The War Against Earth

Okay, I am not, emphatically not, a Gaia-ist. I do absolutely accept and work within an understanding that the earth is a single ecosystem whose complexity gladdens me each time I dip into my weekly copy of New Scientitst. Hell, I think can go further and accept the whole dang universe is one big complex system that we should seriously think about mucking around with, which is in part why I am very scared of the growing support for doing stuff like nudging asteroids out of the way of ramming into earth given that we can have no way of predicting which other poor planet's path we nudge it into, and anyway, while I love dinosaurs I'm not sure I want to be one so I kinda like the idea that someback then the slamming of an asteroid into the Caribbean did for those scary/lovable reptiles.

But as for going all spiritual about this interconnectivity, well that's not me. So I usually don't heed much anyone rabbiting on about Gaia's laws for this and that, or the notion of waging war against a something/body called Gaia. So I'm glad that Vandana Shiva left Gaia out of her speech as recipient of the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize till after she'd said a heap of other stuff that had me nodding and smiling. [Or at least, the edited version of her speech as published in the Sydney Morning Herald 4th November left Gaia till a couple of pars before the close.  Maybe it was a clever ploy to suck me into nodding and smiling when the Gaia reference came up too!] The title of this blog is the title of the article in the SMH and her use of the metaphor of war was potent and pertinent to me in ways I wouldn't have expected. Here are a few quotes from the speech that resonated with me.

'When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the biggest war is the war against the plant'...The war against the earth begins in the mind. Violent thoughts shape violent actions. Violent categories shape violent actions. And nowhere is this more vivid that in the metaphors and methods on which industrial, agricultural and food production is based. Factories that produced poisons and explosives to kill people during wars were transformed into factories producing agri-chemicals after the wars.' 'The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names of Monsanto's herbicides - "Round-Up", "Machete", "Lasso" American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto, gives its herbicides similarly aggressive names, including "Pentagon" and "Squadron" '.

Okay, I knew about Round-Up, and I confess I have in the past used it to kill off privet. But I had taken it's name more American-cattle-Rawhide-innocent. But put it alongside the others and you do wonder what herb the lab lads of Monsanto have been at to come up with a string of names that do sound as a set arguably consciously framed in seeing what they are involved in as a war, which should give us pause. I didn't know about the transformation of munitions factories into herbicide/agri culture ones, though that may just mean I have, as often, read shallowly in this area - hey, until recently I thought Monsanto was just a cement manufacturer. But it isn't just this, for me, revelation, that struck me. It's where Shiva takes this perspective of violence and war within food practices that arrests me in particular. She goes on to say this:

'Violence to the soil, to biodiversity, to water, to atmosphere, to farms and farmers produces a warlike food system that is unable to feed people...There are three levels of violence in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.'

The image of a 'warlike food system' I find particularly powerful, though for me as I think about it I push it's operation further back than the development of agribusiness, thinking about the Western programs of colonisation and their impact on the foodways of the colonised and the violence of this not only in practices like enslavement on sugar plantations, or the treatment of cinnamon growers in Sri Lanka, but also on the health and well-being of the colonised as for example in the link between the introduction of sugar and white flour into the diet of indigenous Australians and the development of Type 2 diabetes within indigenous populations, or the clear evidence for obesity in immigrant Asian populations as a result of adopting Western foodways in their countries of settlement. My ideas are not fully formed, as you can tell, but the idea of food violence is bringing things into focus for me in ways I know will be useful for me in future when thinking about foodways.

The final section of Shiva's speech that struck me is this:

'The growth of affluence, measured in money, is leading to a growth in poverty at the material, cultural, ecological and spiritual levels. The real currency of life is life itself.'


Check out the full text of the edited speech here. [As an aside, for those unfamiliar with Hinduism, one of the aspects of the god Shiva is that of the destroyer, which makes it a tasty irony that the thrust of Vandana Shiva's talk is against the destruction of Gaia/the planet.]