SL:

As one of India most respected scientists and activists, Vandana Shiva is a leading proponent of environmental sustainability and social justice. She has coordinated a wide range of grassroots networks, from highly publicized efforts to pursuing Indian forests, to people’s programs on biodiversity, to broad based campaigns against the World Bank. Much of her work is aimed at counter-development, in favor of people-centered participatory systems. She has also developed a considerable reputation in the West, mainly as a writer on issues having to do with the global economy and its effects on traditional societies. She has written more than a dozen books, including "Monocultures of the Mind," "Staying Alive," "Women, Ecology, and Development". In 1993 she was awarded the prestigious "Right Livelihood Award," also known as the alternative Nobel Prize. When I spoke to her on a recent visit to the United States, I asked her how her training as a physicist and philosopher of science led to the work she is now doing on Social, Women’s and Environmental issues.

VS:

• I did Physics because of my love for nature, and as young students of science, that’s what you’re taught. That this is the way to know nature. So, my travels through Physics, really, are the same edges that make me travel through Ecology now. They are not really different. Except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction, seeing the very life support that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed, and that makes me do more than just inquiry, makes me compelled to act and intervene. I’m a woman. I was born the daughter of a feminist. The granddaughter of a feminist grandfather, and I don’t think I could have avoided working on women’s issues. I don’t do it as a sort of career, or profession or organizational existence. It is my very essence of being a human being. And when I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality, why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest… I can’t just sit back and not trying to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, why there are more homeless, more hungry people in the world, all these issues of justice, of ecology, of a scientific inquiry into nature through Physics, to me they come from, you know, the same sources of mobilization of my spirit. In one sense, I haven’t really moved, I have just traveled on, on the same road.

SL:

• Is it unusual for an Indian woman to be interested in Physics and to pursue a doctorate in that field? Were you an exception in that sense?

VS:

• I was unusual, and in fact, I can’t still figure out what inspired me to do Physics. But since I was 9 or 10 years old, I wanted to be a physicist. I wanted to be like Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. I went to a convent, which didn’t have higher Mathematics and Physics. And I self-taught myself these subjects to get into University. But I think, given that I was interested in Physics, it was easier for me to do Physics in India. I think the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually loose their confidence over time. And the structures of exclusion work against them. We have other structures of exclusion, but we don’t have structures of exclusion around modern scientific knowledge. So, if you can make it, nobody stops you. Nobody defines it as something women shouldn’t be doing. And, in a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country – women in professions that… it’s difficult for women to entry. We even had a woman head of state. And that’s something this society has to catch up with.

SL:

• That’s right. And so, you took your master’s in Physics and then you went on to get a doctorate in the Philosophy of Science.

VS:

• I went on to follow my interest in the foundations of Quantum Theory. I had started out at nuclear Physics. I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of a nuclear system, and even though I was being trained to be the first woman in the fast breeder reactor in India, and I was in that reactor when it first went critical, and it was very exciting… this kind of split between the safety aspect of the nuclear system and the intellectual excitement, I couldn’t be comfortable with that. So I went into Theoretical Physics. I did my master’s in Elementary Particles, but the foundations of Elementary Particles is Quantum Theory and there were too many conceptual problems around Quantum Theory that I couldn’t live with, and so I decided… I went to work on the foundations of Quantum Theory… and that’s what I did my PhD on. I’ve never left Physics because it bored me. I’ve left Physics because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself… and I’m 60… I would like to go back to what I interrupted.

SL:

• What were some of the issues that compelled you on those early days?

VS:

• The early days… the first issue that compelled me was a very strange split between India having extremely high scientific development. We were the third biggest scientific manpower in the world and yet, the amazing poverty, and the linear equation that had being made that if you have enough more than science you will have progress, you will have poverty removal. Why wasn’t it happening? Something was wrong. Something was different. So, understanding the social context of science and technology started to become one of my imperatives. The other was the fact that in the areas where I had grown up, in the Himalayan Forest, we had a movement blossoming, called the "Chipko movement," where peasant women were coming out, embracing trees, stopping logging, and my father had been a forester. I had grown up on those hills. I had seen the forest disappear. I had seen streams disappear and I had just sort of literally jumped into this movement with the peasant women, and started to work with them, having them as my teachers in terms of what forests mean, for a rural woman in India, in terms of firewood and affordable medicine plants, and the rich knowledge. It became very clear that my father, who was a scientifically trained forester knew something about forest, but these women knew about every looking corner of their local ecosystem. And knew much more about the local diversity than any trained forester ever could. So, I learned from them and I worked for them. I’d write their reports. I’d write their counter-reports and that’s what made me leave University teaching, to start an institute called The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. A very big name for a very humble objective, which was to put research at the service of grassroots movements, not just at the baffle. At the service of the baffle in society. The government research works for that. All private research works for that. And I saw insights, I saw brilliant issues coming out from the movements that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration, more systematic analysis. And I just followed that. It has been exciting.

