Stay Free - Russel Brand - Vandana Shiva (You Can’t Fake Food!)

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to my new podcast, Subcutaneous, which is a posh word for under the skin.

00:00:05.000 If you enjoyed Under the Skin, you're going to love Subcutaneous, particularly because half of it is free and we do a new episode every Tuesday.

00:00:13.000 We dive deep into the minds of Elon Musk, Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and others.

00:00:21.000 In this episode, my guest is Vandana Shiva.

00:00:24.000 Who I consider to be a world teacher and the only person I'd vote for as global president, turned 70 on the 5th of November.

00:00:31.000 Her new book, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, is out on the 27th of October.

00:00:38.000 Vandana will be joining us again for Community 2023.

00:00:42.000 Get your tickets now.

00:00:43.000 It's a three-day festival with Vandana Shiva, Wim Hof, Huron, Gracie, and obviously me and Laura Brand, my wife.

00:00:51.000 That takes place on the 14th to the 16th of July.

00:00:54.000 Hang on wide.

00:00:55.000 If you want to get tickets, go to RussellBrand.com right now.

00:00:58.000 Remember that all of our merch goes to help people with addiction issues, not the merch itself, any money we make from the merch.

00:01:03.000 So you can have a look at that.

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00:01:08.000 Remember, every day you can see us live streaming on Rumble with Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:01:13.000 In this conversation, we talk about the role of agriculture and big food during the cost-of-living crisis.

00:01:18.000 We talk about how food and agriculture became a commodity and how corporations got into agriculture, creating the junk food that's responsible for 75% of the diseases in our times.

00:01:29.000 It was an amazing conversation with Vandana.

00:01:32.000 I sort of asked her, at what point in agriculture did it become a problem?

00:01:36.000 At what point is it like, you know, is it the plough?

00:01:39.000 Is it the sickle?

00:01:40.000 Is it just planting seeds or animal husbandry?

00:01:43.000 And Vandana's answer, as always, is illuminating.

00:01:47.000 The reason I enjoy talking to Vandana Shiva is because I feel like there's hope.

00:01:50.000 I have so many conversations, so much analysis, the stuff we talk about on Stay Free with Russell Bradd Makes me see that corruption is so entrenching that the human condition can be so frail that I start to become despondent.

00:02:00.000 When I listen to Vandana, I believe it's possible to change the world.

00:02:03.000 Hello Vandana Shiva.

00:02:08.000 Hello Russell.

00:02:10.000 At this time where the world is consumed by a cost of living crisis,

00:02:15.000 what role does the control of agriculture and big food play?

00:02:22.000 Do you feel that there is a concerted effort to exert control over the basic components of human life?

00:02:31.000 Well, you know, trained as a physicist, I wouldn't have dedicated the last four decades of my life trying to figure out The food and agriculture system that first is very violent.

00:02:46.000 It is based on instruments of war.

00:02:49.000 Otherwise, farmers of Punjab wouldn't have been dispossessed and got into debt.

00:02:55.000 Innocent women, children, men wouldn't have died in the city of Bhopal in 1984.

00:03:00.000 That's the year I started to study the agriculture system.

00:03:03.000 And I have not stopped since that time.

00:03:07.000 Big corporations had no role in growing food.

00:03:09.000 Growing food was an act of care, an act of love.

00:03:13.000 The corporations got into agriculture first after the wars.

00:03:18.000 Same corporations that made chemicals for Hitler's concentration camps, poison gases for the war.

00:03:26.000 Corporations that started to trade in food as a commodity rather than food as nourishment and food as life.

00:03:32.000 And then, of course, a bunch of them created junk food And ultra processed food that's responsible for 75% of the chronic diseases in our times.

00:03:43.000 Globalization, you know, the rules of WTO literally were rules of handing control over agriculture to them.

00:03:50.000 This has brought us the multiple crisis, including the fact that after the financial crisis, the Wall Street collapse of 2008, the financial system has got into food.

00:04:02.000 And if you look at the current cost of living crisis, whether it's energy or it's food, both basic needs should be public goods, should be regulated as public goods.

00:04:14.000 Most of the hype in the prices is related to speculation and financialization.

00:04:21.000 So food and agriculture have become another commodity, an outward node of the financial system as understood through trading, city trading.

00:04:34.000 I suppose it's another abstraction of life and another opportunity for control.

