Climate Chaos, Climate Action
Currently, 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 determined 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-oriented food production.
An industrial fossil food system of producing, processing, distributing food, in fact, contributes to more than 50 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions. The monocultures promoted for fossil fuel inputs are driving the loss of biodiversity and genetic diversity, and species extinction. Fossil agrichemicals, on which industrial food systems are based, are pushing 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 symptoms and consequences of violence and war against the earth and earth citizens, backed by the 1%. A new green colonialism is emerging through Greenwash, which essentially reduces a complex, interrelated ecological crisis to distinct and disconnected crises and one-dimensional symptoms, and then blindly promotes false solutions for more profit and greater control over the earth, its resources, and our lives.
In her new book, The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climaye Change, Vandana Shiva, scientist and eco-feminist, delivers both a dire warning and a passionate call to action to build a food and climate future based not on the corporate greed and techno-optimism of the 1%, but on the natural regeneration of biodiversity, in partnership with the biosphere. Climate action, Shiva states, is not dimming the sun to reduce global warming, engineering mechanical trees to absorb carbon emissions, or producing fake food in labs to solve our acute food crisis, but decolonising nature, decreasing food miles, and deindustrialising and deglobalising 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.”
The time for climate change denial and its disastrous consequences is long over. What we eat, how we grow our food, how we distribute it will determine whether humanity survives or pushes itself and other species to extinction.
ABOUT THE NATURE OF NATURE:
Four billion years ago the earth was a hot, lifeless planet. Through evolution, the earth and her biodiversity reduced the carbon rich atmosphere of the planet from 4,000 ppm to 250 ppm; and her temperature from290°C, without life, to 13°C, with biodiversity. And 200,000 years ago, she created the conditions for our species to evolve.
In an age of climate catastrophes and extinction, proposals put forward by Big Ag and Big Tech to solve the intertwined climate and food crises will, in fact, exacerbate both, says Vandana Shiva. Her detailed unpacking of the promises made by technology-oriented, lab-intensive digital agriculture reveals the dangers posed by fake and ultra-ultra-processed foods—to the environment; to increasing greenhouse gas emissions; to the health of animals; and to our health and food security.
Food is the currency of life. The food web weaves the web of life, in co-operation and mutuality with the earth and nature. When this interdependence is ruptured the conditions for what the author calls the ‘metabolic disorder’ for climate change come into being. Shiva argues powerfully for a food and climate future based on the regeneration of biodiversity, in partnership with the biosphere.
PRAISE FOR THE NATURE OF NATURE:
Vandana’s is a clear, indefatigable voice of outstanding intellect and compassion, of deliberate and compelling outrage in our planetary crisis.
—Prof. Marilyn Waring, author of If Women Counted
The Nature of Nature makes the incontrovertible connections between a global warming climate and an outmoded agricultural system, and guides our species into a more ecologically sensitive approach to provisioning food by treating nature as a shared commons for all of life on earth.
—Jeremy Rifkin economic and social theorist, writer and activist
FROM THE PAGES OF THE NATURE OF NATURE:
Biodiversity, climate, food, health
The biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, and the food and health crises are a single planetary crisis, because the biosphere and atmosphere are an intimately coupled system of the living earth. The biosphere has created and regulates the earth’s climate system. The biosphere, in turn, is sustained through food cycles and the flow of food as the currency of life across species and ecosystems. The carbon cycle is a food cycle. What flows across living systems is nutrition. The nutrient cycle is the foundational cycle of life. It begins with the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with the help of sunlight through photosynthesis. Atmospheric carbon is transformed into carbohydrates by plants. The carbon thus returns to the biosphere, including the biodiversity of plants and the biodiversity in the soil. Animals, including humans, eat the plants as food and emit carbon dioxide. This is the carbon cycle. Climate change is a result of the rupture of this cycle, caused by fossil fuels.
The shift from biodiversity-based food systems to oil-based, fossil fuel- and fossil chemical-based food systems has violated the earth’s ecological cycles, created a paradigm of linear extractivism, and the associated creation of waste, contributing to the pollution of water, of the soil, of the atmosphere, and of our food. The earth’s capacity to regulate her climate through the biosphere and biodiversity is being disrupted by pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and using their products in the form of petrochemicals. This pollution creates what are referred to as greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been increasing since the industrial age.
The pollution of the atmosphere through GHG emissions—CO₂ (carbon dioxide), N₂O (nitrous oxide), CH₄ (methane)—is what drives climate change, and industrialised, globalised food production is responsible for 50 per cent of GHG emissions. The Poison Cartel has already trapped farmers worldwide in an energy intensive, chemical intensive, capital intensive agricultural system that is causing a deep agrarian crisis, food crisis and health crisis. The Age of Oil has totally transformed our food systems. We are actually eating oil, from the production of food to its industrial processing, plastic packaging and distribution. The junk energy of fossil fuels is not only negatively impacting the earth’s metabolism and leading to climate havoc, but junk and ultra-processed foods have disrupted human metabolism and led to a pandemic of chronic diseases as well.
Climate havoc has made natural disasters like floods and droughts more common, and more extreme, leading to frequent crop failures and intense food insecurity, because unlike indigenous, diverse, artisanal farming, industrial monocultures are more vulnerable to destruction. Global estimates reveal that by 2050, 3.5 billion people will suffer from food insecurity, an increase of 1.5 billion people over today. Rise in temperature, combined with the destabilisation of the hydrologic cycle, has adversely impacted our food systems. ...
The false solution to climate change, being promoted in the form of fake food made in labs, is creating a dystopia of farming without farmers, and food without farms. However, lab food requires more resources for feedstock and, being resource and energy intensive, contributes to higher GHG emissions. Rushing faster and further down the path of resource and energy intensive industrial food production, processing and distribution will only increase centralisation and corporate control of the food system, and accelerate the destabilisation of the earth and climate systems.
There is an alternative path, a path made by walking with the earth, following the ecological laws of the earth—the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health. This path offers solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected. ...
Regenerating the earth through care is our ethical, ecological duty. In regeneration lies the potential, power and promise of healing the earth and humanity. Ecological laws have sustained life on earth through its diverse evolutionary stages, increasing recycling through circular economies based on biodiverse, chemical-free, artisanal, local food systems. The same processes, based on regenerating biodiversity, that produce healthy food also address climate change by getting rid of emissions from fossil fuels and fossil chemicals used in energy and chemical intensive production, long distance transport and industrial processing. The ecological, democratic and humane option for addressing climate change is growing, as is eating real, healthy food by creating biodiversity and ecological, local, circular, living food economies. The artificial solutions offered by the food industry will increase hunger by diverting food from people to feedstock for producing lab food, just as the diversion of food to animal feed and biofuel has exacerbated it. It will aggravate climate change through increased energy use, and increase disease through the ultra-ultra-processing of food using synthetic ingredients. ...
We need to reconnect earth justice to human rights, to recognise the pain of the earth as connected to the pain of people. It is time to connect the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis to the industrial food system. It is time to see that the same fossil fuel-based, chemical intensive, resource intensive, ultra-processed food systems that cause metabolic disorders for humans are leading to the metabolic disorder of the earth, whose symptom is climate change. At the root of the poly crisis is a mechanical, militaristic mind, a monoculture of the mind, which reduces the biodiverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine. 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.
OTHER TITLES BY VANDANA SHIVA:
Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements (2022)
Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (2018)
Who Really Feeds the World? (2016)
Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard (ed.) (2015)
Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars (2012)
Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity (2009)
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (1988, 2010)