Stay Free - Russel Brand - August 03, 2023


β€œIT’S A SCAM!” | BlackRock, Fake Food & the Hidden Agenda! - Stay Free #182


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per Minute

140.4882

Word Count

8,633

Sentence Count

609

Misogynist Sentences

7

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

In this episode, I share a conversation I had with Vandana Shiva. She is a plant-based organic farmer, activist, writer, and eco-activist who has dedicated her life to understanding why our current food and farming system is destroying the earth and destroying our health. In this conversation, we talk about how Big Food received $400 billion in subsidies to make highly processed food look cheaper, the true power of BlackRock and Vanguard, and how the World Bank and IMF are linked and how they really work. Let me know what you think in the comments section below! You're going to love this conversation. I'm so pleased and thrilled that she came again. I know you'll love this chat, and I can't wait to share it with the community. I hope you do too! - Russell Brand Stay Free, Woke Wonderings - Veena Shavanshara Thank you so much for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand today. I can t wait to do it again next year. -Vandana Shiva My name is Vandana Shiva and I am so pleased to have her as a guest on the show. I m so excited to share her wisdom and knowledge with you. I hope that you enjoy it and that you do as much as I enjoyed it. Love, Russell Brand - Stay Free - Veeda Brand - Thank you, Veenas Shavara, Vardana Shiva, Veedha, Vandana Shave Vardha, Thank you Veenah, Vanderha, Vandana, Veeee, Vadna Shiva, I love you, thank you, I appreciate you, bye bye bye Bye Bye, bye, bye Bye, Bye Bye Bye bye, Bye, Love, bye! Love ya, Love ya. - - P.S. - Namaste, P.B. & P.A. - R.V. & Gita, Gajendranjee, - Shesh Vinandi, Gautam, Pravya, Gaviravarajan, Prakash, Ganesha, Gauravar, Virdha, Bhagavar & Gajeevara, Gauri, Prahadhar, Prita, Parshuravarai, Vellam, Rachit, etc, etc., etc.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 So, we're going to go ahead and start the video. So, we're going to start the video.
00:00:07.000 So, we're going to start the video.
00:01:00.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:01:12.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:01:16.000 Today I want to share with you a beautiful conversation I had with Vandana Shiva.
00:01:21.000 What will astonish you about Vandana Shiva is her ability to confront corruption, her willingness to articulate complex issues, her willingness to confront Head on, the accusation that I know you will have faced, that you're a conspiracy theorist, that you're right-wing, how these smears and slurs are used to censor and control conversation.
00:01:41.000 We also talk about how Big Food received $400 billion in subsidies to make highly processed food look cheaper, the true power of BlackRock and Vanguard, and how the World Bank and IMF are linked, and how they really work.
00:01:53.000 You're going to love this conversation.
00:01:55.000 Let me know what you think in the chat.
00:01:57.000 Please welcome to the stage one of my great teachers, the great mother herself, this glorious woman who's peculiarly humble, who's recently given me this amazing gift that's got a great story behind it.
00:02:09.000 Please welcome Vandana Shiva.
00:02:11.000 Vandana Shiva, thank you so much for joining us for community.
00:02:24.000 You came last year.
00:02:25.000 For us, it was absolutely necessary, vital, necessary that you came again.
00:02:29.000 I'm so pleased and thrilled that you're here.
00:02:31.000 Thank you very much for this gift.
00:02:32.000 Would you mind starting off our conversation by explaining to our beautiful, loving community what this gift is and its significance, as you explained it to me?
00:02:41.000 Thank you.
00:02:43.000 Sir, as you know, since 84, I've dedicated my life to understand the puzzles of why our agriculture and food system destroys the earth, destroys farmers, and destroys our health.
00:03:00.000 And from 87 onwards, when those who, through chemicals, have created industrial agriculture, talked about owning the seed and patenting the seed through GMOs, I started to save seeds.
00:03:15.000 But originally only crop seeds and food seeds and vegetable seeds.
00:03:20.000 But in the areas where cotton was growing, an epidemic of suicides of farmers started.
00:03:27.000 Within no time, all cotton, 95% of cotton, had become Monsanto's BT cotton, a GMO cotton.
00:03:35.000 And these are the areas where 85% of the 400,000 suicides have taken place.
00:03:39.000 of the 400,000 suicides have taken place.
00:03:42.000 400,000 suicides of farmers in India.
00:03:46.000 And so I did a pilgrimage to understand why the farmers were taking their lives.
00:03:53.000 I I realized it was the seed monopoly.
00:03:57.000 So I spent years finding some place where we would have the old cotton varieties.
00:04:04.000 We found them.
00:04:06.000 The beauty about seed is it multiplies, just like community multiplies.
00:04:06.000 Lovely!
00:04:13.000 And so with little bits of seed, we started to multiply it.
00:04:17.000 We've trained hundreds of thousands of farmers to do organic farming.
00:04:22.000 And then we've taken that organic cotton to the ashrams that Gandhi, in his time, had started.
00:04:29.000 Because he fought the British Empire by bringing out the spinning wheel.
00:04:34.000 And said, till we make our own cloth, we will be slaves.
00:04:38.000 We have to learn how to produce again.
00:04:42.000 And he started spinning cloth and the whole country started to spin cloth.
00:04:45.000 So we went to those ashrams.
00:04:47.000 They take the organic cotton and they hand spin, hand weave, hand print.
00:04:54.000 Each of those leaves is printed with vegetable and natural dye, indigo in this case, with love.
00:05:01.000 So every fiber It's full of love, it's full of non-violence, and I call it the fiber of freedom.
00:05:09.000 And like that, we must grow foods of freedom everywhere!
00:05:14.000 And have pots of freedom everywhere, which is what I think you're trying to sow with the community festival.
00:05:22.000 Yes, because I believe very deeply in individual freedom.
00:05:25.000 I believe in it.
00:05:27.000 It's beyond belief.
00:05:28.000 It's a deep and intuitive feeling.
00:05:30.000 I sense sometimes that globalism is not only vast, but globalism is small.
00:05:36.000 It intercedes where we might have relationships with one another.
00:05:40.000 It intercedes where we might have relationships with nature, that all things have become commodity and commodified.
00:05:46.000 In our first conversation, I was struck by the way you spoke of the desacralization of the earth.
00:05:52.000 Can you speak to us about this desacralization, what this process means and how we might begin to reverse it?
00:06:02.000 I think most Indian indigenous cultures held the earth as sacred.
00:06:08.000 saw the earth as Terra Madre.
00:06:12.000 We have a hundred thousand names for her, Vasundhara, Bhumi, Gaia, the Greek name.
