Earth Democracy

My deepest inspiration from Gandhi comes from the recognition of swaraj — self rule. Self-rule not just at a national level, but self-rule at a local level and at a personal level. You cannot have self-rule unless you are self-organized. Therefore the concept of democracy in Gandhian thought is the ultimate capacity of people to collectively organize their lives and their community. 

The second very powerful concept of Gandhi that has inspired me is swadeshi—which means the creative ability of every human being and every community to produce what they need. In globalization and in this killing democracy we have the idea that everyone should be a consumer, but no one should be a producer of things and a creator of ideas and goods. That is at the root of poverty. We need to reclaim our capacity to create and produce.  

Finally, I believe his deepest gift to us is the celebration of non-cooperation against unjust and immoral rule. He called it satyagraha . Recently our government has signed what I would call a Monsanto agreement with President Bush to push more genetically engineered organisms and crops on India. When our laws make farmers’ seed saving illegal, but make it legal for Monsanto to sell seed, like BT cotton, and kill our farmers, then we have to start saying we will not cooperate with these laws. We will live by higher laws: laws of the planet, ecological laws, and laws of humanity, our ethical laws. 

What do you see as the reasons for and the origins of fundamentalism and terrorism? 

The recent upsurge of religious fundamentalism is for me the shadow of corporate globalization. It has its roots in insecurity that globalization creates. Last week when there was a terrorist attack at a temple at Varanasi, one of our most ancient cities, 5,000 years old, instead of turning it into a conflict, Hindus and Muslims joined their diversity and pluralism and celebrated the welcoming of spring, the colors of Holi, as the colors of our diversity. When does that celebration of diversity fail? First, when people are made insecure and, secondly, when politicians do not want economic democracy, do not want people to make decisions about what they produce and what they consume, they shift the entire debate about democracy to hate and to fear of the other. In a context of insecurity and in the context of death of economic democracy, the rise of religious fundamentalism ends up becoming the best captive vote bank. It is not a surprise that you have the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States. It is also not a surprise that the rise of religious fundamentalism started in India after the new economic policies of trade liberalization were institutionalized in 1991. 

Terrorism has similar roots. Terrorism is the reaction of those whose voice has been taken away. Terrorism is the scream of the voiceless. Terrorism does not grow if democracy is thriving because democracy then makes sure that your voice is heard and that dissent is looked after. Even though everywhere in the world it is clear that the issue of terrorism is the issue of lack of possibility to influence your fate, the terrorist is not perceived in the mainstream as the disenfranchised who is angry, but as having some internal genetic defect. 

No one is born a terrorist, they are made a terrorist. The fact that there is growing terrorism should force us to look into what creates fertile soil for this growth. That fertile soil is the greed of corporations wanting to control every drop of water, every drop of oil, every inch of land, every bit of germ plasm on this planet. That kind of greed creates deep exclusions. Deep exclusions will create violent responses if democracy is not rebuilt non-violently fast. Most people don’t realize that in India large parts are already controlled by those subscribing to ideologies of exclusion using violent means. It’s a phenomenon that is inevitable if you disenfranchise and exclude millions of their very basis of life, livelihood, and freedom. 

How are women promoters of life-centered cultures? 

Women are promoters of life-centered cultures because of this very ancient division of labor. It was left to women to look after life, whereas men broke off to get the glory, to get the conquest, in less privileged situations to get the wage labor. The division of labor left sustenance to women and the market to men. That expertise of sustenance is now being called on to create living economies and life centered economies and women are doing it whether it is through seed saving, water saving, or water sharing. Whether it is through creating ecological systems of food production and decentralized control over agriculture, women are very much in the lead in reshaping the economy that is not under the patriarchal control of global corporations. Patriarchy is usually defined as something limited to the household, yet increasingly patriarchal forces are defining this beautiful planet as their household in which they would like to take every bit of power, capacity, creativity, and productivity away from women. Women are determined to not let go. We just had a celebration on our farm two weeks ago of our women members from Navanya, the movement I started, 150 of them, and all are committed to keeping food security in women’s hands, keeping seeds in women’s hands, not as empty rhetoric, not just as a slogan, but as everyday life making a difference. 

