Vaissnavi Shukl
I remember the first time I heard Dr. Vandana Shiva. It was at my alma mater sept University in, I think 2015 and I was left in complete awe of her work, her activism and her grace. She opened my eyes to a whole new world of seed saving, biodiversity and feminism. The last time I saw her was a few days before the COVID lockdowns began. She had generously accepted our invitation to deliver the keynote lecture for the International Women’s Week at the GSD but since then, a lot has changed. The world has changed. So for today’s episode, and this season’s finale, I thought of having a candid conversation with her about the fears and anxieties of a young architect.
I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

So what I’ll do is, I would frame my questions and today’s conversation through the perspective of young professionals unsettling. Because they don’t think I can parallel or even compare to all the other big questions that you might get asked over normally. I keep this very light vague, and we’ll take it from there. So of course the last time we met, this was one week before the lockdown and in your conversation in your talk you very briefly alluded to the virus and the potential that a small virus can have in terms of disrupting an entire planet, so to speak. And then, of course, looking back at it, it seems like there’s a certain ability of hyper engineered matter to disrupt life on Earth and even when it comes to vaccines and everything that happened after, but since that talk and now, so many events have been related to our food systems. So right from the Farmers’ Protest that we saw last year in India, to the War in Ukraine and how it disrupted the global wheat supply. It seems like there are so many economic and geopolitical factors at play here. My larger question is, at this point, I’m not sure where my food comes from. I am not sure at what cost that comes to me at, and I don’t know how to reconcile my identity as a consumer with all these wages in justices that are involved in the food system.

Vandana Shiva
You know, the globalisation of the food system is designed to erase any knowledge at any level. It’s an eraser. You know, I’ve always seen the current neoliberal globalisation of corporations as mimicking the colonial globalisation. Except that in colonialism, you know, agriculture was transformed into producing raw materials, like cotton, which has always given the clothing for people, then became the biggest raw material for the Empire, leading to the colonisation of America, slavery for working those cotton plantations, Indigo cultivation, the Indigo Revolt. The difference between that period and today is in between, was Hitler’s Germany, the dependence on oil…two years… 200 years of fossil fuel, but 100 years of oil and oil used to then make chemicals. And that changed not just the way food is distributed, but how it’s produced. And the very fact that food is produced with new inputs means it is actually costlier food. Fossil fuels… fossil fuel fertilisers because all chemicals are fossil fuel based and very costly to produce. The only way they can spread around the world and I’ve realised this when I first tried to study why did Punjab go so wrong and I wrote my book called ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’. And if you don’t have subsidies, this one spreads. You have chemicals in farming, because of the subsidies, which means the taxpayers will get poisoned by the same chemicals that they’re subsidising, they’re poisoning, without their knowing. I did a report three years ago on… we did a book called ‘True Cost Accounting’. Just in India, if you take the costs and harm to society and the environment, just two externalities. Every year, just chemical harm is $1.3 trillion. But at that time, we weren’t looking at health costs. When we did that wealth per acre, you have the health cost, that’s another $1.52 trillion. So we’re talking about the externalities of the dominant way of producing food as bigger than that’s formally measured. The new report we did ‘our daily bread’, we decided to look at what share was to the farmer. And we found an average of 5%. The UK has just done a new study of farmers groups, they have done a study but that is not that the farmer… the farmer is getting 1%. But the farmer is also in debt  for the chemicals for the machinery, and add it all up. I bought it in a book called ‘biodiversity, agroecology and regenerative organic agriculture’ . It’s also published in The States but it was first published in India and a publisher heard me and he said, “I had no idea, farming had science to it. I thought organic was about trade and the brand”. And I said no, “Its foundation’s relationship and knowing the science and relationship.” So that book has come out and you have a whole chapter in that on this whole issue of true cost accounting. So when you ask me what the true cost is, the true costs is unaffordable, for the Earth and the people. This industrial globalising system would not exist if true costs were being paid. The problem is globalisation and Industrialisation has split you know, any production system, the person who produces bears the costs, gets the profits and the margins. And we have an industrial globalised food system, where the farmer who is producing is losing, that’s why we have 400,000 farmer suicides in India. The people who are consuming don’t know what they are consuming and they are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. But the ones who are not producing or consuming and selling the inputs into the system are walking away with trillions of dollars of profits. So it’s a very dismembered system and we will not be able to make it whole till farmers and consumers start to connect. It’s now an ecological survival imperative. And it needs effort. All good work needs effort. When people say, ‘It takes work’. I say, “You were born by hard work by your mother”.  Tell me a child that came into this world without labour. Labour is creation. And the farmers work really hard. And I think it’s now time for consumers to do the hard work to connect.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s interesting you mentioned raw materials, and how all the basic necessities of life became sources for a whole different set of industries and then to industrialization. But again on your recommendation, I’m looking at new raw materials…

