Vandana Shiva
Once a system has interacted, no matter how far apart you take the paths, they stay connected. And what you do to one, you do to the other, and that’s called nonlocality entanglement. Everything is interconnected. You can never separate. And how do these principles then become guides to life?
Elizabeth Rovere
What does quantum physics have to do with healing our planet? My guest today, quantum physicist Dr. Vandana Shiva, became an environmental activist when she realized that the key to healing our world lies in reawakening our connection to nature and each other. Her philosophy, which merges ancient wisdom with quantum theory, invites us to embrace interconnectedness and rediscover nature’s sacredness. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rovere, a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I am forever curious about our experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us. With Wonderstruck,. we invite you to explore these ideas through conversations with experts and experiencers across disciplines and perspectives. Welcome to Season Three. So it’s just so wonderful to sit here with you today, Vandana Shiva. It’s just been my utter pleasure to meet you and spend time with you, and I’m really grateful that you’re here and on the podcast with us today. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Vandana Shiva
Thank you. Thank you for making all this happen and bringing us together. And it’s a joy meeting you.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love the story that you really grew up kind of in the mountains in the Himalaya, and you read a book on Einstein with the quotes, and your path started becoming this nature and science pathway and theoretical physics. I mean, it’s such a beautiful story into what you do now. And I was wondering if you would share with us what was it like growing up in nature in that way?
Vandana Shiva
Yeah. And of course, there was another element that my parents had made a choice to be in nature, and they also were always spiritual seekers. We didn’t get any exposure to religion in its fundamentalism and hate and exclusion, but we got an exposure to the best teachers of our times, Anandamayi Ma Swami Sivananda Neem Karoli Baba. My dad gave the license to Maheshi Mahesh yogi for setting up the ashram where the Beatles came and stayed. So, I mean, this was our lives. So consciousness was the ocean in which we were a part. We weren’t studying it. We weren’t objective about. We were swimming in it. Swimming in it.
Elizabeth Rovere
We were living it.
Vandana Shiva
And I think that. And the phrase that’s used always is to be in higher consciousness, you know, so when of course, in physics, your teachers are always saying, solve the equation, solve the equation, solve the equation. I said, no, I want to understand the wonder of the world. And so I am entered to do a PhD in quantum theory. But I was always doing it with that deeper sense of how are we in this world? Because the mechanistic explanation didn’t make sense in the forest, it doesn’t make sense in spirituality, it doesn’t make sense in the spiritual. In the quantum world, it doesn’t make sense intuitively. It just doesn’t make sense. Too violent and too crude. You know, who thinks mechanically? The dominators do, because it’s very convenient. They’ve internalized it so much because they’ve lived it for so long. And that’s where the extractive mentality and dominating mentality comes from. Otherwise you’ve got these built in bricks. You can’t do this to another human being, you can’t do this to this forest, can’t do this to this river. So the breaks of consciousness becomes so natural. When you are conscious about consciousness and when you think, when you shed the living aspects of living organism, you shed the consciousness aspect of conscious beings, then you are in a free for all. And that’s where the violence, in my view, begins. But it is not natural to ordinary human beings. So even think of our relationship with children. The word education is derived from educare and it’s the Latin word. And basically to bring out the potential of the child, it doesn’t say, fill an empty brain with whatever is useful for you to use as human raw material. Because we are reducing humans to the same kind of raw material as we did the iron ore, as we did the bauxite and aluminium here. Humans are the new raw material with this whole data obsession. But data is not knowledge. No, information is not wisdom. And all of that, you know, the beautiful presentation on the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere, the organizing principles of values, of memory, of being able to say this is right and wrong, that comes from the right hemisphere. Managing data. Yeah, that little bit can be downloaded into a machine. But the conscious B is A in relationship with all other conscious beings and B is in consciousness. Therefore its life is self organized, its life is out of breathing. And that bit is unique to conscious living beings.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, we’ve been talking about consciousness and you know, we were talking about how, you know, it’s not just quantum, quantum science and consciousness isn’t just some kind of theory. I mean, it is a theory, but it’s also a way of life. Because I had asked you, like, how did you go from being a theoretical physicist to…. To an environmental activist?
