From gratitude to Navdanya

Topics

What has always guided me is my love and respect for the Earth and for humanity. My gratitude for the life that the living Earth gives us is what guides me to defend nature and people’s rights. The human right to be alive flows from the Earth’s intrinsic rights, therefore, for me, defending the Earth is our duty as well as our right.

The best way people can become engaged is in participating in the regeneration of the living Earth by growing a garden, or by growing food ecologically, without chemicals. When we care for the soil we become part of the Earth, we become aware that we are part of nature.

We are made of the same five elements that also constitute the Earth: space, air, water, fire, earth. Humus, as in soil, is the root of the word human. We are soil. We are made of soil. And we can and have the duty to regenerate soil.

We have to change course. We have to abandon the path of extractivism, of taking without giving, of putting profits above people. This is the path of consumerism, which is destroying the conditions of human life on Earth. It is a dead end; it ends in extinction. The path that leads to the possibility of a human future is shown by following the path that indigenous people have walked over millennia without destroying the Earth. It is walking in nature’s ways that have sustained life on Earth over thousands of years.

At Navdanya we are deeply aware that the soil is living, and that caring for the living soil is the most important aspect of growing food. Food is the gift of living seed and living soil. Seed and plants make living soil, and living soil grows living seed. The land on which the Navdanya farm is located was a desertified piece of land, impoverished by a eucalyptus plantation. To regenerate the soil, we feed the soil microorganisms by adding organic matter. We grew biodiversity, and it invited a biodiversity of insects and pollinators, of earthworms and soil organisms, of medicinal plants and uncultivated, wild edibles. When we do not spray pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate, which kill insects and plants, biodiversity grows biodiversity.
Biodiversity grows abundance, biodiversity grows life.

Our research shows that one third of the food is produced by pollinators. The nutrition in our food comes from soil microorganisms. Seed care is taking care of open pollinated, renewable seed, growing seed diversity in a living seed bank so it can coevolve with changing climate.
Navdanya’s seed bank is living, it’s a commons, where seeds coevolve with human care. The Navdanya seed bank on the Navdanya farm is one of the 150 community seed banks we have helped to set up since 1991. I started community seed banks to save the diversity of living seed, and to keep seeds in farmers’ hands.
It was in 1987, at a meeting on new biotechnologies, that the chemical corporations first mentioned how they would have genetically engineered seeds to own them through patents. They said all seeds would have been corporate GMO patented seeds by 2000, and the trade related intellectual property rights agreement of GATT/WTO[1] would have been used to make seed saving and exchange illegal.
For me saving and sharing seeds is an ethical and ecological duty. So I made a commitment to save seeds with communities in community seed banks, and also to challenge the false claim that seeds are machines invented by Monsanto. A community seed bank is the reclaiming of the commons of life in a time of imperialism over life, beginning with monopoly over seeds.

In terms of water, throughout history, water sources have been regarded as sacred. They are places worthy of reverence and awe because water is a gift of nature, and it gives the gift of life. It is essential for our survival. Not only does it constitute a significant portion of our own bodies, but through water soil is hydrated so plants can grow, giving rise to life. In turn, the organic matter from plants and other living beings return to the soil, making it more resilient to erosion and increasing water holding capacity.
Water is a commons. It is the ecological basis for all life. Its sustainability and equitable allocation depend on cooperation among community members. However, there is a growing momentum towards the privatization of water resources. We see increasing intervention by the state in terms of water policy and the subversion of community control over water resources. Throughout history and across the world, water rights have been shaped both by the limits of ecosystems and by the needs of people. Water has traditionally been treated as a natural right. Water rights as natural rights do not originate with the state; they evolve out of the given ecological context of human existence.

As for soil, living soil is a complex food web teeming with life. One cubic meter can hold more than 5,000 earthworms, 50,000 insects and mites, and 12 million roundworms. One gram can contain 30,000 protozoa, 50,000 algae, 400,000 fungi and billions of bacteria. This life in the soil is what rejuvenates soil fertility and makes nutrients available to the plants that support our agriculture. Yet the agricultural industry adopted the myth that synthetic fertilizers can increase food production, independent of soil life, as they remove the ecological limits to food production. This myth is supported by the construct of yield – a measure of the weight of the commodity that leaves the farm. It is not a measure of the nutritional value of food produced from the land, nor does it take account of the condition of the land after harvest. The use of artificial fertilizers has resulted in the death of soil life, and therefore in the reduction of soil fertility. Meaning that nutrition per acre has decreased. The cycling of carbon and nitrogen through the soil has been disrupted. The hydrological cycle is negatively affected.
Industrial agriculture is inherently water intensive. It uses ten times the water to produce the same amount of food as ecological agriculture. This is the primary reason why water is being mined, leading to water scarcity in large parts of the world. Chemicals and synthetic fertilizers also destroy the water holding capacity of previously living soil.