SL:

• What’s interesting is that much of the emphasis today on growth and development and progress in general, is sort of predicated on science and scientific thinking. And even though you are schooled in this area, you are now working on alternatives to it.

VS:

• Well, my training in science is actually a training that is very critical of mechanistic science. I’m trained in Quantum Theory, which was already at the turn of the century, — we had a whole century — a sort of, you know, behind… absorbing the leaps that Quantum Theory made of the human mind. One that the idea that things, objects have properties in them, in fixed ways, is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and forces. They are not inherent. In electrons, of photons, of quanta, as much as in trees, and soils and in people. So, my critique of a modern science that it is reductionist, that is very mechanistic, is really a critique I have inherited from my scientific training. It has got deepened with my experience in the way ecological destruction is taken place. My evolution as an ecologist and my reading of this is basically that the dominant structures of science are extremely good at many pleating objects for single functions and external objectives. So if you want a cow to not be a cow but a milk machine, we can do a very good job by creating new hormones, like the bovine growth hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might have to turn it into a drug addict, it might even create consumers’ scares about health and safety aspects of this milk, but we’ve got so used to manipulating objects, organisms, and ecosystems for a single objective, which I call "The Monoculture of the Mind," and in the dimension of monocultures, of course, this is very, very clever. But in the multiple dimension, in the dimension of diversity, it is extremely crude, because what we have lost out on is cattle as sources of energy, as sources of sustainable energy. In India this has meant that cross-breading programs are mimicking the milk hills of Western cows like the Jerseys and the Holsteins then get rid of the capacity of animals to pull plows and puller carts. So, we have humpless cattle through cross-breading programs with no stamina. And if you see cattle as both sources of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, India cattle are not that inferior. It’s only when you measure them as milk machines, they become inferior. But when have we measured the dairy cows of America, or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior if we had the energy objective for improving livestock. So, the single one-dimensional development has created the monoculture of the mind. The monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of improvement. And this is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology, sustainability against justice.

SL:

• We have tended to justify these monocultures in the name of growth in human development.

VS:

• Well, let me develop that a little more. If we say something has to grow, because people need more food, people need more housing, people need more meat, people need more milk, we can make one thing grow in a certain way, even though we create externalities so there are scarcities in related things. So, there are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute your ground water with nitrates. There is scarcity in diversity when you create huge corn fields with the same strain of corn, so that when one disease strikes in the 70’s and all the corn fields of this country were wiped out, which is when, for the first time the United States realized the value of diversity in agriculture, and the discussion on genetic resources and the conservation came up. So, when you take the entire system into account, ways of developing in one dimension can actually create scarcities, therefore you are not getting more. The entire system of technological production in the way we have it has been justified on creating more goods, to feed more people, to provide more needs, but it destroys more of the resources that we need to meet all those multiple needs. Therefore, enormous destruction and resource scarcity for the poor and resource access is intimately connected. If we shift to an ecological perception, if we shift to a diversity perception we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive instruments for dealing with nature. And that to me is the real lesson of the ecological awareness, at the end of the millennium.

SL:

• I’m speaking with the ecologist and philosopher Vandana Shiva. She is the author of many books, including "Staying Alive," "Monocultures of the Mind," and "The Future of Progress". This is "Insight — an Outlook". I’m Scott London.

• For me, the two are very closely linked, partly because my ecological lessons really have come from those margins of Indian society, which is the 70% of India that lives directly in terms of a dependence on national resources. It could be the biodiversity, it could be the land, it could be the forest, the water. 70% of India is agricultural producers. Nature is their means of production and for them, injustice is the same as ecological destruction, when the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when the fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities… I think, globally, we have reached the stage when we have to find the solutions for economic injustice, in the same place, in the same ways in which we find the solutions for sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system — they are the same phenomena and they have to be put back again in the way of thinking. They have been artificially separated.

SL:

• Well, something that you have worked on a lot, and that I would like to touch on a little bit is… You work on patents and your project conserves seeds.

VS:

• Yes, there is… right now, and it’s a phenomenon that really started out in the United States…. a claim being made to patenting life forms, biodiversity and the innovation of other cultures. For example, the patent on pesticides from the "nim" tree in India, or the use of a hub called "philantus neruri," or even more blatantly, the use of turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and grandmother do in every home, and now the Mississippi Medical Center claims to have invented this capacity of turmeric to heal wounds.

SL:

• Yes, you are right about this. You describe a very dramatic example of where some Americans actually come to India and take, what are very commonly known… folk remedies…

VS:

• Indigenous science. Actually, it is innovation through indigenous science.

SL:

• This is wisdom that has been among the people for many, many generations.

VS:

• Absolutely. It’s common knowledge. And according to patent systems you shouldn’t be able to patent what exists as prior art. The United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as prior art. And therefore anyone from the US can go out, find out the use of a medicinal plant or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention, claim it as an innovation, take a patent on it and grab an exclusive right to the use of the product or processes that are linked with that knowledge. I have called this the phenomena of Biopiracy and Intellectual Piracy.