00:06:22.000 And the earth was desacralized when the land was colonized.
00:06:29.000 Because what had to be taken was the land and its productive power.
00:06:35.000 And while the land was appropriated and desacralized, the idea of knowledge was redefined.
00:06:46.000 You know, Bacon in this country used to be the Chancellor.
00:06:51.000 Ran the witch hunts.
00:06:53.000 Ran... Yeah, he ran the inquisition of this country.
00:06:55.000 What do you mean?
00:06:56.000 You mean specifically Wales and Britain, that there were witch hunts where people... No, huge!
00:07:01.000 Nine million people in Europe.
00:07:04.000 Killed for thinking independently.
00:07:07.000 Women healers knowing which plant heals.
00:07:11.000 Jonah Fark, you remember?
00:07:17.000 And he was in charge of that in this country.
00:07:19.000 And he wrote a book called The Masculine Birth of Time.
00:07:26.000 In India, we think of time as Kali.
00:07:30.000 Yeah?
00:07:31.000 She is the perennial circularity.
00:07:36.000 And in the masculine birth of time, he says, I will teach you how to make nature a slave.
00:07:45.000 At the same time, Robert Boyle, the governor of the Church of England, who was responsible for a lot of the New England colonization.
00:07:53.000 I think he was the one behind Boyle's law.
00:07:56.000 He writes, the idea that nature is sacred, comes in the way of our empire and it must be destroyed.
00:08:07.000 And the common narrative we get is the Church and the Enlightenment were in conflict.
00:08:13.000 No, the Church was implementing the reductionist mechanistic philosophy that we are separate from nature.
00:08:21.000 Nature is just raw material, what Satish was talking this morning.
00:08:26.000 Nature is merely property.
00:08:29.000 At the same time, while the enclosures of the commons were taking place on this land, the colonization was taking place elsewhere.
00:08:37.000 Now forests and rivers and land were being enclosed.
00:08:40.000 But here the enclosures took two centuries.
00:08:44.000 That's how much the peasants fought.
00:08:47.000 Two centuries.
00:08:48.000 And Locke did not talk about the enclosures, but he writes about how The first nations of America are primitive people.
00:09:01.000 They don't enslave their bison.
00:09:04.000 They don't fence their fields.
00:09:06.000 And therefore we must take away their land and just leave it up for their survival.
00:09:11.000 And that's how private property... He defined private property as the mixing of human labor with nature.
00:09:19.000 But that means anyone who works the land has rights.
00:09:22.000 No.
00:09:23.000 But it's not the work of a farmer It's not the work of the horse that plows the field.
00:09:30.000 It's the spiritual labor of capital.
00:09:34.000 So capital, which was totally a construct, appropriated not just the earth, appropriates spirituality.
00:09:43.000 And that's where things started to go wrong.
00:09:46.000 And that desexualization also meant no reverence, no limits, no knowledge of living systems.
00:09:55.000 And to me, the ecological crisis begins there.
00:09:58.000 India was colonized, and in 1780s, Lord Cornwallis wrote that all the land of India belonged to England, all the soil of India belonged to England, and therefore England couldn't collect rents from the peasants who were growing the food, who became landless overnight, and they had to pay half of what they grew as taxes.
00:10:22.000 So they were driven to famine.
00:10:24.000 Forty-five trillion dollars was transferred to England.
00:10:30.000 Sixty million peasants died.
00:10:32.000 That is the economy that comes from desacralization, that comes from not respecting nature, or respecting the life of others, or respecting their work and their labor, or respecting their sovereignty.
00:10:48.000 To me, sovereignty is sacred.
00:10:51.000 It's beautiful to hear you describe it so explicitly.
00:10:54.000 Oh yes, thank you.
00:10:58.000 Because I sometimes fall into the trap of believing, Vandana, that there was a kind of inevitable momentum, almost an inertia that has led us to materialism.
00:11:09.000 That it's not the result of conscious choices and political decisions, not the result of declarations that we should separate ourselves from nature, that we should regard nature as a resource, that you have to break the nature between humanity and nature herself.
00:11:25.000 It was also, it seemed plain, Vandana, and here is some gentle rain to remind us of our fallibility and of the limitless and abundant power of nature.
00:11:35.000 I want to pay them a compliment.
00:11:37.000 Yes, please.
00:11:38.000 You know, they've stayed.
00:11:40.000 Yeah, thank you.
00:11:43.000 Thank you for staying.
00:11:44.000 Thank you for being so tolerant and gracious because to remain so joyful and so abundant and so generous in such challenging conditions for me is a demonstration that you have the necessary fortitude that will be required when any change is brought about.
00:11:59.000 It will not be easy to change the world.
00:12:01.000 It is not easy to sacrifice.
00:12:03.000 It's not easy to recognize that the inner world is the real world and that we must practice there with honor and respect and regard and we must overcome our materialistic models in favor of subtler forces that are sometimes difficult to access.
00:12:16.000 Vandana, I felt that in your answer there was embedded within it, or in fact it was quite overt, that part of the process of the management and subjugation of nature involved the subjugation of women.
00:12:29.000 If this is so, as you say, how do we begin to heal this wound While honouring both the masculine and feminine, because in our culture there is a lot of opposition.
00:12:39.000 I think a lot of males are uncertain about the role of masculinity.
00:12:43.000 How can we ensure that the culture war doesn't prevent necessary conversations from taking place?
00:12:49.000 How can we celebrate and honour the divine feminine without denigrating masculinity?
00:12:54.000 How can we honor both of these forces after you have said that time is regarded as Kali and it was this masculine movement to time and it was about all of this oppression when there seems to be simultaneously a movement to alienate men and women from one another?
00:13:07.000 You know, just like the earth and nature was sacred in most indigenous cultures and actually the old research shows that even in Europe The old temples were all goddess temples.
00:13:26.000 There were no weapons.
00:13:29.000 They were all about the renewal of life, the sacredness of life, the fertility of the earth.
00:13:37.000 The same process of colonialism that desacralized the earth also created gender polarization.
00:13:46.000 First by pulling the men out to be the workers in the mines, in the factories, pulling them out from their homes.
00:13:57.000 If you went to the commons, the men and women were equal workers.
00:14:01.000 They were householders.
00:14:03.000 And the economy was oikos, the economy of the household, maintaining the earth as our home, as well as our local homes, and women and men as equal partners.
00:14:17.000 There was no gender conflict in my society, in tribal areas where I go to, you know.
00:14:23.000 In so many tribal cultures, the men are doing all the cooking.
00:14:26.000 They're taking care of the babies.
00:14:28.000 All this is industrial society labels that define men do this, women do this.
00:14:38.000 So men were pulled out.
