The Clock is Ticking... Warming Up to Climate Action
You don’t have to look very far to find the essence of life. But in a society caught up in a blur of technological advances, bio-hacks and attempts to improve ourselves and the natural world, we are hell bent on destroying it. ... We think we can engineer life, we can change the carefully organised DNA of a living organism, and there will be no wider impact. But this is a dangerous illusion. —Vandana Shiva in an interview to The Gaurdian
- Every five seconds, the equivalent of one football pitch of soil is eroded. Yet, it takes 1,000 years to generate 3 centimeters of topsoil.
- Trees in urban areas can cool the air by up to 5°C, reducing air conditioning needs by 25 per cent.
- Lakes, rivers and wetlands hold 20 - 30 per cent of global carbon despite occupying only 5 - 8 per cent of its land surface.
(Source: UNEP 2024)
Land plays a key role in the climate system as an essential carbon sink, and in the last decade alone, land-based ecosystems absorbed around 30 per cent of the carbon emissions generated by human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.
Today, degradation of land—40 per cent of the world’s land has been destroyed including 30 per cent of its cropland and 10 per cent of its pastureland—is among the single greatest cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss, and as per the UNEP, drought and desertification is expected to displace nearly 250 million people by 2050.
We depend on land for life itself, and yet globally, a toxic cocktail of pollution, climate chaos, biodiversity decimation and industrial agriculture, are turning healthy lands into dead ecosystems. They are wiping out our forests and grasslands, and sapping the strength of land to support ecosystems, agriculture, and communities. The result: crops failing; water sources vanishing; economies weakened; and communities endangered, with the poorest hit the hardest.
At present, food is at the heart of the climate debate both because of the impact of climate catastrophes on agriculture, as well as due to the concerted efforts of the 1%—that extracts, encloses and pollutes a sentient environment—to eradicate small farms and farmers by aggressively funding fossil fuel and tech propelled food production. In fact, more than 50 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions come from an industrial fossil food system of producing, processing, distributing food. The monocultures promoted for fossil fuel inputs are driving loss of biodiversity and genetic diversity, and species extinction. Fossil agrichemicals, on which industrial food systems are based, are driving plants, insects, and birds to extinction. Synthetic fertilisers kill soil organisms, pesticides and insecticides kill insects, herbicides kill plants.
The extinction emergency, climate havoc and climate chaos, and the food crisis, are the symptoms and consequences of violence and war against the earth and earth citizens unleashed by the greed of the 1%. A new green colonialism is emerging through Greenwash—reducing a complex, interrelated ecological crisis to distinct and disconnected crises and one-dimensional symptoms, then blindly promoting false solutions for more profit and greater control over the earth, its resources, and our lives.
So, how do, we deal with the catastrophic climate crisis, social crisis and economic crisis? Will ‘dimming the sun’ help reduce global warming? Are we really ‘idiots’ if we plant more trees instead of fixing ‘mechanical, fake trees’ to absorb carbon emissions? Will producing fake food in the lab solve our acute food crisis? Will blaming nature and farmers, and pushing anti-nature, anti-farmer remedies make our lives better? According to Vadnana Shiva, scientist, eco-feminist, crusader against corporate globalisation, and one of the loudest and most consistent voices against monocultures and industrial food systems, “Soil not oil is the path to the future. Soil is the answer to problems that the Age of Oil has created. It is time to recognise the difference between the fake science and false solutions of the 1% and the deep ecological sciences of living systems, and real ecological solutions to the real, interconnected crises we face. A paradigm shift requires walking a path beyond climate colonialism and climate change denial. It means walking the path of regenerating the earth as members of the earth family, interconnected and entangled in a thriving, living web of life. It means seeking climate justice and food freedom in our everyday lives, everywhere.”
Here’s a list of titles by Vandana Shiva that meticulously and methodically unravel the vicious and indiscriminate colonisation of life itself by the biotechnology industry, the technology giants, and financial giants staking their claim over nature and biodiversity.
