Читать книгу Reclaiming the Commons - Vandana Shiva - Страница 10

IT IS NO EXAGGERATION to place Vandana Shiva as one of the most important visionaries, authors, public speakers, and activists of our era. Once ‘profit at any cost’ agriculture and globalization is finally defeated, once we turn around the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy, and join hands together across borders and continents to celebrate; we need Vandana Shiva, the traditional farmers, rural villagers of India, and the indigenous world to sit at the head of the table.

I have worked with, and been inspired by, Vandana for almost three decades starting with a solidarity picket line and press event that I helped organize on October 2, 1993 (Gandhi’s birthday) in Boca Raton, Florida. Together, we protested the W.R. Grace Company’s attempt to patent India’s neem tree with a simultaneous protest against Cargill, Monsanto, and ‘Patents on Life’ in front of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange.

In October of 1994, the network that I helped coordinate, The Pure Food Campaign, joined forces with Navdanya, Vandana’s India-based organization, and activists in over two dozen nations to launch the Global Days of Action Against Genetically Engineered Foods. This was the beginning of a global grassroots movement against GMOs and for organic and regenerative agriculture that has persevered until this day, nurturing not only resistance, but a healthy and organic alternative to what Vandana aptly calls ‘the Poison Cartel’. At the close of the twentieth century, Vandana and our growing global movement helped organize the teach-ins and protests at the ‘Battle of Seattle’, successfully blocking Monsanto and the Gene Giants from extending their monopoly patents and control over seeds and agriculture across the entire world. More recently, in 2015, Vandana and I, along with a network of food and climate activists, met in Costa Rica and formed Regeneration International, dedicated to reversing global warming through regenerative food, farming, and land-use. Vandana and I currently serve together on RI’s international steering committee.

The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ of industrialized, energy and chemical-intensive agriculture, GMO foods, and seed patents have not only degraded our health, our biodiversity, our environment, and driven hundreds of millions of small farmers and rural villagers into poverty, forced migration, and desperation–they now threaten our very existence. As world scientists and our own everyday experience points out, we are facing nothing less than a climate catastrophe and a Sixth Great Extinction of biodiversity that will unravel the fragile life-support systems of our planet. Along with the continued burning fossil fuels, our current degenerative food, farming, and land-use practices are pumping billions of tons of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and our oceans every year.

Fortunately, people all over the world are turning against the fossil fuel corporations, Bayer-Monsanto, and all the other multinational corporations and indentured politicians that threaten our well-being and the future of humankind and turning back to nature and taking back control over their health, diets, and political destinies. As we move forward out of these dark times, let’s remember and celebrate the history of our struggles for seed and food sovereignty, the preservation of indigenous knowledge, and our precious biodiversity. Reclaiming the Commons is a strong reminder of this history and of how the forces of life and biodiversity, inspired by Mother Earth and indigenous tradition, have managed to hold back the forces of corporate greed and monopoly control, not only in India, but at many of the front lines of grassroots struggle throughout the world. Long live Mother Earth and inspired visionaries such as Vandana Shiva!