March 29, 2006

Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace
by Vandana Shiva
South End Press, 2005

By JOE MARTIN
Contributing Writer

Early in the novel March To The Montería by the enigmatic B. Traven, an impoverished Chamula Indian, Celso Flores, is robbed of his hard-earned pesos. For two years he had slaved on a miserable coffee plantation in order to earn a marriage dowry. On the journey back to his home he is threatened by a greedy, ruthless upper-class caballero who claims that Celso’s father owes him money. The hapless Celso turns over his earnings. The duplicitous caballero ends the cruel transaction by telling Celso to let his father know “that if he wants a cow or a mule or the best seed in the state, he can get it from me at the cheapest price in the whole comarca.”

It is a heartbreaking and infuriating scene. As I read the new work by the indefatigable ecological activist Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy, Celso’s brutal humiliation came to mind: for it encapsulates the myriad and rampant forms of exploitation transpiring daily on a global scale.

Parlous economic trends of which Shiva writes are overwhelming the lives of billions of people in the Third World. Gargantuan corporations with global designs abetted by the World Trade Organization and insidious patent laws are threatening the biodiversity of the planet, and eroding the social and cultural legacies of human beings throughout our world. Everything — land, water, resources, plants, animals, and people — is a potential commodity to be bought, sold, traded, controlled, and owned by the highest bidder.

Shiva’s metaphor for this carefully planned planetary plunder is the “enclosure,” a reference to the English Crown’s 17th-century effort to fence off specified pasture and forest lands that had previously been freely accessible to the poor. “A head-on clash developed between the lords of the manors and the peasantry in many parts of the country over the control of the commons,” Shiva writes. “Between 1628 and 1631, large crowds repeatedly attacked and broke down the enclosures. Large areas of England were in a state of rebellion.” The reaction of the English peasants was understandable, for the reviled enclosures placed their very lives at stake.

So it is with the refined and technologically bolstered corporate pilfering now taking place on a massive scale: “Commons are the collective economic assets of the poor. Enclosures of the commons are thus a theft of the resources on which the poor depend for their livelihood.”

Shiva relates how the Bechtel Corporation claimed that all the water in the region of Cochabamba, Bolivia was its private property, thus “a rural woman using a pail to draw water from her own well was a thief.” The Bolivian people organized a democratic resistance to this swindle and got rid of Bechtel. But the arrogance, audacity, and outrageous legal finagling of global corporations remain largely undeterred: “These treaties are about more than goods moving across international boundaries. They are about the commoditization of the entire planet and transformation of the very basis of life – the planet’s life and human life – into corporate property.”

Shiva makes cogent arguments for localization of governance, for regionally-based agriculture, for the preservation of naturally germinating seed. She submits compelling evidence for the enhanced productivity as well as the ecological benefits of family and community-based farming over the exploitative methods of agricultural conglomerates: “A shift to ecological agriculture and organic farming is an ecological, economic, and security imperative.”

Shiva’s book is a work of idealism and hope. But in measured prose she warns that our own species is imperiled by the gross spoilation of our beautiful planet’s environment in the name of crass profiteering that enriches the few at the expense of the multitude.

“ Imperialistic globalization is emerging as the worst form of genocide in our times. It is turning the vast majority of the human race into a threatened species.” A tocsin call to awareness and action, Earth Democracy will enlighten even those who already share Shiva’s convictions. More importantly, its clearly expounded rationale could convince many who are yet to be alerted to our collective peril. n