04:39
Vandana
Founder of modern organic Chemistry Having to tell the people who hijacked the science and reduced it to nitrogen fertilizers. First guano and everything else. Then they destroyed it. And then to the labs of Hitler. And to know the same processes that allowed explosives and ammunition to then be turned into making fertilizer. And if you want to understand the violence of this system, I think it’s good to look at people like Haber. The. Haber–Bosch process is the basis of synthetic fertilizer. Haber’s wife committed suicide, and in her suicide note, she wrote that she was also a chemist. And she says, I cannot tolerate the kind of violent turn Haber has taken to make chemicals for killing. So what went wrong really is I. G. Farben, Rockfeller, Standard Oil got together and with the finance and fossil fuels and chemistry, made the entire inputs to what became industrial agriculture.
It’s really based on the science of killing and the tools of killing.
And that’s why it’s not an accident that insects are disappearing and birds are disappearing. Rachel Carson tried to wake us up to this on the silent spring. And yet we are still not connecting any extinction crisis to the crisis of chemicals in industrial farming, chemicals that we designed to kill. But with it came the mindset that we are enemies of nature. And nature has to be destroyed in order to get food. Interestingly, it’s now flipped, as you will have seen. They now are talking about destroying food in order to save the climate.
06:34
Vandana
But it’s always through these dualism and polarizations when the Earth works in cooperation and symbiosis and the beautiful symbiosis between the mycorrhizing, the organic soil and the plant, and the beautiful symbiosis between the sunshine. You have woken us all so much to this growing life that we have to shift to growing life from spreading death. And the reason we have to do regeneration is because war has entered every farm, in every field, every forest. The reasons the forests are burning in Canada is because they’re spraying glyphosate. And the Indigenous people have a huge campaign called Stop the spraying. Because if you spray a desiccant which dries the forest, of course there’ll be fires. And the oceans, the rivers, our bodies, because food is what connects the world. Food is what gives us life.
07:35
Vandana
And when poisons enter at that end and the war mentality enters the food system, then all the systems of destruction begin and all the systems of silencing the voices of truth and science. Rachel Carson, she was attacked for saying pesticides killed. The founder of Modern organic Chemistry, who taught us about nitrogen, is having to say, I have to destroy the altars of Lies. Because the science he had created was being destroyed. And because today media is vague and because billionaires have got into food, have got into agriculture. Mr. Bill Gates talks about one agriculture for the world, and that one agriculture of the world will be producing raw materials for lab food, which he also has patents on. And the Bayer of the world are totally in sync with him. Let me just share with you what Bayer said.
08:41
Vandana
Bob writer of Bayer says in order for plant based companies — (plant based is just another word for — in their vocabulary, another word for lab food, because everything is plant based. Everything begins with the green leaf, begins with the photosensitive. So plant based in their language is factories to produce food). And Bayer is saying, in order to get this at scale and in large enough quantity, they’ll have to turn to us. They will require efficient sources of amino acids and carbohydrates. Food has disappeared. Food is raw material for the lab, speed stock, as you know. And this will bring them around to grow crops. The last thing we want to do to around crops that can be tilled and cultivated by machine. All the things that are wrong with industrial agriculture.
09:36
Vandana
What’s wrong with industrial agriculture is a, it’s based on fossil chemicals and a war mentality. Two, it’s based on fossil run machinery. Three, it’s based on rows of monocultures. Four, it’s in the hands of the poison cartel. And they, with the billionaires now, will not tolerate the real science. They will not tolerate truth, and they will attack every journalist, every scientist, every farmer, as has been done in so many countries. And that’s why our common work of solidarity, our common work of truth, our common work of caring for the Earth and stopping this war is so much more important. In our times, it was always important. We’ve had a century of this war, but now it is going to determine the future of humanity.
10:29
Andre
What you’re saying there is very important. And I just want to go back to when you talked about Australia and 60,000 actually, we actually have very good data now of Aboriginal food systems of 65,000 years ago and what they were eating, how they were preparing it. And I think from me, myself and others, I’m actually going. I’m writing a book on their agricultural systems and I’m going to call it 65,000 years of regenerative agriculture and show these complex systems of food forests, of how they manage grazing. They actually use fire at particular times of the year to regenerate pastures, and then their livestock, which are kangaroos and emus, would follow them. They didn’t need fences, they could manage them and they had sustainable harvesting systems. These particular pastures weren’t monocultures, they were incredibly biodiverse.