Vandana Shiva
Right.
Elizabeth Rovere
I had thought that it was different, but when we talked, you explained how it’s actually not really so different, that there’s a natural way that this unfolded. And I think that we talked about starting and like, why are we living in a Newtonian world when we’ve moved from that theory 100 years ago? At least scientists have disproven the Newtonian world, but we live in it still, in our psyche or in our consciousness and way of being. So I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about what is quantum everyday life, so to speak, and how you live in that way and how you got from being a physicist to an environmental activist.
Vandana Shiva
You know, the mechanistic age, which is unfortunately called the classical thinking. Nothing very classical about it, nothing grand. It’s a very crude way of organizing the world. And it does not begin with Newton. Newton just gave the laws of motion. But it came 100 years after. The real architects of the mechanical world, Bacon and Descartes, laid out a world of separation, that humans are separate from nature. We are masters of nature. Nature is mere extension to be measured and weighed, and mere raw material. Because when it’s purely raw material to extract, then all you need to know is how many tons of iron ore you can take, or silver or gold. So I don’t call it the Newtonian age. I call it the mechanical age of Bacon and Descartes. And its key principles are separation, nature and humans, but separation of every part of nature. There’s no whole, nothing is whole, it’s just fragments. The second is the assumption that therefore you can separate the observer and the observed. And everything is an object with no life, no organizing capacity, no subject, and no agency of its own. And with the idea of mastery. In fact, if you read Bacon, he talks so clearly about make nature your slave, I will teach you how to do it. And that then became the basis of every scientific thinking and institution. So how did the quantum thinking make a break of it? In a very beautiful way in which life works. Life evolves out of diversity, self-organization, and yet coherence among all the self-organization. So it’s always self-organization, autopoiesis with symbiosis. The symbiosis is, I respect you, you respect me, and out of it grow the relationship. So the three principles of the quantum thinking that evolved not in a… You know, no one dictated it, everyone was doing their bit and it hung together. The first is there are no Things in the world. There are no objects in the world. There’s potential happening waiting to happen and evolve. And that evolution into expressions of a wave or a particle comes through a relationship of the observer and the observed. There is no difference between subject and object. That phenomena, that process is what is the creative process. And because of potential, there are no hard facts, as they constantly talked about. Potential has probabilities. Something could become this with this probability, or become that with that probability. So probability of potential and transition then becomes the basic unit, rather than certainty of this is the position and this is the momentum. So instead of certainty, we have uncertainty. Instead of determinism and control, we have indetermination and participation. And finally, the beauty of it. As Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen showed that once a system has interacted, no matter how far apart you take the paths, they stay connected. And what you do to one, you do to the other. And that’s called nonlocality, entanglement. Everything is interconnected. You can never separate. And how do these principles then become guides to life? A: always be aware that there is another. No one’s your object, right?
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
You are living with other living beings who also have self-organization, conscience, capacity. And to merge in harmony with the conscience is respect for life on earth, other human life. That’s where peace emerges from. That’s where harmony emerges from. And never seek control. If Bacon wrote two books, one is called the New Atlantis, in where he defines this world. And we’re going to make plants grow according to our will for our use, you know, and he laid it all out. The technologies weren’t there, but he laid out that vision. The second was a masculine birth of time, of power, of control and making nature a slave. But also in the process of defining a masculine birth of time that women with their knowledge, don’t have knowledge. So many apartheids were being created in that one process. So out of that, then comes the mechanisms of control, technologies of control. Synthetic fertilizers are the first, but they come out of the war thinking the synthetic fertilizers are made from fossil fuels. The partnership between Standard Oil and IG Farben, the group of companies in Germany that were working together for Hitler, and they started to make explosives by burning fossil fuels at very high temperature. That same process, Haber Bosch made explosives on the one hand, but made fertilizers after that.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, I remember that.