00:04:40.000 What is the role of Bill Gates and other big tech moguls and titans in this increasing Technologisation.

00:04:53.000 That is indeed the correct phrase of food and agriculture.

00:04:56.000 So, you know, years ago, Gates visited India and visited our president.

00:05:04.000 And, you know, the Indian presidential palace is a leftover of the British rule.

00:05:08.000 And really brilliant banquets are put out for international guests.

00:05:14.000 And here was all this wonderful Indian food.

00:05:17.000 And Bill Gates ordered a hamburger.

00:05:20.000 Now, you know, that's the level of his food literacy.

00:05:25.000 How is he getting into the food system?

00:05:28.000 You know, two years ago, actually, no, a few years ago, he started to, A, try and control the seed.

00:05:39.000 And I know in England, there is huge uproar around deregulation of GMOs, particularly the new GMOs, which are called gene edited.

00:05:48.000 But life is complex, self-organized.

00:05:50.000 It's not a word program that you can cut and paste with no consequence.

00:05:55.000 Every change in the editing, one gene editing, 1,500 other genes get destabilized.

00:06:04.000 And now the results are there because there's enough experimentation.

00:06:08.000 And the first company that brought a gene edited food, Calix, was going to be an absolute big return on investment.

00:06:19.000 Well, it just collapsed about three days ago because you can't fake Growing food.

00:06:26.000 You can't fake self-organization of the seed.

00:06:29.000 So Gates started to try and control the seed through gene editing.

00:06:33.000 Monsanto had tried to control it through genetic engineering, you know, putting toxic genes into the plants and then taking a patent.

00:06:42.000 Gates is taking patents through editing.

00:06:47.000 It's a wrong term.

00:06:48.000 It's just the wrong term.

00:06:50.000 He actually has a company called Editas, which rakes in all the patents.

00:06:55.000 I mean, we know what happened with the vaccines.

00:06:57.000 The very people who were supposed to be regulating were taking the patents for the vaccines, rather than be detached, work in the public interest, work as independent regulators.

00:07:12.000 The second way in which Bill Gates is getting into agriculture is by what he calls digital agriculture.

00:07:18.000 You can't do digital agriculture.

00:07:19.000 Agriculture is about living seed.

00:07:21.000 It's about living thought.

00:07:22.000 It's about trillions of organisms, trillions of organisms outside and trillions in our gut.

00:07:29.000 What is he meaning by digital agriculture?

00:07:32.000 Basically a surveillance agriculture.

00:07:34.000 If the farmers first were forced to get addicted to chemicals and chemical fertilizers I want some of the most destructive elements in the world.

00:07:42.000 They're killing the oceans with dead zones.

00:07:44.000 They're leading to emissions of nitrous oxide.

00:07:47.000 Which is 300 times more damaging to the climate and the soils are being killed because soil organisms need organic matter.

00:07:55.000 They don't want a chemical that was made first for explosives and ammunition and is now being used for the soil.

00:08:04.000 Gates is taking the next step after the Monsanto control.

00:08:10.000 The Monsanto control was adapt engineer seeds to take more chemicals.

00:08:16.000 So the explosion of glyphosate and use of Roundup is because of the Roundup ready crops.

00:08:22.000 Gates is now wanting a new dependence.

00:08:25.000 The farmers have to have their minds.

00:08:27.000 Farmers have knowledge.

00:08:29.000 He is trying to treat them as empty heads, just like they define the soil as an empty container.

00:08:35.000 And He has signed agreements all over with the Mexican IT, you know, the person who controls the smartphones of Mexico, that farmers will have to take instructions from the billionaires and the poison cartel of the world.

00:08:54.000 So they depend on chemicals, they depend on seeds, now they have to depend on them.

00:08:59.000 on their knowledge, and this total control can only happen.

00:09:03.000 It can't happen on a farm like Nafdanya's where we are just concluding a beautiful course with people from around the world called Return to Earth.

00:09:11.000 For us, doing good farming is returning to the earth as earth beings, taking care of the earth, growing diversity.

00:09:18.000 Our farm is so diverse, there is no way a drone Could monitor it, it'll get thoroughly confused.

00:09:25.000 But to do the kind of agriculture Gates wants, he wants an agriculture that will have very large scale monocultures, will be chemical, except that you will now, you know, have precision agriculture to tell the farmer, you know, put five kilograms of nitrogen here and put 5.2 kilograms of nitrogen here, and would try and engineer the entire industrial agriculture operation.

