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Vandana Shiva: Teachers for a Living World
Yes! Magazine / Video Interview
Published: Saturday 28 January 2012
While Ivy League schools marvel at India’s economic growth, Vandana Shiva’s University of the Seed looks to the earth—and Gandhi—for guidance.
Gandhi once burned British cloth imported from the mills of Manchester to reveal the power of the indigenous spinning wheel; and led the famous Salt March to underscore the capacities of all Indians (in fact, all human beings) to live autonomously, depending on the support of themselves and each other while throwing off the shackles of global empire.
Renowned food and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva’s Bija Vidyapeeth (University of the Seed), co-founded with Satish Kumar in 2001, is grounded on the four Gandhian principles of non-violence:swaraj (self-rule), swadeshi (home-spun), satyagraha (truth force), and savodaya (the uplifting of all).
Inspired by these principles, this university grown on a farm preserves a wild diversity of indigenous seeds in cooperation with thousands of farmers across India and the world, committed to the organic principles of working with Mother Earth—rather than waging war on her with chemicals.
“Gandhi and Globalization” is a course co-taught annually at Bija Vidyapeeth for ten short, intense days in November and December. Vandana Shiva, Satish Kumar (founder of Schumacher College in England), and Samdhong Rimpoche (the first Prime Minister of Independent Tibet) designed this course for students coming from all continents, speaking in multiple tongues, and joined by a shared passion for both Gandhi and the end of the era of globalization or neo-colonialism.
During the last three years, I have had the privilege of joining these four great teachers in the fabulous intellectual and moral adventure of co-teaching this course with them.
“Gandhi and Globalization” is one among a range of courses offered by Bija Vidyapeeth to demonstrate that Gandhi’s relevance grows even as globalization strangulates indigenous traditions of teaching, learning, living, and celebrating life and death.
Madhu Suri Prakash interviewed Vandana Shiva for YES! Magazine, a national nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Madhu is a contributing editor toYES! Magazine.
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5 comments on "Vandana Shiva: Teachers for a Living World"
January 30, 2012 4:39pm
good job to save the humanity. America is dying by chemicals and hybrids and genetic modified food.
February 05, 2012 2:52am
The case that pesticides are pisoning us has little or nothing to do with rejecting sciecne, freedom and equal rights. And that's teh trojan horse in vandana Shiva's action. No mention of women's rights and women's condition, harassment, exploitation by local powerful people in India...quite the contrary...she's co-chairing the "university" with a "lama" Just remeber the Dalai lama said the suffering theya re going through now, under China, may well be a punishment for the way the lamas treated their people (slaves in the XX Century) for eons... Nice alternative to Modern World!
January 30, 2012 4:38pm
good job to save the humanity. America is dying by chemicals and hybrids and genetic modified food.
January 30, 2012 1:52pm
Well done Vandana Shiva! A bright woman, well educated doing so much for the world, very inspiring indeed.Heloisa
January 29, 2012 6:45am
The whole Vandana Shiva issue is a cheap version of the most conservative type of society in which non of the Post Modernists who praise it from the West, would ever accept to live.It's founded on acritical embracing of an authoritarian and defunct past, challenging at the same time Science and Technology (which they are unable to distinguish) and Marxism, which is too Modern for them as a mean for understanding the way power is distributed, or concentrated, in any society. They are willingly covering native exploitation, inefficiency and inequality disguised under the pseudo revolutionary concepts of gandhi (himself a person of doubtful value for the sake of Indians- read about his meetings with mussolini, letters to Hitler and his support to S.C. Bose). I am astonished on how is it possible that meaningful and knowledgeable people can still subscribe to this stupidity! Still, irrational is always appealing, look at the stories of Mother teresa or the late Nazi pole Pope and let me know.