Why are so many policies and initiatives taking place in the world antithetical to their acclaimed purpose? The truth is that the decision making of a select few individuals is negatively impacting the rest of humanity, and is actually threatening the continuance of life on this planet, all for the sake of self-centered interests. Much of the “efforts” to fix global issues are actually just facades. As Vandana says, “The act of taking is hidden by what’s given”. This is the mindset of ‘empire’, which has pervaded nearly all of our institutions. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of numerous books. She has been fighting on the front lines as a fierce defender of the environment for decades. In this podcast, Vandana delves into the agenda of big pharma, big agriculture, and Bill Gates- we get into the nitty gritty of what the 1% are actually doing. We also highlight the positive responses to this agenda, and posit what the more beautiful world to come will look like.Connect with Vandana ShivaWebsite|https://vandanashivamovie.com/Twitter |https://twitter.com/drvandanashivaYouTube |https://bit.ly/3fw2Qh1

AUBREY: Vandana, good to see you.
VANDANA: Very good to see you, Aubrey.
AUBREY: Absolutely. What is going on in India right now? What's going on?
VANDANA: Very untimely rains. We should by now be harvesting crops. They should be golden in the fields. And the rains don't stop. It's October. October shouldn't be bright, sunny. The sun should be sunny, the ground should be sunny. Climate havoc everywhere, everywhere, with very high costs to agriculture.
AUBREY: There's been some talk that there should be a price to be paid for what people assume are the culprits of this type of climate change. It's creating these types of rains. And it seems like a measure that's not actually going to be that effective. But you can feel people's anger towards what they feel to be the cause of all of this climate change. What are your thoughts on what this landscape is?
VANDANA: I've been an ecologist, ecological activist for five decades. And part of that period from '92, we got international environmental laws, we got the Convention on Biological Diversity, we got the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And most importantly, we got two principles that have been used in law all over the world. The polluter should pay. If harm is done, the cost should be borne by those who cause the harm. We know. The data is so clear now. The 1% are responsible for 50% on a planet with more than 7 billion people. 1% is destroying the climate. And then worse, they are trying to find clever ways to make money out of the disaster they have caused. For example, geoengineering, intentionally destroying the climate. Blocking the sun, called solar geoengineering. As if the sun is the problem. Sun is the blessing. We have life on earth because of the sun. The sun is not the problem, pollution is the problem. And just in my country, one year, the cost of climate havoc is $85 billion. And the entire UN fund for the whole world is supposed to be $100 billion, and they haven't even managed to collect that. I think you are so right, people's, basically, gut reaction is so right that those who have caused the pollution that is driving climate havoc. I don't use the word climate change because it's too smooth. Climate chaos, climate havoc, climate catastrophe is what we are living through. And we know the actors, we know the corporations who are responsible, we know the oil companies, we know the fossil fuel based chemical companies, fertilizer, more than 1.1 billion tons of emissions. 50% of the damage to the world is from the same system that is damaging our health, an industrial food and agriculture system, an industrial globalized system. Yes. Justice means those who cause the harm should compensate those who are impacted by that harm. That's what the polluter pays principle is. It was part of the climate treaty. It's been forgotten. It should be resurrected. And that's what the new democracy movements have to be about. After all, in the days of slavery, when the British found they could destroy India's textiles and make textiles in Manchester and Lancashire, but they had to get raw material. And for that they had to capture the lands of America, they had to capture people in Africa to do the cotton picking. And in those days, I am sure it would have felt like there would never be an end to slavery. But we put an end to slavery, the abolition movement. We need, today, an abolition movement in terms of dealing with the new criminals of our times, the criminals who are putting life to the edge. Criminals who are destroying the ecological processes of the earth, which she has evolved over billions of years, 4 billion years. She created the infrastructure to cool the planet, to make life livable for the human species. From 290 degrees, she brought down the temperature to 13 degrees. We need to respect again the laws of the Earth, the laws of ecology. And this is what people are feeling in their guts. They are not ready for the fake solutions, the net zero, the lab food, agriculture for carbohydrates, and proteins for lab food. No, we are connected to the earth through the food we eat. And how we grow our food decides whether it will contribute to climate havoc or be a solution. And ecological agriculture which recycles carbon and makes both the soil and the biodiversity carbon-rich, that is the solution.
AUBREY: What would you say to those people who are trying to steel-man the other side of the argument? And the other side of the argument would be, there's been climate havoc forever. Things happen. Monsoons last longer or shorter. Earthquakes, fires, disasters, there's climate havoc. We live in a tumultuous and chaotic natural biome. And this has always happened. It just seems to be correlated right now and we're trying to correlate it to that. That's one side of the argument. And then the other side of the argument is that if we stopped producing energy, then people will not have enough energy to go about their daily lives, to support themselves, to actually make a living, to live life in accordance. And if we stop these agricultural practices, then people will starve. Those would be the two steel-manned arguments from the other side. And I'm not saying that that's my argument. I'm just saying, if I'm going to steel-man those arguments. So, how would you respond to both of those things?