All humans have the same rights to food and water, clean air and a safe and healthy environment. Human beings, as part of the Earth, have the natural rights to be alive, well and healthy. The right to life means the right to breathe and have clean air, the right to water and freedom from thirst, the right to food and freedom from hunger, the right to a home, to belonging, to land, to the sustenance and livelihoods that soil and land provide. Since we depend on nature for sustenance, destruction of nature translates into violation of human rights to food, water, life and livelihood. All ecological problems have common roots in the denial of the Earth as a living system, and in the violation of the limits of her ecological cycles and processes. The violation of the integrity of species and ecosystems, the breaking of ecological limits, planetary boundaries, cultural integrity and diversity are at the root of multiple ecological emergencies the Earth is facing, and of social and economic emergencies humanity is facing.
Industrial agriculture is responsible for the destruction of soil, water and biodiversity of the planet. At this rate, if the share of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased anymore, we will have a dead planet.

Biodiversity, the diversity of species, their mutuality and interconnectedness create the web of life, maintain the living planet and the infrastructure of life. The emergencies humans face in terms of hunger and thirst, disease and pandemics are rooted in the ecological crises and in the crises of injustice, inequality, and inhumanity. The multiple crises and pandemics we face today – the health pandemic, the hunger pandemic, the poverty pandemic, the climate emergency, the extinction emergency, the emergency of injustice, exclusion and inequality, dispossession, and disposability of large numbers of humanity – are all rooted in a worldview based on the illusions of separation and superiority which deny the interconnectedness and oneness of all. The anthropocentric assumption that humans are separate from nature and superior to other species who have no rights is not just a violation of the rights of our fellow beings, but also a violation of our humanity and human rights. Scientists are now finding out that cooperation shapes evolution, not competition. From the molecules in a cell, to organisms, ecosystems and the planet as a whole, cooperation and mutuality are the organizing principles of life. Indigenous cultures have always organized themselves as members of the Earth community working in cooperation to maintain the infrastructure and well-being of life. As for technology, in a mechanistic paradigm, chemical, mechanical and genetic technologies become the measure of the sophistication of a health system. But technologies are tools. Tools must be assessed on ethical, social and ecological criteria. Tools and technologies have never been viewed as self-referential in Indian civilization. Instead, they have been assessed in the context of contributing to the well-being of all.

Food systems need to regenerate biodiversity[2] in order to provide more food for more species and more people so no one is hungry, no one is malnourished, and no one is sick with chronic diseases. We need to rewild our minds, our food, and our food systems. Rewilding also means regenerating biodiversity on our farms and forests, and rewilding our gut microbiome, our bodies, and our minds. Rewilding food also includes undoing the historic injustices perpetrated against indigenous people and tribals. It includes bringing people and food back into the forests, and trees and animals back on farms.

Rewilding includes rediscovering and regenerating forest foods and wild edibles, as well as creating food forests. It includes taking animals out of factories and putting them back on the land. Letting them be free-range, and integrating them back in an agroecological farming system, to nourish the plants that feed them.

Given the planetary emergency, and the social and economic emergency of unemployment, farmers’ debt and suicides, we now need to protect the Earth, to defend the rights and livelihoods of our small peasants, our tribals, our artisans, in order to create meaningful, creative, dignified self-organized work in living economies that regenerate the Earth and people’s livelihoods, people’s hope in the future. The shift from fossil-fuel driven corporate globalization to localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative. Economic localization implies that whatever can be produced locally, with local resources, should be protected, to build a vibrant local economy so that both livelihoods and the environment are protected.

Twenty years after I wrote Water Wars, every crisis I wrote about has intensified in the industrial world. Privatization of water has increased, but we have also had victories against water privateers like Coca Cola. In a small village in Kerala called Plachimade, women were able to shut down a Coca Cola plant.
The movement of protecting water as a commons has grown worldwide. Industrial agriculture is water intensive and has dried up lakes and aquifers. In the chapter on climate change in Water Wars, I quoted a farmer from Orissa saying: «Too much water and too little water create disasters». Climate extremes are experienced as floods and droughts, and both have been increasing. On the other hand, our biodiversity-based practices at Navdanya do not just regenerate biodiversity, they also regenerate water systems. When soils are fertilized organically, as previously mentioned, their water holding capacity increases, thus increasing climate resilience.

Soil and water are deeply interconnected. We need to shift from an extractivist model of economy to a circular model. We need to shift from separation and mechanistic reductionism to an organic understanding of ecosystems and the planet.

 

[1] General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, later become World Trade Organization (Ed.’s Note).

[2] www.navdanyainternational.org/rewilding-food-rewilding-our-mind-rewilding-the-earth/