Go on youTube and put in Vandana Shiva, you’ll find a number of videos of her speaking.  Every one of them is worth listening to.   I’ve been thinking Vandana Shiva is a genius, the way she cuts through infinite complexity with brilliant simplicity.   She has a doctorate, in physics, I think, and is one of the great speakers alive today.  She may be the most important voice out there, a voice that few have heard. a wonderful voice.  

There are a bunch of great speakers operating today.  You  can find many of them on TED talks, a great source for fascinating ideas to think about.  But unlike most of them, Vandana Shiva is not selling anything.  She lives past, present and future at once, her passion is sustainable life.   There is no subject more vital, literally, than sustainability.

Vandana Shiva will explain this to you, like you are sitting together after a delicious meal of fresh local vegetables seasoned with fragrant seeds.   You will not stop her conversation lightly, she draws you in with great compassionate logic and the light touch of humor.  Her humor is irony, that refreshing irony people need when they must use their bare hands to handle things made by monsters.  

Is she accurate when she says 270,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last decade, as the crop seeds in India went from 80% owned by farmers to 95% of farmers now paying Monsanto for a license to grow crops?  I have no reason to doubt her.  

And I know quite well, I assure you, that few give a rat’s ass about an Indian farmer.  Isn’t it true that millions are slaughtered every year in senseless war?   That child soldiers are raped and forced to murder?  Isn’t it true that gorillas and chimpanzees plead for mercy when they are being slaughtered? And aren’t children torn apart every day by explosives sent by men who never set foot on their continent?  Who has tears for the Indian farmer who can’t bear the shame of bankruptcy after countless generations living well off the land?

Vandana Shiva spends only a moment on the suicides of the farmers.  She knows it is not the point.  The point, she says, is that if we do not take back control of our food supply from predatory corporations, those companies will profit from the death of the world, until the world is dead.  Then there will be no more human life and no need to fear man’s unsustainable ways, but that will not necessarily be a good day to wake up.

On the other hand, as they teach a lawyer to argue, Dr. Shiva herself admits that Indian seed companies only made two rupees per bag of seed under the old regime.  Now Monsanto charges thousands of rupees for a bag of the patented seed, a seed very similar to the original seed in most ways, but patented and licensed by one of the wealthiest mega-corporations on earth.   The Indian seed company now makes several hundred times more profit, since they are middlemen in the licensing deal between Monsanto and the Indian farmers.  So you do the math, two rupees or fifteen hundred rupees, your choice. 

In our infinitely puckish world, the logic of the earth’s greediest and most morally debased, backed by irrefutable economic fact — and the death of a human who is  not a wealthy, white American truly is an unfortunate externality, after all — carries the day every time.  Never mind that many more will starve, preventable disease (caused by a diet of poison) will continue to proliferate, , the earth itself will whither and die.  And until that time, the earth’s most greedy and unredeemed will continue to amass more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

You might wonder, did I ever stop to examine why I hate your freedom so much?