How do we go from the world we have today to an earth democracy? 

I think the first thing to do is center our lives in the earth and not in dependency on corporations or a ten-year-old institution called the World Trade Organization. Of course, each of us is in a different location: someone is a teacher, someone is a scientist, someone is an unemployed youth, someone is working in slave conditions. Every one of us is in a different location and each of us has to begin this recovery where we are. We have to then join hands with others who might be doing the same thing as we are or something different. It doesn’t really matter. Take something like food: every one of us can make a decision—every meal that we eat we are either shaping an earth democracy or we are reinforcing corporate globalization. Every drop of water we drink is the same kind of choice. Every bit of energy we use is making a choice towards earth democracy or for a dictatorship in our times. The choices are limitless, we just have to start recognizing that there is never a situation where any human being doesn’t have a choice. If you have no other choice then at least you have the choice to say no. 

Can you talk about how this book came about? 

The book was inspired by two issues: one was that for too long the movement of people defending their freedoms was labeled as the anti-globalization movement. Repeatedly it was said that, “Oh, these people know what they don’t want, but they have no idea what they want.” I thought it was time to tell those who think that we don’t know what we want that we know it well, and through what we know we will be there when corporate globalization has collapsed because of its social and ecological non-sustainability.  

The second reason I wrote the book was because I felt the movements of people were strong and yet they could be stronger if they recognized that no matter how different they were—whether it was someone working on human rights, someone else working to defend a wild species, someone else working for the food sovereignty of small farmers and family farmers the world over—that every one of these was part of a mosaic, part of a fabric combining care for the earth and defending the conditions of human life on earth while also striving for social justice. These strivings were not separate strivings, they were the same and these were actually the strivings for peace. They created the condition for peace in a period where we are repeatedly being told that the way towards peace is more war and more violence. 

Can you talk about how your own political and ecological consciousness came about? 

My own political and ecological consciousness has grown in a number of steps. I was a very enthusiastic nuclear physicist training to join our nuclear energy establishment. My sister, who was a medical doctor made me aware of what a physicist is never taught: that nuclear radiation has health hazards. That is the first time that I woke up to a world beyond harmless equations. 

My next step was becoming active in the Chipko movement when I saw the forests of the Himalayas disappearing rapidly. I had grown up in the Himalayan forests. I’d trekked and walked those forests. My father used to be a forest conservator and in my childhood and youth I could see a dramatic change. That led me to become a volunteer in the movement. The next step was in 1982 when the ministry of environment started to call on me to do studies. That led to the creation of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. Through it I did participatory studies with communities and successful action research. We won legal victories, stopped mines, monocultures, and shrimp farming. 

The next watershed was in 1984, the year that we had the rise of terrorism in Punjab. I studied the Punjab to figure out why the land of the green revolution, which was given a Nobel Peace Prize, had become a land of war. I started making connections between violence, fundamentalism, terrorism, ecological degradation, undemocratic economic systems, and anti-people development. It was the same year as the Bhopal disaster, which killed 3,000 people in one night and has killed 30,000 people since. I was forced to look at industrial agriculture as a system of war. I committed myself to ecological agriculture as a system of peace. 

In 1987 I happened to get invited to a meeting where corporations laid out their plan for how they would patent seed, genetically engineer seeds, and have free trade treaties to prevent anyone else from being free to do their own thing and grow their own food. I decided that I had to start saving seeds and protecting biodiversity. Since then I have worked with millions of farmers to say no to the WTO and GATT and with thousands of farmers—200,000 farmers—to build an alternative. 

I mentioned the farmer suicides. For me 2006 is the year I will dedicate a lot of my energies to creating hope among our farming communities, that the dead end, the genocidal economies, the suicidal economies of globalization is not the only way. We can build our own economies and we don’t have to wait till our governments tell us how to do it. We don’t have to wait till the WTO gives us permission to do it. We need to turn to ourselves for that permission.