Vandana Shiva
Thursday 12th June, 2008
Whenever we go to Santa Barbara there are always amazing things happening. This April’s visit was no exception. 
We arrived to learn that Vandana Shiva was in town and giving free lectures sponsored by Santa Barbara University. I was given one of her books last year; Staying Alive, Women, Ecology & Development
Kyoto is a environmental hoax
During the one hour lecture I felt as though I traversed lifetimes of awareness. Not only did I gain more incredible and terrifying insights into the state of the world, but also several myths were smashed. The main one I wish to take the time to mention here. With the election of the new Australia Government last year the Prime Minister immediately fulfilled his promise of ratifying the Kyoto summit. Many Australians, including me, sighed with relief. Imagine my horror as I sat and listened to Vandana outline why Kyoto is a environmental hoax, a committee put together by the polluters to allow them not only to continue polluting, but to in fact be able to pollute more. CFC trading has created a trillion dollar industry and the rights to pollute are based on rights to buy the air. “As a result of these polluters the air no longer belongs to the commons but has been enclosed,” Vandana told us. In effect it is “owned” by these corporations who now have permission through the legacy of carbon trading to increase their pollution massively as long as they reduced by some small percentage at the same time. “All they have to do is buy emissions rights.” And, she added, America is even worse as although they haven’t ratified Kyoto they have gone off on their own and created their own private deals with carbon emission trading and are among the worst offenders of all.
“A 25 percent increase has taken place in emissions while countries have made an agreement to reduce by 5 percent.”
She explained how we are being fooled into thinking that we have more time with the greenhouse effects as the information is being manipulated. We have been told the damage of a 2 degree rise in global temperature but, she says, we are gearing toward 6 degrees because nothing is being done and so we are advancing more rapidly. She went on to outline how the big corporations shape Kyoto and what they want to make of it. “This is enclosure of the air,” she stated, and “at the heart of Kyoto is emissions trading.”
200,000 suicides
Vandana is currently engaged in 6 law suits with the Monsanto Corporation, the company who owns the intellectual property of many seeds and is one of the major GM producers in the world. Vandana’s story of their horrific work in South India is a diabolical illustration of their ethics. With the privatisation of seed - especially the cotton seed, the people had no choice but to buy them - such is the way with these intellectual property laws and the corrupt way they work. At the same time devastating poisons were introduced. This has ruined traditional farming there and dispirited farmers have been committing suicide at alarming rates. Known as the suicide belt, for the past 10 years on average, one farmer every 30 minutes drinks the pesticides that got them into debt. So far 200,000 farmers have died this way. When Monsanto were trying to get a deeper foothold in Vandana’s area, she spoke with the Monsanto representative who said they intended to build another factory even if they had to use crow bars to get the farmers out of the way. Vandana gave a speech to the farmers and quoted the Monsanto representative. The outraged farmers took their own crowbars and farm tools and they tore down the nearby Monsanto factory. She summed up the evil of Monsanto and their intellectual property rights when she pointed out that Monsanto “ sees they have saved the farmers from being usurped by bees and have prevented plants from stealing the sunlight. They can spray everything green and kill everything except the plant they have genetically engineered, such as roundup ready soya, roundup ready wheat and roundup ready corn.” Monsanto and gm are a force to be reckoned with on a global scale, no less in their own back yard. 
In Canada many farmers have been bankrupted as they have been sued by Monsanto when gm seeds have sprung up on their properties, the courts unsympathetic to whether seeds blew in on the wind, off the back of a truck or what. These farmers have been forced to destroy all their seed banks, even though many are several generations old and were brought to the Americas by immigrant European farmers. Beautiful, organic pure seeds. Destroyed for the sake of a big corporation seemingly hell bent on owning all seed. Vandana has established an organic gm free seed bank in her region of India which is constantly being added to and in the future may be one of the few sources of pure seed we have left. She also heads a committee which has gained the commitment of 43 European nations not to go GM. What a shame she hasn’t engaged the Victorian Government on this issue.