VANDANA: The first is, the earth through her biosphere, evolving the microbes and the plants that through photosynthesis, could fix the atmospheric carbon dioxide, turn it into molecules of life, the food we eat, the oxygen, the life that we breathe, that is what has both created the climate and maintained it. And that's a system that has not just evolved over millennia, but has been in balance till, literally, two centuries ago, when we started to use fossil fuels and broke the cycles. And broke the capacity of the biosphere to recycle. Because we abandoned the biosphere and we went into the dead, fossilized living material that the earth has fossilized over 600 million years. As debates in modeling, you can have any amount of debates. But I have witnessed in my country, and we have lived on our farm this year, three rounds of flooding. We've never had flooding on our farm. We are on a mountain. We've had good monsoon, heavy monsoon, but never the levels of extreme events that we are witnessing now. We are in the Bay of Bengal, Orissa, Bengal. We've had cyclones, but never the cyclones we are witnessing now. The super cyclone of 1999. 300 miles per hour. Killed thousands of people. And that's where the seeds that we had saved of salt-tolerant seeds and the seed banks that Nathani has created. They allowed agriculture to bounce back. And these are sources of resilience. So, for those who say this is just nature's pattern, they are insulting nature. They are insulting Gaia. Gaia has more orderly patterns. In India, we call the climate system and the weather patterns, rita. The ritu. And ritu is derived from the word rita, the order. Rita, the right order. The right order. When I talk to old peasants in remote villages, they tell me, we used to have eight predictable seasons. We could predict exactly when the monsoon will come. We could predict exactly when the monsoon will go. We knew exactly when the summer would start shifting into the monsoon. We knew when spring would come and when autumn would come. The seasons have just disappeared. There's nothing like a spring. I do not accept that, I mean, I think the illusion, the colonial illusion, that nature is disorderly. And it's man and superiority that puts nature in order. I think that's an illusion we really must shed. We must start becoming more humble in a context of being part of nature, observing nature much more closely. And seeing the patterns of a tiny little seed growing into a plant and giving you thousands of seeds. That's the observation I do, that's the practice I do. And for those who think that the 200 years of very, very wasteful, pollution-creating, entropy-creating industrial age has created a better standard of living, and oh my gosh, what will we do if we don't have so much gas, and so much oil, and so much coal? I've lived in India, where we were not driven by fossil fuels. And it was a better life. It was a better life because there was more community. It was a better life because we were plastic-free. I've seen plastic invade my country. Plastics, and petrochemicals, and agrichemicals are the poisoning of the world. And anyone who thinks these are gifts should just watch the mountains or waste in which we are drowning. Are people doing better by drinking Coca Cola? I worked with women who fought Coca Cola. I had no idea. I knew that drink was bad. It never tasted good to me. But I didn't know it had such a heavy ecological cost till a group of women invited me in 2002 to celebrate Earth Day in a remote village, because they were fighting Coca Cola. I went home from inquisitiveness. And I said, how could it be that a soft drink company could cause so much havoc? 1.5 million liters per day. And the women fought, and I supported them. And the Coca Cola plant was shut down. But people forget that Coca Cola doesn't manufacture water. When they put the Kinley bottle, they say manufactured by. No, water is not a manufacture, seed is not a manufacture, life is not a manufacture. Just putting more petrol and oil in the plastic bottle and using oil to mine the water basically ends up and we are drinking oil and making ourselves sick with diabetes and obesity. I really do feel we are in such a precarious moment that every sensible human being, every thoughtful human being should shed the brainwashing that has brought us to this brink and start observing, living, experiencing much more intimately what's going on.
AUBREY: Beautifully said. And I think there's no one that can argue this gnawing, growing sense that something is not quite right, and that what we're doing is ultimately not sustainable. And I think a lot of times you can get lost in the arguments of this thing or that thing, and this model versus that model. But at the core of it, we all feel and we all know that what we're doing is unsustainable, something must change. And that everything we're doing collectively on the vector, on the Telos of how it's evolving, is actually not making us any happier. We have to acknowledge that. And those things become inarguable because we just know it. And whatever models and whatever things there are, sure, maybe you can debate this thing or that thing. But fundamentally, we know that we have to shift and we have to shift in a meaningful way. And that shift has to come from our consciousness, our hearts, our awareness, our care for each other. It has to be a universal shift.
VANDANA: Absolutely, Aubrey. I've just done a book published in Italy called "From Greed to Care" because publishers wanted me to reflect on the crisis in which all of us spent two years. And those two years showed very clearly that caring is not a luxury. It's the only economy that makes life possible and worth living.
AUBREY: Amen. What was it? I haven't got a chance on my podcast. What was happening with the farmers' strike in India. Walk us through that from your perspective, being, obviously, so close to the ecology and so close to the Indian people. What did you see happening there?