00:09:50.000 But even more seriously, Gates wants to control our food, you know.

00:09:55.000 He is the biggest financier of fake food, lab food.

00:09:59.000 So, Bayer and Monsanto are already planning a large-scale agriculture where agriculture doesn't produce food that we eat, but raw materials of carbohydrates and proteins for fake food to be manufactured in the lab.

00:10:14.000 So, it's the ultimate fake.

00:10:15.000 It's fake science.

00:10:16.000 It's fake food.

00:10:17.000 It's fake knowledge.

00:10:18.000 And, you know, stay free.

00:10:20.000 Your program Russell, you know, staying free today is about seed freedom and food freedom.

00:10:25.000 This is the movement I've been building for 40 years.

00:10:29.000 Each of us, each of us has a right to food freedom.

00:10:33.000 And food freedom means to know what you're eating, how it was grown, and to eat what's healthy for you, rather than eat what will kill you with disease and will kill the planet with chemicals, fossil fuels, because industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel agriculture.

00:10:48.000 It feels like extremist materialism to the point of ecocide, where the idea of spirit or mystery or symbiosis or Gaia has been extracted by this advanced rationalism, this obsession and fetishisation of measurement and control, To the point where our planet becomes unviable.

00:11:17.000 It's almost a trope, Vandana, in the sci-fi world that the mechanical mind of an AI entity will one day, in a dystopian twist, decide that there's no point in humanity, that life itself is unviable.

00:11:34.000 But it appears that we're doing this already by adopting a kind of AI rationalist mentality that excludes the immeasurable value of that which is difficult to know.

00:11:48.000 Other than what you've just said, and I reckon it is contained in what you said, other than returning to practices of agriculture and indeed life that are at odds with and oppose this advancing ideology, How do we re-engage with nature in a way that can oppose something that's so vast, so powerful and hegemonic?

00:12:14.000 Something as potent as Bill Gates and all of his wealth and power and infrastructure, all veiled under philanthropy.

00:12:22.000 What kind of movements can we practice and support?

00:12:27.000 Well, you know, what I've always done is first understand what are the instruments of control.

00:12:35.000 When I understood the instruments of control were the chemicals and poisons in agriculture, I said, let's grow food without chemicals.

00:12:42.000 And that's totally possible in ecological agriculture, agroecology, organic farming, biodynamics, give it whatever name you want to.

00:12:49.000 Then I found seeds were to be patented and genetically engineered seed forced on us.

00:12:54.000 So freedom, staying free was saving the seed.

00:12:57.000 Now we have this horrible convergence of failed biotechnology, the genetic engineering biotechnology edifice, totalitarian information technology, and the financialization of the world Through a new technologizing of money, turning it more and more fictitious.

00:13:23.000 And, you know, the Gates and the Rockefellers and the New York Stock Exchange are already talking about owning every bit of nature through natural asset companies.

00:13:35.000 and making money on the financial markets. A river flows, it's got that much water. You can't

00:13:42.000 fictitiously multiply water, but if you turn it into a financial asset, you can multiply

00:13:48.000 fictitiously while appropriating the natural resources. So they're talking of $4,000 trillion

00:13:55.000 of gambling on nature and making money out of it.

00:14:00.000 So if this is the instrument, I mean, this fourth industrial revolution that Mr. Paul Schwab keeps talking about is this convergence of power.

00:14:08.000 And its illusions include, just like our seeds were called primitive, we in the colonial period were called primitive and we could be colonized.

00:14:18.000 Humanity is being called primitive and, you know, unevolved.

00:14:22.000 Being, and therefore needs to be enhanced by being totally enslaved, you know, through the algorithms and the computers, the machines.

00:14:32.000 And, you know, Gates has a patent called 060606, exactly when COVID was locking us all in.

00:14:39.000 He had already applied a Microsoft patent of us as users and the gadgets as the determinants of our value through the algorithms and the social credit system.

00:14:51.000 Would they decide whether we are worth having freedom or not?

00:14:56.000 That to me is an unlivable word.

00:14:59.000 I think there are two forms of resistance.

00:15:03.000 One is when farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by laws like the Dutch laws.

00:15:08.000 The last time we met and we talked, that was what was the big issue, the Netherlands laws that would wipe out small farms, that would wipe out animals, or the Indian protests.

