The Gary Null Show – Earth Day Special – 04.22.15

Earth in Crisis and Our Sacred Duty to Preserve Life, with Vandana Shiva and Satish Kumar. 

Dr. Vandana Shiva is an internationally renown environmental and social activist, and formerly one of India’s top nuclear physicists. She is regarded as the leading pioneer behind India’s ecological and ecofeminism movement. In 1982 Dr. Shiva founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya – an organization dedicated to the restoration of organic farming across India and the preservation of indigenous knowledge and culture.

For several decades, Vandana has fought for changes in the globalized practices of agriculture and food. She has traveled the world speaking against biopiracy, globalization and patenting of indigenous knowledge by large agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations. Her activist efforts have created grassroots organizations throughout the developing world to counter genetic engineering of crops, as well as empower women throughout the third world.

Dr. Shiva has received numerous international awards, including the Alternative Nobel Prize (the Right Livelihood Award), the UNEP’s Global 500 Award and the UN’s Earth Day International Award.  Among her more important books are “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace”, “Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed”, “Soil Not Oil” and most recently  “Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars”  Her websites are VandanaShiva.com and Navdanya.org

Satish Kumar is one of the few people in the world who fully embraces the principles of Mohatma Gandhi to promote a spirituality opposed to war and ecological destruction.  At the age of nine, Sateesh renounced the world to become a wandering Jain monk. But dissuaded by his inner voice at eighteen he left his ascetic life to embrace Gandhi’s vision of land reform and global peace.  Having been influenced by Bertrand Russell’s anti-nuclear war philosophy, Sat-eesh undertook an 8,000 mile peace pilgrimage, having walked penniless from India to Soviet Union, France and traveling to the UK and America, he delivered “packets of peace tea” to the heads of government of each of these four nuclear powers.

Having settled in the UK in 1973, Sateesh is now the editor of the prestigious magazine Resurgence, which highlights many of our world’s greatest thinkers and visionaries on environmental, ecological and sustainability issues. Influenced by the “small is beautiful” movement of Schumacher, he has founded pioneering schools and colleges that introduce ecological sanity and spiritual values into their curricula.  He has been a hero for many of our progressive leaders and received two honorary doctorate degrees from prominent British universities.  Among his books are “Soil, Soul, Society: A New Trinity for Our Time” and “No Destination” which is an extraordinary autobiography of his remarkable life and philosophy.  His website is Resurgence.org