00:14:40.000 The economy of life, of continuing to survive, was left in the hands of women.
00:14:47.000 They're the ones who continue to grow the food, fetch the water, protect the children, the old people, something that's still going on now.
00:14:55.000 So how do we overcome this very artificial duality?
00:15:01.000 First by realizing that the Divine Feminine is everything living, including in every man.
00:15:07.000 So every man should celebrate, I'm the Divine Feminine.
00:15:10.000 Who said the Divine Feminine is not in man?
00:15:16.000 You know, the birth of masculine time that Bacon talked about was removing the divine feminine and trying to crush it.
00:15:27.000 And that is what creates both the violence over the earth and violence in society, but then the emptiness within.
00:15:36.000 And that emptiness then is what allows for more violence.
00:15:41.000 I believe the femicide that is growing all the time in the world is a result Of an emptiness.
00:15:48.000 And that's why we need to go beyond this shallow identity politics.
00:15:54.000 Into a deep identity that we are all earth citizens.
00:15:58.000 We're all earth beings.
00:16:00.000 We're all part of the divine.
00:16:04.000 And together, as we waken that divine in us, Of course there are differences, but those differences aren't the overriding determining factors of who we are.
00:16:18.000 Who we are, being alive comes as being part of the earth.
00:16:23.000 The spirituality comes from both going within, but through that being connected to the larger consciousness.
00:16:30.000 Yeah.
00:16:31.000 Thank you.
00:16:33.000 Thank you.
00:16:37.000 Vandana, when you talk about this emptiness, it really resonates with me and I think it resonates with all of us.
00:16:42.000 I think we understand what is being said.
00:16:44.000 This emptiness, this sense that something is missing, that there is something that has been absented and extracted.
00:16:50.000 I speak from the perspective of an addict, where there is unbridled yearning and longing and a sense somehow that the material or external world is going to provide the solutions to this.
00:17:00.000 When you speak about the nature of identity, that we can honour individuality and diversity without creating unnecessary conflict, I understand what you are saying and I believe you, I believe you.
00:17:10.000 How is it then, Vandana, that over the last three years we have found ourselves fraught with conflict, we have found ourselves to some degree imposed in places of division and isolation?
00:17:26.000 Sometimes it feels, as with the example of the establishment of masculine time, that there is some coordination at play when it comes to this divisiveness.
00:17:35.000 The power, while opaque, insidious and difficult to track, must be somewhere.
00:17:42.000 Somewhere, decisions appear to be being made to turn people against one another, to make people sick because of the food they are eating, to perpetuate cycles of ill health.
00:17:54.000 Where are these decisions being made?
00:17:57.000 What are these systems?
00:17:58.000 How do we identify them so that we can oppose them?
00:18:05.000 You know, when the East India Company was created, which is the first corporation, you know, corporations haven't been around forever.
00:18:11.000 Businesses have been around, trade has been around, but not the corporation.
00:18:16.000 As a corporation that has rights, but no responsibilities.
00:18:21.000 That's what limited liability really means.
00:18:24.000 No responsibility.
00:18:27.000 There was just 300 men.
00:18:30.000 Merchant adventurers, they were called.
00:18:32.000 And they got together to say, you know, if our ships come home, we'll divide the wealth.
00:18:38.000 If they don't, we take it from society.
00:18:41.000 And that's what's going on.
00:18:43.000 You know, the beautiful group of singers earlier were telling me that they still, in their salary, there's a deduction of a reparation that goes to the old slave owners who have to be paid because they lost their profits of slavery.
00:18:58.000 Something we should be looking into.
00:19:00.000 So where does all this thinking happen?
00:19:04.000 At that time, 1600, you know, 300 people got together.
00:19:11.000 And every time they start losing power, because then, you know, we threw out the East India Company.
00:19:16.000 1857, first freedom movement around bread.
00:19:19.000 Always around bread.
00:19:22.000 And then the British crown took over.
00:19:25.000 But in 1947, we became free by spinning cloth.
00:19:32.000 That's how we became free.
00:19:35.000 Around the time we were becoming free, the rich men became the World Bank and IMF.
00:19:41.000 You know, they created these instruments.
00:19:43.000 I was at the 50th anniversary of the World Bank-IMF in a place called Bretton Woods.
00:19:48.000 It's a tiny place in New Hampshire in the U.S.
00:19:52.000 And I went down to the basement where they had a shop.
00:19:56.000 And the shop had the first day covers of that event.
00:20:00.000 And the title of the first day covers Money Men of the World Meet.
00:20:07.000 And they created the three Bretton Woods institutions.
00:20:10.000 The World Bank to lend and get you into debt.
00:20:14.000 The IMF to bail you out of the debt.
00:20:17.000 And GATT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which then became the WTO now, for the trade issue.
00:20:25.000 It didn't become an institution because Cuba was put in charge and Cuba said what we need in trade is a correction of the harm of exploitation.
00:20:36.000 So there was no acceptance of that till a new recolonization was put in place with the WTO in 1995.
00:20:45.000 But these bureaucracies don't do the thinking.
00:20:49.000 It's the corporations who want to use it as an instrument that does the thinking.
00:20:55.000 So, this I know deeply because I spent a lot of my time on this.
00:21:00.000 When Monsanto wanted to own seed, then I started to follow GATT and WTO.
00:21:06.000 Monsanto wrote the Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of WTO to define seed as their property, as their invention.
00:21:17.000 And that's why I've dedicated my life to saving seeds and keeping seed free.
00:21:22.000 And keeping farmers free to have the right to save and exchange seed.
00:21:29.000 And you know, for those of you who want to know more about this, do come to Navdanya where we save seeds and we learn how to do all this.
00:21:38.000 We do a whole month course of returning to the earth because that's what we have to do.
00:21:43.000 And the beauty is returning to the earth is both about a spiritual return home And a material return in an ecological sense, not in a mechanistic sense.
00:21:55.000 So, Monsanto wrote the Intellectual Property Agreement, Cargill, who's polluting this river.
00:22:01.000 You know, those chicken farms, those chicken farms, ultimately the chicken is owned by Cargill, and their big shares are in all the chicken companies.
00:22:10.000 The farmer is just a passive instrument in the hands of these corporations.
00:22:16.000 And then the next, how do we make become sick?
00:22:20.000 Because the sickness creators became in charge of health and safety.
00:22:24.000 There's a treaty in WTO called Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement.
00:22:31.000 Sure enough to not let you know what it's all about.
00:22:35.000 And this was drafted by Pepsi, Coke and Nestle.
00:22:40.000 And it was drafted so that all local artisanal food would disappear.
00:22:46.000 And they actually have destroyed... India was a very big economy of artisanal food.
