Vandana Shiva

And so now they were looking at like, OK, well, if we're not going to have war on people, where do we direct this? And it became war, I believe, on Mother Earth.

I mean, Vandana Shiva, Dr. Vandana Shiva, I think really popularized that concept.

It's a war on nature.

So when these products came to Sri Lanka, the farmers were told to abandon their old ways.

So they spray and they put artificial measure in the ground.

Vandana Shiva is another bright mind and she explains that organic food, if you say, okay, I buy a kilo of tomatoes, then you say, okay, if it's organic, it costs 20% more.

But if you look at the nutritional value of it, then organic tomato has 40% more.

So you have to pay more.

Basically, that the Green Revolution was a straightforward good thing for the world, putting more food in hungry mouths, and in the process allowing farmers across the world to support themselves and their communities because of higher crop yields.

Contrast that with a paragraph in the 1991 book, The Violence of the Green Revolution by Vandana Shiva.

She had this to say, comparing the Green Revolution to an earlier model of agricultural development operating in India in the 1950s.

"While Indian scientists were working out self-reliant and ecological alternatives for the regeneration of agriculture in India, another vision of agricultural development was taking shape in American foundations and aid agencies.

And since then, Maria and I have made several projects together.

The latest one is called Kinfolk, a film built around an unusual encounter between Maria and legendary activist Vandana Shiva.

Two women who have never met, but who in very different ways have devoted much of their energy to enlivening the world.

In Kinfolk, Vandana does most of the talking and Maria does most of the doing.

That's for some kind of biologist or ecologist to come here and look at it.

It's like always, we don't know what we do, but it seems to be something good and right.

And that's what Vandana Shiva talks about as well, working from what you believe in and on this side that grows.

If I stand in opposition, I always lose.

But guess what? The reason that it's so hard is that three-year transition.

So the way I look at regenerative, the way that I've taken it on in cotton farming over the last decade plus when the regenerative movement started, right? And I was collaborating with the Regeneration International and Vandana Shiva and the beginnings of Kiss the Ground and, of course, the Rodale Institute.

And when this all really started to get talked about, it was why can't we use regenerative as a lever to get to organic, help the farmers have a market during their transition to organic, where we can say it's regenerative farming and validate and verify that? So by the time they get to the three-year transition of organic because they get into the system, it's regenerative and organic.

So instead of going organic and then regenerative, let's go regenerative and then organic, right? And so for me in cotton, I started a program in two thousand fifteen, I think, fourteen, called RESET, which stands for Regenerate the Environment, Society, and Economy through Textiles.

Um, Tyson Yunkaporta, who works at the, um, Indigenous Thinking Lab at Deakin University, I utterly rate his work.

Also Vandana Shiva, for example.

Um, we've really got to challenge the current system, and coming back to David Graeber, um, his book with Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, we've lost the idea that we can choose how to live.

But in that book, he tells the really fascinating story of two adjoining Indigenous tribes in North America with what we would call the same kind of economy, the same crops, the same trading the same goods.