I suggest reading the article at the following link, or viewing the video at the link there.www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/12/4/video_extended_interview_with_vandana_shiva
Dec. 4, 2013
Watch our full interview with Jane Goodall and Vandana Shiva at the recent International Women’s Earth and Climate Initiative Summit, where they discussed their decades of work devoted to protecting nature and saving future generations from the dangers of climate change. A renowned primatologist, Goodall is best known for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees and baboons. An environmental leader, feminist and thinker, Shiva is the author of many books, including Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars and Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace
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VANDANA SHIVA: I’m born in a beautiful valley called Doon Valley in the Himalaya. And I took for granted that the forests and rivers I had grown with would be there forever, because they were. And then, in the early '70s, the streams started to disappear, the forests started to disappear. That's around the time peasant women of our area just rose and started the movement, Chipko, which means to embrace, to hug. And the movement basically was women saying we’ll put our bodies before the trees so you can’t cut them, because these trees are our mothers, they give us food, fuel, water, but more importantly, they give us soil, water and pure air.
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because we don’t want leadership in that rotten world of destruction. It’s not worth it anyway. It’s not going to last too long. We want the seventh generation, cultivation of leadership for the future. And it’s interesting, the seventh generation logic that Janice talked about, that every action we take should bring to our minds the seventh generation, in India we have the same, seventh generation. That was what civilizations took care of. Uncivilized people rape the Earth for today.
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VANDANA SHIVA: •••
Agriculture, industrial globalized agriculture is 40 percent of the greenhouse gases. We can do something about it today.
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And I think if there’s one thing women can bring to this discussion, in addition to those beautiful words that Jane used of love and compassion, the capacity to have compassion is the capacity to see connections. That’s the disease that the deeply patriarchal mindset has not been able to overcome, that they can’t transcend fragmentation and separation and thinking in silos, and, worse, thinking as if we are separate from the Earth, and therefore, as masters and conquerors, there’s just another experiment of control that you need the freedom to have. And I think we need to give a message saying, no, the Earth was not made by you, therefore you can’t fool around further. You’ve already messed up enough. Stop these geo-engineering experiments. We had a discussion on Democracy Now!, I remember, once about this. We need to tell them this world is about life, not just about your profits and your bottom line, so don’t reduce everything to a commodity, and don’t financialize every function of the Earth and all her gifts.
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JANE GOODALL: •••
people about going to Greenland and being there with this great ice sheet cliff going up to the ice cap, with Inuit elders, who are crying because, they told me, "When we were young, we came here. It was very hard to come here, but we came here. And even in the height of summer, there was no melting of the ice." And as we stood there, the water was roaring down this ice cliff, and huge, great sheets of ice were breaking off. And it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. And learning that if the entire ice sheet melted and the ice cap melted, the oceans of the world would rise seven feet, and half of the world would be under water.
And then I went straight from there, and I went to Panama, and I talked to the Kuna elders. And they said, "We have been moving our people off the offshore islands. We have a plan to move nearly all of them, because the sea is rising, and they’re losing their homes, and we have to find places for them on the shore."
You talked earlier about Kilimanjaro, coming from the Kilimanjaro region. When I first went to Tanzania, the Kilimanjaro—the snows of Kilimanjaro were known everywhere. And now the glacier has almost gone. There’s very little snow. When you fly over it, you just see a tiny bit of snow.
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JANE GOODALL: Well, as I was—I already mentioned that I was traveling around the world and, you know, talking to people about all the problems that I was seeing. And I kept meeting young people, particularly high school and university, who seemed to have lost hope. Most were just apathetic, didn’t—they just seemed—you know, they didn’t care what they did. But some of them were depressed, and very depressed. And some of them were angry, bitter. And so, I began talking to these young people, and they mostly said the same thing: "We feel this way, because we feel you’ve compromised our future, and there’s nothing we can do about it." Well, as I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is. But, yes, we have compromised their future, but is it too late? I think none of us in this room believe it’s too late.
[We may not be able to avoid all harm from our actions up to now, but that doesn't mean our actions can't affect how bad things will be.]
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VANDANA SHIVA: And I will just add one more thing. I think it’s so clear that the rights of nature and rights of Mother Earth are also the rights of future generations, because to the extent the Earth is protected in fulfilling all the services she offers us—the water she gives, the air she gives, the food she gives—to that extent, we are taking care of the seventh generation. So, rights of nature, rights of future, one right, indivisible.
AMY GOODMAN: Just as we open up the floor to questions and comments, I also wanted to ask Jane—we last had you on Democracy Now! when you wrote Harvest of Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. The relationship between what we eat to climate change and climate action?