VANDANA: I've also been very close to the farmers movement. The farmers movement grew in India as a result of the costs of the Green Revolution. Soils dying, water disappearing, poisons everywhere, and agriculture turns non-viable, where the costs of production shoot up high. And what you get for what you produce never increases, it keeps falling. And then, 1987, I was invited to a meeting on the new bio technologies. It was called the laws of life. And that's where the chemical industry first laid out their plan on every seed being a genetically modified seed because they wanted to take a patent on seed so that they could collect royalties from the farmers. I heard them. We started to look out for the GATT agreement, which became the World Trade Organization. And I traveled the length and the breadth of the country to meet farmers' movements, to inform them about what's coming. Because there is no way they'd have got to know till it had happened. So, we have built an amazing movement. We brought together the regional movements because agriculture was a regional subject till that time. And globalization made it a national system. We united all these broken, fragmented groups and they became a big farmers’ movement. 1991 is when the GATT agreement leaked. It was called the Dunkel Draft Text because Dunkel was the director general of the GATT at that time. But Dunkel Draft Text, as you will notice, abbreviates to DDT. So, we called it the DDT text that is going to totally destroy farming. And we organized this big rally of 500,000 to say food and agriculture is too important for every society to be left to free trade, corporate greed. And it was becoming clear that four or five corporations would do the trading, led by Cargill, who wrote for the United States, negotiated the agricultural agreement of WTO. The intellectual property agreement drafted and they confessed that they wrote it, Monsanto. That we will own the seed. We are the inventors of seed. And then the junk food industry, the Pepsis, and the Cokes, and the Nestles wrote the Sanitary and Phytosanitary agreement to destroy real food and force industrial ultra processed food that has spread disease. In '91, the World Bank also imposed structural adjustment on India, having tied us in debt for chemical farming called Green Revolution. And among the conditionalities they had is we should get rid of a law that ensures prices of essential things never rise too high. And no one can hoard, no one can have stockpiling. That trade should stay small, decentralized, and regulated, with a fair price for the growers and producers and a fair price for the eaters. This was called the Essential Commodities Act. We also created systems where the farmers and the small traders work together in what are called agricultural markets. Farmers had rights. No trader could have more than a certain amount of grain. And together, they fixed the price. This was called the Agricultural Produce Marketing Cooperative Act. Third, we never had corporations in agriculture because agriculture is not by accident, the prime activity of most Indians. But we have defined ourselves as an agrarian civilization. Taking care of the soil, taking care of mother earth is the most evolved way of being human. We fought the East India Company on issues of land and bread. We fought the British. We got freedom from British colonialism after they left us with famines and extracted rents and transferred from India to England $45 trillion. So, these laws they were trying to propose from '91 onwards, but we had a very vibrant parliament. And at that point, the WTO had not dismembered our democracy as it is dismembering it everywhere. What happened is every time these laws would come to parliament, they would be rejected. '91 onwards. 2020, in the peak of the lockdown and peak of the corona shut down, they were brought in as an ordinance. And most of the farmers who led the protest that lasted 14 months, for me, it was very touching because they were sons of farmers I had worked with in the '90s. They were the next generation. And they were fighting these three laws because they said corporate agriculture will wipe out the small farmer. And we don’t want to be serfs on other people's land. We want to be proud producers of food. We have a beautiful word for it, annadata, the ones who give you food. And the farmers of India are small, again, by policy. And the small farmers are proud people. And even though, between globalization and the Green Revolution, they've paid a very heavy price. But it was for me, very, very inspiring to watch hundreds of thousands of farmers gathered in total harmony and discipline. They didn't know each other. No one planned it for them. This is the ultimate self-organization that comes together in coherence. They came from different parts of the country. They stayed together in tents. They cooked food for each other. Including men, because India's image is very patriarchal. The men were making chapatis to feed each other. And most importantly, they were remembering. Across their protest were the history. The history of all the agrarian revolts we have had in India. And they were, in a way, continuing the freedom of the farmer and food freedom in our times of corporate globalization. Eventually, the prime minister had to withdraw these laws. He would not do anything. I think it's the first time he stepped back. First time. And it's the small persons with their resilience who have made him remember what democracy is about.
AUBREY: Such a powerful story, and so redeeming that it worked. Everybody self-organizing, the people bringing their power back, claiming something. Not as one individual attacking one individual, but as a group in coherence, working together, loving each other, supporting each other, and then changing the giants and the policies of these massive forces.
VANDANA: And Aubrey, the beauty was, no one was giving them speeches. But they were overcoming religious differences which the political system is feeding on. The women and men were sitting together, women were giving speeches, women were organizing. The dominant system constantly tries to divide us. It cannot exist without a divide and rule policy. And people's movements can only get strong when they transcend the artificially created divisions.
AUBREY: The thing that gives me hope is that the more insane the policies that come down from these top-down corporatist, the corporatocracy that masquerades as a democracy, but really, it's all captured by corporate interests, and whether it's big agriculture, or big war, big medicine, or whatever, Big Pharma, all of these different aspects, they end up capturing the politician so they really just become puppets for a much bigger force that's behind them. And as that increases and gets more and more crazy and more destructive, then that's when people start to overcome their differences, or at least have the opportunity to. And that's what gives me hope. The more that those top-down forces press, the more likely people are to respond and come together and set aside their differences.
VANDANA: Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I think the system based on greed, corporate rule would never have survived if they hadn't made us support that structure through consumerism. We had to become consumers in order to have corporate rule. And part of what we have to do is become citizens again, become earth citizens again, know what enough is about. And through it, get satisfaction. And through it, get happiness. Because I've seen billboards come up in my country, happiness for sale. Happiness can't be sold. And the more you try and buy happiness in the supermarket and the malls, the more it runs away. Because new clothing will not bring you happiness. And chasing the next pair of throwaway shoes won't bring you happiness. The throwaway culture. Throwing away precious earth resources, throwing away precious human beings. To me, that throw away culture is the violence of this system. And the non-violence is living with deep respect for all life on earth and deep respect for every human being. No one is an outcast. No one is disposable.
AUBREY: Beautifully said. What, from your perspective, was going on with some of the seemingly insidious and somewhat coerced vaccine policies that also have been happening in India? Where it feels like different corporations and different special interests have decided to use Indian population as test subjects for different vaccination policies.