00:15:20.000 Everywhere, everywhere where laws are brought in to make it more difficult for farmers to farm, there are protests.

00:15:27.000 But I think an even bigger movement is the movement of reclaiming food sovereignty and growing your own food.

00:15:35.000 And this got accelerated during COVID because people, A, the supply chains were shut down, but more than that, people started to make the connections between food and health.

00:15:45.000 And they realized there's no food better than food you've grown with your own hands and your own heart.

00:15:51.000 And the explosion of organic gardens around the world You know, in our movement, about 6,000 Gardens of Hope were created by the women in this period of when we were locked down.

00:16:05.000 So, both are resistances.

00:16:07.000 One is a creative resistance.

00:16:08.000 The other is a resistance that says a clear no.

00:16:12.000 But every no that comes from a deep conscience is a powerful no.

00:16:18.000 You asked about coordination.

00:16:19.000 There are two kinds of coordination.

00:16:21.000 There's a coordination from the top.

00:16:23.000 Where a centralizing force puts autonomous things together.

00:16:29.000 That's the kind of totalitarian control the billionaires, the Gates, the Klaus Schwab's want to be.

00:16:37.000 The second is the autopoietic organization.

00:16:42.000 Think of the fact that there are thousands, A hundred trillion microbes in our gut, and they're working in coordination.

00:16:50.000 And our body's working in coordination with them.

00:16:52.000 And in community, you know, you celebrate community.

00:16:55.000 What is community?

00:16:56.000 No one controlling from outside, but autopoietic, self-organized, autonomous beings sharing.

00:17:06.000 Sharing the same concerns, the same love for life, the same love for freedom.

00:17:11.000 That is the bond that brings us together.

00:17:14.000 And Gandhi called it, he had a beautiful word for it, Swaraj.

00:17:18.000 He wrote a book before he came back to India.

00:17:20.000 He wrote it while he was still in South Africa.

00:17:22.000 He wrote it while Traveling from England to South Africa, fighting the racist regime.

00:17:27.000 And the book is called Hind Swaraj, and we do a course every year with Satish Kumar, who's at Schumacher College.

00:17:33.000 Satish and I have been offering this since the year 2000, when we started the Earth University at Navdanya.

00:17:39.000 And Swaraj, that's a beautiful, powerful word.

00:17:42.000 Swaraj means self-rule.

00:17:44.000 Swaraj does not mean atomization.

00:17:46.000 Swaraj does not mean isolation.

00:17:49.000 Swaraj does not mean Insulation from each other.

00:17:52.000 Swaraj means each being governing themselves with the highest consciousness and the highest values and beings with high value and high consciousness coming together in larger and larger wholes.

00:18:05.000 He had a beautiful quotation for this.

00:18:07.000 He said, I do not see the world where the pyramid, where the top of the pyramid crushes the bottom that supports it.

00:18:14.000 That's the pyramid we are trying to create.

00:18:17.000 I see the world as ever-expanding, never-ascending oceanic circles, where every circle gives love, care, and strength to all circles within.

00:18:29.000 So I believe that life's self-organization is from the molecule to Gaia.

00:18:36.000 There is amazing coherence.

00:18:39.000 And you know, my dear friend May Wan Ho used to talk about quantum coherence.

00:18:43.000 That every molecule, every cell knows how to function.

00:18:47.000 And every cell together knows how to function.

00:18:50.000 Every organ knows how to function.

00:18:52.000 Every body knows how to function.

00:18:53.000 Every community knows how to function.

00:18:55.000 And all the way to Gaia, as a self-organized being.

00:18:59.000 That's why James Lovelock called her Gaia.

00:19:01.000 She managed her temperature.

00:19:03.000 She managed her I see parallels between the disruption of the human body's metabolism with junk food and fast food and ultra-processed food and the destruction of Gaia's metabolism through junk energy.

00:19:22.000 Gaia has her energy.

00:19:24.000 Regenerative living energies.

00:19:26.000 And then we turn to fossil fuels.

00:19:27.000 And in two hundred years, they've totally messed up.

00:19:30.000 Of course, they now are coming up with new jugglery.

00:19:34.000 Gates jugglery.

00:19:35.000 I have his book here to remind me all the time.

00:19:40.000 Yeah.

00:19:41.000 And he's got a net zero section where he's been saying net zero doesn't mean zero.

00:19:45.000 It doesn't mean we'll get rid of our emissions.

