Vandana Shiva - Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace

EARTH DEMOCRACY

EARTH DEMOCRACY

Justice, Sustainability,
and Peace

VANDANA SHIVA

Berkeley, California

Copyright 2005, 2015 by Vandana Shiva. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California

Cover photo Jakkree Thampitakkull/Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Adept Content Solutions
Printed in the United States of America

First published in 2005 by South End Press.

Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the publisher upon request.

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E arth Democracy is both an ancient worldview and an emergent political movement for peace, justice, and sustainability. Earth Democracy connects the particular to the universal, the diverse to the common, and the local to the global. It incorporates what in India we refer to as vasudhaiva kutumbkam (the earth family)the community of all beings supported by the earth. Native American and indigenous cultures worldwide have understood and experienced life as a continuum between human and nonhuman species and between present, past, and future generations. An 1848 speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe captures this continuum.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.
This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites our family. All things are connected.

Earth Democracy is the awareness of these connections and of the rights and responsibilities that flow from them. Chief Seattles protest that the earth does not belong to man finds echoes across the world:Our world is not for sale, Our water is not for sale, Our seeds and biodiversity are not for sale. This response to privatization under the insane ideology known as corporate globalization builds Earth Democracy. Corporate globalization sees the world only as something to be owned and the market only as driven by profit. From Bangalore in 1993, when half a million Indian peasants pledged to resist the classification of seeds as private property required by the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003 when protests stopped the WTO ministerial meetings, the corporate globalization agenda has been responded to creatively, imaginatively, and courageously by millions of people who see and experience the earth as a family and community consisting of all beings and humans of all colors, beliefs, classes, and countries.

In contrast to viewing the planet as private property, movements are defending, on a local and global level, the planet as a commons. In contrast to experiencing the world as a global supermarket, where goods and services are produced with high ecological, social, and economic costs and sold for abysmally low prices, cultures and communities everywhere are resisting the destruction of their biological and cultural diversity, their lives, and their livelihoods. As alternatives to the suicidal, globalized free market economy based on plundering and polluting the earths vital resources, which displaces millions of farmers, craftspeople, and workers, communities are resolutely defending and evolving living economies that protect life on earth and promote creativity.

Corporate globalization is based on new enclosures of the commons; enclosures which imply exclusions and are based on violence. Instead of a culture of abundance, profit-driven globalization creates cultures of exclusion, dispossession, and scarcity. In fact, globalizations transformation of all beings and resources into commodities robs diverse species and people of their rightful share of ecological, cultural, economic, and political space. The ownership of the rich is based on the dispossession of the poorit is the common, public resources of the poor which are privatized, and the poor who are disowned economically, politically, and culturally.

Patents on life and the rhetoric of the ownership society in which everything-water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plantsis property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood. It is a worldview in which the rights of farmersto seed, of patients to affordable medicine, of producers to a fair share of natures resources can be freely violated. The rhetoric of the ownership society hides the anti-life philosophy of those who, while mouthing prolife slogans, seek to own, control, and monopolize all of the earths gifts and all of human creativity. The enclosures of the commons that started in England created millions of disposable people. While these first enclosures stole only land, today all aspects of life are. being enclosedknowledge, culture, water, biodiversity, and public services such as health and education. Commons are the highest expression of economic democracy.

The privatization of public goods and services and the commoditization of the life support systems of the poor is a double theft which robs people of both economic and cultural security. Millions, deprived of a secure living and identity, are driven toward extremist, terrorist, fundamentalist movements. These movements simultaneously identify the other as enemy and construct exclusivist identities to separate themselves from those with whom, in fact, they are ecologically, culturally, and economically connected. This false separation results in antagonistic and cannibalistic behavior. The rise of extremism and terrorism is a response to the enclosures and economic colonization of globalization. Just as cannibalism among factory-farmed animals stops when chicken and pigs are allowed to roam free, terrorism, extremism, ethnic cleansing, and religious intolerance are unnatural conditions caused by globalization and have no place in Earth Democracy.

Enclosures create exclusions, and these exclusions are the hidden cost of corporate globalization. Our movements against the biopiracy of neem, of basmati, of wheat have aimed at and succeeded in reclaiming our collective biological and intellectual heritage as a commons. Movements such as the victorious struggle started by the tribal women of a tiny hamlet called Plachimada in Indias Kerala state against one of the worlds largest corporations, Coca-Cola, are at the heart of the emerging Earth Democracy.