Vandana Shiva

Last Thursday I saw Vandana Shiva speak at Cowles at HHH.

If you don't know who she is check out her site:

http://www.navdanya.org/

Or the site of the month-long exhibition symposium that brought her here, which has some video clips of her (and will eventually post her talk from last week):

womenandwater.net

She is pretty amazing and mind-blowing (and I'm not saying that lightly), and my notes don't really do her justice but I wanted to share them with you anyhow.

3/26/10 Vandana Shiva @ Cowles Auditoriem (audience of about 600)

* the exhibition at the Nash shows us how art fills a particular role; the inadequace of communication through science; "Only art can communicate the ways out of the catastrophe we face"'; art can have the ability to reach a larger audience

* every river (except for one) in India is characterized as a woman (named for various goddesses and characters from the epic tales)

* chipco (sp?) movement--- women protected a forest by attaching themselves to tree, because they saw haw the forest is the source of their water, the soil holds in water, the trees hold in the soil against the force of the ganga (ganges river)....later told story of coastal villages where commercial shrimping operations (similar to our fish farms here) cleared the mangrove trees from the coast, then when storms came the villages that were no longer protected by the mangroves were destroyed. she had a great phrase along the lines of "the mangrove trees caress the angry waves of the ocean"

* sustenance economy, economy of care--these do not require capital

* ecological responsibility cannot simply be outsourced to organizations and governments--we each must care for our ecology

* "environmentalist" she feels this implies something outside of ourselves that we look at, also that it implies that we can sit back while the environmentalists do the work

prefers "ecologist" because that implies the system you are apart of....

* limestone mining in India--the rain creates caverns in the limestone underground, those caverns then store water supply...there was a case where the mining was shut down because they realized the water is more financially valuable than the limestone

* shrimping--for every $1 earned, $10 of the local infrastructure is lost....

* you can send researchers to look at a place but you could also ask 100 local women to examine the area, they already have the context, they already know the extent to which their wells are being salinated, their glaciers are melting etc.

* a leader in Bolivia (??) is working on a new update to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that will be the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. (In part in response to the failure of Copenhagen--she said Obama flew in at the last minute and presented his own accord, after 190 countries had been working on one...??) anyhow--the idea is that all human rights are predicated on the rights of the earth...

* 80% of humanity is disposable; 20% of humanity is destroying itself through consumption

* you are not just producing good food (with trad'l ag practices) you are also producing good water

* chemical ag requires way more (didn't get the # sorry) water than trad'l ag

* the biggest reservoir of water on the planet is the soil

* forgotten foods (example millet) are foods of the future. who knows how to grow these and how they act---women. these foods also tend to be higher in nutrients

* "the worst pollution is the pollution of the mind" prime minister of tibet who visits and teachers at her farm research center each winter

* dupont suing monsanto....

* technology cannot create big heart full of love

* book: Richistan--about a new class of rich that crosses political borders...

* contested Jeffrey Sachs "end of poverty" esp. ch. 1 because she feels sustenance economies do not require $$.....

issue is cost of living--not income--privatization makes living more expensive

* organic isn't expensive, the other food is too cheap.