Vandana Shiva
Yes, I remember, you tried to meet her. But she was in Maine.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. So I’m looking at this raw material which is, Shoshana Zuboff, she… she talks about our data and our activities that becomes raw material for a whole different way of capitalism. And this goes into my next question, because my next point of concern has to do with your emphasis on diversity. Now a lot of people have wrongly portrayed us as anti-globalisation, which I know is not the case. But as a young designer, I often see that there’s a relentless urge among people, among my clients, friends, to aspire for this more than global culture, whatever, whatever that that is. And this reflects not just in the design briefs I get, where somebody would want a new housing in India, to look like a new house in Italy, for example. But also the kind of food cultures that are developing in cosmopolitan cities. So you would have sushi and burgers and Pad Thai and Thai curry being now made in Indian households. I’m not sure what I… what I think about it, but it seems like we are all heading towards this fuzzy homogeneous culture which has no relation to the time and the place that we’re living in, or to our identity as people belonging from a certain geographical location. How do I make sense of that?

Vandana Shiva
Because I’ve dedicated my life, to first understanding nature to quantum theory, but understanding nature through ecology for a large part of my life. I’ve understood that diversity emerges from self organisation and self organisation means relationships in place. So a rice variety becomes different according to the context in which it’s growing. And that’s the reason we have such unique food cultures all over the world. Gujarati is so different from Bengali food, so different from Kerala, so different from Maharashtra. So nobody forced it to default as the relationship to the plants of the place, the soil of the place, and the best expressions with deep knowledge of health and diet, because none of this is uninformed. It’s deeply informed about what’s good for the health of the soil and our health. Globalisation has basically become, just like in the issue of costs, has become a negative economy. Corporate globalisation, which is not a meeting of autonomous locals, you know, that’s internationalism, at the political level, that’s what the UN system is supposed to be. That is planetary in terms of Gaia, you know, the Gaia as a whole is one small organism made of many, many, many ecosystems, many, many other organisms. And that’s what a truly global culture is, networked through evolved indigenous local cultures. And that’s what in food brings health and in clothing brings beauty. Now, the minute you have everyone wearing very blue jeans, the poor people wearing a copy of Levi, and the others very Levi, you’ll get the boredom of uniformity. And that boredom of uniformity is an internalisation of colonisation. Colonisation is basically not just material control over resources and territory and land, but it is a cultural cultivation of a sense of superiority, telling you’re inferior, that’s what Macaulay…when Macaulay said, “This countries too rich you know, we can’t colonise it economically. They’re too rich, but we can make them feel they’re inferior and that everything they have is inferior. And everything we bring, even the junk we bring, is superior. That’s how we colonise them.” So in a way through corporate globalisation, based on neoliberalism. What’s really happening is everywhere people are feeling inferior about who they are, what they wear, what they eat, and it’s not that nobody’s thinking through that, “Oh, sushi is tastier than Khakhra” and they just thoughtlessly mimic me and that’s what consumerism is. I will mention something, around the time, WTO hadn’t yet been signed,  but the debates that were happening and I was part of the International Forum on Globalisation, but actually stopped WTO in Seattle. And by the way, there is a new film, beside my book, independently people made a new film called, “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva”, which is very good footage of the Seattle protests.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And it has Mark Ruffalo inside.

