Dr. Vandana Shiva's Lecture

This evening I walked to campus to hear Dr. Vandana Shiva speak as the keynote speaker for this year's Water workshop at Western State College. Dr. Shiva is an Indian environmental educator and activist whos strong emphasis on local resilences and her stark condemnation of multi-national corporations was refreshing to hear. I am very happy to live in a community that is engaged towards building resiliency as a fundamental core value perhaps driven by the college and many of the professor interests.

Dr. Shiva talked about her research and observations that directly counters many of the corporate sponsored research about the productivity gains using GMO crops and modern fossil-fuel based agricultural chemical pesticides and herbicides. Indigenous farming techniques do not require massive external inputs to produce a wide range of food stuffs, where as industrial farming focusing on monocultural crops relay on up to 7 times external inputs to produce the same crop output on land. Dr. Shiva also railed against patients on genetic crops as a form of slavery that just transfers wealth from the poor to the weather corporate interests as Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto . She has personally lead India's fight against Coca-Cola who was taking large amounts of water in India that deprived local villages of easily accessible water. She has brought Cargill and Monsanto to India's court to redress some of their worst practices. I have heard some of these stories but to be in the audience listening to one of the main activists that lead some of these fights was amazing. She also said that we need to get back to producing and not just being consumers. We need start using our arms and hands, to build and not be afraid of hard work that is required to build local production facilities. She also mentioned that local problem Gunnison Organic Ranchers are experiencing by not having an easily available slaughter house to support these local producers of food.

During the question-and-answer section, a student asked Dr. Shiva what suggestions or advice she had for him. She responded that while she didn't like giving advice, she recomened to get involved with one thing, food. Food is becoming so important and how we produce and feed the world is becoming more of an issues that impacts a lot of other important issues like global climate change, equal rights, and environmental adjustment.

I have a couple of personal takeaways from listening to Dr. Shiva speak. First, I am going to look for some of her books to read. Second, tomorrow I am going to take her advice and finish building my first SIP (sub-irrigated planter) and try to plant some of the heirloom tomato seeds I saved from a purchase I made last month at Gunnison farmer's market. I have most of the material and last winter I grew a tomato plant that provided a single cherry tomato. Hopefully this effort will turn out more successful.