What's the evolution of Earth Democracy thinking, to lead me to write this book on the Economics of Care? For one and a half years, we've all been locked down, haven't we? We've faced a pandemic that no one could have imagined. The Economics of Care that I'm evolving is really building upon Earth's democracy and trying to understand what makes us so vulnerable, whether it's vulnerable to climate disasters, vulnerable to pandemics, vulnerable to hunger, vulnerable to inequality of a very deep kind that makes both the ones on the top and the ones at the bottom very unhappy.
Half the people of the world are still farmers. We forget that. Every fourth in the farmer of the world is in India. These are small farmers, and they provide 80% of the food we eat. If we were to think of it, half of humanity could be happier if you could just have a better food system. We don't have to destroy the earth.
I was helping the Sri Lankans, because the Sri Lankans have decided they won't use chemicals, and they will go organic. The government had asked me, and then the organic farmers had asked me, for training, and this was happening while the ship was sinking on the coastline, in Colombo. What is the ship carrying? Nitric acid to make ammonia, a fertilizer.
There was a young girl who rang me up and said, "The sea, I am a scuba diver, the corals are dead." I said, "The damage we do to the earth and the damage to the ocean is the same damage. We got to start relating the death of the oceans and the depth of soil." That is true ecology. That's true science.
(...)
“The world needs new lenses to understand growth and how humans and societies can thrive.” ~ Luis Gallardo
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Vandana Shiva
It is a joy to be with you all, a joy to be part of this group, promoting happiness in every way, in every sphere. I grew up in India, and I went to school which never taught physics, but I was deeply inspired by Einstein, so I followed my heart to physics, and I even got a science talent scholarship that sent me to the best institutions, to the BARC, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, to the IATs.
And I did my MSC honors in particle physics at Punjab University. I wanted to do a Ph.D. And join the best particle physicists of India. At a certain point, I'd ask him questions about the foundations of quantum theory, conceptual issues. He said, "Just do the calculations." I said, "But anyone can do the calculations, I want to understand.
I eventually went to Canada to do a Ph.D., Because everyone who was working on foundations had been attracted by the University of Western Ontario in a colloquium on quantum theory, the best brains. I'd write to Australia, I'd write to southern Africa, I'd write to Israel, I'd write to Poland. The best people had been brought to this one department for a period of five years. And so I decided that's where I'd go, that's where I did my Ph.D.
But just before leaving, I suddenly realized the forests grown up in were disappearing. I simultaneously made a commitment to protect nature and became an ecological activist while doing my Ph.D. We were witnessing amazing phenomena in my native Himalaya, where women were coming out to hug trees. The movement was called Chipko, which literally means to hug. And for a decade, they worked and stopped the logging, and said, "These forests are not about the timber. These forests give us soil and were water and oxygen."
This year, when the COVID was pushing so many to their death beds, for lack of oxygen, suddenly people are waking up to oxygen. I've just done a series of talks for the Rotary Club, growing oxygen. Planting trees is growing oxygen. So the interconnectedness that I was learning in quantum theory, my Ph.D. was on locality and hidden variables in quantum theory.
Here was the quantum world says everything is A, connected, and everything is potential. That's been my worldview that everything is potential waiting to happen. Potential waiting to be very depressed and very unhappy or potential waiting to happen for happiness. Then my ecology work was teaching me the same, and then Punjab erupted in violence in '84, and that threw me into trying to understand what had gone wrong with agriculture.
I was then working for the United Nations University, which is based in Tokyo, and they had a major program and I did a book for them. Since that time, I've been looking at agriculture, because the problems are not only the biggest in agriculture, but the best solutions also lie in the right relationship with the earth, the right relationship with our food, the right relationship with our farmers. So that's been my trajectory.
Destroying soil is part of what agriculture has done. I've watched the beautiful soils of Punjab, the rivers of Punjab disappear. But we have [inaudible 00:04:00] where we started, we began with a seed bank. It grew into a farm. It grew into the Earth University. We've realized we can repair all of this. We can repair the water system, we've got 70 feet more water. We can heal the soil. When the farm started in '94, it was so sandy that if you put water, the water would just go through the sand.
