A message of hope from Vandana Shiva
Listening to KPFK while driving on February 11, I caught part of Mitch Jeserich’s interview with agroecologist Vandana Shiva on his “Letters and Politics” show. I was so impressed by her wisdom and eloquence that I transcribed part of the interview. See transcript below.
You can download the entire audio interview at this link. In these mostly dark and depressing days for those of us concerned about the state of our natural environment, it’s refreshing to hear her message of hope.
Vandana Shiva interview on “Letters and Politics with Mitch Jeserich,” KPFK, 2/11/19
43:43 Mitch Jeserich: Do you have hope that we can change this, ‘cause that’s the other thing. On one hand, I feel we are a species that can at least recognize what we are doing to our environment, but as a whole, as a species of 7-plus billion people on the planet, can we stop it?
Vandana Shiva: When we think of the fact that it isn’t all of the 7 billion people that are making the mess. Most of them are victims, as much as the species, the 200 species, being driven to extinction each day, as much as Gaia as a whole, whose systems of managing her climate have been disrupted.
I have hope because I save seeds. Plant a seed, you get a thousand seeds. You plant a climate-resilient seed, it can take the cyclone and the flood. You plant a drought-tolerant seed, it doesn’t matter if the rain didn’t come for three months. So I am engaged in a movement for sowing the seeds of hope. But it isn’t just for that that I have huge hope.
I have huge hope because my life has been spent on figuring out how an extremely narrow idea of what is knowledge, has been violent to Nature and women…and I know there’s all those [other] knowledges and I’m hopeful because those knowledges are resurrecting everywhere!
A lot of my work is work in sustainable agriculture. All we do is say “thank you” to the Earth, give her some organic matter, trillions of soil organisms come on their own, trillions! They start making miraculous fertility.