a scientist first and foremost, yet you talk a lot about spirituality. How do you make sense of the interaction of these two paradigms, which, at least here in the West, are most often viewed as conflicting?

I think that the best scientists have been spiritual beings. I mean, you just have to read Einstein’s writings. Because the best of science — and I don’t mean tinkering with formula and pretending to do science — is an understanding of the way in which the universe functions, trying to understand the patterns and forms and the amazingly creative order that is there. Unraveling that order is, to me, what science is. Not to its deepest depths, you can’t, but at some levels, at some layers, you can. And at the deeper levels, it is exactly the same search. What is this order that keeps this amazing system moving? What are the forces that keep the cosmos evolving? Those are the issues that are spiritual questions and spiritual strivings, and, as I mentioned, at a shallow level that’s exactly what science is. At a deeper level, both are one.

To me, spirituality is about our oneness with the universe. Science is about our oneness with the universe.

What comes first then? Do you see your spirituality as informing your scientific mind, or is that even how to articulate it?

No, I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think we are multi-dimensional beings and as multi-dimensional beings there are moments where a scientific experience becomes a spiritual experience. There are other moments where a deeply spiritual awareness and awakening to the world makes you travel down a certain scientific path.

I can tell you, for me, the work I have done for the last 20 years on the issue of seeds and biodiversity and the fight against genetic engineering and life patenting really came from a spiritual route [resulting from] a sense of deep pain. I mean, the beings of this planet were now being defined as inventions of human minds, and therefore the exclusive property of a handful of corporations. For the last 20 years, my scientific enterprise has really been an enterprise, in a way, flowing out of that spiritual sense of rejection, of a world organized around the notion of colonize everything, including life itself, rather than become part of the flow of life, rather than to serve life, as your duty as a human being.

Here in Canada, water is becoming a big issue. To the south, the United States is running out of water, and part of the argument here is that we should simply sell the water to them while we have the chance, otherwise they’ll just come and take it. How do you respond to an argument like that?

I respond to that argument by saying that if you start to think that any power on earth is more powerful than the deepest values of our humanity, then you have lost even before you have started. I do not believe that the United States has the power to shape our relationship with the planet, including the gifts of water that we receive. I do not believe that the biggest armies in the world have the right to shape that relationship. We, as ordinary human beings, have the highest power. That is the power that we need to exercise, and that power is what movements are exercising by basically saying that water is not a commodity. Water is not for sale. It is a gift we receive and it has to be shared. Wherever people have organized around these very basic principles and values, they have become powerful enough.

We’ve done this in Delhi. The World Bank, organized with our government and organized with the corporations that wanted to privatize water, has for the last six years tried everything within their means, and all we’ve done is stand by our values that the River Ganges is sacred to us, that it will not be sold, that water is a public good, a common resource. It will not be sold.

I just returned from Rajasthan, where the government is trying to turn water into a state property in order to privatize it. In every village we started a dialogue, a discussion, and the more we say it, the more it gets power.

The United Nations recently released a report critical of the so-called “terminator gene” developed by Monsanto and friends. The report suggested that the very existence of traditional peasant farming may be in jeopardy partly as a result of the incursion of these seeds. How did you react to the report?

I’ve been part of the movement fighting terminator technology, and Pat Mooney, very much a Canadian citizen, is the one who alerted us and in fact named the technology “terminator technology,” and that’s how it’s called today. The doublespeak name the corporations try to give it doesn’t work; it’s still called “terminator.”

There have been, every few years, attempts by basically the corporations in the United States and the government of the United States to use other countries who are members of the Convention on Biological Diversity, because the United States isn’t, to push this technology through. So far, it has worked to get enough governments organized to say no. But, if a coalition of co-opted governments manages to do with the Biological Convention what has been repeatedly done in the WTO in a setting on trade treaties, then we can see that there may come a moment when governments say it’s all right, and then people will have to decide. And people will have to say: “No, it’s not all right,” which is why I talk about earth democracy, because I do believe that formal democracy, formal representative democracy with all power in the hands of states, is starting to become the vehicle for corporate subversion. They are breaking the links between people and governments and making the links between themselves and governments very, very intimate and very, very close.

That requires a re-invention of democracy. I call it earth democracy, and for me, earth democracy in that context is basically just organizing communities to say we will not let corporate seeds into our region. We will save every seed we can. Yesterday, I inaugurated one more of our community seed banks, which is the way we are trying to fight it. Tomorrow, I will go to Nanpur, where we have had the highest rate of farm suicides in the last six months, all related to bio-engineered cotton, Monsanto’s genetically modified cotton. Part of what I want to tell people there is that we don’t have to buy these seeds and then beg for compensation for failure. We just don’t have to buy these seeds [at all]. We have good enough cotton varieties. Let’s grow it organically. Let’s create alternative systems of agriculture, of markets, of trade.

I think that never before have ordinary humans been called on to perform the duties that they have delegated so far. Some economic duties they delegated to corporations, some negotiations they allowed governments to perform, but delegated duty to corrupt power is not working any longer. We need to reclaim our duties and perform them.

It turns out that this past year, 2005, was the hottest year on record again. This seems to be a recurring theme in recent years; even to the greatest skeptics, climate change is a new reality. How do you remain optimistic in face of what many people would call a pretty bleak situation?

For me optimism comes from two sources. One, no matter how dark the situation looks for human beings, the power of creation is at work and the cosmos will continue to look after itself [laughs], without us if it has to. That’s why the spiritual rooting is extremely important, because to the extent that you can appreciate the power of energies and forces beyond you, the more joy you experience even in the darkest moments.

There is a second very important part. Just reading one of our trustees and a very dear friend of mine, Rajiv Mehrotra, who is also a trustee of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and he’s just finished a book, basically saying that so much of recent thinking, and especially thinking relating to industrialism, thinking after the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, was about ends. It didn’t matter what means you used as long as you got to a particular end, doesn’t matter if the technologies are violent, if you’re feeding the world then it is fine. People like Gandhi came along and said no, the means are very important, and the means are as important as the end. Rajiv’s book is, in talking about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, saying the means is what matters.

If you do the right work, then the way the world goes is not your pre-occupation. Your pre-occupation is whether you are doing the right thing. And if you are doing the right thing, again, your hope is coming out of you doing the right thing.

All right. Good words to leave that on. I know it’s late over there, thanks for your time.

And good night from this end.