00:19:48.000 Just means we've got to fix it.

00:19:49.000 They want to fix it financially and they want to fix it through a new resource grab.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:54.000 We call it carbon colonization.

00:19:56.000 They'll keep emitting carbon dioxide and they want our land.

00:20:00.000 As Carbon Secretary.

00:20:01.000 So I've said, you know, our Mother Earth is not your sink.

00:20:05.000 We're sorry.

00:20:06.000 You know, we are not here to be dumped on all over again.

00:20:10.000 We will live lives of love, taking care of Mother Earth, and we will together generate the kind of power that makes your system redundant.

00:20:21.000 As long as we know you are cooking up structures of further control and extinction, as you said, ecocide, you know, Their idea is destroy the earth and destroy all human freedom and our idea is regenerate the earth and grow human freedom even deeper.

00:20:40.000 I need to speak to you every day because like I return to a kind of, even though I oppose the ideas that I frame in the questions, in another way, Vandana, I am sort of similarly seduced by Ideas of materialism and individualism and competition and almost in a way it's like I want to challenge these centers of power with the same frequency of force that they espouse that I feel like a sort of an individualistic, priapic

00:21:18.000 Urgency to oppose it.

00:21:20.000 When I hear you describe the organic systems that are in place from the sub-molecular to the cosmic that in their own almost archetypal rhythms are already assuring a certainty in survival.

00:21:38.000 That there are cooperative systems that don't need like overt masculine assertion in order to be resolved.

00:21:46.000 I feel like, God, I'm sort of just part of this.

00:21:49.000 I'm just another person in the mix, sort of fighting for a kind of form of individualism.

00:21:56.000 Like that what you say, it sounds, you know, the when it entered Western culture, so sort of Rousseauian and idealistic that it's, unless it's directly coming from you, I sometimes feel like, no, this is like, this is utopianism.

00:22:13.000 Like I've been schooled in the West.

00:22:15.000 I've been schooled in individualism and the kind of self-centeredness that our system inheres and encourages.

00:22:23.000 Like I've had my own journeys of feeling weak and unempowered and then my own journey of feeling personal success and personal prowess and personal potency so that I've sort of it's somehow in my body and in my blood to kind of to even to unconsciously somehow agree with The systems of power that we are describing and that my questions are directing you to condemn.

00:22:47.000 So how is it that, what kind of faith is it that you have, as well as the action that you're undertaking?

00:22:54.000 I didn't know, for example, about that Earth University and that Satish Kumar comes there and teaches.

00:22:58.000 And I thought, my God, I want to come to that place.

00:23:00.000 I'd like to go there and... Yes, come!

00:23:02.000 You come and offer a course!

00:23:04.000 Come and offer a course!

00:23:05.000 I can do it!

00:23:07.000 Do a course.

00:23:07.000 I've got to sit there quietly for at least a year.

00:23:10.000 I shouldn't be allowed to speak for a couple of terms at least.

00:23:18.000 Do you see what I mean?

00:23:20.000 The level of the individual, this kind of individual autonomy that you're describing for someone from my culture requires a degree of personal surrender and I wonder if you encounter that a lot with Western people even when they're being condemnatory of their Well, you know, I am, of course, grateful that, you know, I'm born in India.

00:23:49.000 Of course, there's a huge consumerist India now.

00:23:51.000 There's a globalized India today.

00:23:53.000 There's a careless India today.

00:23:54.000 I mean, look at the mountains of waste that are being generated and the mountains of plastic that we have been immersed in.

00:24:04.000 So, I mean, I won't think and talk about an India that is not contaminated by the limitless greed of consumerism.

00:24:20.000 Where do I, you know, my own worldview comes first and foremost from my own studies and reflections on quantum theory, so much of my thinking.

00:24:31.000 is about the interconnectedness of the world that the quantum world teaches us, that there is no separation.

00:24:36.000 Second, that there's only potential.

00:24:39.000 There's nothing like fixed things, this idea of essential entities, fixed entities that can't change.

00:24:46.000 That too is totally obsolete.

00:24:48.000 But my second stream comes from the fact that, you know, now it's, you know, I'm going to be 70 this November and And, you know, and that's part of the reason my publishers wanted me to write my movement memoir, The Terror Viva.

00:25:08.000 And I hope we'll have time to talk about it.

00:25:11.000 But, you know, it's 50 years since I've been doing ecological.

00:25:14.000 Yes, that's it.

