Vandana Shiva has been an environmental activist for five decades. At the 2023 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) she spoke about her lengthy fight for environmental justice and about ecofeminism, organic farming, challenging powerful corporations, and preserving heritage seeds.

On the third day of the festival Shiva was in discussion in the morning with the award-winning Indonesian conservationist Farwiza Farhan, who has been at the forefront of work to protect the Leuser Ecosystem in Aceh and North Sumatra.

In the afternoon Shiva and Farwiza were joined by the Ecuadorian environmentalist and human rights campaigner Helena Gualinga in a session entitled ‘Shaping Justice Through Ecofeminism and Activism, moderated by Amanda Katili Niode, who is a founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association and manager of The Climate Reality Project Indonesia.

In the morning session Shiva, who has a PhD in quantum theory, talked about what she had learned from the women in the Chipko forest conservation movement in India.

“They knew so much. They knew every herb. They knew forestry management of such detail that they knew exactly how much of a branch they should cut so that the tree itself, its regeneration, does not stop,” she told the UWRF audience.

“It’s arrogant to think just because you go to university and do a PhD you have some exceptional knowledge. They’re different. They can’t do quantum theory, but they are my professors of biodiversity and ecology.”

The forestry that was introduced in rich, tropical forests was commercial forestry about monocultures and timber extraction, Shiva says. It was not about the forest. It was treating the forest as timber mines.

The Chipko women, Shiva says, saw the trees as their mothers, who provided them with soil, water, and fresh air. The women saw the connections between forests and rivers.

Shiva cited the devastating flood in the Ganges river basin in 1978 when an entire mountain slipped and created a dam about four miles long, which burst, causing floods all the way to Calcutta (now Kolkata).

“That’s when the government realised the women were right in saying these forests protect water, that what people were getting out of revenues for timber was nothing compared to the amount they were spending now on disasters,” she said.

Shiva spoke about the importance of women’s work, which, she said, was what was “holding society”. Women, she says, are the real creative producers and sustainers of society.

The idea that hard work is drudgery is a very false construct, Shiva says. “We have been brainwashed to think that working is a curse,” she told the audience at UWRF 2023.

“Work for sustaining life is not just the most meaningful work, and is the economy of care in which women participate, but it is regenerative work.”

Shiva has published a book entitled From Greed to Care. The dominant economy, she says, only measures greed and only rewards greed while punishing care.

Humanity needs a new relationship with the Earth, Shiva says. The old one, she says, is colonial, anthropocentric, and patriarchal.

We need to learn from indigenous people and women, Shiva says, and we need to recognise that the Earth is living.

“The earth is our mother,” Shiva told the UWRF audience. “That’s why we’ve done a declaration of the rights of Mother Earth, that all relatives in the Earth family have rights and they all have to be respected. And all cultures have to be respected.”

Shiva has been studying how the economies that sustain life work. “How do economies of nature work? she asks. “Does nature keep extracting water from a river till it’s dry. No. Nature circulates the water.”

If a hotel resort requires electricity, Shiva says, water will be diverted from farmers’ fields and, before you know it, you have a famine.

There were cheers from the audience when Shiva referred to the closing down of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Plachimada in the southern Indian state of Kerala. There had been lengthy protests, mostly by indigenous Adivasi women, about the company’s overuse and contamination of local water resources.

Shiva says she learned from the Chipko women that people don’t see the diversity of the forest because they suffer from monoculture of the mind.

“The monoculture of the mind only looks at what you can make money out of,” she told the UWRF audience. “You might have 1,000 species in the forest; you don’t see them. You only see what you can take and extract.”

The global economy only measures extraction, Shiva says. It is blind to diversity and doesn’t see the circular.

Shiva is writing a new book about climate change and the future of food.

“Right now, when we say intensification, we mean two things: chemicals, more chemicals, and more external fossil energy,” she said.

“But that’s the reason we are having all the problems we’re having: the build-up of carbon dioxide, the disappearance of species, the degradation of food.”

Shiva says we should be measuring nutrition per acre, not yield per acre. Yield only measures the commodity that left the farm, she says. It doesn’t tell you what that commodity was used for.

Ninety percent of genetically modified corn and soy is being used for biofuel and animal feed, Shiva says. “It’s not feeding anybody. It’s contributing to hunger,” she told the UWRF audience.

It’s very important, Shiva says, that we give up the “anthropocentric arrogance that was created as part of colonialism”, the belief that human colonisers can take anything from anywhere.

