Earth Family  Interview with Vandana Shiva Resurgence, March/April 2000 In my view the most significant part of deep ecological thought is, first and foremost, to place human beings within the context of a family of other species, an Earth family. And then, to wind down our demands on the ecosphere, recognizing that we are just one among many species. It was literally a Western perversion, to assume that the only species with rights on this planet is the human. And even among the human the only part of the human species that has rights is the one that can colonize, that can exploit, that can dominate. We all, like the plants around us, like the atoms in the soil, have similar rights to survival and to life. Now that very simple idea of being part of an Earth family, starts to change everything about how we have organized society. It starts to change our production system, because you can't anymore assume that a chemical technology that totally wipes out the life in the soil is a smart technology. And your ideas of science, of technology, of production and consumption, start to undergo a major shift. That, to me, is the grounding of deep ecology. It is not a new idea. It is the basis on which sustainable civilizations have been based. India has been based on the idea that we are all an Earth family. We have a very powerful saying in one of our ancient Upanishads which says: `Every part of creation has a right to live to its full potential.' And: `No one species has the right to encroach on the ecological space of other species.' Now these sound as very modern concepts, but they are there, in our writings of five thousand years ago. Is that what is meant by the notion that species have intrinsic value? A cow is not of value only because it can produce milk for us. Its value cannot be determined purely in terms of its function that we impute to it. But that the cow, as much as the different trees, the oak, as different from the pine, has its intrinsic worth, has its intrinsic value. And that value is a reflection of its own self-organizing, self-determination capacity. We a compassionate root to understanding that intrinsic worth, not an intellectual. I believe human species are very capable of living in partnership with other species. The rural part of India that inspires me constantly for my ecological work, is an India where there is such a generosity of space and that generosity shrinks with the robbing of intrinsic value of other species, with defining other species as merely being of value according to how they can bring you better functions for meeting human needs, or, more usually, profits. Which puts only two options for our relationships with other species: One is dispensability. If they are not useful, push them to extinction. And if you, in the short term in which use is being determined, do not understand that a whole ecological chain is maintained by this one species that you thought useless, and declare a death sentence for it, you in a way declare a death sentence for your own conditions for life. The second thing is: even the species that are found of value, you manipulate, you distort, you mutilate, basically using a machine metaphor in your relationship with life. And then, it is not a surprise that we get the Mad Cow Disease. It is not a surprise we get outbreaks of epidemics. Because these are consequences of us treating life as if it has no intrinsic worth and no intrinsic organization and intelligence. The deep ecology movement came into being as a direct response to the current ecological crisis. How serious is this crisis presently, according to you? I think, in terms of ecological threat, the most direct, obvious threat comes from patents on life and biotechnology, partly because this new threat will totally disrupt life in every-day production. Agriculture was bad enough with monocultures. But if we make genetic engineering the basic mode of production, in fisheries, in farm-forestry, in agriculture, there will be no ecological way of producing food, there will be no capacity for human beings to live and co-habit with other species. Other species are being reduced to totally raw material. Life's diversity is being destroyed. A planet that is so beautifully endowed is being transformed into a living mine, which can be exploited for the genes of value that the industry needs. I think even more serious than the direct ecological impact of destructing life's processes and ecological connections, is the fact that if we allow the basic thinking behind genetic engineering and patents of life to inhabit our minds, as the Industrial Revolution allowed Cartesian thought to become the basis for the way in which we relate to the rest of the world, we will be at constant war - with ourselves, and with nature. It is a philosophy of war and violence. The dominant categories of thinking, particularly as they have gone out from Europe in the last few hundred years, have constructed the self as separate from the other, which includes nature, which includes other species, which includes other human beings. But not just separate, but engaged in an antagonistic relationship. The self and the other are always at war. The wider sense of self includes the other as what the self is. There is a beautiful phrase in many Vedantic philosophies of India, which says: `I am thou. I am you.' And it is in this experiencing of the other, through compassion so deep, that there is no separation. That is also what Gandhi had communicated in this very beautiful statement which he called `the talisman'. He said: If you are in doubt about whether you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing, just bring to your mind the face of the least privileged person you know, the most marginalized individual you have ever come across. Judge the consequences of your actions according to what it will do to him or her. If it is going to hurt the person, then don't take that step. And if it is going to benefit the last person, do. That is a way of including the other in the self. That is also at the root of thinking in a deep ecological way. What kind of technology should you have? How should you manage a forest, how should you manage a river? Except, in deep ecology, the last person