SL:

• What are some of the other examples? You mentioned the "nim" tree…

VS:

• Neruri… I am just being told that Nestlé has taken out patents on making "polal." You know, polal is the way we make our eyes, without the vegetables or meat, whatever… And before you know it, every common use of plants, of food processing, will be a patent owned by a Western corporation. To me, this is an absolute outrage. It’s worse than slave trade. Because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80% of this world. 80% of the people of this world live on the biodiversity and … And it creates a situation where the common uses in peoples lives over time become monopolies — of a handful of corporations: the pharmaceutical corporations, the agribusiness corporations, the agrochemical corporations, who then turn people incapable of looking after their own needs, where every farmer must go to the seed industry every year to buy their seed, or pay 80% royalties, which is already happening in this country. Over-the-fence exchange is starting to be treated as a crime and as theft, and as an infringement. Or every time someone needs a biological pest control, instead of just using your main seed in your backyard, you depend on the grace or of the corporations. That kind of dependency basically means increased poverty and increased ecological disruption.

SL:

• How do you, and the women you work with counter this?

VS:

• Oh, we have a very multiple level program of resistance. The first is challenging it, as a moral, an ethical issue, just like slave trade was challenged. But you can’t trade in people. You can’t buy their knowledge. It’s illegitimate and shouldn’t be done. The second is working on legal alternatives. One of the movements we have developed is to say that just like intellectual property rights are relevant to, actually, individual invention, what we need is common rights to protect the common intellectual heritage of peoples. Indigenous peoples. And these are rights that are recognized through the convention on biological diversity. We are working to make sure that these become foundations of our jurisprudence. That these ideas are the basis through which our intellectual property rights laws are formed. And we would go all the way from the grassroots to the national government, and all the way to the World Trade Organization and ... Basically what it means is that it is all very multidimensional in our campaigns and that’s what part of the fun is. It works towards resistance and creativity. It’s a more constructive action, while saying no.

SL:

• Do you like in it at all to some of the work that Gandhi did, in terms of his emphasis on peaceful non-cooperation, and so on…

VS:

• In fact, we called, when we started making these challenges, we called them the "Seeds of satyagraha". Now Gandhi had started the independence movement with the satyagraha. Satyagraha means the struggle for truth. Satyagraha was a direct action in non-cooperation. When the British were trying to create salt monopolies, he went to the beach in Dandee, picked up salt and said: nature has given this for free. It is meant to sustain us. We will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the imperial armies. We have done exactly those kinds of actions around biodiversity and seed, that nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations. We will keep it as the richness of nature and the richness of people and the basis of their wealth and the basis of their sustenance and, for us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity say more to patents on life and developing the intellectual ideas of resistance is very much a continuation of Gandhi’s satyagraha… It is keeping life in its diversity that is the satyagraha for the next millennium. It is what the ecology movement must engage, not just in India, but in the US, where people who believe in the freedom of ideas should engage in, wherever they are, because the world of ideas is being closed, through new patent laws, where University teachers can’t teach their students freely because they have taken a grant from a corporation and the products of their mind are owned by that corporation.

SL:

• We were talking about Gandhi a moment ago. Who are some of your other role models?

VS:

• Like I told you earlier, Einstein quite clearly was a big role model. I hear that, nowadays, all kinds of rumors, that he played the fool with women and was very nasty to his wife and maybe if I had know all that he wouldn’t have been such a hero, but I also do sculpting sometimes when I get the time and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of Einstein and his sisters. It’s on my table. It still inspires me, because at least the Einstein I knew was really a person who triggered my imagination, my ideas. Gandhi is the other person because I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy. Not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy to be really free through societal freedom, freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, freedom from hatred, to me those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based. The women of Chipko are real good models for me. And people like S. Guna, who’ve been part of Chipko. Over time, having worked now for years and years on a number of issues, there is really a handful of creative people across the world who constantly inspire in their interactions, which is what makes this kind of work exciting.

SL:

• Are you generally hopeful that you’ll be able to turn things around in time?

VS:

• Well, I’m absolutely confident that things will change. I believe that we will see a lot of destruction, but I believe that if we can see the right patterns and draw the right lessons from that destruction, we might be able to rebuild before it’s too late. And then I have that ultimate optimism that, even if we can’t, life will rebuild itself. And, in a way, the global economy might collapse, but Gaia won’t… peoples’ ingenuity won’t and we will rebuild society, we will rebuild local economies, we will rebuild human aspirations, and the kind of global monoculture, in which everyone is feeling paralyzed, and everyone is feeling like they have to run faster than they’re running just to stay in the same place… I think we will have a disenchantment with the glamour of the dream of globalization. That I can see happening even before this millennium ends.

I was speaking with Indian physicists and ecologist Vandana Shiva. She’s the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, in Deradaan, India. Her many books included "Monocultures of the Mind", "Staying Alive," "Women, Ecology and Development."

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