VANDANA: My sister's a medical doctor. She's an MD in medicine and has become the leading voice over the years on trying to regulate Big Pharma for hazardous drugs that they dump on us, for untested vaccines that are dumped on us. And there's so many cases, especially with Bill Gates funding of young women who were never informed that they were part of a clinical trial, and many died. And that case, actually, was a very successful case, built by a group of doctors who then supported the victims. India has both been at the heart of, we are both a very hugely successful scientific community. I did some research on how we are the third biggest scientific community of the world. And it's not an accident. Look at the fact that all of Silicon Valley is being run by Indians. And I think part of it is our training in the mathematics system, long before modern mathematics, has facilitated the young people from just slipping into the new IT sector. Big Pharma and big poison in agriculture are actually the same players. They're not different. Bayer, people think of it as an aspirin company when they bought Monsanto. But Bayer's first product, one of their products, was heroin. When you look at heroin addiction, you wouldn't imagine its Bayer. Bayer was part of the IG Farben and part of MOBE during Hitler's Germany. Monsanto, Bayer, had a partnership. And Bayer's of course, also a big pharmaceutical giant. So the chemicals and the glyphosate give you cancer. And then the Bayers have the patented cancer drug. And each circle of poison creates new possibilities for Big Pharma. And I think one of the big issues that at least for India is becoming so clear is we have had an explosion of disasters. I started to look at agriculture, not because it was my field. My field of physics. My field was quantum theory. I started to look at agriculture in '84 when the land of Punjab, which is where I done my MSc in particle physics, it erupted in violence. Thousands were killed. And that same year in '84, a city called Bhopal had a pesticide leak and thousands were killed. And I'm saying at the end of the year, why on earth are we doing agriculture in a way that kills people? Where did these chemicals come from? And I said, what is this thing called the Green Revolution? And of course, like you will say, the story is, oh, my gosh, without chemicals, people will starve. People are starving because of chemicals. People are dying because of chemicals. Every year 200,000 deaths because of pesticide poisoning. Not a trivial number. India has lost 400,000 farmers because of debt driven suicide. What was this debt for? Seeds and chemicals. And this connection between big poison and Big Pharma, and the connection between the way poisons are imposed on people, and the cancer epidemics we are living through on the one hand. And on the other, for the rest, the ultra-processed food that is creating chronic diseases that are much bigger in terms of cost than the economy of agriculture. We have a book called "Wealth Per Acre." We have another book called "Health Per Acre" because I save seeds. We promote organic biodiverse farming. And then we worked out how much does it produces when you don't look at the monoculture. A monoculture commodity, of course, more will be produced in a monoculture commodity of a monoculture. But we have to eat different things. And when we cultivate diversity and you measure nutrition, every acre gives you far more food and nutrition and health by not using chemicals and growing monocultures. And then our work has shown that farmers who leave the chemical treadmill, who reclaim the seed sovereignty, who reclaim the knowledge of farming without chemicals, who reclaim the market and say, we will shape the market, the market will not push us to extinction, they're earning much, much more. And the shadow of environmental disasters, suicides, and the chronic disease epidemic is at least, for us, it's a bigger shadow than the former GDP, which anyway, is not a very meaningful number. That's why the lovely country of Bhutan, north of us, the former prime minister called me and said, they gave up gross domestic product and gross national product. And said growth means nothing. Because they saw unhappy people with growth. They said, we are going to maximize happiness. They measure gross national happiness. Their planning is done on the basis of happiness, not on the basis of growth. And one little country can do it. Surely, we can make this shift everywhere. Individually, that's what we should be thinking every moment. What is more satisfying? What allows me to spread joy around me rather than constantly being pushed on the money treadmill? And everyone feeling so insecure, because they pay you a little bit and then they make everything cost double and triple. Look at this year's cost of living crisis. No one can afford to live. But everyone has a right to live. So, this idea that you've got to buy your life is a fake idea. It's an immoral idea. And it should be put aside. All beings have a right to live, all human beings have a right to live. Real democracy society is being designed in a way that people are living, living with wellbeing, living with satisfaction, living in community, living in healthy ways with less. And both my activism and my research and my cultural experience tells me that actually, the less resources you exploit, the more there is for everyone. And therefore, everyone is happier. The more you steal the water from the ground like Coca Cola or steal the water from a river for intensive irrigation to just dissolve chemicals, there's disasters everywhere. There's disasters for the plants, there's disasters for the crops, there's disaster for animals, and there's disaster for the smaller farmers for whom no water is left. Taking less means sharing more.
AUBREY: Well said. Our friend Charles Eisenstein recently went to Kansas, and he wrote an article about what's happening in the heartland. And it seems like in our country as well, we're experiencing many of the same things that you're talking about in India. Where there's starting to be the seeds of intellectual consciousness revolution, a heart-led revolution in the heartland, where people are saying, this way of mono cropping and spraying all of these chemicals, and petrochemicals, and everything on the ground, it's making the soil less and less workable, the yields are going down, we're not able to actually live. And we know, we know in our body that we're actually doing the thing contrary to all of the values that our grandfathers and their fathers and everyone had held, which is the pride at being a farmer. I think there is great pride in that. And that's all starting to slip away. And these movements are so necessary, not only to restore the soil, but restore the soil of people's care, and love, and self-respect, and dignity. And this is why I think there's all of these ideas of this new top-down world where the government just gives you a little money and then the machine produces enough. But if people don't have the dignity to feel like they're contributing to themselves, their family, their fellow man, it's never going to work. The deep gnawing pain and lack of purpose that that will cause will completely erode any sense of happiness that we have. So, these movements are vital, not only for the earth, but for the sustenance of human joy.