Vandana Shiva
So it’s mechanistic and militarized. The two go together. And I would say it’s very masculinist. So the three m’s go together. And because you have already defined a living person in the time of concentration camps, a living plant, the living soil, you’ve already defined them as inert and dead and absent. You get the license to be violent because you have no respect, recognition. There’s no recognition of the autopoiesis. Right. And that’s what brings limits, right? That’s what tells you what not to do.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it’s interesting too, because it’s when you start opening the door to unfolding this perspective that I think. I mean, my sense is that it’s an inherent perspective in us. Right? Like, if you believe in the ancient traditions, right, Which I. The idea that everything is interconnected and that there is this web of consciousness, that consciousness is first principle. Or in a way that the Vedanta. Or in a way that like so many world traditions talk about, in a way that myself as a psychologist can see that, you know, you and I are related. This is a relational experience that something grows out of it. That’s part of, you know, psychological training. It’s like that feels to me very inherent and that somehow we’ve kind of limited and closed the door on this perspective of seeing. Seeing our connection to the world and each other in a way that’s more deeply meaningful. Or dare I say sacred. Sacred. You’re supposed to say sacred because it has a religious connotation. But life is sacred. And when you start opening the door to that, people seem to naturally feel it. I would say the awareness starts to generate.
Vandana Shiva
Well, I think when you remove the lids of pollution. Of conditioning.
Elizabeth Rovere
Of conditioning, yes.
Vandana Shiva
And the natural state of every being, from cells and plants to human beings, without that conditioning is to be a free expression of the one consciousness. Yes, but you unique to yourself.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, of course.
Vandana Shiva
And the two go together.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
That’s why autopoiesis and symbiosis go together in the biological world.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
But autopoiesis at the consciousness level is I’m a conscious being. Symbiosis is I’m a compassionate being.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
And the two go together.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it goes back to something that you had said. That’s like the idea that it’s not just us and nature in this kind of mechanistic way. It’s like we are nature and if we are taking resources from nature and we’re nature, it’s like then the human starts to become a resource. And then it’s a separation of different types of humans, of who’s the resource to be extracted and exploited and who’s not. But when does that line finally stop.
Vandana Shiva
I think we educated relationships and interconnectedness and self-organization out because it creates respect. It says, you know, actually the sacred is not about religion. The sacred is about limits.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s a nice point.
Vandana Shiva
This is a beautiful sacred forest. You can’t destroy it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
This is a sacred river. You can’t pollute it. And I think the consciousness that (a) we are part of one undivided consciousness, we are unique expressions in that consciousness out of a particular place and our diversity of relationships, that’s unique to us. That’s why in Indian philosophy we talk of dharma. But as Swadharma say it again, dharma is the right way of organizing our unconscious. Yes, Swadharma is your dharma because your relationships are unique. You know, we are related in this relationship. But all your other relationships are unique to you. All my relationships are unique to me. But those relationships make who we are. Yeah. And so we talk of interbeings increasingly now that we are self organized beings, but we are interbeings. And the whole pranayama of breathing in and breathing out, the mantra with it is So Hum, you are, therefore I am. And so you are the condition of my being. You are the context of my being. But then you realize, where do I get my breath from? The trees and plants and the green leaf, they are the condition of my life. They are me and they become me, or that they is me. Because I get the water from there and the soil and the seed and the biodiversity with the sun transformed into food becomes me. And there’s no separation between the soil and that plant. And there’s no separation in a realistic way. Because we even thought of the human body in that Baconian mechanistic way. And the mechanistic way is so ingrained in our children. I work with little children on the food consciousness. And you go to a school and say, what’s the body? The body is the machine and food is the fuel that runs the machine. And so it is just diesel. But the body is really consciousness in expression, in the concreteness of who and where we are. And food is consciousness, transforming the relationship of the embodied sunlight, the embodied drop of water, the embodied renewal life of the seed. All of that distilled into what goes into us. And then in a new communication and our gut microbiome.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. I was just thinking that.
