Globalizing Peace, Love, & Understanding

Her melodic name is known to millions who follow or are part of many of the struggles around the world for food quality and sovereignty, water for all, for peace and against the violence of corporate globalization and religious fundamentalism. Vandana Shiva: dynamic Indian writer, alternative Nobel prize winner, 'physicist and philosopher,' activist.

Her earlier works discussed the effects of privatization and corporate control on agriculture, water and genetic diversity. Their titles reflect her stand: Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge and Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology.

Now in "Earth Democracy" she has brought together the themes of her life's work, with a holistic view of the current situation and what people can do about it. "Earth democracy shifts the worldview from one dominated by markets and military, monocultures and mechanistic reductionism, to the peaceful co-creation and co-evolution of diverse beings, connected through the common bonds of life… (It) allows us to remove our blinders, imagine and create other possibilities… Liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive." (185)

"Earth Democracy" presents basic problems threatening planetary health and even survival, but in a format oriented towards the positive. The major sections address aspects of this Earth Democracy: Living Economies; Living Democracies; Living Cultures; and Earth Democracy in Action. Each section discusses ecological and social challenges, with historical background and current examples. But first, she presents the 10 Principles of Earth Democracy, listed here in short form (see pages 9-11):

1. All species, peoples, and cultures have intrinsic worth.

2. The earth community is a democracy of all life.

3. Diversity in nature and culture must be defended.

4. All beings have a natural right to sustenance.

5. Earth Democracy is based on living economies and economic democracy.

6. Living economies are built on local economies.

7. Earth Democracy is a living democracy.

8. Earth Democracy is based on living cultures.

9. Living cultures are life nourishing.

10. Earth Democracy globalizes peace, care, and compassion.

Sentence after sentence in the text rings out, as if Vandana Shiva were bringing an audience to its feet, as she so often does. As I read it, marking one stirring phrase after another, I feared only that a so-called 'average reader' might have trouble with some terms that could, if unfamiliar, be a bit much to digest, such as: "New intellectual property rights enclose the biological, intellectual, and digital commons."

But as I continued, I found that these broad statements were followed by close-to-home illustrations. For instance, new laws on patenting in many countries prevent farmers from raising, selling, and exchanging seed freely, the basis of indigenous and ecologically successful agriculture for millennia.

Examples of such 'legal' thefts of seed range from Scotland to Iraq, where a 2004 order "imposes plant and seed patents on Iraqi farmers," an estimated 97 percent of whom used farm-saved seed, which would now be illegal. (p. 150). In India, 80 percent of all seed is saved by farmers.

There is organized opposition to these patent injustices. Shiva notes, "Farmers throughout (India) served notices at district offices… and more than 5 million peasants have taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed, and to disobey any law that prevents them from doing so."

And in fact the most inspiring aspect of "Earth Democracy" is this contrapuntal presentation of oppression and resistance, with India as the predominant scene of action. This center forces those of us from so-called more 'developed' lands to appreciate the importance of local food production and "sustenance" economies intimately bound with age-old cultures.

US and European subsidies, economic 'dumping,' and world economic institutions wage a deadly war on these cultures and economies as well as future generations through support for chemical farming, mono-cropping of genetically-modified corn, soy and cotton, and destructively inappropriate regulations.

The resisters range from brave individuals ñ like Mylamma, "the woman who started the movement against Coca-Cola in Plachimada," where the water-hungry bottling plant made local wells go dry, then fill up with polluted wastewater ñ to literally millions in the combined opposition to privatization of water in the capital, Delhi, and a related dam planned for the sacred Ganges river.

"Building water democracy means building alliances," writes Dr. Shiva, but she also makes it happen, as in the next sentence: "I started to contact citizens groups in Delhi and people's movements along the Ganges."

Vandana Shiva's message is one of hope and empowerment, through diversity and local resistance and alternatives for survival.

Her closing words in "Earth Democracy": "Imperialism has always had global reach. Today's movements have a planetary reach and a planetary embrace. We have just begun to tap our potential for transformation and liberation. This is not the end of history, but another beginning."

Thanks to her, and others like her, some paths are clearer.