00:22:50.000 They destroyed all our cold press mills, five million of them.
00:22:54.000 Every woman used to make pickle and sell it.
00:22:57.000 Pickle's gone from the market.
00:22:59.000 Papad's gone from the market.
00:23:01.000 All the snacks gone from the market.
00:23:03.000 And all the junk food is in the most remote part of the Himalaya.
00:23:08.000 So those three treaties were written by these companies.
00:23:11.000 Now where we are is, because when I wrote Oneness vs. 1%, I wanted to understand, how does Gates rule the world?
00:23:18.000 How did Bayer buy Monsanto?
00:23:21.000 And then I found that after the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest players are the large investment asset funds, financial asset funds, called BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street.
00:23:35.000 They own every corporation.
00:23:37.000 They control every government.
00:23:39.000 And they decide how... And in fact, the other day, Fink, who's the Blackrock chief... Yes, Larry Fink.
00:23:45.000 He's sitting there and saying, we have to force behavior.
00:23:48.000 No, Mr. Fink.
00:23:50.000 Dictators force behavior.
00:23:52.000 You can't do that.
00:23:53.000 But they've allowed it to be accepted that not only will they control corporations, they'll control governments, they'll control our lives.
00:24:00.000 And that's where festivals like this are so important.
00:24:04.000 Stay free.
00:24:04.000 She did the goddamn tagline.
00:24:10.000 Cut it, print it.
00:24:14.000 You know, like, often what people ask is, what can I do as an individual?
00:24:18.000 But when you're talking about the World Bank, and you're talking about IMF, and you're talking about Monsanto, and you're talking about Vanguard and Blackguard, you're also talking about the significance of making pickles and artisan economies.
00:24:28.000 Because the thing you can do yourself is the only thing, and it's the necessary thing.
00:24:32.000 It's not like, oh no, I can only do these small things.
00:24:34.000 That is the thing.
00:24:35.000 That is the answer.
00:24:36.000 That is ultimately and necessarily the answer.
00:24:39.000 Not only is it vital because it's the only way to create another economy, but it's also necessary because if each of us does it, I mean, just imagine if this community would go home and say, from today onwards, I will not support the earth-destroying, health-destroying, farmer-destroying food economy.
00:25:08.000 I will support the economy of ecological agriculture, local farms, and healthy food.
00:25:16.000 And I know from farmers around here, they're already doing a lot of this work.
00:25:21.000 But if you reached out to them, or every one of you, wherever you are, reached out to them, and just said two things to yourself.
00:25:29.000 I will grow some of my food if I can.
00:25:31.000 And if I can't, I will find a farmer In my vicinity, or a group of farmers in my vicinity, to take care of the earth, the farmer and myself.
00:25:41.000 Because the beauty about community is, it's both about ultimate freedom of each part of the community, but it is about freedom of the community as an indivisible quality.
00:25:58.000 And we will not have food, you know, the next step of Corporate colonization is going to be fake food.
00:26:13.000 Yeah?
00:26:14.000 And that's why there's such a war against the farmers.
00:26:17.000 Because as long as the farmers are there, there'll be food.
00:26:19.000 Destroy the farmers, let the food disappear, and then feed the people.
00:26:23.000 Impossible burger.
00:26:25.000 Lab-made bread.
00:26:28.000 And we know processing ultra-processed food is already responsible for 75% of the disease.
00:26:35.000 Every ingredient made synthetically is what destroys the system.
00:26:42.000 Because everything in nature moves in a circular flow.
00:26:47.000 It comes from nature and goes back to nature.
00:26:49.000 Nature has no pollution, no waste.
00:26:53.000 But nature has no extraction.
00:26:57.000 Nature takes and gives back and takes and gives back and takes and gives back.
00:27:00.000 So for those who want to live outside the nutrition cycle and the food cycle that makes us Earth beings and say, no, we live outside it with food from labs.
00:27:13.000 To me, they are the same mentality of escape from our Earth being as the Jeff Bezos and the Elon Musks want to fly to Mars.
00:27:25.000 You know, they want to escape and let the earth, abandon the earth.
00:27:30.000 No, escape is irresponsible.
00:27:35.000 Taking care of the earth at whatever scale you can take care of the earth is your duty.
00:27:41.000 And it begins with agriculture.
00:27:43.000 So the war against farming is a war against the human capacity to take care of the earth.
00:27:49.000 And that's why we must all join in a resistance against fake food and the attack on farmers.
00:27:54.000 I suppose that gives us an opportunity to redefine what our relationship is with, well,
00:28:11.000 Thank you.
00:28:12.000 We've come to be regarded as consumers.
00:28:14.000 We're spoken of primarily as consumers.
00:28:16.000 And even when you say that we have individual freedom and choice when it comes to the food we eat, to a degree, of course, that is true.
00:28:23.000 And I love your suggestion that we must grow our own food, although it's quite hard, isn't it?
00:28:27.000 It's quite hard to grow food.
00:28:28.000 I've got to get better at things like that.
00:28:29.000 The patience, the patience, the negotiation with the soil and the seed.
00:28:33.000 I've not been granted those skills.
00:28:35.000 I've not been taught those things.
00:28:36.000 And the necessity to... Oh, you do a course.
00:28:39.000 Yeah, we do a course.
00:28:41.000 Is there anything I could say where you won't say, we do a course?
00:28:45.000 There will always be a course.
00:28:46.000 There's a course on Gandhi.
00:28:47.000 There's a course on everything.
00:28:48.000 There's always a course.
00:28:49.000 Thank God we can learn.
00:28:50.000 Thank God we can grow.
00:28:51.000 Thank God I'm not going to be stuck at my present state.
00:28:53.000 Thank God I can move forward.
00:28:55.000 Thank God I don't have to be a consumer forever.
00:28:58.000 Thank God I don't have to be just a cipher for other people's ideas, latched onto this vampiric and parasitic system.
00:29:04.000 Um, Vandana, um, but what about like, uh, it's very cheap, the mass-produced filthy food, and a lot of people, the food they eat, I believe, is determined by their economic status.
00:29:16.000 I believe that people are trapped in a cycle of poverty and sickness.
00:29:19.000 How do we ensure that good, wholesome food is economically viable?
00:29:26.000 How can we do that?
00:29:27.000 What level of institutional, global, political change is required to make that plausible?
00:29:35.000 So in nature...
00:29:36.000 Will you stay on the microphone please because I respect you so much, I can't offer you instruction
00:29:41.000 because it's not the dynamic.
00:29:42.000 But I do need you to...
00:29:43.000 I'm used to talking to you and this instrument.
00:29:47.000 You have to because everyone needs to hear you.