Vandana Shiva
Which shapes every cell, our brain, our blood, our bones, so you can think, you know, the soil becomes the food becomes us.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
There’s a mechanistic way of thinking is, oh, you just need the Cartesian way is it’s just dimension, it’s just res extensa. All you need to do is this much calories, all you need to measure is on the labeling, on food safety, this much sodium, this much fat, this much. And it doesn’t tell you anything about the food.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
Because it’s only what is res extensa? The external, not the being.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
In the process, you’ve substituted real food with ultra processed and fake food.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Vandana Shiva
And at every level, it is at war while producing in the soil and the toxics. And when we eat it, it’s at war with 100 trillion microbes in our gut microbiome. So disease is a war.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, disease is a war. That’s really interesting.
Vandana Shiva
Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I’m thinking like, then we add microbiome, probiotics that we have to take because we’ve taken it out of the soil. And then it makes me think like how much we are the soil. If the soil has the probiotics, that is in the soil that we’re supposed to be eating, that’s in the gut, that’s in the heart, that’s in the brain, and that’s part of our consciousness, you know, and how that’s connected to the earth, the dirt, you know, it’s right there. That’s like you could have like a very tangible sense of interconnection. Right?
Vandana Shiva
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And then you said, also you said the opposite of life is not death. The opposite of life is machine.
Vandana Shiva
Because you can then you see death is not opposite of life for the simple reason it’s part of life.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Vandana Shiva
Birth and death are two points in the same cycle of life. Everything that is living gets born. Everything that’s just living is maintained in uniqueness. And that’s to me, the mystery and wonder of life. You know, when Schrodinger says what is life? And says it’s negative entropy. The whole machine world is built on external inputs, external energy, pollution and entropy. Here you have a form of life, embodied consciousness, which is able to reverse the laws of the machine. Because life is not a machine. And this basic simple recognition is what, you know, when they said, we’re going to now do GMOs and patent life, I said, okay, so for you, GMO means God, Move Over and we are the creators and we will collect rents. But the seed is not a machine. And they said, by the time we are finished, it will be recognized as a machine we invented. I said, by the time I’m finished, respect for life, respect for the seed, respect for the farmers. Who protect the seed will at least be present in communities and not go extinct.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this about Earth University. So it feels like it’s a manifestation of your philosophies that’s kind of come together. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Vandana Shiva
The Earth University is not a manifestation of my philosophy. It’s a manifestation of the Earth. And I just decided to start saving seeds because this idea was every seed will be genetically modified and controlled by us and patented. And that means the seeds will go. So I said the freedom of the seed to evolve on its own autopoietic terms is a freedom that I must defend. And the freedom of the farmer who has given us these seeds to save and share seeds, which is the highly human element of saving and sharing that must be defended. So I defined it as seed freedom.
Elizabeth Rovere
Seed freedom.
Vandana Shiva
And so I started to create community seed banks. 150 in India, but one main one where, you know, my home valley there, the. And then that grew into farm. Because then we had to do trials with these. We had to grow them out. We just planted 750 varieties of rice on our farm and harvested a few months ago, 250 varieties of wheat and every kind of pulse and nitrogen fixing plant and every spice and every oilseed and 100 species of trees. And all of this I did to save seeds. But when a seed becomes a plant and that plant is in relationship, the pollinators come six times more pollinators than the forestings do. Which also teaches you, you do the right kind of farming, you don’t have to be destroyer of biodiversity. It just creates. And the soil organisms are just bursting. Even the soil scientists cannot believe. And I said all we did was give back to the earth a little bit of what she’d given us with gratitude. That much we know and trust that she knows better about what to do with this. Yeah. And then people started turning up at her doorstep to say, I want to learn. So. And then the Schumacher College got in touch with me and said, we must have a Schumacher college at your farm. And before I knew it, they said, you know, we’re offering the first course. And I had to overnight in six months build the first bit.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh boy.
Vandana Shiva
And the Earth University then grew. And so I call it the University of the Earth as teacher. Nature as teacher.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s beautiful.
Vandana Shiva
We are just instruments.
Elizabeth Rovere
The university is the Earth as teacher. And that is. It seems like that’s something that all schools and universities should have.
Vandana Shiva
Absolutely.
