When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.
The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, "if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence."
In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.
American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. Thats what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.
We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
I have a deep connection with Mahatma Gandhi, partly because my mother was a very, very staunch Gandhian and brought us up that way. When I was six years old, and all the girls were getting nylon dresses, I was very keen to get a nylon frock for my birthday. My mother said, I can get it for you, but would you ratherthrough how you live and what you wear and what you eatensure that food goes into the hands of the weaver or ensure that profits go into the bank of an industrialist? That became such a checkstone for everything in life.
I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didnt even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of womenof embryos, of eggs, of bodiesby a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasnt freedom from men but total control by men.
One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasnt there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.
The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think its time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world.
Governments have a favorite phrase: lean and mean. But theyve been made very, very fat for corporate interests.
The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers.
When you control seed, you control food.
To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet its growing extremely thin as a protector of people.
If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.
My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into Chipko movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge.
If India is an emerging economy with millions of new consumers, sell them the Volvo. Sell them the Cielo car. Sell them whatever you can, hamburgers and KFCs. Its the middle classes who have moved into being able to own a car, a refrigerator. For them there is this mantra that the General Electric refrigerator is better than some other model, that the Cielo car is fancier than the Ambassador.
In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs.
For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.
Because of these new car models there is suddenly on the streets of Delhi a new intolerance by the motorists for both the cows and the cyclists. So for the first time the sacred cow in India, which used to be such a wonderful speed-breaker, is now seen as a nuisance. For the first time, Ive seen cows being hit and hurt. These guys just go right past, and if the cow is sitting on the road, they dont care. We cant afford to have a sacred car rather than a sacred cow.
My training in science is actually one that is very critical of mechanistic science. I was trained in quantum theory which emerged at the turn of the last century. We are a whole century behind in absorbing the leaps that quantum theory made for the human mind.
The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.
I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.
democracy ... begins from the ground up. Anything living grows from the bottom up. Everything dangerous, like bombs, gets dropped from the sky down.