The other day, when we were preparing 750 varieties of rice, nursery, and they were plowing because we don't use fossils on our farm, we use Biloxin. When they were plowing, I was looking at the soil. It was so rich. Because when you do organic farming, the soil starts to build structure, it starts to build a life. Even soil is like a living community. It binds. I think part of the unhappiness in the world is people are fragmented, people are atomized, people feel alone. When you look at the living soil where the mycorrhiza fungi, in one cubic meter, is so long that it'd cover the diameter of the earth. Can you imagine the miracle? One cubic meter of soil, the little fungi, and the fungi bringing miracles is creating the glue, holding the soil, it's holding the water. It becomes like a sponge.
So part of what we are doing is very deep research. Our farmers always knew this, but the verification of all of this through good agro-ecology is part of what we are doing. We are focusing a lot on women farmers because they don't ever give up their wonderful role of feeding their families. They don't chase going all over their field, which then rots and they can't sell it. We want to grow the food that will feed their families. We have lovely gardens of hope. And throughout the lockdown, our members call from the field, and say, "These gardens have seen us through. We've had food. We've had food for ourselves, we've had food for our neighbors."
But the new thing, because just yesterday, I had a call from the UN saying, "Do you know this year, the Youth Day is dedicated to transforming the food system?" I said, "What could be better to bring a new food system to the future generations, who are the worst victims of bad eating? They are the ones suffering from obesity and diabetes, they're suffering from diabetes at seven and eight and 14 years old. I'm so looking forward to it.
I was thinking, that we might even think of starting the School of Ecological Happiness on World Youth Day this year. We'll be in touch about this because I think it'll be so good to get the young people involved and to both take care of their health and take care of the earth, and through it, take care of the happiness. We are realizing, and this is from my quantum background because everything is related, how you treat the soil is part of your happiness, how you treat, whether you spray poisons and kill the butterflies and bees, or you protect them. That's part of your happiness.
We are evolving an ecological wheel of happiness with our team at the Earth University, on how every spoke connects to every part of the ecosystem, and how taking care of the ecosystem is taking care of your own happiness, that you cannot separate the wealth and health of the earth and the happiness of the earth from your happiness and your health. They are one interconnected all. We are working with a lot of happiness because this is very inspiring. I think ecological happiness is the way it has to be because happiness is not a consumer product. I actually [inaudible 00:08:13], you can't go to a supermarket shelf and buy happiness. You have to grow happiness, and you grow happiness through interaction, through in relationship and the minute there are relationships, it's ecological because ecology is about the science of relationships.
Like my mother would always tell me, "Don't hurt the plants." Then JC Bose did the amazing research. He was among the founders of electromagnetic radiation, and he used to do these experiments. He was a physicist. So do these experiments with plants. And he said, "If you send nasty singles of anger, the plant's electromagnetic [inaudible 00:08:52] shows that it's getting disturbed. When you send messages of love to the plant, the electromagnetic signals are showing signals back of love."
So it's just that we've been a bit blind. We didn't allow multiple senses to understand that happiness... I think we try to define everything else as non-sentient. To me, the revolution of happiness has to be the Buddhist understanding that everything is sentient. Life is sentient. And if it's sentient, then you got to respect life. And if it's sentient, then that happiness, your happiness is one, and you feel it.
I know you have dogs. Can't you see the minute you're leaving, they're immediate, they have sad eyes. They sense it totally. It's called anthropocentrism, this is your assumption that only humans have feelings. It's not true, all beings have feelings. I want to share this anecdote with both of you.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he's now 85, but 25 years ago, he was 60 years old. I had been invited to the big celebration to give a talk at the Ashok Hotel in Delhi. I gave my talk, talked about what I do. Then he scribbles a note for me, which his scribble I've still got, we published it in many places. He scribbles a note for me, which says, "All beings have a right to happiness. We don't have a right to take the happiness away."
So yes, the trees and the plants, they all have a right to happiness, and we have a duty to protect their happiness and feel with them. So Chipko, Chipko is more than a physical gesture. Chipko is about this oneness and non-separation with a living earth and all her beings. That's ecological happiness.