Vandana Shiva
I was debating, I think, the Trade Secretary or the Commerce Secretary of the US, in Washington. And he said, “Democracy now, is buying anything from anywhere at any time.” And I said, “No. Democracy is the right to produce, according to ecological and social responsibility with the least harm to the Earth. And creating the best well being for everyone in society. So this idea, of the right to consume, fits right into the right to control by the corporation. And so we are all tumbling moving down that way. To the extent that in these 30 years of globalisation, everyone was wearing a saree, and now when I walk, you know, when I go to the airport or something, you know, people will… young people will come up to me, and say “Are you a nun?”, you know, they don’t imagine the saree to be an Indian clothing. That’s how much we can forget. That’s how much we can not remember. But because you started this question by showing Shoshana Zuboff book, which very powerfully shows that we are being reduced to new raw material, but also the new dumpyard, you know. Every industrial system has to have raw material somewhere which they extract, but that generates waste, which has been generated some.. throw in some somewhere else, and India has become a land of piles of things which we didn’t have before. I think I’ve read that book before I met you. But besides the fact that that little virus taught us so much, the management of the virus taught us that the surveillance system is totally in place. And it is the new economy, as she says, capitalism. So it is not just political control, it is a generate of profits through the control.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And again it ties back into what you talk about in your book as well you know, ‘Oneness versus the 1%’. And how all the profits are actually controlled by that one percent is 0.001 percent. Yeah, it’s ridiculous if you think about the scale and the power that that 0.00001 percent holds. But my next question is going to be related to a personal guilt that I face on a day to day basis. And the many violences that we subject our land and are soil to. And this… this guilt is real, when, as an architect, I  break ground for a new site, there’s ofcourse tremendous joy in building something on plain ground, but also the realisation that the ground is really not plain. It is home to millions of pests and insects and you talk about the role of pests and insects in organic farming and how they kind of self sufficiently manage a whole different system which reduces the need for fertiliser or discards the need for fertiliser, that this plain ground is also home to the organisms that my naked eye cannot even see. And it feels like through the act of building I am disturbing a natural ecosystem. It almost seems like I’m subjecting that land that ground to a violence that it could have not been subjected to and come to think about it at a very global scale, I mean, this is a very micro action,  when you multiply this, the nature of the profession, the nature of the industry is such that once we’ve done this intervention on the land that can never go back to what it used to be because, one, our cities are growing at a scale that we were never prepared for them to grow at. And then of course, our population is at an all time high. And there’s still that kind of an aspiration to move to the city and live in the city. And so there’s a tremendous migration in terms of the rural to the urban. Even in terms of seasonal labour, we used to see construction workers still going back to home for your Holi plantation for harvest season, and that seems to be reducing that relationship between humans and land on the kind of interventions we have between us and the land. How do we really think about this?

Vandana Shiva
Yeah you have raised a very serious question, because removing people from the land has been the enterprise for the simple reason that people who are on the land are free. You know, they are on lands…When I organised a 500,000 farmers rally in Cubbon Park in Bangalore, in 1993, before the ‘signing act’. And I invited many people, including the Environment Minister of Brazil, the Environment Minister of Ethiopia who are friends of mine. And Brazilian minister, José Lutzenberger, is sitting with me scribbling away from the stage. And he says, “You know, now I understand why they are so scared of small farmers.” Remember the protests in the Netherlands right now. And then while we were chatting on stage there, we realised that really, it’s only in part that the Earth can produce. Of course, industrial farming is a displacement of people organisations. Who said the population is increasing. And of course, what’s happening is the country’s being the earlier one of the early reports, and yet, I remember coaching Agriculture Secretary of the United States, working in the 70s said, we’ve just squeezed the last farmer off the land, lightly squeezed them out last bit of toothpicks from a toothpaste. So that is what is flushed out of the villages into the cities. And you know, I’m having to deal with a landmark here because I’ve saved an area for farming and of course, everyone’s eyes turn all around us. Everything’s gone. It’s a whole new challenge, you know, living in a village was so sick, and now I smoke so of course, that’s that’s fine But when you talk about your profession, think about think about the larger context with which you are so many, you all are working on ecological agriculture and ecological design. And, and the first principle of any activity has to be making the omelette. I mean, even those times were saying, I have to be who your mother was, I will make myself known than I am. And I think that principle is the basic principle. And then there’s so much innovation now. I promoted gardens of hope. Or whatever is really showing from China entire cities now. The soil is what’s monitoring everything on the land, but you can bring soil to a high level that’s where the new but I do not treat as inevitable. The idea that that’s why earlier I said was to connect and create farming communities, to the designers to do with the advice of the smoke of the city to advise them reforming of the Barcelona mayor is very very progressive. As I said the two things that must be done that have been destroyed by these ideas of the economy and alpha falling out and because he was here, first. Maybe not large amounts, but definitely a large amount. Because it’s all fed into each other. We had an agriculture that reduced agriculture or Syrian commodities, just because they could be traded long distance. But we do just read about it and read it lots of subjects and subjects have grown close to that of production. Definitely get into design of housing and architecture. Just today or yesterday there was an article on how the tomato growers are destroying it. Because you know when the World Bank structural adjustment that’s when they close the history. Farmers are protesting the laws were introduced now that this shouldn’t be going on there should be growing demand. So some places it’s called tomatoes, onions, potatoes, some places. Wherever you see the last stretch is only going to Mentos because hybrid medicine is one of these chemicals. It’s irrigation. And then it’s the seed you’re more than one that the product is one and you can even recover the cost of taking it into the account or sell it. So I think we have to stop vegetable production more and more. It’s interesting you’re seeing this right now because one of the younger guests is a graduate and design project just