Elizabeth Rovere
How could we? It’s almost like. Right. It’s like you’re brought up by your mother and father, right? But your mother, like the earth, is our mother.
Vandana Shiva
Absolutely.
Elizabeth Rovere
Can we please learn from our mother? Sometimes she has something positive to tell us and helpful.
Vandana Shiva
And she is much older.
Elizabeth Rovere
She is much older.
Vandana Shiva
You know, just think of one little fact. Because plants have come into my life in a big way because of the seed. Because seed is the plant. And now I did a book on soil, not oil, connecting food and climate. But I’ve just finished a new book on nature of nature. Because the debates. There are no debates anymore. The climate discourse is another polarized discourse. You either have the deniers or you have the opportunists. And that’s why this book I’ve written is on the metabolic disorder of climate change. That the Earth, if the Earth is living, and she is living, she’s Gaia. Just like when we are fed rubbish, when we violate the food system. At every point, there’s a lot of abuse going on.
Elizabeth Rovere
There’s a lot of abuse. And we’re abusing ourselves.
Vandana Shiva
We’re abusing. And therefore, every harm we do to the Earth, we are doing to ourselves.
Elizabeth Rovere
Exactly. That’s that weird disconnection. Like every time I’m harming the Earth or even another person, it’s like it’s coming back to me. I’m harming myself. You can feel that. You can see that in what you’re talking about. We’re eating this because we’re doing this for some kind of opportunistic reason. And she has a metabolic disorder. We get metabolic disorders.
Vandana Shiva
We pitted the Earth and humans against each other, and we defined more for humans by saying less for nature.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right?
Vandana Shiva
So the more we could spray glyphosate, we thought somehow it was a miracle for humans, Right? And right now we’ve had this tragic landslide in Wynard in Southend, and the newspaper, in a typical way, besides the fact that they’re reporting 350 dead and they’re saying maybe 450, the way they’re reporting it is humans versus nature. 450 people died. How could it be beneficial to them to destroy the forests that protected it? You know? But we’ve constantly become, you know, human progress versus the environment. They cannot be human progress with a destroyed nature.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right, Right.
Vandana Shiva
And therefore, I think breaking free of the mechanical mindset is scientific imperative, ethical imperative of consciousness.
Elizabeth Rovere
So even, yeah, breaking free of the mechanistic mindset is the scientific imperative at this point. It’s like we’re beyond it. We’re beyond it. We just need to start seeing Seeing it more.
Vandana Shiva
Exactly.
Elizabeth Rovere
And, when you were talking about it too, I was thinking about, as I’m speaking to you, you have such a sense of joy and levity about you. And I really appreciate sitting here with you. And I think about how you bring that into sometimes this work that can feel so difficult or demanding or like, I can’t believe this is happening again, some of these difficulties. But you seem to bring such a sense of joy to it. And I wonder about. Is that because of your. Is it because of how you value the interconnection or the sense of inherent sense of service in what you’re doing and the connection that you feel when you’re with people or with the Earth?
Vandana Shiva
You recognized it, Elizabeth. Yes, the joy is in the interconnection. And so even when there’s an assault, my focus is on the interconnections and integrity and the joy of service. Yeah, because I think a lot. There’s a lot of activism that are very mechanistic, that acts in a divided world.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes, yes.
Vandana Shiva
And it centers.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, interesting.
Vandana Shiva
It centers the world around destructive powers. That’s why I said, why do I always get called anti-globalization when I am defending the integrity of the Earth? Why am I…
Elizabeth Rovere
So, pro integrity of the Earth?