JANE GOODALL: Well, it’s huge, because—I think Vandana has already talked about the intensive farming, the Green Revolution, and how this is leading to climate change, and how the huge fields, the monoculture that destroys biodiversity. And then I think you also mentioned—or maybe that was this morning, but the—as more and more people eat more and more meat, this is an absolute disaster for climate change. First of all, huge areas of forest are cut down to provide grain to feed the livestock or to provide grazing. I’ve seen it happening myself in South America. I’ve seen it happening in Tanzania and Kenya. And so, as these animals are kept in intensive farms in horribly cruel conditions, maybe we don’t care about the animals. Some people don’t. But even if we don’t care about the animals, what’s happening to keep them alive in these horrible places, they’re fed antibiotics routinely, and this means that the bacteria are building up resistance. And people have died from a scratch on the finger. Plus they’re fed grain when they’re normally grass eaters, and they create an awful lot of methane gas, which is a much worse gas for climate change than CO2 even. And so, what we eat also—I don’t know. If we start eating foods filled with chemicals, I’m not sure about that affecting climate change, but it certainly affects our health. And although there’s no absolute proof yet, the number of people today who are allergic to things is far more than when I was growing up. And the—some of these strange disorders of the mind, it seems to be on the increase, and we don’t really know.
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JANE GOODALL: ••• So, we try to introduce young people to nature. And this is one of the terrible, terrible things of our world today, in the Western world, that young children are kept away from nature more and more. They’re in the inner cities. They’re surrounded by concrete. Even if they have a choice to go out in the country, they prefer to look at their video games and look at nature virtually rather than actually get their hands dirty. And so, actually, when young children have an opportunity to be out in nature to watch birds, to watch seeds growing, this is beginning to open them up. And animals—we found that animals—dogs, cats, rabbits—they really, really make a big difference, and it’s all tied in with empathy.
There is a wonderful, an amazing place, run by Sam—I’ve forgotten his other name—it’s called Green Chimneys. Some of you may know it. And these are children. They’re boys. And they come from—they’re really at the end of what they can do. They’re about to disappear in the underworld or be killed or whatever. They’ve been thrown out of every school. They’re about 12, 13. And when they come to this farm, they’re introduced to an animal. And they then spend their time with the animal. When they start off, they’re abusive. They’re not allowed to hurt the animal, but they shout at it. And then, gradually, they realize, for the first time, here is a creature that will never betray me, that I can tell anything to. And gradually the bond grows up between the child and the animal. And it changes them, because they’re now with an innocent being who won’t hurt them. And the animals, of course, are chosen carefully.
And I’ve been there, and I’ve seen it, and I’ve felt my heart really bled when this boy, I saw him come in, who was 12 years old. He came from inner-city Bronx, I think. And he was asked, "What animal would you like to be with?" And he said, "I don’t care." So they said, "Well, maybe you’d like to be with a rabbit." He said, "What’s a rabbit?" Think of our childhood, the stories we’re read. There isn’t a child any of us in this room knows that doesn’t know what a rabbit is. He had lived in the kind of life where he didn’t know what a rabbit was. A child like that can’t develop empathy, because he doesn’t get kindness. So, Roots & Shoots is very much dealing with inner-city children and helping them—letting them have a chance to connect with these life forms that are essentially innocent, and that will, as you say, unleash the—I do believe there’s a natural empathy that we all have.
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AMY GOODMAN: What about the importance of real, not virtual, community? We live in a digital world now. My colleague, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, our reporter in Egypt, joked, but maybe it’s not just a joke, that Mubarak’s greatest mistake, what brought him down, what led to the revolution, was turning off the Internet, because here, he said, "We’re Egyptian. We would have been inside on Facebook, online, figuring out what people are doing. Now we had to go outside, be together and actually see what was happening."
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VANDANA SHIVA: The Agent Orange, yeah. And the problem with the entire presentation of the organic being costly is because the costs related to environmental destruction and health have not been internalized, either. In this country, GMOs led to emergence of superweeds in the fields. They’re now using Agent Orange, ingredient 2,4-D, which was used in Vietnam, and DuPont is waiting for an approval for an Agent Orange-resistant corn.
[And farm workers will be exposed to this chemical]
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JANE GOODALL: Well, I just can’t resist something I heard last week, which relates to your, you know, we have to have conformity of size. I met this person, and she said, well—and this was in California—that she had just met this farmer, and he said—and he was a genetic engineer—and he said, "It’s absolutely amazing." You know this, but—"We’ve created the square tomato, because it’s easy to pack." And she tasted it. She said, "Yes, but it doesn’t taste like a real tomato." And do you know what he said? And this is what’s chilling to me. He said, "Yes, but very soon, everybody who knows what a real tomato should taste like will be dead, and nobody will know." That’s the frightening thing.
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So, you know, so I want to end up again with what I feel is so desperately important, and that is the youth, because if we help them to understand that they have the power, that they can do it, that they don’t have to go and be confrontational—they can do it quietly. We don’t have to confront people to win. We can very quietly move in, like the sea coming gently in and going quietly over all the ugly parts on the sand 'til it's all beautiful. We can do it quietly, and then we won’t be challenged. And then, eventually, all the young people will have created a better world, and perhaps gone back to true democracy.
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