00:29:48.000 Look how patient they are, it's raining and stuff, if I may say.
00:29:52.000 So in nature, everything eats.
00:29:56.000 You know, the soil organisms are eating and feeding, eating and feeding, eating and feeding
00:30:02.000 all the time.
00:30:03.000 The mycorrhizal fungi is picking up the nutrients and bringing it to the plant.
00:30:09.000 And the plant is feeding the mycorrhizal fungi.
00:30:13.000 The bee is coming and pollinating the flower, but the flower is feeding the bee.
00:30:19.000 So the symbiosis is going on all the time.
00:30:25.000 In all cultures before colonialism and industrialism, if there was hunger, it was, it passed.
00:30:34.000 It was local.
00:30:35.000 It was limited in time.
00:30:39.000 It was never permanent.
00:30:41.000 What we now have is a structural hunger that doesn't go away.
00:30:45.000 You might have a good rainfall.
00:30:46.000 You might have a very good crop, but as a farmer, you could still be starving.
00:30:50.000 Half the hungry of the world are farmers because they're not growing food.
00:30:54.000 They're growing commodities.
00:30:56.000 They're not growing food that they can eat.
00:30:59.000 They're growing food with huge borrowing for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, seeds.
00:31:04.000 And then they're having to sell what they grow to pay back the debt.
00:31:08.000 And then borrow once more to buy to keep themselves alive.
00:31:12.000 And that's happening even at a country scale.
00:31:15.000 So, the issue of hunger today And the issue of price today has to be seen through the lens of the fact that there's structural systems to deny people their right to food.
00:31:31.000 And the denial begins with denying them the right to produce food in a way that they can access their own production.
00:31:38.000 But the second very big issue is this entire industrial globalized food system is supported by stealing our tax money.
00:31:50.000 It cannot run on its own without subsidies.
00:31:54.000 $400 billion a year, more than a billion a day, is what's taken from our pockets, given to the corporations, to take high-cost production and make it look cheap.
00:32:10.000 And so, industrial globalised food looks cheap even though it's much more costly to produce.
00:32:15.000 I mean, how can it be that food produced by a patented seed that is used round up and all kinds of chemicals and by the time it becomes processed, it becomes cheaper food.
00:32:30.000 Because the costs are not internalized.
00:32:33.000 They're externalized to nature and society.
00:32:36.000 So where do we begin by correcting what I've called the nutritional apartheid?
00:32:42.000 You know?
00:32:42.000 Like apartheid is separation.
00:32:45.000 I mean, separateness is the African's word.
00:32:48.000 And I call it ecological apartheid when we pretend we are separate from nature.
00:32:53.000 And it's nutritional apartheid when we divide society up to deny large numbers their right to eat healthy food.
00:33:00.000 Because food is not a commodity, as you said.
00:33:03.000 Food is us.
00:33:06.000 It becomes us.
00:33:08.000 And the longer you eat processed junk food, the sicker you will be.
00:33:12.000 So during COVID, most of the people who died didn't die because a little virus gave them an infection.
00:33:21.000 The virus didn't kill them.
00:33:22.000 What killed them was the diseases of bad food.
00:33:25.000 9.6% higher risk with Diabetes, 7.6% higher risk with cancer, both of which link to a food system.
00:33:38.000 So I think what we have to do is a multi-layered movement.
00:33:42.000 First begin with changing the system where you are.
00:33:47.000 Protect the farmers, create markets, do the direct links, stop the separation.
00:33:53.000 Because community building to me is we've been made separate from each other.
00:34:00.000 And all we have to do is allow the flows between each other to rebuild community.
00:34:05.000 And food is a very good place to start because it's real and you need it.
00:34:14.000 So, you know, begin with local food community and whatever you can do with your means.
00:34:19.000 Now most places where I know farmers markets have been created or the CSAs have been created, people have done it with their own initiative.
00:34:28.000 They've done it to civil society.
00:34:30.000 Some places they've been able to go to regional level, local town level.
00:34:34.000 Some places they've been able to go to country level.
00:34:36.000 I just gave an award to Denmark Denmark procures all the food for its schools and hospitals from organic farms.
00:34:50.000 That's where you make the shift.
00:34:51.000 But I think we absolutely need a rebellion against our taxes being stolen from us without our permission and being used to finance systems that are destroying the earth and destroying our health.
00:35:04.000 And when we see the full connections, That movement will be easy.
00:35:08.000 Remember the big, the US freedom began with saying, no taxation without representation.
00:35:18.000 Now we should say, no stealing our taxes without our permission.
00:35:22.000 This is a very unifying idea.
00:35:27.000 Of course, I'm sat here as an English person, and all these revolutions, like, we had to kick some people out of India.
00:35:33.000 Yeah, I can't remember who that was.
00:35:34.000 Then there was the American Revolution.
00:35:36.000 I don't know what was going on there.
00:35:37.000 We're simply trying to help everyone.
00:35:40.000 Vandana, it's sort of hidden in plain sight that food is sacred, not least in the word festival, that is surely connected to the word feast.
00:35:53.000 Most religious practices honor the process of eating your grandmother's food, your community dish, your national vegetable, the continuing instantiation of meaning connected to food.
00:36:08.000 Meaning that perhaps might fill this spiritual void, this emptiness to which you referred, in the same way that substantive food might provide us with succor and nutrition anatomically and biochemically.
00:36:23.000 It's interesting for you to hear you, Vandana, describe how integral the relationship between the farmers and the earth and the farmers and the rest of us and our obligation in a sense to become farmers is.
00:36:37.000 Curious I am also that when we hear that the global farming movement Well, let me say there are global farming protests in Sri Lanka and in India and in Germany and in England and in the Netherlands because it seems as if there is one central movement that is impacting and infecting people from, let me use this word, diverse communities of multi-races and yet much of the rhetoric that is used to dismiss, disparage, smear and attack them relates to fascism.
00:37:14.000 and being right-wing.
00:37:16.000 Why is there such a conscious and deliberate effort to divide people along these lines?
00:37:22.000 Why in particular is this movement around food autonomy and community autonomy being targeted so aggressively?
00:37:31.000 And how might we reverse and neuter some of these arguments?
00:37:37.000 Because I've been called a right-wing fascist and conspiracy theorist.
00:37:39.000 It really hurt my feelings.
00:37:40.000 What are we going to do?
00:37:42.000 So three quick issues.
00:37:44.000 The first is that we have to create another narrative.
00:37:51.000 We have to create a narrative that brings together the sacredness of food, the vitality of food to our health and well-being, both mental and physical, and the fact that food can.
00:38:04.000 Food has been a destructive force under the industrial globalized system, but food is a regenerative force.