Vandana Shiva
So it’s always, what’s the center? Well, there is no center in a conscious world. The whole world is conscious. There’s no one centre. It’s everywhere. And when you define the world with the centers of power, of destructive power, and you define yourself with respect to that, then what happens is every time that destructive power finds a new way to create, play tricks, you have the burnout.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Vandana Shiva
Because you work like a machine against a machine, whereas you live as a conscious being, knowing there’s a machine. But you address it in its pettiness. This very beautiful, you know, my level, the kind of mission of organization, which is the name is Navdanya, which means nine seeds. And it also means the new gift. And the word came to me from a tribal peasant when I was collecting seeds and he was growing nine crops. I said, wow, you’re growing nine crops. And I’d just done studies on monocultures in Punjab. And he looked at me and said, you know, you stupid woman. He’s basically, yes, the nine crops I grow. The nine planets. Because in India we plan, you know, the rattle gate, the nine planets in the universe. The nine crops in my field and the diversity of food my family needs for health is one continuum of harmony. That’s why I grow nine crops.
Elizabeth Rovere
Wow.
Vandana Shiva
That’s why I grow navdanya. And that’s when I named the movement Navdanya. But out of this tribal peasant came this amazing connectivity, this powerful harmony, beauty, beautiful poetic health of the family, ecological health of the field and cosmic health. And the beautiful expression of nonlocality that my little field is connected to the cosmos. Therefore, I have to take care of this field with cosmic care. That’s what I’m doing. And I think that larger awareness, it also brings with it humility. That your actions have to be the right actions generating the right harmony. You don’t fight big with big. You’ll never be big. You don’t want to be big. And so I’ve always told young people, I’m having burnout. I’m getting exhausted. Everyone says, you’ve been doing this for 50 years. How do you carry on? Life’s been going on on this planet for 4 billion. I said, don’t think of yourself as Atlases with the Earth on your shoulder. And you’re carrying her. Remember, Mother Earth is carrying you. And just act in service and take joy in every moment.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that. I love that atlas carrying the world versus Mother Earth carrying you. That’s so beautiful. And it’s just. It’s like. It’s right there. It’s right in front of you. It’s like we’re standing here, we’re on the Earth. Why are we carrying it? And you know, the other thing too, we talked about this weekend has been the sense of awe and humility. Like, odd humility. And what you were just describing with the nine seeds. That’s exactly it. Right. It’s like connecting the cosmos to the health of my family and these nine seeds. And it’s like it’s being a part of something so huge. Right. And having this wonderful little part. So I feel a part of this amazing thing. But I’m. You know, the humility of it, the respect for it.
Vandana Shiva
I think, you know, the humility, the larger consciousness go together.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes.
Vandana Shiva
Whereas the mechanical mind creates lack of humility. Because you’re in control.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yep.
Vandana Shiva
And pettiness. So the other thing that’s been our inspiration is one place where Vasudeva Kutumbakam is mentioned. Vasundhara is the God, one of the thousand names in India. We love giving a thousand names to everything. The Ganges, Lalitha, the thousand ways Mother Earth plays. She plays. Yeah. It’s always play. It’s always play, never boring. I’m going to, you know, create the perfect world. She’s always at play. Vasundhara is one of her names. And Vasudheva Kutumbakam is Vasundhara as the earth, her family, which is the whole earth family, the trees, the grass, the butterflies, the bees. And it has just two lines to say, this is mine and this is yours. To say, this person is my friend and this is my enemy, that’s a petty mind. The elevated mind sees the whole world as one family. So the largeness of consciousness embraces diversity and with it, respect.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes. And it’s like the elevated mind. Elevated, but with humility.
Vandana Shiva
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
We’ve lost. We’ve lost humility. We’ve lost a sense of humility. You know, everybody wants to be so important and in charge and in control. You know, like, it’s profound to me. Like, we’ve lost a sense of humility. You know, it makes me think of, you know, vulnerability came back into popularity with Brene Brown, who wrote this bestselling book on the power of vulnerability. Right. But it’s like, you know, when you’re more vulnerable and open, you’re more able to connect with other people. But when you’re more feeling like you have to be in charge and you have to have everything buttoned up so tightly, it’s hard to relate to another person. And I feel like we’ve lost the sense of humility. We’ve lost our ability to recognize how important and crucial and vital it is. And I don’t know, what do you think about that? How can we bring that back? Is it just through this ongoing awareness of our intellectual.
