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.
32:04
Vandana
We can bring it totally to zero, while enhancing the capacity of the biosphere through regeneration, to pull down the excess. As you have shown repeatedly, as we have talked repeatedly, and I think this is our work in the people’s regenerative movement, our work is to understand the lies, pull down the altar of lies, sow the seeds of diversity and regeneration, and heal the people, heal the community, heal the soil, heal the earth, because it is the same work. It is not different pieces of work.
32:44
Andre
Your metaphor mentioning, actually, more than the metaphor, mentioning the mycorrhiza and the microbiome, I think is critical. And one of the really important things there is Changing the way we see nature. I think one of the most unfortunate things about the misinterpretation of Darwin is this Concept of survival of the fittest. It’s a jungle out there, and you fight, and it’s the fittest that survives. But when you look at nature, that’s not true. If that’s the case, you look at a forest, it’d only be one species of tree. That’s the fittest. But over time, the opposite happens. You get more and more species, more diversity. And there’s a word for that: synergy. And it starts with the mycorrhiza, because the mycorrhizal fungi cannot photosynthesize, it cannot make its sugars and foods.
33:43
Andre
Soit lives in harmony, in coexistence, with plants that can photosynthesize, and the plants make glucose and organic molecules that feed the mycorrhiza. In return, the mycorrhiza then will go and get the plant, go deep down, get the plant water if it’s a drought, or get them phosphorus or nitrogen. And from the mycorrhiza’s point of view, the more nutrients it gives its host plant, the more it grows, the more organic molecules, more glucose it gets, the more it grows. And then the other thing we understand now is not one mycorrhiza with one host plant. All these mycorrhiza are interconnected, like an Internet, and they communicate, they speak. So if one plant is attacked by an insect, it will communicate it through the mycorrhiza to other plants and say: “start protecting yourself”.
34:44
Andre
Or if one plant hasn’t got water or nutrients, another plant will actually take those nutrients out and feed it through the mycorrhiza to other plants. So what we see here, it’s synergy and it’s cooperation and working together, that’s the strength of these systems. And that really, I suppose what I’ll say is the underpowering strength of regeneration, why systems regenerate.