Shiva doesn’t mince her words when talking about the business magnate Bill Gates. When Gates gives money, seemingly as philanthropy, he is actually creating a new market of monopoly, she says. He is, she says, the biggest driver of fake food.

Ultra processed food has already made us very sick, Shiva says, but lab food is “ultra, ultra, ultra processed food with synthetic ingredients”.

Gates is trying to undermine the laws protecting seeds, Shiva says. These laws were now shifting from patenting to digital sequencing.

The idea of engineering life is based on the assumption that life is inadequate, that nature doesn’t know what she’s doing, Shiva says.

In the afternoon session Shiva was asked about the lessons she has learned in fifty years of activism, and how to be resilient. Shiva has a simple answer: “Never give up.”

Helena Gualinga (pictured left) is a striking example of someone who doesn’t give up and she is from a family and a community of women who don’t give up either.

Gualinga comes from a very remote community in the Amazon that can only be reached by canoe or on a small aircraft.

“That is important because it means that our culture and identity has been as protected as it can be today from the outside world …,” she told the UWRF audience.

“It’s one of the reasons why we’re able to keep out the oil companies and the militaries.”

The year that Gualinga was born the oil companies tried to come onto the Sarayaku community’s territory. She told the audience at UWRF about the time when her aunt gate-crashed a meeting in which representatives of oil companies were discussing the government’s granting of concessions, got up onto the stage, and told the company representatives that their plans would literally kill her people.

Gualinga also spoke about the time when soldiers were sleeping in the forest and Sarayaku women stole their guns and demanded that the soldiers leave their land.

If it hadn’t been for the women, Gualinga says, the oil companies would have managed to get the concessions they wanted on Sarayaku land.

The men in her community were afraid, Gualinga says, but the women were not. Her mother told her this was because the women had everything to lose. The men, Gualinga says, gained strength from the women’s determination not to give up.

Women, Gualinga says, are the fundamental pillars of society. “Even though it’s not all the time reflected in the dynamics of power or leadership positions women are the ones that make things happen. And that is what happened in my community,” she said.

Both capitalism and patriarchy that practise violence against women and the planet come from entitlement, Gualinga says, and this sense of entitlement is a pattern that needs to be unlearned. Everyone practises some kind of entitlement, she says.

Gualinga talks about indigenous female leaders who are extremely strong, and wouldn’t blink if they met an oil CEO, who would have no fear in that situation. Back home in their communities, or in general, however, they were suffering a lot of political or even physical violence.

“They’re constantly putting up with violence in their lives,” Gualinga said. “And so how can we expect these women to fight for us … How can we expect them to continue and to carry this burden while they receive zero support.”

Gualinga said female Ecuadorian land defenders had been threatened and attacked because of the work they were doing.  She told how the women’s campaigning with Amnesty International blossomed into an Amazonian women’s collective.

“Today what they focus on is the well-being of these women and how they also can get support for the work that they do,” Gualinga said.

For Ananda Shiva, ecofeminism is the basic recognition that the highest level of activity is constantly taking place in nature and the most active people on a daily basis are women.

“It’s just that the dominant paradigm of capitalist patriarchy is blind to this creativity,” she told the UWRF audience. “It can’t see it. Because it he looks at everything from the perspective of profits and power.”

Activism, Shiva says, is what nature does, and what women do.

Ecology and feminism are part of one continuum, she says. One stops the violence against nature and the other stops the violence against women.

Ecofeminism, Shiva says, is about respecting the freedom, dignity, and rights of all life, including all human life, which included men. It is, she says, about a restructured thinking about the Earth and our relationships with each other.

“To me, ecofeminism is also about liberation for men, Shiva said.

“They definitely need much more awareness of the restrictions they put on themselves with the illusion of privilege.”

Farwiza Farhan has appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “One of the World’s Rising Stars”. She’s modest about her achievements and points to the collective nature of work to protect land and the environment.

“Somehow, to be the person that is standing there on the cover, it felt so wrong; that I shouldn’t be there at all,” she told the UWRF audience.

“It’s not necessarily the global coverage that protects the Leuser Ecosystem, but the belief that we have amongst us that we got this, we have the power to protect this landscape because this landscape is so important for us; it’s so close to our heart and our livelihood depends on it.”

We need, Farwiza says, to acknowledge and value the grassroots wisdom of people in indigenous communities.

Ananda Shiva is the founder of the Navdanya movement for biodiversity conservation and organic farming and president of the Earth University/Bija Vidyapeeth. 

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