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s interesting you’re seeing this right now because one of the younger guests is a graduate and design project just thinking out loud what it was to become an actress. All the public gardens that cause a lot of water and sustainable gardens are very colonial constructs. What if we convert all the causes and public spaces into farmland? And what about the farmers instead of being disconnected as migrant workers? What if farmers were in a service provider could then build a new economy? Cities could have open folders from a service provider. But just because I would say not all. And not only service providers because you know having dedicated my life since the autonomy of the farmer

Vandana Shiva
I would still like farmers because you know they have a location. The second issue and that’s really the cities is on this global food. And I remember after the Paris Agreement that mommy minister Bowser had asked me in a similar way and then accepted this and they put into the urban housing design that you had to have gone to pass your design you ever had to have gone to jail. But the second is because like I said, I grew up in the city. Cities take care of them. There’s something called but they don’t care, which is the basics so we need food. chips for every city, not for people who don’t know what the cities of the country are, not what not human beings but to relate the living relationship of those who are in the sea. And the farmers that we know. So just like we managed to do those days, don’t be distorting US farming. grow rice and beans for everyone in India and you won’t grow any. You will let your body disappear, you will let your oil and your village disappear. And the reason we have a crisis we have is we are having a crisis in Punjab but we’re having a crisis. So instead of that model, one region is feeding on cereals and then torturing people because of the riots. He didn’t want the wife didn’t want to eat rice. You know that you talked about someone else in the city. We also should think about livelihoods for the country and the city, and you know how familiar you are with leaving work. He was the person who was the founder of organic chemistry, but he’s the one who really did all the work. But they turned it into input and he rebelled against it. He said this is not what was ever seen. And he wrote a book called Something on the Rich side. And I was asked a few years ago, a foreword to the English translation originals in 1800 German. It’s amazing in this book, he said no, this isn’t what I said. This is what I meant. I meant the circulation of I’m in the circulation of hospitals, not producing commodities. And he used the word metabolic. Marx picked it up from him and talked about the metabolic and what we are suffering is not just a metabolic rift between the country and the city, but a metabolic rift within the city itself and within our bodies. Marx picked it up and talked about the metabolic rate. And what we are suffering is not just a metabolic rift between the country and the city, but the metabolic rates within the city itself and within our bodies, the disease or the metabolic rate. So, I think food is an amazing teacher to help us redesign relationships of humans with the array of cities with the countries of every person in the city, with their food and their identity. And so much can happen, lowering the ecological footprint, lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases, this is the work I’ve done. Then I wrote solidor This is what I was talking about. Increasing biodiversity, not not just in the rural area. If only Punjab was right for the country, it would grow. Rice and when my pyjamas for itself it was going to so the minute you’re closer closer, you know, in terms of producers and consumers, the more you can diversify. uniformity is a result of centralised and if you want to bring biodiversity back and we need biodiversity for the planet, for the biodiversity, but also managing the planet, and for a health search, without biodiversity or microbiome. So to reverse the desertification on the land and desertification and biodiversity biodiversity by tightening the rich way for making that distancing short,

Vaissnavi Shukl
my last question has to do all of your job extensively about the infrastructure of care, and how of course you’re buying your your point the dog ecofeminism and point out how a lot of the justice system in the world right now in our food systems and our life right now have to do because there’s been an inherent gender inequity in the function. Now I sometimes shy away from identifying as a feminist because I feel like if I ever used that word out in the open, there’s a certain connotation of women being anti-men in some regards, or women or even put it it’s just a head of everything in the world, but women, it’s that kind of identity that people often associate feminism with. And I feel like if I were to ever raise my voice in this male dominated industry, where on a day to day basis I go to sites I’m often the more people that I work in this field that is full of men, that if I ever was to raise my voice for injustice that I am seeing, or if I was to take on the role of an activist, that I cannot probably be associated with the broader your feminism because that which is probably pushing me in a very different light. Now, at heart I know I am a feminist in a lot of the ways that I mean, I run a factory where we are all only men and that’s a very conscious affirmative action, but I do want to try and change the narrative. In order to do that I had to get the products documented by female photographers working mostly with vendors and try to do it in the very subservient way that I can. But I find myself shying away from thinking about the role of an activist when I need to, and because you’ve done it with so much grace and so much courage. How does one G switch roles from say, for example, you being a physicist, you being somebody who has this wonderful foundation to you being an activist as well? And are those two roles often mutually exclusive? Do you compartmentalise them or does activism become a way of life?