VANDANA: Being human. What is being human? What is being human? Is being human the ideas that those who follow are very outmoded, obsolete, they got an idea that we are just minds and not bodies? And now we're thinking, and the mind of the computer is superior to my mind. And therefore, I must dissolve my identity and give up. And, of course, to create a superior human race. That's what Bacon was talking about. A superior race of supermen who will control the rest. That's what some people would like to see in the world. And they really are thinking. I remember Zuckerberg's talk at Harvard. He said 99% of people will be useless. In your world, Mr. Zuckerberg. In the real world, every person can contribute. Does contribute. And this monoculture of the mind that I've talked about, it's not just about how we farm, and how we practice fisheries, or how we grow our forests as monoculture plantations. But monoculture of the mind is also imposition of a uniformity on the diversity of society. And to say, you can only be this. And even this, you can only be for one year. Because then you've got to scale up to fit into the next generation of the machine. When the 1% says 99% of you are useless, it's time for the 99% to say, actually, your ideas are quite useless for us. We will create nicer ones that are more generous, that have more solidarity, and have more potential for bringing happiness.
AUBREY: How is the dissemination of this consciousness happening in India? We think about it now. People are listening to podcasts, they're finding information, but what's happening on the ground? How is this movement happening in India amongst the people? And maybe we can extrapolate how this could happen in the world. Obviously, there is a lot of technology and I'm sure it's helpful. But what are the ways that these ideas are actually rippling outward?
VANDANA: Ever since colonialism and even worse, since globalization, there've always been, there are two Indias. Very different. One deeply integrated into the monoculture world, and the other deeply rooted. I work in the rooted world. I work with women, I work with farmers. We save seeds. But we are not just saving seeds for an agriculture of freedom. Because as Kissinger had said, you control food, you control society. You control arms, you control governments. And I said, when they want to control seed, you control life on earth. And therefore seed freedom, of course, is the basis of food freedom. But what's growing so beautifully, particularly in the last few years, and especially in the last two years of lockdown, is women started to remember things they had forgotten. Healing plants that give you immunity. They treated themselves. No fear of COVID. We used to drink this as a child, these three herbs put together in this kara. And more importantly, because we worked on local economies, seed sovereignty, food sovereignty, that's what the women are practicing. And when the supply chains collapsed, it's these circles of living economies that sustain such a society. How does it spread? It basically spreads, I think everyone these days is on this thing called WhatsApp. I'm not on it, even in the villages. Because everything has been connected in India to your having a phone. You can't get your food without the phone, you can't send your child to school, you can't go to the bank without the phone. So, everyone has a phone. And everyone now is chatting away all the time. One little message is sent, and it spreads. Not through podcasts and not through YouTube, but through this amazing ability of local communities to take the part of the technological empire that serves them.
AUBREY: It's one of the things that I read about. And again, I don't know the details because I haven't talked to anybody like you who's been on the ground and experienced it. And I'm very skeptical of what gets filtered to us through mainstream media. I think we've seen that mainstream media is also captured by corporate interests or political interests, which are in turn captured by corporate interests. It's very difficult to trust mainstream media about whatever is happening. But it seems that in Iran, that actually one of the moves that the government made to try to squash the revolution that's happening there for women's rights was to try and shut down all forms of communication like WhatsApp, and Instagram, and Twitter and whatever else they could. Because I think they realized that if people can communicate with each other, then that's what's going to give the people power. And if they can shut that down, then they can maintain control. But that's an absolutely entirely despotic, tyrannical move that people won't tolerate. Ultimately, it'll just feel the revolution even more because people will realize that the deep corruption and oppressive violence of preventing people from even communicating with each other.
VANDANA: Yeah. But of course, I think very often, and it's true for the COVID years. One is total totalitarian shutdown of communication systems. The other is that very subtle censorship so that all you get is fakeness. And of course, the more sophisticated places, they never shut down straight away. They should just shut down one voice. Or one kind of voice, or one set of voices. And only one voice. I think the mainstream media is a big part of the problem. I've done two books on Mr. Gates. One is "Philanthrocapitalism," and the other was the book that made me learn where the world was going called "Oneness VS. the 1%." And of course, we are chatting because Chelsea Green has just brought to the United States my movement biography. It's not my autobiography. It's my biography of movements over five decades of my life. And it's called "Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements." And I have lived through enough. When I started with the Chipko movement, there was nothing like international media. And we were used to that. We were used to the fact that big things can happen, and they'll never be reported. Then there was a period of internationalism, where real news from remote places. And to the extent that when I was starting to save seeds, I called someone I came to know who had started the seed bank in Nicaragua. And I said, I don't know how to save seeds. I have to do it, but come and teach me. And then I sent him off to the villages. And he went to the villages. He said, Vandana Shiva has sent me. I'm so and so from Nicaragua. Everyone in the remote villages, high mountains, knew about the Sandinistas, knew about Nicaragua, knew about the revolution. Now these are pre-globalization takes where we were much more international because there was no filtering happening. Then comes globalization and the more recent hyper-globalization. Basically, you never get real news about any place. And I'll give you my own example. Monsanto came in with the Bt cotton. It came in illegally. I'd been part of writing international, national laws on biosafety. When I found that they were in India illegally, I sued them. But then I also started to monitor what was happening. Suicides started. They started to do reports. And of course, it started to come on Indian media. And then the international media was mobilized. Not the mainstream as much as bought. That's why it's such a pleasure to talk to you, Aubrey, because it's such a pleasure to talk to a free mind rather than a paid fake news operator, or a fake spin operator. And what's very encouraging is those numbers actually are not very big. Whether it's tobacco, or nuclear, or GMOs, it's the same people. They're just available. They're available for hire. Now attack the science. Now go attack this person.