is the last species. A criticism often levelled against deep ecology, is that it is really a rich society's phenomena, that it is a luxurious position to take. First poverty has to be solved, it is argued, and then we can save nature. Well, I have looked at these problems long enough, for over a decade with a lot of intimate investigation of what is really going on. And I believe poverty is a creation of a worldview and a paradigm that has pitted people against nature. That has defined scarcity as the condition of nature, and has then tried to create technologies that are supposed to compensate for the scarcity. These technologies actually create scarcity because they destroy the environment, they destroy ecosystems, and they actually leave people poorer. I just give you one example. The sea has given enough to fisher folk for centuries. It was not considered as ever generating scarcity by the fisher communities. But new technologies have been generated, trawlers so huge that they can take twelve jumbo jets in the trawl net. They are just scraping the entire sea floor, catching everything that comes in the way, disrupting cycles of regeneration. And today, we have a situation that the Food and Agriculture Organization, which partly promoted these technologies, has to admit that something like ninety percent of the fisheries of the world are near collapse. There is nothing left to catch. The fisher folk of India have become poorer as a result of these technologies, which were meant to remove poverty. The fisher folk were not poor. They were poor, if measured on Western consumption patterns. But in my view, Western consumption is not a measure of whether being poor or not. I work with the poorest communities in India, and most of the time the solution to their poverty is an ecological solution, a deep ecological solution. The solution to the survival of the small farmer of India today in a period of globalisation of agriculture, is the enrichment of the farming system with biodiversity. It is being able to use native seeds for which you don't have to buy chemicals, being able to use seeds which don't need irrigation, so that you don't have to wait until you have for 300.000 Rupees in your pocket to be able to drill a deep tube well, through which you can pump ground water out. Deep ecological solutions are the only viable solutions to ensuring that every person on this planet has enough food, has enough water, has adequate shelter, has dignity and has a cultural meaning in life. If we don't follow the path of living in ways that we leave enough space for other species, that paradigm also ensures that most human beings will be denied their right to existence. The only real solution to poverty is to embrace the right to life of all on this planet, all humans and all species. The problem of Western civilization has been a very mechanistic thinking about the world, about nature, about how societies organise themselves. In my personal view, deep ecology should mean you go out of that kind of mechanistic thinking, in which you measure the state of the environment purely in terms of numbers of human beings. It is a highly mechanistic thinking to translate numbers into pressure. When we jolly well know that twenty percent of humanity is using up eighty percent of the resources. And therefore, quite clearly, it has nothing to do with numbers. It has to do with how you produce, what you consume. If every American was to live like an Indian, we would not have an environmental crisis. There are now very good studies on ecological footprints that have shown that India, with 900 million people today, still has a surplus of resources, equivalent to Sweden and Canada which have next to no populations. In your work, you have sharply criticised the way modern science is practised in Western society. Well, there are very many ways through which one can know reality. Modern science has made it look like the only way to know reality is through reductionism, through taking a part, chopping it up, analyzing it in those parts. Shredding the parts that cannot be measured, treating only the measurable parts as real. And what that instantly does, is: get rid of the relations, because the moment you chop reality up, the relations disappear. And the most important element of the reality is no more there. You cannot ever measure relations. You can only measure objects, between which relations occur. The second very serious consequence of this is that you essentialise property. Properties like those that come out of a relationship between a forest and a watershed, which leads to a stream flowing throughout the river, are essentialised, separated. Things that are really properties of things in interaction, end up being termed properties of things. Nothing could make this more evident than the whole genetic reductionism in which traits that have come out of interaction of species with their environment, are located into a gene of a species. The entire edifice of the industrialization of life, and genetic engineering is being built on a very false basis of what life is about, what living organisms are about. When a medicine person in the Amazon, or in an Indian village, goes into a forest - and this is being said to me again and again by people - they do not put the plant through DNA screening, they do not analyze the active principles. But they know exactly what the plant will do. They have said, those older healers: `The plants speak to me'. That ability, to perceive directly, to know in direct connection, has also been called intuition. But it is more than intuition. It is another way of knowing. It is a way of knowing in which your connection with other species, with the plant, with the soil, with a cow, with a sheep, is so intimate, so deep, that there is instant communication of what is going on. When the ecosystem speaks to you as a whole, it is an arrangement and a pattern that could never be communicated through dissection. But it is the soundest base of knowing the world. In India, philosophy has not been seen as a process of analyzing, chopping up into pieces, and piecing these reductionist forms together. Philosophy is called dharsha, which means: 'to see'. © Interview: Jan van Boeckel