The Nature of Nature

With her inimitable mix of scholarship and activism, Vandana Shiva lays out the emergency we all face: extinction, climate havoc and the global food crisis. She lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1%: corporations, polluters and turncoat governments. She challenges the idea that all humans are responsible for this emergency and therefore challenges the term 'anthropocene'.

Environmental treaties intended to protect the earth have been appropriated and are now being used to create new markets in pollution and massive environmental damage. The Biodiversity Convention (1992) has been undermined and subverted by the same 1%. This is a travesty for the planet and its inhabitants. In a similar fashion, the UN Climate Convention has been turned into a marketplace for trading pollution.

The shift in power from governments to corporations is epitomized by the 2023 COP 28 meeting being presided over by Sultan Asmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and their investors BlackRock EniSpA and KKR & Co. Inc.

Our future, Shiva argues, is not about fake foods made in labs but by following the ecological laws of the earth by decolonising, decreasing food miles, deindustrialising and deglobalizing food systems. A future sustained by biodiversity, local foods, and end to deforestation and an ethical and organic farming system in which degenerative cycles are transformed into regenerative cycles.