AUBREY: They're like mercenaries that are—
VANDANA: They are total mercenaries. They're total mercenaries. Each of them have tried to attack me.
AUBREY: That's a badge of honor, Vandana. That's a badge of honor.
VANDANA: I think big media today is so much part of big money that we need decentralized media to regenerate democracy.
AUBREY: Tell me about Bill Gates. There's a lot of people who have a lot of strong opinions about Mr. Gates. And I've seen some things that I think are highly questionable. Whether he's trying to participate in releasing GMO mosquitoes, which seems like a horrible idea to me. I don't know. I don't know enough about GMO mosquitoes—
VANDANA: No, no. He's financing it for sure. He's financing engineered mosquitoes.
AUBREY: That seems like a terrible idea. It seems actually very, what he was doing during COVID seemed highly questionable. But until I really know something and I have a gnosis of something, I always reserve some judgment. But it seems like you've really been diving deep in this. So, tell me, from your perspective, what's this man up to?
VANDANA: I'll tell you about three levels at which I've had to cross paths with him. The World Economic Forum had designed globalization. And then the Seattle movement happened, and WTO was shut down. They tried to revise their spin and decided to call people like me. And I remember one of the World Economic Forum meetings was in Melbourne. And I've written about it in my book, "Terra Viva." Protests were huge. I was walking with the protests. And then at a certain point, I told the mountain people in the march that I have an invitation to speak inside with Bill Gates. And if you think it's worth it, I will go in. Otherwise, I'll keep marching with you. Quickly, they made a declaration. They said no, no, go and present this. So, I went in. And I went in from the streets. Bill Gates couldn't arrive from the streets because there was a total blockade. He had to fly in on a helicopter. And here I was talking about what the people are saying. I was talking about what women in my land are saying. And all he went on repeating ad nauseam was, there's a digital divide. There's a digital divide. There's a digital divide. As if life and death depends on having a gadget or getting a Microsoft program. The next was the time when he—
AUBREY: Wait. Just to get this clear. You were bringing issues that the people had brought forth. What were you trying to accomplish by meeting with him first, just so I understand.
VANDANA: No, I wasn't meeting with him. He and I were addressing the World Economic Forum. I wouldn't go meeting him. No. We were just invited, and we were both speakers.
AUBREY: Part of the same speaking network.
VANDANA: Yeah. The two of us were speakers. I had done the book on the Green Revolution and known how deadly it is for the earth and for farmers. And then he started to push the Green Revolution in Africa, the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. And I went to Africa many times. The people of Africa rejected it. Said, take it back, don't push it. Scientists of the world said—
AUBREY: What is the Green Revolution? Explain that for people who don’t know.
VANDANA: The Green Revolution is just chemical farming imposed on the world with a very fake idea of greenness. Of course, there was no green movement in the '60s. The green movement only came much later. The word green was different from red. There was a red revolution in China. And so to create a different path based on commercialization through chemicals and commodification, the US, the World Bank all joined hands, and the Rockefeller Foundation all joined hands and first introduced the Green Revolution in India. And that's what ruined Punjab. And even today, like I said, it's the grandchildren of those who suffered first who are still, you know? Punjab is one of the lands with the highest level of suicides. The Green Revolution in India has had high costs. Elites wanted to take, he called it the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. It abbreviates to be AGRA. And I said this AGRA will not create the Taj Mahal. This AGRA is going to be very, very serious. And it already has had huge costs. The yields are lower. They're selling more fertilizers, but arid areas can be devastated with fertilizers. The third time I—
AUBREY: Just to add one thing to that. It seems like, for people to understand. The Green Revolution is about green, yes, plants. But in this case, it's about money. And our money is green. Money is green here in the US. And that's the fucking irony is really what they're talking about when they say Green Revolution. They're talking about greenback American dollars.
VANDANA: The third time round. And I realized then that no matter how much you pay, movements, hundreds of thousands of signatures from Africa, movements from around the world, he doesn't care, he doesn't listen. He doesn't have the capacity to take feedback.
AUBREY: Do you think that's because he just thinks he's smarter than everybody, and that he's got it all figured out?
