Hi all,

I am reading Soil Not Oil, a small, heartfelt book by Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental thinker, physicist, author and activist. I highly recommend reading this book for anyone who cares about the future of Earth, believe endless economic growth is not the solution for our current problems, and is ready to take action...

Let me share a few excerpts:

Engineering the Planet: Mechanistic "solutions" to problems caused by the Mechanical Age

" Fossil fuels fueled the mechanical age. When machines driven by non-renewable energy replaced renewable human and animal energy, the atmospheric carbon cycle started to get disrupted

" The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to climate imbalance. The mechanical mind that has caused the problems of climate change is now applying the same mechanistic and reductionist thinking to solutions to climate change. These mechanical interventions threaten to cause even more ecological dislocations and disruptions to our fragile biosphere

" Interfering in Gaia’s process is at the root of climate change

" Playing with Gaia as if she were a LEGO set cannot be the appropriate response at a time when human intervention in the Earth’s living systems is threatening our very survival. The mechanical mind cannot solve the problems of the mechanical age.

Earth Democracy: Climate, Energy, and Resource Justice on a Small and Fragile Planet

" The problem of climate change is clearly related to the issue of energy. However, it is also an issue of the economy, how goods are produced and distributed, how our town and home are designed, our food and clothing is produced. Yet globalization and industrialization are not even referred to in the climate change negotiations and discussions. The issue of over extraction and over consumption of energy is being avoided, as is the issue of the injustice to the poor and other life-forms whose homes and habitats, lives and futures are being sacrificed to provide the energy and resources to run a globalized consumerist economy.

" The solution to climate chaos is not an energy shift - from fossil fuels to nuclear, biofuel, and big hydro. The solution is a paradigm shift:
- from a reductionist to a holistic worldview based on interconnections
- from a mechanistic, industrial paradigm to an ecological one
- from a consumerist definition of being human to one that recognizes us as conservers of the earth’s finite resources and co creators of wealth and nature

" The climate crisis is at its roots a consequence of human beings having gone astray from the ecological path of living with justice and sustainability. It is a consequence of forgetting that we are earth citizens.

" The real problem is the conflict between the economic laws that have reduced the planet and society to a supermarket where everything is for sale and the ecological laws that maintain the planet’s ecological functions and social laws that distribute nature’s goods and services equitably.

" If these are the real problems, then the real solutions cannot be replacing fossil fuels with other non-sustainable sources to power the same systems. The real solution must be to search for right living, for well-being, and for joy, while simultaneously reducing consumption.

" Earth Democracy and ecological equity recognize that because the planet’s resources and capacity to renew resources are limited, a reduction in energy and resource consumption of the rich is necessary for all to have access to land and water, food and fiber, air and energy.

" The eco-imperialist response to the climate crisis is to grab the remaining resources of the planet, close the remaining spaces of freedom, and use the worst form of militarized violence to exterminate people’s rights and people themselves when they get in the way of an insatiable economy’s resource appropriation, driven by the insatiable greed of corporations. There is another response --that of Earth Democracy.

" Earth Democracy recognizes that if the survival our species is threatened, maintaining our ability to live on the planet is the only intelligent response. Chasing economic growth while ecosystems collapse is a sign of stupidity, not wisdom.

" In Earth Democracy, solutions will not come from the corporations and governments that have raped the planet and destroyed people’s lives.

Climate Change and the Two Carbon economies: Biodiversity vs. Fossil Fuels

" Reductionism seems to have become the habit of the contemporary human mind. We are increasingly talking of "the carbon economy" in the context of climate change. We refer to "zero carbon", as if carbon existed only in fossilised form under the ground. We forget that the cellulose of plants is primarily carbon. Humus in the soil is mostly carbon. Vegetation in the forests is mostly carbon. Carbon in the soil and in plants is living carbon. It is part of the cycle of life.

" The problem is not carbon per se. The problem is our increasing use of fossil carbon that was formed over millions of years.

" While plants are a renewable resource, fossil carbon for our purposes is not. It will take millions of years to renew the earth’s supply of coal and oil

" Our dependence on fossil fuels has broken us out of nature’s renewable carbon cycle. Our dependence on fossil fuels has fossilized our thinking.

" Biodiversity is the alternative to fossil carbon. Everything that we derive from the petrochemical industry has an alternative in the real of biodiversity.

" Climate change is a consequence of the transition from biodiversity based on renewable carbon economies to a fossil fuel-based non-renewable carbon economy. This was the transition called the industrial revolution.

" Renewable carbon and biodiversity redefine progress. They redefine development. They redefine being ‘developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘underdeveloped’. In the fossil fuel paradigm, to be ‘developed’ is to be industrialized –to have industrialized food and clothing, shelter and mobility, ignoring the social costs of displacing people from work and the ecological costs of polluting the atmosphere and destabilising the climate. In the fossil fuel paradigm, to be ‘underdeveloped’ is to have non-industrial, fossil-free systems of producing our food and clothing and providing shelter and mobility.

" In the biodiversity paradigm, to be ‘developed’ is to be able to leave ecological space for other species, for all people and future generations of humans. To be ‘underdeveloped’ is to usurp the ecological space of the other species and communities, to pollute the atmosphere and threaten the planet.

" We need to change our mind before we can change our world. This cultural transition is at the heart of making an energy transition to an age beyond oil. What blocks the transition is a cultural paradigm that perceives industrialisation as progress combined with false ideas of productivity and efficiency. We have been made to believe that industrialisation of agriculture is necessary to produce more food. This is not at all true. Biodiverse ecological farming produces more and better food than the most energy- and chemically intensive agriculture. We have been made to falsely believe that cities designed for automobiles provide more effective mobility to meet our daily needs than cities designed for pedestrians and cyclists.

" The biodiversity economy is the sustainable alternative to the fossil fuel economy.

" We need to create a carbon democracy so that all beings have their just share of useful carbon and no-one is burdened with carrying an unjust share of climate impacts due to carbon pollution. "

__________________________

Bottom line, as far as I understand, our culture can't continue living as is everything is fine, we can't keep growing for ever. Most of all, we must reduce over-population and over-consumerism. Our lifestyle IS negotiable, it must be negotiable. We do need to change our minds, our culture, before it is too late.

Shiva ends her book with this statement:

" We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves"