- Vandana Shiva: "We have solutions to climate change"..."10 years we can solve the climate crisis" Archived Message
Posted by Garry
on March 3, 2019, 3:11 am
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This is a transcript of a broad-ranging interview with Vandana Shiva on Democracy Now. I found it all particularly interesting but I wanted to draw attention to what Shiva said at the end, because she seems to be making an extraordinary claim about the ability of soils and vegetation in "ecological farming, biodiverse-intensive farming" to take down and hold gigantic quantities of carbon. "...We have solutions to climate change, because it’s only through taking the excess carbon and the excess nitrogen out of the air, can we heal the broken nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle. Ecological farming, biodiverse-intensive farming does that. And we only need to add 2 percent, and 10 years we can solve the climate crisis. With 0.5 percent organic matter, we can get rid of the drought. AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what you mean, to the nonfarmer audience. VANDANA SHIVA: So, the basic problem of climate change is that the planetary boundaries have been ruptured. There’s a limit of cycling of carbon, of nitrogen and other minerals and elements. By taking fossil fuels out from underground and burning them at a very high speed, 600 million years of nature’s work—20 million years being burned every year—we are putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is why we have climate change. We use some of this fossil fuel to then make nitrogen fertilizers, which emits a nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more deadly for the climate. You get rid of chemicals, you get rid of fossil fuels, and you start doing organic, all that excess carbon can be pulled back by the plants and put back in the soil, which is why I wrote the book Soil Not Oil. When you put nitrogen-fixing plants, the pulses—you know, everyone’s now talking of plant-based diets, proteins from plants. We did it in India forever with our lovely dal, our pulses. They fix nitrogen nonviolently. You don’t have to blast fossil fuels at high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen. The plants have the intelligence to do it, peacefully, and give us good protein, the same way, while fixing the broken nitrogen cycle, which if you look at the planetary boundaries graph, the nitrogen cycle is and the biodiversity system is the most abused. And in every one of these problems, whether it’s hunger or the chronic disease epidemic or climate change or species—you know, the pollinators on our farm are six times more than the pollinators on the forest. And now, every year, we offer a 1-month course on the practice of biodiversity, agroecology and organic food systems. Everywhere, the world is being healed, with a lot of solidarity, a lot of oneness, between ourselves and the web of life, and a reclaiming of that, our intelligence. Intelligence will never be artificial. Real intelligence is what makes us live. Life is intelligence. Intelligence is democracy." Vandana Shiva - Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty and seed freedom advocate, and alternative globalization leader and author. She’s written more than 20 books—her latest, Oneness vs. the 1% and Who Really Feeds the World? LINK: Znet |