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.
20:23
Vandana
And interestingly, the governments that talk a lot about free speech do not allow the free speech and the right to know of their own citizens when it comes to the food question. Because when it comes to the food and agriculture question, sadly, most governments are totally captive to the poison cartel. And that’s why I want to congratulate the Mexicans, who, through the movement of defensive corn and saying no to GMO corn, have created an entire system of governance where the governments, the president, stands with the people and with the corn, and they have resisted the worst, abusive power of the United States. And we need to stand wherever the voice of truth is defending biodiversity, defending farmers freedom and seed freedom and food freedom, and defending the democracy of life, because this is what farming has become.
21:30
Vandana
It has become the issue of freedom for life. It’s about freedom. It’s about truth, freedom, life.
21:38
Andre
You’re exactly right there. And I think what we’re seeing is two things. We’ve got this incredible attack on small farmers, regenerative farmers, First nations, traditional owners of ecosystems, or managers of ecosystems. We’re also saying that they’re controlling the media. They are censoring our voices in the mainstream media, in social media. If we say too much, we get cut out. They also limit our reach. But despite that, we are reaching. For instance, this event last year, we got over half a million people viewing it live. And then we promoted various videos like yours in particular. We got another 300,000 views for your video last time, and we got extra. So we actually reached 1.2 million people. So despite the fact they’re trying to censor us, we are getting through.
22:50
Andre
And the other thing I just want to say, because you’re like me, we’re all over the world. We meet with people, and what we’re seeing, the word I use is a regeneration revolution. We’re actually seeing these farmers and community groups and consumer groups and other people who are concerned about food systems and the environment coming together to promote and build these new systems.
23:22
Vandana
When we think of the world as a pyramid of power, where the top controls everything below that supports it, then you feel disempowered. You feel: oh they have so much power. But first, their power depends on us. In the top of a pyramid wouldn’t be able to be there if the bottom of the pyramid wasn’t holding it up. So the bottom of the pyramid has to be far more active of taking power away and not supporting the top of the pyramid. But I think the real vision we need to carry for our 65,000 year vision is the uncentered and decentered democracy of the mycorrhiza. There’s no part of the mycorrhiza that is calling the shots in nature. There’s nothing like a master molecule. There’s nothing like a dominant species. There is no privileged species in nature.
24:29
Vandana
In fact, the tiny microbes have bigger power in the world, even though we’ve underestimated them. And if anyone thinks it’s not true, just think of your COVID days. One little virus held the whole world through the control that others were taking to it. But the mycorrhizal fungi is such a beautiful teacher of decentralized democracy. And I think we are like that microorizal fungia. We are so uncentered. We move. But wherever we are giving, we are spreading, we are nourishing, and that is where the future movement will grow. We should not be anxious. We should not be anxious that we are not centralized. We should celebrate that we are decentralized, that wherever we are is the center of life of that place. And as we shift our mindset, not only because the crisis is getting deeper, and more people are being rubbished.
25:36
Vandana
There’s no place for you. There’s no home for you. BlackRock will own your home. No, there’s no education for you. BlackRock will own your education. Because as I wrote in the book, Oneness Vs The 1%, with my son, after the Paris summit where were together, I realized Bill Gates was running the show. And then went deeper into where the economy had changed. And then we found every giant corporation actually was now owned by the financial asset companies. And where do the finances come from? The same extractive economy and rent economy of the billionaires. So the big money is now controlling all the ways of making money. Now will BlackRock, which wants to go bigger. –. It was a nothing body in 2008 when the financial crisis took place and Wall street collapsed.
26:26
Vandana
The collapse of Wall street led to these guys emerging, and they’re totally self governed. No one controls them. They’re owned by the people whose money is in it. This has never been the case. And they really are desperate to create new ways of making money, whereas we are in the enterprise of growing life. And when life grows on its own terms, in its self organized, autopoietic ways, sadly, there’s no space for them. The mycorrhizal fungi will work on its own. They will try and engineer it for sure, but with consequences they have no idea of. And that’s why our turning to the ways of nature, our turning to the power of regeneration, which is built into living systems, our turning to our duty to care, which is what regeneration is about. Because we don’t create regeneration. Regeneration is life.
27:28
Vandana
What we do is facilitate it and stop the destruction. Our human work is to stop the harm. So stop the harm. Get rid of the pesticides, get rid of synthetic fertilizers, get rid of the GMOs, get rid of the patterns. Shift to the small farms, where the ability to care is real. We had a prime minister who was an agricultural economist, but also a farmer. And he said in his book called Agricultural Economics, his name was Chaudhry Charan Singh. And he said, if I had 100 acres, I would not give it to one man who would farm the 100 acres. I would give it to 40 small farmers. Because the small peasant can do what the large peasant farmer can’t. The small peasant can give care.
28:21
Vandana
And what care is about is being able to watch every plant in detail, to watch every patch of the soil and the eyes and the heart on the land is what the small farm has. So while they have been desperate to destroy the small farmer ever since they brought chemicals into farming. Our 65,000 year agenda is to protect life in its diversity and self organization, to protect the cultures that protect life, which is the indigenous cultures, and the small farmer. And if you have to be a small farmer, growing 200 things on your farm, half of them wild and uncultivated, you didn’t grow them, but if you’re not killing them, they’re growing. If you’re not spraying roundup, they will happily give you lots of food.
29:07
Vandana
Half the food of the world could be uncultivated edibles if we just let it grow, and it will increase the biodiversity. And when we do that, we end hunger when we allow this biodiversity to grow. And as our book Health per acre shows, biodiversity is where food comes from. Biodiversity is not just more nutrition per acre, but for now, we are realizing our gut microbiome needs biodiversity. Can’t cheat the gut. You can cheat the supermarket shelf, but you cannot cheat the gut. And therefore, when you have this level of diversity, then you will have to decentralize distribution, because the global market needs monocultures. And that’s why we’ve reduced from 10,000 species of plants we ate to about four or five commodities that can bring profits to the agribusiness. No, we need to shift from 10,000 to 20,000 and just increase our diversity of edibles.
30:10
Vandana
That means a much more indigenous knowledge in our food systems and more distribution. First, food for the soil. Anyone who says the soil doesn’t need food doesn’t realize food begins in the soil. Second, food for the family, the small farmer has to be fed. Half the hungry of the world are farmers today. That is so unfair. Then food for the local community. Let local distribution thrive, neighbor to neighbor. Local markets everywhere. Farmers markets everywhere. And let the global system get a few leftovers, it’s fine. We used to send spices to Europe way back, and we are happy to continue to do that. But we will not destroy our ability to produce food for the soil, food for the community, food for humanity, just for churning out larger and larger commodities that have an appetite that is so limitless that they must invade every forest.
31:12
Vandana
And let’s just go back to the climate thing. When I wrote Soil Not Oil, I assessed about 45% because IPCC was not doing an agriculture disaggregation. I said, when food gets transported, food gets industrially manufactured. And I just took those categories and said, let’s say half of it for food came to 45%, but it’s 50%. 14% from the fossil production, both fossil fuel use and fossil chemical use. 20% from destruction of forests. Why are we growing soya bean in the Amazon? 20% from food miles, ultra processing that is making us all sick, packaging that is polluting the planet. And then, because you’ve created a system of uniformity, you’ve created a system of waste, another 4%. Well, we can get rid of all of this.