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Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, and a tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, then shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology, and environmental policy. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, particularly native seeds, and to promote organic farming and fair trade. The organization has served more than 500,000 Indian farmers and established 60 native seed banks across India. As a bestselling author and a powerful activist, Dr. Shiva has campaigned around the world for intellectual property rights, biodiversity, and women’s empowerment, and against genetic engineering and chemical agriculture. In November 2010, Forbes Magazine named Dr. Shiva as one of the “Seven Most Powerful Women on the Globe”. In this adapted excerpt from the updated edition of her book Soil Not Oil (North Atlantic Books, 2015), Dr. Shiva discusses why healthy soil and a world independent from fossil fuels is necessary for a sustainable future. Climate chaos and peak oil are converging with a third crisis—the food crisis. The food crisis results from the combined impacts of the industrialization and globalization of agriculture. The very forces and processes that have promised cheap food are pushing food beyond people’s reach. Prices of food are rising worldwide. More than 33 countries have witnessed food riots. In early June 2008, an emergency meeting of the UN was called to address the crisis of climate change and the food crisis. As expected, the same corporate interests that have created the two crises tried to offer the disease as the cure—more fossil-fuel-based chemical fertilizers, more non-renewable genetically engineered and hybrid seeds bred to respond to the intensive use of chemicals, more corporate control of food, and more globalized trade. We are now facing a triple convergence of crises: The energy and climate-change crisis stands as a unique social and ecological challenge. No other challenge is so global in scope. There is no place to hide. Climate change is impacted by diverse human activities—how we shop, how we move, how we live, how we eat. Solutions cannot be restricted to one or two sectors. They will touch all aspects of our lives. Mitigation and adaptation must happen across all aspects of our lives. Climate change results from what is done to the land, and its impacts transform the land. Air, water, land, biodiversity, and energy are intertwined elements of climate change—its cause and solutions. The most creative and necessary work that humans do is to work with the soil as co-producers of nature. Human effort and knowledge based on care for the soil prevents and reverses desertification, the root of collapse of so many historical civilizations. Rebuilding soil fertility is the very basis of sustainable food production and food security. There is no alternative to fertile soil to sustain life, including human life, on Earth. It is our work with living soil that provides sustainable alternatives to the triple crisis of climate, energy, and food. Peak oil and the end of cheap oil demand a paradigm shift in our conception of human progress—we need to imagine how we can live better without oil. The emerging food crisis will add another billion people to the billion who are already denied their right to food and condemned to hunger and malnutrition. 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. We will either have justice, sustainability, and peace together, or we will descend into ecological catastrophe, social chaos, and conflict. Soil, not oil, offers a framework for converting the ecological catastrophe and human brutalization we face into an opportunity to reclaim our humanity and our future. Living Soil Versus Dead Dirt Chemical agriculture is based on the idea that soil fertility is manufactured in fertilizer factories. This is the idea that drove the “Green Revolution”, introduced in India in 1965 and 1966. In 1967, at a meeting in New Delhi, Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning “father of the Green Revolution,” was emphatic about the role of fertilizers in the new revolution. “If I were a member of your parliament,” he told the politicians and diplomats in the audience, “I would leap from my seat every fifteen minutes and yell at the top of my voice, ‘Fertilizers!... Give the farmers more fertilizers!’ There is no more vital message in India than this. Fertilizers will give India more food.” Today, the Green Revolution has faded in Punjab. Yields are declining. The soil is depleted of nutrients, and the water is polluted with nitrates and pesticides. In 1909, Fritz Haber invented ammonium sulfate, a nitrogen fertilizer made using coal or natural gas to heat nitrogen and hydrogen. The manufacture of synthetic fertilizers is highly energy intensive. One kilogram [2.2 lbs.] of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of two liters [half a gallon] of diesel. One kilogram of phosphate fertilizer requires half a liter [.13 gallons] of diesel. Energy consumed during fertilizer manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion liters [50.5 billion gallons] of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion [73.2 billion gallons] in 2030. Plants, however, need more than [the nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium (NPK) that’s in conventional fertilizers]. And when only NPK is applied as synthetic fertilizer, soil and plants, and consequently humans, develop deficiencies of trace elements and micronutrients. A pioneer of organic agriculture, Sir Albert Howard, defined fertile soil as a soil teeming with healthy life in the shape of abundant microflora and microfauna, will bear healthy plants, and these, when consumed by animals and man, will confer health on animals and man. But an infertile soil, that is, one lacking sufficient microbial, fungous, and other life, will pass on some form of deficiency to the plant, and such plants, in turn, will pass on some form of deficiency to animals and man.
