“We will either make a democratic transition from oil to soil or we will perish. The poor, the weak, the excluded, the marginalized are threatened today. In the short term, we can continue to extend the profits and consumerism of the privileged by further dispossessing the poor. But tomorrow even the rich and the powerful will not be immune from Gaia’s revenge and the revenge of the billions of dispossessed. We will either have justice, sustainability, and peace together or we will descend into ecological catastrophe, social chaos and conflict.”
The multiple crises of climate insecurity, energy insecurity, and food insecurity create an imperative and an opportunity to transcend the limits of the mechanistic-industrial-capitalist paradigm that has been systematically shrinking our potential even as it peddles progress.
The paths out from this crisis are not being blazed in the boardrooms of the global corporations who dominate our world today and are largely responsible for crimes against nature and humanity. Industrialization of food and agriculture has put the human species on a slippery slope of self-destruction and self-annihilation. The movement for biodiverse, ecological, and local food systems simultaneously addresses the crises of climate, energy, and food. Above all, it brings people back into agriculture and reclaims food as nourishment and the most basic source of energy. New ways of thinking and acting, of being and doing, are evolving from the creative alterna-tives being employed in small communities, on farms, and in cities.
It is this renewable energy of ecology and sharing, of solidity and compassion, that we need to generate and multiply to counter the destructive energy of greed that is creating scarcity at every level—scarcity of work, scarcity of happiness, scarcity of security, scarcity of freedom, and even scarcity of the future.
Climate chaos, brutal economic inequality, and social disintegration are jointly pushing human communities to the brink. We can either let the processes of destruction, disintegration, and ex-termination continue unchallenged or we can unleash our creative energies to make systemic change and reclaim our future as a species, as part of the earth family. We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves.
The multiple crises of climate insecurity, energy insecurity, and food insecurity create an imperative and an opportunity to transcend the limits of the mechanistic-industrial-capitalist paradigm that has been systematically shrinking our potential even as it peddles progress.
The paths out from this crisis are not being blazed in the boardrooms of the global corporations who dominate our world today and are largely responsible for crimes against nature and humanity. Industrialization of food and agriculture has put the human species on a slippery slope of self-destruction and self-annihilation. The movement for biodiverse, ecological, and local food systems simultaneously addresses the crises of climate, energy, and food. Above all, it brings people back into agriculture and reclaims food as nourishment and the most basic source of energy. New ways of thinking and acting, of being and doing, are evolving from the creative alterna-tives being employed in small communities, on farms, and in cities.
It is this renewable energy of ecology and sharing, of solidity and compassion, that we need to generate and multiply to counter the destructive energy of greed that is creating scarcity at every level—scarcity of work, scarcity of happiness, scarcity of security, scarcity of freedom, and even scarcity of the future.
Climate chaos, brutal economic inequality, and social disintegration are jointly pushing human communities to the brink. We can either let the processes of destruction, disintegration, and ex-termination continue unchallenged or we can unleash our creative energies to make systemic change and reclaim our future as a species, as part of the earth family. We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves.
Vandana Shiva, in “Soil not Oil”, South End Press, 2008