VANDANA: I think part of it is that and the part of it is, even though he pretends to be only a nerd, he's always looking for ways to make money. After all, he cheated everyone to make Microsoft. He created his own partners and he patented the basic program that college professors had written. He's the inventor, he is the inventor of everything. And he is today a bio pirate and this is what I've written. In 2015, President Obama sadly, had killed the legally binding climate treaty in Copenhagen. By the time people met in Paris, there was nothing like a legally binding framework. It was now voluntary commitments. We'll do this. And it wasn't adding up. But having attended so many of these meetings since '92, and before '92 in the prep forms, I could not believe that Mr. Gates was basically giving all the directions. He was on the stage with heads of state. Never seen that before. I said, since when did billionaires who are not elected, not only stand equal to but superior to people who've been elected? I started to look and my lovely son helped me. We started to look at, how's money really working? Where are the decisions taking place? So, we wrote the book called "Oneness Vs. 1%." Basically, what had happened very quickly was globalization and deregulation had, and allowed wealth to be so concentrated. And Mr. Gates had managed, for the first WTO meeting, to get total freedom from any taxation on information technologies, and the movement of information. So if Microsoft was paying for all the back and forth, they'd have had to pay lots of taxes. They made so much money, he got so rich because of the deregulation of globalization. And the first WTO ministerial in Singapore is where the rules were written. But very fast, he started then. From 2015, I watched him take over the climate discussion. Just before that, he'd taken over the agriculture discussion. He's now talking of one agriculture for the whole world, which he'll control. He is the biggest farmland owner of America. The biggest farmland owner of America is Mr. Microsoft, because he is trying to now push control over agriculture through surveillance, through digitalization. And of course, through genetic engineering every GMO that we questioned because it was an inferior version. Golden rice for more vitamin A. No. We had so many alternatives of vitamin A. The carrot itself from where carotene comes. So, we said this is a very inferior technology because all we needed was biodiversity. He resurrected this failed project and is financing it and pushing it through deregulation in the Philippines, trying to spread it to the world. In 2011, we stopped the Bt aubergine in India. There were seven public hearings through various parts of the country. Everyone said we don't need this. But cotton has already destroyed agriculture. We threw it out through a democratic debate. Mr. Gates takes it to Bangladesh. So, every failed technology rejected by science, rejected by democracy has been picked up by his money. Another big issue about Bill Gates that most people don't know. All public institutions are suffering because the public support system is being made to collapse. So, these seed banks that were put together by the World Bank in the Green Revolution time, because they needed all the rice diversity, they needed all the wheat diversity, they needed all the barley diversity. These seed banks, now Mr. Gates is the driver. He gives tiny bits of funding and then he takes control. All the seeds of the word, including the seed, they call it the Doomsday Vault in Svalbard, he's the big funder of the Svalbard gene bank. He's controlling seed, he's trying to control agriculture, of course, he's the biggest funder, for WHO, education, media. Just look at which big media does not fund. So, when you ask me about Mr. Gates. And here, sitting directly in front of me is his book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." And it's really a book on how to create more climate disasters. He says it's the four stomachs of the cow that are the problem. No, it’s the bad feed and putting cows in factories. That's the problem. Not the cow, not the four stomachs. Herbivores need four stomachs. Or saying, I love fertilizers, at a time when we know they're the biggest problem in terms of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Here's Mr. Gates showing off, him saying, I love fertilizers. I'm happier than I look standing in front of a fertilizer factory. He's the one who invented net zero. It's all in his book. He wrote this just before the Glasgow Summit. Every decision, every language, the vocabulary that came out of the official UN summit is already here. The Food Summit used to be in Rome, where the FAO is. Last year, it was taken by Gates to New York. Instead of being countries, it was now corporations. And the head was Mr. Gates's Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa chief. So, I think, the UN system is totally eroded by his maneuvers. And governments, he just walks in. He just walks in and gives a little, here's a million. And then he takes 10, 20 million.
AUBREY: Hearing that, it all makes sense based on everything. I've also heard about the moves that he's making. Doesn't seem like anything you're saying is debatable. This is just really what he's doing. Then the question that comes to my mind, which is not even an important question to ask, it's almost rhetorical is, does he really think that he's doing good actually? Or does he know that he's become a Bond villain and he's just happy to be a villain in this case? At some point, does he have such little self-awareness and is his shadow so great, that he really thinks he's doing the best that he could? And in that case, is potentially redeemable. Or is he just like, fuck it. I'm going to take the whole world.
VANDANA: I think he's basically so ignorant about how the world works, and he is so arrogant about his pattern of how it should work, that he has no time for learning, he's got no time for listening. And I don't think all the ideas come from his head. I think every perverse power, the green of money, the green of the dollar, they use him. And they really thought that his, just like the image of Rockefeller was changed and then Rockefeller became a philanthropist, a makeover of Bill Gates to place with him creating the Gates Foundation. And so the book we've done on philanthrocapitalism, is that this is just the next stage. Because in a way, just extraction by itself is too naked and people are catching on and saying, we don't want this. So, philanthropy capitalism shifts the gaze to say, oh, no, he's giving. The act of taking gets hidden by the tiny little bit that's given. I don't think he's his own man. I don't think so. I think he's just the right face at this point. But it's a face that's getting very fatigued very fast. Because he doesn't look happy to me.
AUBREY: No, no, no, definitely not. Making these decisions, you have to be disconnected from great spirit, or mama Gaia, or whatever the language you want to use. But that thing that is within us and beyond us, to be in discord with that energy and live your life, it takes a toll. It has to because this is the reifying, this is the life affirming force that moves through us. This is the true source of joy, and love, and laughter, and bliss, and Eros, and life. And to be disconnected from that, which you must be, to be doing this, it bears a cost. But also at the same time, the world is bearing a big cost. And hopefully, people are starting to wake up to what's happening. And he's just one of the, as you said, one of the focal points of this focus. But really, we need to expand our gaze and start to see that this is a machine. It's a machine called Empire. And it used to be that you could march in with your guns and your army and just take whatever land or country that you wanted. And then at a certain point, you realize, we can't do that. Now we have to buy it. We can't take slaves, we have to buy them. We have to buy them through the production that they created. And it's almost creating serfs in a way. It's just the same mentality of Empire, just shifting strategies, but the same energy behind it, because they just can't get away with what they used to get away with. But there needs to be a radical shift, a new octave, a new operating system beyond the operating system of Empire. And that's hopefully what we're all driving towards together.