Power of community
Vandana was not finished at this point. There was more. She went on to discuss how the food web is being enclosed. She explained how the food market is artificially engineered when companies wish to make more profit. Furthermore, as a result we have achieved nutritionally empty food - chemically grown food where mass and dimension has replaced nourishment. This manner of food production gets rid of everything that is nutrition and it gets rid of relationship and connection of communication that naturally takes place in Earth’s growth and reproduction. We must, she emphasised, reclaim the growing of food. Every aspect of it belongs to the commons. Globalisation has transformed the commons into commodities. We can’t reclaim the the commons other than through community. Industrialisation brought some of the first enclosures - for sheep and for textiles. The Highland clearances were to enclose the commons. Enclosures have eaten into the forest of the tribals. The enclosure of the commons, Vandana told us, is not just the land - or air, it is also the water. Take for example the $10 billion suite against the government of British Colombia for interfering with private trade of BC waters. The right of common people to what is our birthright is being taken from us - the land we live on and grow food on, the air we breath and the water we drink. Her message was alarmingly clear. The building blocks of the modern world are pollution. Carbon emissions haven’t come down because they were never designed to come down. She emphasised that we must fight the privatisation of the commons and if we are to protect them we must prevent trade in pollution. According to Vandana it is the loss of community that has allowed privatisation to take place and community has been lost in globalisation. Reclaiming our communities is the power that will reclaim our commons. We must revise our ideas about community rights and property. Community, she says, has a fluctuation but constancy of identity. The loss of the commons affects the lower 80 percent of communities. This is a fact that we have to come to terms with. This means most people in my community, all my family, all my friends and me. The commons are the basis of our survival. Common law is what the commoners shape by the way they live. This is part of our being born on Earth. It is a natural right like trees have the right to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Now much has been shaped between state and market - but market is a set of relations through those who have an interest in it. State is the market and shapes the market. State can sell our air - to the polluters, it can buy and sell our water - as with the Los Angeles water supply. The food web is being enclosed by the states giving monopoly rights to big interests. Markets are then established between them and then they can increase the prices of food as they choose. Only the commons can’t be shaped - if we own them. Life is richer where communities have been a building block of society. Privatisation and enclosures rob all people. To be excluded from air and water and food means you are pushed to extinction. Consider again the privatisation of seed. 200,000 Indian farmers have been driven to suicide after Monsanto privatised the cotton seeds, drinking the pesticide that got them into debt. These suicides still occur at a rate of one death every 30 minutes. Asked about the hope for the future, Vandana mentioned the chlorophyl molecule. What about nano technology someone asked? Nano technology, she stated, is outrageous, it means patenting of the chemical building blocks. She emphasised that we must think differently, we must turn everything around. We must imagine a world where there are communities and where there are the commons that we all share. And we must take action on what we think and believe and claim them back.
Reclaiming the Commons
To reclaim the commons in a globalised world we must be creative and we must have courage. Genuinely clean activities take place in small communities with traditional processes. While we can not go back to the past, there is much we can learn form indigenous communities and their respect for each other and for earth. 
We all benefit from community, from a sense of culture and place. This is something I have learnt from my many visits to Connemara in west Ireland. Here there is still a strong culture. There are many festivals and events that celebrate the local traditions and there is a sense of continuity. There are people who can tell you stories about the land that have been passed down to them through the generations, people know each other, wave to each other as they pass by on the road, stop and talk and live life at a slower pace, with a different purpose than many in the western culture who are driven by needs that are blown out of context of an ordinary life. Few grow their own food, let alone dig in the garden or take time for a walk at sunset. Few can tell you the traditions of their family, let alone the names of their great grandparents. Community supports us in a sense of who we are, where we come from and what we have to offer. Community embraces you in times of trouble, in times of sorrow and times of joy. In community our children don’t grow up feeling alone or overwhelmed by the world out there. To my delight we were invited to a dinner with Vandana the next evening. She spoke at the dinner - there were a dozen of us there and we were invited to ask questions. I was burning to ask about the plight of the bees and the CCD epidemic. I held back though as there were many complex environmental and economic questions being discussed. I had my chance after dinner though when Wim and I strolled outside and joined Vandana for the sunset. I asked my question, “what do you think is happening to the bees?” She grew very thoughtful and told me, “I don’t know. We really don’t know enough about it. It is probably the excessive amount of electro magnetics in the air along with other factors such as the poisons and GM.” The bee article will be up on the website very soon. Community has always been important to me. Now that importance is strengthened a hundred thousand fold.