00:38:15.000 In any system that works for the earth, and works in service for the earth, and works in care for the earth, food is a by-product of love and care for the earth.
00:38:24.000 Wow.
00:38:24.000 Yeah?
00:38:25.000 I heard that about pleasure.
00:38:26.000 That pleasure is meant to be a by-product of doing stuff, not the end point.
00:38:30.000 It helped me with addiction.
00:38:31.000 So food is a by-product of doing the right thing.
00:38:34.000 And by the way, on the issue of spirituality and the material, I think it was already a strange division But now even the materialism is being hijacked because the last time I was in FAO, they were talking about dematerializing the seed and food.
00:38:54.000 What is FAO?
00:38:56.000 FAO is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that takes care of the food.
00:39:03.000 Anyway, what they call dematerialization is not the seed will disappear.
00:39:07.000 No.
00:39:08.000 It just means Mr. Gates will take a genomic map, a digital map, and take a patent of it.
00:39:16.000 He's still on the seat, and the same is happening with land.
00:39:20.000 They keep telling people, telling farmers, leave the land.
00:39:23.000 If you don't do it on your own, we'll force you off the land.
00:39:26.000 This is happening in every... It's happening in this country.
00:39:28.000 It's happening in Netherlands.
00:39:29.000 It's happening in India.
00:39:30.000 Everywhere, farmers, leave the land, leave the land, leave the land.
00:39:33.000 Agriculture is a primitive occupation.
00:39:36.000 Growing food is obsolete.
00:39:38.000 And each of these billionaires is buying the land.
00:39:42.000 So they're using dematerialization as the new trick of taking away the gifts of the earth.
00:39:49.000 And, you know, they took the seed, now they already took the land, but now they want to take it all over again.
00:39:55.000 The issue of labeling as fascism those who challenge fascism is a typical trick of double speak.
00:40:08.000 You know, remember?
00:40:11.000 1984?
00:40:12.000 It's 1924!
00:40:14.000 And I wrote, you know, when the junk food industry was trying to rewrite our laws on food safety, food and health safety, I wrote a very quick briefing paper for our Parliament.
00:40:28.000 And it's called Food Fascism.
00:40:31.000 And I said, stop this food fascism.
00:40:34.000 So when your seed is controlled by Monsanto, your trade is controlled, your chicken are controlled by Cargill, your junk food and therefore you're creating disease is controlled by Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, all of this is a system of food fascism.
00:40:51.000 And then the next step of Silicon Valley and the techno-billionaires wanting to invest in fake food so that not only do you have one patent on a seed, now you have 14 patents on an impossible burger.
00:41:04.000 On every fake food, there are hundreds of patents because every synthetic artificial element has a patent behind it.
00:41:13.000 Can you imagine if the whole world would shift to fake food?
00:41:17.000 How much royalty collection they'll have.
00:41:20.000 That's what they are looking at.
00:41:22.000 And what we have to do is take the simple thing.
00:41:25.000 Same simple thing as a scarf, right?
00:41:28.000 If Gandhi could spin and say, we will make our own cloth.
00:41:33.000 And we said in Navdanya, we will save our own seeds.
00:41:36.000 We will never let seeds be the monopoly of the Monsantos and the buyers.
00:41:41.000 We have to do that now.
00:41:43.000 And we have enough time because not only is their fake food not ready, it's failing financially.
00:41:50.000 We're doing a report.
00:41:52.000 Many companies have gone bankrupt.
00:41:55.000 Many companies have gone bankrupt.
00:41:56.000 So we need to look at the failed system, the fascist system, and say, no, you're part of the fascist system.
00:42:04.000 Don't try and call us fascists.
00:42:05.000 We are the new freedom movement.
00:42:17.000 Often we think of talking about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley and these powerful new emergent titans in the global economic space who appear to have influence in areas of health, commerce and agriculture.
00:42:32.000 I'm speaking of Bill Gates in particular there.
00:42:36.000 It's become, in the same way as it's become fascist and right-wing to have conversations about personal freedom and conspiratorial, it's become conspiratorial to talk about some of the figures who appear to be benefiting from these new institutional and systemic changes that are taking place undemocratically without anybody voting for them or even being invited to have the conversation and often the conversation itself is shut down.
00:42:59.000 How is this happening?
00:43:01.000 How is reality being presented to us in this peculiar way, Vandana?
00:43:05.000 What is the agenda?
00:43:06.000 It seems to me that what you're suggesting is the agenda of Bill Gates and this new cadre of technocrats and this elite billionaire class is a new kind of Total domination, a new kind of globalist imperialism, the likes of which we've never before seen because the technology didn't exist before.
00:43:26.000 And whilst the technology for instantaneous communication exists now, which could be used of course positively, that we could organize and communicate differently, that we could form new confederacies, that we could form new independent communities that took responsibility for their own agriculture, that traded only when necessary in forms of currency that are decentralized and not attached to them, it also seems that there is A very, very powerful resistance to these freedom movements.
00:43:50.000 How are they getting such good PR?
00:43:52.000 I sometimes see them on TV represented as, well, philanthropists and stuff.
00:43:56.000 How is this happening?
00:43:59.000 Well, it's happening, of course, because any regime that takes power without the permission of people is a regime that lives under fear.
00:44:12.000 It's always afraid of losing power.
00:44:16.000 And I've watched this with the process.
00:44:17.000 We create the anti-globalization movement.
00:44:20.000 We created IFG.
00:44:23.000 We stopped the WTO in Seattle democratically.
00:44:27.000 And after that, they militarized the system.
00:44:30.000 They actually started to send armed people to every protest.
00:44:35.000 They killed a young man in Genoa.
00:44:38.000 You might remember the G7 protests.
00:44:41.000 So, earlier they used to use, you know, military and police.
00:44:47.000 Now they're using instruments of surveillance and control.
00:44:51.000 And the instruments of surveillance and control perform three functions for them.
00:44:56.000 The first is to declare any dissenting voice.
00:45:05.000 Because in a period of unfreedom, freedom is a dissenting voice.
00:45:09.000 So to declare it as a threat and a conspiracy, and we watch that, a lot of it.
00:45:17.000 The second is, we are living through a convergence of technologies.
00:45:23.000 So Mr. Gates is key to the fact that he wants to digitalize agriculture.
00:45:28.000 He's desperate to digitalize The economy, the financial... On India they pushed it in 2016.
00:45:37.000 But you might have heard of the digital currencies.
00:45:42.000 And basically every time anything is taken out of a direct interaction between community and taken into the digital realm, it's generating a rental income to Mr. Gates.
00:45:56.000 Because some processing by Microsoft has to happen.
00:46:00.000 So, of course, the desperation of digitalization, including digitalization of farming.