VANDANA: In fact, the book "Oneness Vs. 1%" I have talked about new colonies. That basically, it's still colonialism, it's still Empire, except that owning the seed is different from taking over land. It looks different, but it's the same enclosure. It's absolutely the same enclosure. The civilizing mission. It used to be a religion. You're uncivilized because you're not like us. You're not Christian like us. Now, the civilizing mission is the tools of the money machine. If you are not using the tools I want to force on you, you are somehow primitive. And then the primitiveness is built into new levels of economic punishment. You're so right about both widening our gaze and deepening our consciousness. Doing both together. The widening of the gaze allows us to participate in a dynamic living world. And going deeper allows us to know what's the right way to live in this beautiful world.
AUBREY: I read something somewhere a while ago that we've never been in armed conflict with another country that had a McDonald's. And that may seem like something that's trivial, but actually, if you look a little deeper, think a little deeper, there's something very interesting about that, which is at the point that the real alliance is made, and the real alliance is corporatism, it's actually a corporatocracy, a global corporatocracy. When there is an alliance made to allow at least one arm of that to penetrate the country, which is symbolized in this case, by McDonald's, that's what just the symbol is. But that symbol means that there's a whole host of other levels of cooperation and corporatism that's happening. At that point, we're done fighting with them. They're all on the same team, so to speak. The fighting does happen with different financial conflicts and financial moves that are being played. Of course, all of these agents are motivated by win-lose metrics and self-interest. There’s financial conflict. But nonetheless, as soon as the multinational corporatism gets into another country, they're an ally to some extent. And it's just showing where the real nationalism lies and where the real globalism lies. It's in the money.
VANDANA: I think it was Thomas Friedman who said that. And he also wrote and said, behind every McDonald's is a McDonnell Douglas. That actually, it looks like friendly investments. But like he says, behind it, is the military arm saying, we are there, with the McDonnell Douglas. But I have two little incidents with the McDonald's story. In '95, the big Women's Summit took place in Beijing. And of course, I was there. A group of young women came up to me and said, Ronald McDonald is here without a visa. I said, who's Ronald McDonald? We didn't have a McDonald's in India. Who's Ronald McDonald? I didn't know it's the name of the clown that sits in front. They said, will you help us get rid of him? I said, sure, if it's McDonald's, yeah. So, we marched. We picked up Mr. Ronald McDonald from the McDonald's in the women's conference. And then we took him into a toilet, put him in there and locked him up.
AUBREY: Is this a real person or is this a statue?
VANDANA: No, no, it's that little clown that sits in front of the McDonald's.
AUBREY: As a person?
VANDANA: No, no, no, no, no. Just fiberglass
AUBREY: Just the emblem.
VANDANA: Just the emblem. And the other was, the young people in England were starting to find the connections between the meat sourcing of McDonald and this was way back, deforestation of the Amazon. Right now. It's, of course, GM soya. And the BBC was going to come and interview me about comments on these movements. They were to come at 7 am. At quarter to 7, I get a call. We have been threatened to be sued by McDonald's and BBC chickened out. McDonald's can threaten them and say, if you do a story on how nasty we are, we are going to sue you. For me, the tragedy of our globalized times is having grown up in an India that had become free and independent. And all the diversities were flourishing, the diversities of our languages and our foods. And then globalization comes and thumps on us. We had protests in India. We shut down the first McDonald's. We shut down the first KFC. People didn't want it. But bit by bit by bit, they just erode the regulatory system. And as you were saying, they basically steal the governments. And part of what we have to do is A, design how much government in what sphere is desirable. I don't think governments have a right to try and tell us eating bad food is a requirement. because that's what they're doing under the laws written by the junk food industry. And the second really is, where we do need governance to reclaim the democratic control over governance structures, because that's what globalization eroded. It will be different. It won't be the kind of system that we created after the wars and after, for example, our independence. I think they will definitely be far more decentralized, far more diverse, far more self-determining and self-reliant.
AUBREY: Yeah. What can people do? What can people do to start? Besides just raising their own consciousness and awareness, how does every individual who's been moved by this podcast is listening to it, how do we contribute to this more beautiful world that we know we need.
VANDANA: We all eat. And we now know we have enough knowledge that what is grown, how it's grown, what we eat, can either devastate the planet and our health, or regenerate the planet and our health. So, having consciously chosen for the last four decades of my life, to put my ethical, ecological, intellectual energies on redefining and reclaiming the food system from a food system that serves the poison cartel and serves the billionaires to a food system that serves all beings on earth, that serves every human being so that people have food, and that serves the planet as a whole. I think beginning with A, eating. 2, understanding how some cheating is going on to make costly food cheap, unhealthy food affordable. Why is our right to food not being protected? And then I would say, whoever can, start going to your food.
AUBREY: Beautifully said. And we're trying to abide by that here. We have a beautiful little 120-acre farm. We got our chickens, and sheep, and turkeys, and emus, and bees, and fish, and the food for us in the plants. It's been a beautiful process to be a part of that and watch that flourish. There's a deep satisfaction in it for sure. And I think this is definitely a big part of the way forward.
VANDANA: Be a garden. Grow a garden.
AUBREY: Be a garden, grow a garden. I love it. Thank you so much for your work and just the light that you are in the world. I can't tell you how many people have suggested that we have a podcast together. You're making a lot of my listeners very happy that we made this connection happen and—
VANDANA: Thank you, Aubrey, pleasure meeting you.
AUBREY: Yeah, it was a pleasure to meet you as well and count me as an ally. If there's any way I can support you in anything, just reach out.
VANDANA: Wonderful. We'll be in touch. Thank you.
AUBREY: That sounds good. Take care.
VANDANA: Bye.