Vandana Shiva
I think the combination of awareness of relationship and proportions, in what proportion? Because the relationship puts you in proportion, you know, in the right relationship. But while you were talking, I mean, because I worked so long on soil, now, the Latin word for soil, for living soil, is humus.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right?
Vandana Shiva
Right. And the word human is derived from it.
Elizabeth Rovere
We need to remember that.
Vandana Shiva
And the word humility is derived from it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Vandana Shiva
So to truly be human is to be of the soil. And to be truly human is to be humble to not say, the soil is dead earth.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that. That’s great. So I have a. It’s kind of a question that I heard about quantum. I have to ask you. So it’s been said that quantum physics or quantum theory is veiled reality. Is there divinity in some respect in the quantum?
Vandana Shiva
Yeah, I think you can give consciousness different names. You know, the pervasive consciousness is what divinity is defined as in Indian philosophy. You know, there is no person in a particular place.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Vandana Shiva
It’s consciousness and it’s the creative force that then creates from itself all the expressions. And one could call that the veil, you know?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes, yes. What would you say? Is that like Shakti or.
Vandana Shiva
I mean, I have always used Shakti as the creative power that brings forth, you know, on the one hand you can define it as Maya, the illusions, but that same process defined as Shakti, then this consciousness, which is creative in its own power, brings all the forms into the world, you know?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes, yes.
Vandana Shiva
And that Shakti is in everything. And I’ll give you a little story, please. So you know, I worked with Chipko from the 70s and in 82, the Ministry of Environment asked us to do a study on mining which was in my valley. So I came back to my valley for that and created at my institution. And our study which showed that the same limestone is like a gestalt, looks like just mineral to be extracted by the cement industry or the steel industry. And by just talking to women, as well as the issue, this is water. I then did the geo hydrology and that the cavities in the limestone is where water is held. And we just did the economy, you know, if the limestone is left in the mountains, what economy does it serve? If it’s extracted, which economy does it serve? Who, how much? And our basic study showed that the water economy was much bigger, served more people, had a just bigger contribution to society. And on the base of this study, the Supreme Court stopped the mining. The first case in history, I think, said, when commerce undermines life, commerce must stop because life must carry on. And then after this decision, I got this huge group of women marching to my place, which interestingly my institute, my mother had said, if you ever want to give up your job, take the cowshed. So when I gave up my job, I went to the cowshed and set up my institute called the Research Foundation. And so I saw this group of women marching up to my mother’s cowshed and saying, what do you have against us? I said, why? Nothing. Said, why didn’t you stop our mine? So I looked at the map. Their mine was not in the map the government gave us. It was outside in the sense it was. It was created illegally. And so if you do a Chipko, will you join? I said, sure. And then a few months later, while they were doing this blockade of the mine, they were attacked by the goons, which always goes hand in hand. And I got the message. So I went. We had to walk eight miles up to the village. And so went. And I thought, you know, these women who’ve been beaten up will be in their homes. They were all bandaged, plastered, but they’re still sitting at the protest site. And I said to this old woman, I said, where do you get the strength? You’ve just been beaten up, you’ve got a hand in plaster, your friend has a bandage on her head and you’re sitting here. And she said something beautiful, which I’ll never forget. She said, we’re walking on the grass and the grass bounces back and we collect the leaves from these trees for our animals as fodder. And the leaves come right back. That shakti that’s in the grass and in the tree is a shakti in us. That creative power that can never be extinguished.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s great.
Vandana Shiva
That’s us.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s great. I love that. That’s so beautiful. Oh, that’s. There’s nothing else to say. That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I feel like non scientists like me throw around the word quantum like it’s some kind of holistic heal all. I loved hearing an actual quantum physicist connect the theory to the real world in a way that makes our connection to nature even more powerful and important. Thank you to Vandana for joining us and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and think someone else might too, please rate the show and consider sending a link to a friend. We’re excited to hear your thoughts, share what resonated with you and leave us a comment and follow us on @wonderstruckpod on Instagram. Wonderstruck is produced by Striking Wonder Productions with the teams at Baillie Newman and Creator Aligned Projects. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, and Travis Reece. And remember, stay open to the wonder in life.
