Well, you know, in my long journey through ecological activism, 35 years now, money has
been the intervener, propelling ecological destruction.
The first movement I got involved in was Chipco, where women of my region, peasant women came
out to say, we'll hug the trees, you'll have to kill us before you kill the tree, because
these trees are our life, they are our mothers, they give us water, they give us soil, they
give us fodder, they give us fuel, and deforestation is leading to disappearance of water, disappearance
of energy, and ecological catastrophes like landslides.
Why were the trees being cut?
Very simply because cutting a tree makes money, leaving a tree in place gives you stable ecosystems,
gives you basic needs, gives you material welfare, avoids poverty, but cutting a tree
leads to huge profits for the logging companies, and the countries count it as the growth of
the gross domestic product.
A live tree doesn't contribute to the GDP, a killed tree does, and that is the basis
of why the more our economies grow, the more people suffer, and the more people who are
living, and the more the planet suffers.
In the case of agriculture, I got involved in 1984 because of two terrible disasters
in India, 1984 is also the name of a very interesting novel written by George Orwell,
and 1984 was a very Orwellian year for us.
In June of that year, one of the worst violence took place in our history in recent times.
There had been extremism in Punjab.
People think terrorism began with the Al-Qaeda, it began in Punjab.
Began in Punjab because the so-called Green Revolution was supposed to bring prosperity
and peace, and the Nobel Peace Prize was given for the Green Revolution, but what was the
Green Revolution?
The Green Revolution was nothing but bringing money-making into agriculture.
Before the Green Revolution, agriculture was about care for the soil, providing nourishing
food, secure livelihoods, a cultural identity in connection with the earth.
Post-Green Revolution, agriculture was about corporations making money, selling costly
seeds and chemicals.
It was about farmers getting into debt because they couldn't afford to spend that kind of
money.
In initial stages, they took to the gun, shot people, and eventually they were killed
in return.
30,000 people were killed in that period of violence in Punjab.
That is six times nine-eleven, and today that violence continues.
It's not through the gun, it's through drinking pesticide to end their lives.
200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India in the last decade alone as a money-driven
agriculture, an agriculture which is designed not to protect the earth, not to protect the
seed, not to give food to people, but is designed only to make money, has killed people.
1984, the other event that shook me up was Bhopal, a pesticide plant owned then by Union
Carbide, now by Dow Chemicals, leaked in the middle of the night of 2nd of December and
killed 3,000 people, immediately 30,000 people since then.
I started to look at agriculture at that point and I said, why has agriculture become like
war?
I wasn't surprised to find that it had become like war because it started in war, and chemicals
that were designed to make money in war were moved to agriculture as pesticides, chemicals
from fertilizer factories, which were originally explosive factories, were moved into farming
and into producing food, so no matter which way you look at it, the making of money has
become the curse of farming in agriculture.
It's destroyed our soils, it's destroyed our biodiversity, it's destroyed our water.
There's a recent report out from NASA about how the groundwater of North India has gone,
but NASA doesn't connect it to the prescriptions of the United States to put chemicals into
farming and those chemicals require intensive irrigation and the irrigation comes out of
mining groundwater, so it's at every point this focus of money is a recipe for impoverishment.