Luis Gallardo
That's beautiful. If I go back to your book Earth Democracy, 2005. Now you are about to publish The Economy of Care. What happened between 2005 and now? And what can we learn when we focus on care and economics?
Vandana Shiva
I did another book called Soil Not Oil in 2009, in the lead to the Copenhagen summit. It was really on the real causes of the climate disaster, connecting the different multiple aspects because agriculture had not been connected, the soil had not been connected, and the solutions in the soil had not been connected.
What has happened since then? What's the evolution of Earth Democracy thinking, to lead me to write this book on the Economics of Care? For one and a half years, we've all been locked down, haven't we? We've faced a pandemic that no one could have imagined. The Economics of Care that I'm evolving is really building upon Earth's democracy and trying to understand what makes us so vulnerable, whether it's vulnerable to climate disasters, vulnerable to pandemics, vulnerable to hunger, vulnerable to inequality of a very deep kind that makes both the ones on the top and the ones at the bottom very unhappy.
The economics is really, both my own learning from ecology, people forget that the word ecology and the world economy both have the same roots in the word Oikos, the Greek word for home. And ecology is the science of a home, of understanding your home, your relationships. And economics is the management of the house, the right rules, the right order. But recently we've allowed the two to go apart.
And in a way, ecological happiness is bringing the two together. The economics of care is, how do you redefine the economy as rooted in Oikos, in our common home, the planet, but in our particular places, the particular communities. You have been impacted so much by the collapse of the apartment building in Florida. You can't stay disconnected from that disaster.
So it invokes in you the need to care somehow to reach out, do something to reach out. That response world, passion. What kind of activities grows out of that? What are your priorities? What we've learned from the COVID disaster and lockdown is care is the biggest thing. Most of us spent most of our time caring for each other. That's what we've been doing. I've been with my family and my sister at home, with my old brother and my old sister, and three old people taking care of each other. Normally we'd be running around the world, sorting out all the problems of the world. Now we've got to take care of each other.
Luis Gallardo
I love it. At the World Happiness Foundation, we have this vision of 10 billion happier, conscious, free human beings by 2050. You say that it's all about potential. In this case, it is definitely possible. But do you have a roadmap? If somebody asks you, "How do we get to most of humanity as happy as possible?" What is your recommendation? Do you have a roadmap for them?
Vandana Shiva
I'll begin, Luis, with the areas where I've spent most of my time in the last 30, 40 years, which is the area of food and agriculture. Half the people of the world are still farmers. We forget that. Every fourth in the farmer of the world is in India. These are small farmers, and they provide 80% of the food we eat. If we were to think of it, half of humanity could be happier if you could just have a better food system. We don't have to destroy the earth.
I was helping the Sri Lankans, because the Sri Lankans have decided they won't use chemicals, and they will go organic. The government had asked me, and then the organic farmers had asked me, for training, and this was happening while the ship was sinking on the coastline, in Colombo. What is the ship carrying? Nitric acid to make ammonia, a fertilizer.
There was a young girl who rang me up and said, "The sea, I am a scuba diver, the corals are dead." I said, "The damage we do to the earth and the damage to the ocean is the same damage. We got to start relating the death of the oceans and the depth of soil." That is true ecology. That's true science.
Our farmers would be much happier if we weren't pushing them off the land, we weren't poisoning them. There's a cancer cream that leaves Punjab. I don't think that's the way to be happy, and the farmers would like to get out of it. But what our other work, our other part of the work, is showing so clearly, that most of the health issues is so connected to the food you eat.
And it's not just about your bodily health. It's about your mental health. Most of neurodegenerative diseases are coming because of the damage to the gut microbiome. So people will be much happier if they were eating well. I think we could reach 10 billion by changing the food system. But you add to this one more time each, a health system that's available.
The first should be, to eat to stay healthy. Hippocrates said that food is thy medicine. Either we say, or food is the first medicine. But if, for some reason, there is a problem like COVID, then should that be another place for people to suffer and be unhappy and become? Or, as we were discussing earlier, universal healthcare to make the foundational issues of food and health and education accessible to all. And have everyone that happen.