00:25:15.000 That's it.

00:25:17.000 This right here.

00:25:18.000 Best bit of publishing promotion since you held up Bill Gates's book.

00:25:23.000 That's me with my big bindi.

00:25:25.000 I recognise you.

00:25:28.000 So I think the second, you know, 50 years of ecological work, learning from nature, learning from communities, it allows you to shed some of these mechanistic ideas that are at the foundation of how we think of the economy, how we think of political power, how we think of society, you know.

00:25:51.000 This idea of atomized individuals who need hubs to control them, that's what's blocking community.

00:25:56.000 But our basic urge is relational.

00:26:00.000 Our basic urge is to be cooperative, not competitive.

00:26:05.000 And that's the way nature behaves.

00:26:09.000 When Gaia The idea of Gaia was created.

00:26:13.000 It was Lynn Margolis with James Lovelock.

00:26:16.000 And Lynn Margolis was the biologist to show the world that the idea that species compete with each other, that parts of a body compete with each other, are so false.

00:26:27.000 If we didn't have cooperation, we wouldn't be alive.

00:26:29.000 And that applies for the microbes, and it applies for the plants and the forest, and it applies to the human community.

00:26:36.000 So I think, basically, it's partly A paradigm shift in terms of the way we think of science.

00:26:43.000 You know, Cartesian and Baconian science is so disconnected from the world.

00:26:48.000 It was very good for control.

00:26:49.000 It was very good for extraction.

00:26:51.000 It was very good for colonialism.

00:26:53.000 It was very, very good for trying to subjugate nature.

00:26:56.000 But as you said, you know, nature cannot be subjugated.

00:26:59.000 No matter what kind of paths we bring, there's always a path.

00:27:03.000 You know, I mean, I have seen You know, bridges blown away.

00:27:07.000 I've seen dams washed away.

00:27:09.000 I've seen, you know, everything we think we are building strong, you know, build back better, their slogan.

00:27:16.000 No, with nature, there's nothing you can't build back better if you don't work according to her ecological laws.

00:27:23.000 And that is knowledge.

00:27:24.000 You know, that is following the way the earth systems work.

00:27:30.000 Tell us about your book then.

00:27:31.000 You've just told me that this is what I am to do, and as you know, I do what you tell me.

00:27:37.000 I've already made that clear to you on a number of occasions.

00:27:40.000 You've written this because it's your birthday coming up.

00:27:42.000 Happy birthday for your birthday in November.

00:27:45.000 What is it that you in particular cover in Terra Viva, Vandana?

00:27:52.000 Well, I basically cover my life.

00:27:53.000 It's not my autobiography.

00:27:55.000 It's not my personal autobiography.

00:27:57.000 It is, as the title says, Terra Viva, my life in a biodiversity of movements.

00:28:01.000 And my first involvement, of course, with the Chitco movement, the beautiful movement where women came out to hug the trees and stop the logging, which was leading to deforestation, landslides, floods, disasters.

00:28:14.000 And then, of course, my work on the seed and how and why I started to save seeds.

00:28:20.000 How I absolutely rejected the idea that seeds were a machine and invented by Monsanto.

00:28:27.000 And they could have intellectual property rights on this machine.

00:28:30.000 Now, seed is the ultimate self-organized expression of life.

00:28:36.000 And the word for us in India is bija, that which arises on its own forever and ever and ever.

00:28:42.000 And for me, that's freedom.

00:28:44.000 If we can be like the seed, then we will stay free.

00:28:48.000 I talk about the movement globally we created of diverse women for diversity because for me, the idea of monocultures is so perverse because the world is diverse culturally, it's diverse biologically.

00:29:02.000 And when we got together as a movement of diverse women for diversity, and of course, my years of fighting globalization and GATT and WTO and the creation of the International Forum on Globalization, which shut down WTO in Seattle, reminded us that when people get together, they have the power to stop the biggest institution.

00:29:23.000 The whole issue of water, privatization, Including Coca-Cola trying to steal the water and the women rose up and shut the Coca-Cola plant down in Plachimada.

00:29:35.000 And I have the privilege to support them and join them.

00:29:39.000 Or the Ganges River being privatized by Suez.

00:29:43.000 And now there are attempts to financialize water, biodiversity, nature as a whole.

00:29:49.000 So the issue of financialization will be the big issue in the years to come.

