Earth Democracy
Vandana Shiva Explains How People Must Put the Environment First
Earth Democracy is a book and a global movement. Shiva outlines the fundamental concepts: chiefly that all markets must respect the environment that sustains them.
Vandana Shiva was one of India’s most prominent physicists, before becoming one of the world’s most prominent environmentalists. In her 2005 book, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Shiva uses empirical concepts of entropy, entropy and the conservation of energy to argue that the environment is at the base of our global society and when we ignore the environment, all the things built on it – culture, society, livelihoods – suffer.
Earth Demography spans globalization, colonialism, economics and politics, and Shiva makes it out to be a new political movement that is based on sustaining a culture that values nature’s economy, then the sustenance economy, and then finally the market economy.
Shiva makes the argument that property rights are not universal, but that water, food and seeds are universal human rights. She says that joint ownership of the planet is essential in a very real sense in order to stop endemic starvation, malnutrition, thirst, poverty, terrorism, racism, and extremism.
Most scholars would point out Britain on the map as the birthplace of empire. Preceding the industrial revolution, the high-class pushed peasant farmers off English soil and made them pay for the right to grow food in the form of rent. This is an early example of how scarcity was artificially created…and this new capitalist framework has defined us, ruled us, divided us, and exploited us for centuries thereafter.
A monopoly is when, by some means or another, an individual has special rights to a means of production. Karl Marx did not react well to the way workers he saw in the 19th century had to sell their labour to rich factory owners. There was no other way to make a livelihood, and now most of us take this for granted.
Yet, it is not enough for today’s capitalist to merely charge rent to the farmer. The very seed that is nature’s promise of creation is being expropriated by genetic engineering.
Monsanto is a seed company that has successfully copyrighted seeds that farmers have used for centuries. They have removed the adult plant’s ability to reproduce seeds so that the farmer is required to buy their seeds for every harvest. Communities that cannot afford to buy seeds whither and die.
Now, Shiva points out some ways in which people have avoided this horrifying reality by working as collectives and encouraging joint-ownership of food and water.
Shiva says that some of the most “under-developed” societies have no problems with starvation, malnutrition and clean water. Their livelihoods do not involve selling their labour for wages, but they involve harvesting what they need and cooperating with their neighbours to obtain shelter and food. Our idea of civilization, she says, is far
too connected to Victorian ideals and flawed notions of what it means to survive and thrive.
Coke-a-cola and Pepsi-cola have exerted their power in the third world, pumping millions of gallons of fresh water from towns and polluting into the very same waterways downstream. Vivendi, France-based water bottling company and also a media empire, has even prohibited peasants from collecting water from their ancestral waterways.
Shiva says that people faced with the extreme scarcity of water and food are driven to extremes. There has been a drastic rise in fundamental religion and xenophobia driven by jealousy of resources. The global connectivity that some have championed has also created a global divide.
Shiva draws a very good framework of the problems that the new century is facing, and though she sometimes delves into rant, Global Democracy is effective in making the reader think about society critically while giving him/her hope for a future where all the people in the world have a voice.