It's not the case that money isn't being spent. It's just that more money is spent when we destroy universal healthcare. More money is spent by people when we destroy universal education. So those are the things that, to me, are the roadmap for reaching 10 billion happy people, and which are basically the human rights roadmap. They are the universal human rights roadmap. No, it's all potential. There's nothing like a particle, there's potential waiting to happen to become a wayward particle, the spin up or spin down.
I think the other thing we did was because we separated humanity from nature, and that's probably the worst thing we did to ourselves. That's why we have the climate disaster. That's why we have pandemics. It's the separation that has caused all of this. This separation allowed the illusion that we can become higher and higher level masters of the earth, but we can't become masters of the barrier that sustains us.
That's what earth democracy is. We are members of one earth family. We are not masters of the earth, we are members of the earth family. We are just one among the many species, and we go to respect their rights.
I think the other big, big, big step we can take, so this common rule is transcend the divide between the human side and the nature side. I address so many conferences, Luis, and they keep saying, "The science tells us this, but justice requires this." I said, "A science that does not take care of all is not good enough science." If your climate science does not have the impacts on people in it, it's not ecological science yet." So good science and justice go together.
These are the polarities. We must transcend. Between the Earth's rights and human rights, no, our rights flow from the Earth's rights. This is the work we want to do with a School of Ecological Happiness. Develop these links much, much more. When we make these links, then suddenly the relationships explode the group of transformers.
Can you imagine if all the environmental movements realize they're part of a happiness movement? If the extinction realize, oh my God, extinction can become part of a happiness movement. Suddenly, everyone becomes part of a movement for the rights of all beings, the happiness of all beings. As we have beautiful shlokas, actually the ancient Indian shlokas are so beautiful, they're poetry. One of the ones that are very inspiring, and we should use it for Ecological Happiness school, but we should use it even for the board. This, may all beings be happy. That has to be the objective of your life. May all beings be happy. The minute you do that, can you imagine how wide the alliances can become?
It's so easy to do it differently, as long as you have the happiness of all in your mind. So lots of trees to hug, lots of seeds, a lot of people to hug. It's good to be part of a movement where we are trying to first build an imagination, and then the reality that this is possible.
If you have to start with one single step right now, I mean tomorrow, what is your recommendation? In this case, for youth, and in this case for elders. If we have to say something to the youth, like, what is your first step in order to start moving into the roadmap? Now we are aware of the food system, the health system, the way we are separated, how do we bring it together? Everything has potential, but what is the first step? What is your recommendation as a first step?
Because of having spent now 37 years understanding the food system, I would say eating with mindfulness, eating with a consciousness of what the impacts of your eating are, and basically eating for the happiness of all beings. That the minute we turn that into the first step, because we do it three times a day anyway, then the opportunities become... I just want to give you a simple example. Guru Nanak, who founded the Sikh religion, largely to break out of rigid institutions and to really create a religion around being human. And the central tenet was eating. And the lungs, where you can go, and where do they feed you? People get service, the chief ministers and heads of police will be making chapatis in the kitchen because this is the Sabha. The beauty is this offering for Sabha creates abundance.
Here, while the hospitals in Delhi were going crazy, they couldn't supply oxygen. There was hysteria. People were dying for lack of oxygen. Do you know what they did? They created oxygen lungs. So like they used to give free food, they just put out oxygen cylinders. People will drive in and breathe back life.
I think the concept of the langar, of service, beginning with food, but going into every sphere that people need service, need care, I think can be a very, very important to the first step. And that potential changes the conditions in which we are. We have the potential to shift the climate equation if we take care of the Earth. We have the potential to ensure that we create economies of care so that people aren't hungry, and people aren't unemployed. It just means that we just have to be more compassionate, we have to be more inclusive, we have to be more caring.
Basically, compassion and caring is the potential that's waiting to be awakened in each of us, so it can be awakened in all of us together.
Luis Gallardo
This is beautiful. Thank you so much, Vandana. This is beautiful. Compassion and care have the potential to be awake.
Vandana Shiva
Thank you. Thank you, Luis. Thank you, Dr. Rekhi to be part of this community. I look forward to working with you on waking up.
Yes, let's wake up. Thank you, Vandana. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.