00:46:05.000 And the third is that the surveillance economy is what they hope will be the new economy.
00:46:13.000 That the surveillance itself will be the generator of the capital and the profit.
00:46:18.000 And it's been called the surveillance capitalism.
00:46:22.000 And just like nature was reduced to raw material, as we are being mined for data, we are the new minds.
00:46:31.000 Earlier they went for coal mines and cobalt mines and bauxite mines.
00:46:36.000 Now they go for data mining.
00:46:38.000 Every time they mine our data, that's the raw material.
00:46:43.000 We are raw material suppliers.
00:46:45.000 Then it's processed through the data collection and the algorithms.
00:46:51.000 And using that, they control our ideas, they control communication, They control the economy and choices.
00:47:02.000 And just at the time, in March 2020, when COVID was hitting and the lockdowns were beginning, I received a patent.
00:47:15.000 It's called 060606.
00:47:15.000 Oh no!
00:47:16.000 It's a sign, dammit!
00:47:20.000 And it's a world patent by Microsoft.
00:47:24.000 And you read the patent, it says, Patents for a user, that means the patents on us.
00:47:31.000 Patents on a user using an equipment, and on the basis of what they're doing, assessing what they are about, which is surveillance, and then having algorithms allocate value on the basis of their functioning.
00:47:54.000 And assign this value as a cryptocurrency.
00:47:57.000 This is the social credit system in China right now.
00:48:01.000 You can't go from one neighborhood to the next without passing your social credit system, if you have a bad social credit system.
00:48:10.000 You can't go to a movie.
00:48:12.000 You can't go to a cafe.
00:48:14.000 I mean, it's not fiction.
00:48:15.000 It's happening right now.
00:48:18.000 So, it's a policing system, it's a profit generating system, and it's a convergence of control system.
00:48:26.000 And what we have to do, of course, is to bring technology back to where it belongs as a tool.
00:48:32.000 To be regulated by society.
00:48:34.000 Tools that impact society must be regulated by society.
00:48:39.000 They can't be left in the hands of those who want to control society using it.
00:48:44.000 That's why we have biosafety laws for GMOs, you know.
00:48:48.000 That's why we now have a few places, laws for regulating mergers between giant companies.
00:48:57.000 And this will have to be about the next human rights movement.
00:49:01.000 Because it's taking away our very authenticity, autonomy, as free human beings.
00:49:09.000 We are being made raw material.
00:49:12.000 And I don't think we should accept it.
00:49:13.000 We should resist nature being reduced to raw material, but we should also resist humans being reduced to raw material.
00:49:19.000 We are not your raw material.
00:49:21.000 Yeah, I get it.
00:49:28.000 Yeah, that's how the materialistic model works.
00:49:30.000 Everything becomes like a commodity.
00:49:32.000 Everything becomes objectified.
00:49:34.000 We objectify one another.
00:49:35.000 We regard ourselves and one another as objects.
00:49:38.000 Our education system only prepares us for labor markets.
00:49:41.000 If you can't function in the labor market, Then you have no value.
00:49:45.000 Everything that is sacred is being stripped of its sacredness.
00:49:48.000 The process of eating food becomes the dumb imbibing of intense sugar and oil and salt making you sick.
00:49:55.000 Then you've got to be kept healthy.
00:49:57.000 You're just on a loop.
00:49:59.000 You're on a conveyor belt of sickness.
00:50:00.000 Then attention, consciousness itself becomes a commodity.
00:50:04.000 Your very beingness, our very beingness is turned into an object that can be controlled and patented.
00:50:11.000 And Russell, you know, when the early stages of COVID, it was the older people who were dying in, in care homes.
00:50:22.000 And the paper was published called the case for killing granny in a medical journal.
00:50:30.000 And I was rushing back to India before being locked down.
00:50:33.000 And, and the New York times of that day was saying, it's time to decide who will live and who will not live.
00:50:42.000 In Canada, where I did my PhD, so I knew it as a society, but there were no homeless people.
00:50:48.000 Now, they're not just arresting the homeless, they are saying, we will allow you to commit suicide.
00:50:57.000 They passed a law, so that instead of the society ensuring no one is homeless, the dominant system is ensuring the homeless die.
00:51:11.000 So, it is a new level of extermination and genocide.
00:51:17.000 Because when large numbers are made disposable in society, then any instrument will be used to get rid of them.
00:51:26.000 And to me, the only way you challenge this is recognizing there's no being on the earth that can be exterminated and pushed to extinction with pesticides and insecticides.
00:51:37.000 Everything else that kills.
00:51:40.000 But there's no human being who is dispensable.
00:51:43.000 Every human being, no matter who they are, has a place to care for the Earth and regenerate our beautiful planet.
00:51:52.000 We need all the hands, all the hearts, all the minds.
00:51:56.000 Applause Sometimes I wonder what the face of Armageddon may look
00:52:07.000 like, what the apocalypse may feel like when it impacts our skin.
00:52:11.000 Then I think perhaps it's already among us that if you're already a person that is sleeping on the street, then you are a forebear, a harbinger of an already present apocalypse, an already present Armageddon, the observable symptom of an already emerging phenomena.
00:52:31.000 Fandana, it's very important that you convey this, and that when you...
00:52:38.000 present the idea that it is possible to eliminate human life or control human life.
00:52:45.000 This, I think, is a gentle suggestion.
00:52:48.000 This is a forebear.
00:52:49.000 This is an indicator of an idea that they are beginning to wonder if it might not be good to popularize it.
00:52:57.000 And, you know, I just want to say that, you know, the rain came and you stayed.
00:53:04.000 And now the sun is there.
00:53:06.000 So we've got to keep working through the period where it looks like it's rainy and stormy
00:53:13.000 because the sun will shine.
00:53:15.000 CHEERING AND APPLAUSE What is most heartening is that, obviously, I've been at
00:53:27.000 this festival and I'm speaking with everybody, and people are so
00:53:30.000 optimistic and people are so untroubled by the conditions
00:53:33.000 and people are willing and awakening.
00:53:37.000 And in fact, what's been different about this part of my own life,
00:53:40.000 as opposed to the previous period, where it was more what you'd recognise as conventional
00:53:44.000 celebrity in so much as I was participating,
00:53:46.000 In systems of media that convey very particular and obvious messages that are to do with materialism in a sense and the valorization of low behavior.
00:53:54.000 But at that time...
00:53:59.000 I didn't have the same kind of connection with people and the same kind of communication.
00:54:02.000 And now I have learned so much.
00:54:04.000 I learn continually.
00:54:05.000 People tell me about their personal challenges, personal losses, about things that people are personally overcoming.