11:38
Andre
And in these pastures they had yams and all these other plants, herbs, medicines, these phenomenal biodiversity. Then the same with the forests that they managed, and they built these incredibly diverse perennial systems, which the colonists, being used to simple monocultures, couldn’t understand. And they called it wilderness. It was never a wilderness. This was a managed ecosystem. I think it’s actually one of the almost racist terms now, where you don’t realize how First nations people actually created these incredibly complex ecosystems and we write them off. But I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that here’s evidence that we get the right system. We can have 65,000 years of food production without running down the system. In fact, we increase the biodiversity over that time.
12:54
Vandana
And you know, with my work india, found the violence of industrial agriculture, which is a war agriculture. It can destroy fragile ecosystems in two and three years. It destroyed Punjab by one of the most robust areas, with lots of water, good plains, in ten years. But the more fragile arid and semi arid areas in two, three years, it’s finished. And here we have 65,000 years. And I think we need to really start putting this timescale for the work of good farming, that we are here to farm for the next 65,000 years. And our little bit of work is to make sure that the paths to the 65 years is not closed by the greedy, the billionaires, the warmongers.
13:55
Vandana
And it breaks my heart to see the climate treaty, which we framed with the biodiversity treaty, and they were two sides of the same coin, because the biosphere is what manages the atmosphere and the climate. And this is the living Earth Gaia thesis. To put the two separately, and now to try and say the only way we can save the climate is by destroying what remains of biodiverse ecological agriculture and turning it into even bigger monocultures of feedstock for lab food, I think that is the latest attack. And together, the regenerative organic movement, the Indigenous people who are regenerators, we all need to now join hands for the 65,000 year vision.
14:55
Andre
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think this is really important. And when we start looking at Indigenous cultures and how they maintain the planet, and it was colonialism that destroyed know, I think Sir Albert Howard is a classic case on how incredibly diverse and resilient and productive Indian farming was. And when colonialism came along and said, no, you’re not growing food, you’re growing Indigo, you’re growing cotton, and destroyed these systems, created the famines and destroyed it. We say the same with Ethiopia. Historically, you look at Ethiopia, one of the most incredibly complex, rich civilizations, all the historical evidence from ancient Egypt, when they talk about Ethiopia as this land of abundance, and then colonialism comes along, and Ethiopia is still not recovering, and Australia is probably the last continent to really be colonized.
16:08
Andre
And I’m going back to the first accounts of what the soil was like. The one chemist is actually a colleague of von Liebig, who analyzed the soil in the 1830s in Australia. The lowest level he found was 5% organic matter. Some was 50, the average was 30%. And then you talk about the semi arid, like you said, in three years, it was over, it was gone, the biodiversity was gone, the pastures were gone. And the traditional owners now, because their food systems were destroyed, were now refugees in their own country because of this. And where we are today is a direct result of this colonialism. And what we’re really seeing now is the new colonialism by the poison cartels.
17:10
Vandana
Old colonialism only looked at territory. They wanted the land, but the new colonialism wants the life of every living organism. And that’s why the whole issue of patent exceed and genetic engineering becomes so important for them. T. rying to modify soil organisms. You don’t even know 99% of them. You don’t know what the impact of your one engineered organism will be to the 99% that you don’t know. You’re supposed to go through biosafety, and you’re running away from biosafety by creating even more confusion, trying to call the new genetic engineering, which is the old genetic engineering of gene editing CRISPR, totally driven by Mr. Gates, like the old genetic engineering was driven by the ideology of the Rockefellers. They’re now trying to say, oh, this is totally nature, so it should not be labeled, it should not be researched for biosafety .
18:16
Vandana
It should not be regulated. But it’s novel, and therefore we can own it. This is totally a threat to ontology. You can’t say the same thing is natural, and then say, no, it’s not. And again, it comes back to debates. Altar of Lies. This whole edifice is based on an altar of lies. And just because the lies are told by big money power and big destructive power, they think they’ll get away with it. Lies are lies, no matter how powerful the person speaking them, and no matter how much the resonance they create through paid media to attack anyone who speaks the truth. But the tiniest voice of the tiniest mycorrhiza, the tiniest voice of an indigenous peasant, the tiniest voice of a small farmer, is still truth.
19:19
Vandana
And I think the old contest between industrial and ecological, industrial and regenerative organic. Industrial being the fossil system, the fossil chemical system, the war system that continued colonization of the earth and colonization of our mind. It is now reaching such disparate levels. GMOs have failed because complex systems cannot be engineered. You still want to continue to tell the lie that you are engineering organisms to take patents on them. The new gene editing being used to do deregulation of all the biosafety means the end of health and the end of seed freedom. Farmers, they won’t know if the seed is regenerative or is it not. Because nothing will tell them. So taking away the right to know is a big violation.