00:29:53.000 And of course, my dedication to reject the idea of patents on life, because a patent is given for an invention.

00:30:00.000 Life is not invented by humans.

00:30:03.000 We can modify, we can modify badly like GMOs, we can modify brilliantly like Indian peasants involving 200,000 varieties of rice out of one grass.

00:30:14.000 And all my battles on fighting biopiracy, big corporations.

00:30:18.000 Monsanto claiming to have invented our ancient wheat that does not lead to gluten allergy.

00:30:24.000 A Texas company claiming to have invented the basmati rice, you know, the aromatic rice from my valley.

00:30:30.000 Or the big name, you know, 11 ears.

00:30:33.000 I fought against the patenting of neem, a tree that we have used for pest control.

00:30:38.000 My grandmother used it.

00:30:39.000 My mother used it.

00:30:40.000 And then a corporation in 94 claims they have invented the use of neem for biopesticide.

00:30:46.000 And then the climate issue.

00:30:48.000 And finally, you know, because we are interbeings, you know, I think, I think the big breakthrough we have to make in our time, if we have to stay free and stay alive, is to realize that we are inter-beings.

00:31:03.000 90% of us are microbes.

00:31:07.000 90% of us.

00:31:08.000 We are only 10% human cells.

00:31:11.000 And especially with the COVID, you know, just like earlier, every insect had to be killed with insecticides and every plant had to be killed with Roundup.

00:31:21.000 You know, there was so much writing on this war against the virus.

00:31:24.000 But we are the viral, you know?

00:31:26.000 We, our skin, we are just walking my viromes.

00:31:31.000 So I think instead of this cultivation of fear of the diversity of which we are a part, my book Terra Viva is about the celebration of diversity and interbeing.

00:31:42.000 Bloody hell, thank you.

00:31:43.000 That's pretty incredible.

00:31:45.000 A few things.

00:31:47.000 One is, when you get to the point of patenting life itself, I suppose that is the usurping of the divine in a very practical sense.

00:31:55.000 It's almost like the supplanting of God of our understanding as the apex and creator and genesis of all existence.

00:32:05.000 Once you arrive at that point in a kind of a clerical and bureaucratic and indeed patented form, then truly then, Nietzsche's prognosis is carried out.

00:32:20.000 Russell, if I can interrupt there.

00:32:22.000 You know, the issue of genetic engineering was really a path to patenting.

00:32:27.000 Genetic engineering wasn't being done in order to feed the world or anything like that.

00:32:31.000 They said it at this meeting in 87, about which I've written in Terra Viva.

00:32:35.000 We have to do GMOs in order to own life.

00:32:39.000 And over the years I always say a GMO for them means God move over.

00:32:43.000 We will now be the creators.

00:32:45.000 We will be the rent collectors from life.

00:32:50.000 We've just, you know, we're looking at our paddy, which sadly, you know, we have 750 varieties of rice growing on our farm.

00:33:00.000 And the rains haven't stopped.

00:33:03.000 By now we should have been harvesting, but there is no sun to ripen.

00:33:07.000 And while I was looking at the rice, you know, and I'm thinking, here is this amazing seed that became a thousand seeds.

00:33:16.000 And here are the Monsantos and the Gates thinking, oh, we will prevent the seed from renewing.

00:33:23.000 We will terminate the fertility of seed and we will be gods.

00:33:26.000 So God move over is what GMOs actually mean.

00:33:30.000 You're so right.

00:33:31.000 Yes, and when Foucault talked about biopolitics, the control of life itself, I can see now how, through technology, life in a botanical sense is being patented and controlled, and in the form of human consciousness, through the management and control of attention, as well as obviously behaviour, You can see how every aspect of life is being controlled and curated.

00:34:00.000 How spontaneity is being extinguished.

00:34:06.000 Remember now, you can listen to and watch the full conversation by joining Stay Free AF.

00:34:11.000 If you do, you can watch our live sessions exclusively every Tuesday.

00:34:15.000 For example, on the 25th of October, if you're a member of Stay Free AF, you can join me while I talk to Eckhart Tolle.

00:34:22.000 And you can type out little questions and I'll ask him.

00:34:25.000 And on the 1st of November, I'll be talking to Jordan Peterson.

00:34:28.000 Thanks for joining us.

00:34:29.000 See you next week with another fantastic conversation.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - October 18, 2022

Vandana Shiva (You Can’t Fake Food!)

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