00:54:12.000 People everywhere, like, you've got to do this thing, you've got to learn about this thing, here it is, I've written this thing down.
00:54:17.000 Already, as you say, when nature is regarded as a resource and human beings are regarded as a consumer, there is no answers.
00:54:25.000 But when we make the minute internal transition that we are are awakened citizens, awakening wonders as I continually
00:54:32.000 say, when we are awakening then we are no longer participating in that and when we regard
00:54:37.000 nature as not something separate that is a resource but as something that we are
00:54:41.000 participating in, then suddenly the paradigm is different and we cannot be utilised.
00:54:46.000 It's like a reversal of this metastasization into some dark, dark age.
00:54:51.000 Some dark, heavy age.
00:54:52.000 Do you think sometimes that when they talk of the Kali Yuga, that they mean everything heavy, everything dumb, everything not including light, everything not awakened, everything not vital with interconnectivity?
00:55:03.000 Well, the Kali Yuga is basically the process of disintegration of a system that should pass away.
00:55:13.000 And that creates the opening up for the regeneration of a new system.
00:55:20.000 Kali is always in cycles.
00:55:22.000 It's not linear.
00:55:24.000 I mean, there's no linearity in nature.
00:55:29.000 And linearity is a part of a Cartesian worldview, which has created so much despair for so many people.
00:55:36.000 You know, when people talk about, oh my God, I'm living through climate despair.
00:55:40.000 I'm living through climate trauma.
00:55:43.000 I said, go do something.
00:55:46.000 Plant a garden.
00:55:47.000 Your trauma will go and you'll have food.
00:55:50.000 Yeah.
00:55:53.000 And the beauty of it is the science is teaching us that, you know, the figures are so clear.
00:56:01.000 And I wrote a book way back, Soil Not Oil, and the wonderful singers yesterday, it seems, put it to music.
00:56:06.000 And I said, the oil empire has given us the entire climate havoc.
00:56:14.000 But returning to the soil, knowing that we are part of the soil, we are humans because we are humus.
00:56:21.000 Yeah?
00:56:22.000 That is where a new economy, a new imagination, a new identity gets created.
00:56:28.000 But in these many, at that time, I knew that 45% of the climate pollution comes from an industrial food system that's also making us sick.
00:56:37.000 And destroying the land and the biodiversity, everything.
00:56:42.000 But we can regenerate, we can create a 100% solution to hunger.
00:56:49.000 We can create a 100% solution to regenerating biodiversity.
00:56:52.000 We have six times more pollinators on our farm than in the forest next door.
00:56:57.000 So it isn't true that farming always degrades.
00:57:00.000 We have more mycorrhizal fungi in our soil than in the forest.
00:57:05.000 Because care, you know, I think earlier Satish was talking about how love is powerful.
00:57:11.000 To me, care Love calls for care, you know?
00:57:16.000 And that is powerful and creative.
00:57:18.000 Care is a very creative force.
00:57:20.000 It's the true economic force of creating life.
00:57:25.000 And just the other day I was reading, you know, this fake food.
00:57:29.000 Some of those people who accuse us of being right-wing and fake food being a climate solution.
00:57:36.000 Give it all in the lab.
00:57:37.000 Put it all in the lab.
00:57:39.000 It's 25 times more greenhouse gas emissions than ordinary food.
00:57:47.000 What they're offering as a solution is 25 times more polluting, but just growing a garden or doing organic farming, just the mycorrhizal fungi can hold enough carbon to hold one third of the emissions, just the fungi, the tiny little invisible fungi.
00:58:09.000 And the data is showing that if even 10% farms and pastures and forests started to work according to ecological laws, we could draw down all the excess carbon and And of course not continue to emit.
00:58:28.000 But the climate problem, the biodiversity problem, the hunger problem, the alienation problem, are all one problem.
00:58:35.000 Yeah.
00:58:35.000 It's one problem of working as if we are at war with the Earth.
00:58:40.000 And with each other in competition.
00:58:42.000 Yes.
00:58:43.000 And the solution for everything is, knowing we're part of the Earth, that taking care of her is what being on the Earth is about.
00:58:52.000 And And from there comes taking care of each other, and that's building community.
00:58:57.000 because what connects community is care, compassion, love.
00:59:00.000 Vandana, whenever we communicate...
00:59:08.000 I I feel like I'm learning information.
00:59:11.000 I feel like I'm learning information.
00:59:12.000 There is so much information.
00:59:13.000 But I also feel that my heart is opening.
00:59:15.000 Something happens to me that I need.
00:59:17.000 There's something that you have that I need.
00:59:19.000 You're conveying something that I need.
00:59:21.000 It's really, really valuable and important to me.
00:59:23.000 Thank you so much.
00:59:24.000 When we were speaking a moment ago, Vandana, you told me about the three principles.
00:59:29.000 Because this is what I've become aware of.
00:59:31.000 I've become aware that everywhere there are anti-protest laws being passed.
00:59:34.000 I've become aware that there are Censorship laws simultaneously being passed, what are known as the Five Eyes countries, the countries that Edward Snowden exposed, were trading each other's data where their national laws prohibited surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed was happening.
00:59:49.000 But these Five Eyes countries are introducing new censorship laws, the EU is introducing new censorship laws, they're trying to close down free speech, they're militarizing the police force, they are closing down the possibility for protest, they are shutting down good faith communication between different people, and all people are different people because we are They're of course unique.
01:00:07.000 They're creating cultural conflict where it needn't exist, as well as the ongoing annihilation of nature.
01:00:14.000 And whenever solutions are proposed, they are solutions that always impact ordinary people much more than they impact the institutions that are primarily responsible.
01:00:24.000 One argument being the one that you have just espoused, that when it comes to the solution for agriculture is fake lab food and they are 25 times Worse.
01:00:33.000 The solutions that Big Pharma propose make people sick in many cases, and of course, I'm not naive or foolish enough or ignorant enough to suggest that there aren't wonderful people working in science and medicine and in all of these disciplines, of course.
01:00:44.000 And I will just mention as a side note, you can always tell at any festival, no matter what type of festival it is, a conventional music festival or a comedy festival, it's always a good sign when the other acts are watching the headliner.
01:00:56.000 And here I can see Tommy Rosen, and everywhere I look there are people speaking.
01:01:00.000 Satish Kumar is sat quietly observing, Helena Norberg, everybody is stopping.
01:01:06.000 Tahir is still here to watch Vandana Shiva.
01:01:09.000 Before we finish, I've got a few more things to ask Vandana, but please may we celebrate her just spontaneously in this moment with a glorious round of applause for this incredible teacher that we have been granted.
01:01:26.000 Man switching, switching, switching.