Vandana Shiva
First, I did not create the word feminism. I wrote a book with Maria nice, because the publisher’s answers to everything staying alive and the best seller and Marie African a book called patriarchy and elimination on a world scale. And they said why don’t you write a book together on feminism? So they gave the title that we both are equal feminists in central ecological and local feminists, and we were bringing the two together, but it was Francois, a French philosopher, when you first used it in 1975. You talked about the hesitation of using the word feminism. Part of it is the way it has been. And anyway, all along. You know, I remember right from the beginning, feminism in India was about social justice assaults. A large part of feminism about the best was me. And when the Beijing conference took place, that’s when structural adjustment was happening. That’s when we were talking about the structures of Bucha. And in the West, women are still talking about atomized liberation. I don’t think one should ever worry about the word. I’ve never I’ve never I never use the word organic. When I started, I used to use the word non violent farming. Then I found that there’s a system called organic. So I helped contribute build that system, the science economy. Now there’s a massive assumption. And I’m not going to stop using the word you know, because if your intention is to silence me, I will not be silent but speaking can take place in different ways and to be living through it all Don’t be the network. It’s the party you choose. And you ask the question about my role as a scientist exploring nature, functions, relationships, and an activist working to transform, but I don’t jump across boxes that are not in boxes. These are not mutually exclusive. For me, I have never, ever acted without doing. So it’s only because I’ve done the study on the balance between diffusion that I then became active when I studied intellectual property rights, everything about what is happening in WTO. That’s when I say receipt, thinking is an understanding of the direction of your actions and that’s a continuum. And that comes from deep knowledge. It comes from deep knowledge. And the more knowledge you have, the more you act the right way and activism as again, a box of a group of people will go there in childhood streets. That’s the wrong one. Activism for me, is a commitment and ethical commitment to not accept passive violence against the non acceptance of that violence is about non violence. The father of non violence is activism and knowledge of how things are related is what shows what is violent and what is not violent. So that knowledge and the right action or in any way, you know, I’ve done my theory is not excluded. It’s always that you could be a particle, you could be the same one. You don’t have a different the fact that different expressions continuous doesn’t make your expression something we keep pile of books and to have to raise for the fireworks and one of the books that’s raising like it’s beautiful book. Love it that is the point that says love it. 1000 names, so 1000 ways of expression. So I really use the plurality of what is in position much more creatively, including in defining our actions.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Because I would always think of it as, you know, sticking out like a sore thumb if I was to just like to be, this is what I believe I can minimise, which would be to start really small and then just throw it away. I will keep going.

Vandana Shiva
Here and anyway when you I chose to proceed, logical agriculture is a beautiful action of love than hugging. And that’s why having the trees is where I learned my biological parents, but then realised that again, coming back to capitalism, one part that was extracted so the behaviour modification is just like everyone, everyone, everyone can do the same work that’s designing that level of control. So doing it your way, becomes the ultimate activism not the shouting out there. But the change. Activism is the change business.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So you just had a new book that comes out when asked the question always is, what’s next? What are you working on? What do you look forward to?

Vandana Shiva
You know, part of what I want to do is work much more closely in the classroom. I was facilitating the practices to make their lives better. But again, the knowledge that’s been enriched, you know, like I talked with them, a village and in the movies and then everyone’s doing so much automation. So I wouldn’t work with women in the room. Because I want to work with them to articulate another view. Another view on the economy, another view of politics, another view right now, I just want to point out that these two are not met this evening. You know, when I look into the jar, to see them, when they have housing festivals of this flower, and this vegetable of this tree, and then forgetting it themselves. So that’s what my understanding of climate change was always from the soil. You know, that’s what women have. And I think, you know, we’ve reached an absurd situation this week. Every debates and disagreements is making decisions for the love and knowledge of the Book, thank you so much for taking the time and just stopping

Vaissnavi Shukl
Thank you so much, Dr. Shiva.

Vandana Shiva
Thank you lovely seeing you again, in the very best for your activism annual.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.