SOIL NOT OIL Climate Change, Peak Oil, and Food Insecurity
Shiva connects the food crisis, peak oil, and climate change to show that a world beyond a dependence on fossil fuel and globalisation is both possible and necessary. It shows how three crises are inherently linked and that any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial agriculture and industrial biofuels as recipes for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small, independent farm. What we need most in a time of changing climates and millions hungry, she argues, are sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood.
https://www.amazon.in/Soil-Not-Oil-Climate-Insecurity/dp/8188965553
STAYING ALIVE Women, Ecology and Survival In India
Inspired by women’s struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, Shiva shows how ecological destruction and the marginalisation of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically. She argues that “maldevelopment”—the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected, and interdependent systems that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, and injustice—is dragging the world down a path of self-destruction, threatening survival itself. Focusing on science and development as patriarchal projects, Staying Alive is a powerfully relevant book that positions women not solely as survivors of the crisis, but as the source of crucial insights and visions to guide our struggle.
https://womenunlimited.in/catalog/product/view/id/22431
ONENESS VS. THE 1% Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom
In this international bestseller, Shiva takes on the Billionaires Club of Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg and other modern Mughals, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Basing her analysis on explosive little-known facts, she exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas, based on One Science, One Agriculture and One History.
https://womenunlimited.in/catalog/product/view/id/22491
MAKING PEACE WITH THE EARTH Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars
The global corporate economy, based on the idea of limitless growth, has become a war economy. Trade wars. Waters wars. Food wars. Globalisation and consumerism lubricate the war against the earth; corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. It promotes technologies of production based on genetic engineering, geo-engineering and toxins; industrial development that entails the enforced appropriation of land, rivers, mountains; agribusinesses that deplete nature s diversity; land-grab in Africa, Asia, South America. Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival; and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism of interdependence and earth democracy.
https://www.amazon.in/Making-Peace-Earth-Vandana-Shiva/dp/8188965758
WHO REALLY FEEDS THE WORLD?
Shiva believes the answer to this question lies, first, in dismantling the myths that surround the industrial mode of food production which relies heavily on chemical inputs and seed monopolies; and then examining the costs and benefits of monocultures vs. biodiversity; soil depletion vs. soil regeneration; sustainable agriculture vs. cash-cropping; localisation vs. globalisation; and co-operative farming vs. corporate profit.
This is succinct and clear-eyed assessment of the world’s food crisis.
https://womenunlimited.in/catalog/product/view/id/22429
SEED SOVEREIGNTY, FOOD SECURITY Women In The Vanguard
This collection is a unique, international offering on an issue of critical importance—how women as activists, scientists and scholars are at the forefront of shaping new scientific and economic paradigms to reclaim seed sovereignty and food security across the world.
As seed keepers and food producers, as mothers and consumers, women in the North and South are engaged in renewing a food system that is better aligned with the ecological processes of the earth’s renewal, the laws of human rights and social justice and the means through which our bodies stay well and healthy.
https://womenunlimited.in/catalog/product/view/id/22405
TERRA VIVA My Life In A Biodiversity Of Movements
This powerful memoir looks back at the most memorable campaigns and movements that Shiva has been part of, while looking ahead to the challenges posed by the COVID crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources. “The awareness that Vandana’s work and actions provoke is sublime,” says Gilles-Éric Séralini, “it will bring you light.”
https://womenunlimited.in/catalog/product/view/id/22741
SHIVA SPEAKS:
On industrial food systems:
* We cannot address climate change, and it’s very real consequences, without recognising the central role of the industrial and globalised food system, which contributes more than 50 per cent to greenhouse gas emissions through deforestation, animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), plastics and aluminium packaging, long distance transport and food waste.
On Big Data:
* Data is the new gold and the biotechnology industry, the technology giants, and financial giants are joining hands to financialise and monetise biodiversity. In fact, asset management companies are looking to reduce the natural world to financial capital. BlackRock has estimated the worth of our natural world to be four quadrillion dollars, or 4,000 trillion dollars. This, then, is expected to be the biggest land grab, biodiversity grab, wealth grab, in history.
On consumerism:
* The pandemic has taught us that we can do with less—we actually need only our essentials and not multiple brands. With this in mind, we can make choices that heal our planet while healing our own bodies and minds. We can think of ourselves as being Earth’s citizens instead of just consumers.”
On diversity:
* Diversity is the web of life. Diversity is not a luxury; it is the very basis of both our natural and cultural existence. Those who claim to be creating by extracting from diversity—of the seed, of the soil—are, in fact, putting a creation boundary and denying the creativity of those from whom they steal.