Vandana Shiva: "Agroecology and The Great Simplification" | The Great Simplification #46 

Thanks for featuring Vandana, she is a true visionary

This interview has profoundly moved and inspired me. I have just watched an interview with the Earth herself in the human form of Vandana Shiva. Thank you.

Nate Hagens does a superb job of assessing the bio-mechanical intricacies of the human predicament. He and his incredible guests always shed needed light on the subject. Vandana Shiva contributes a much-needed, holistic, almost "spiritual" (though I shudder to use those words) component to the discussion. She has a deeper connection, a more profound respect for the subject matter than most materialistic, "nuts and bolts", pragmatists. Thanks Nate.

Wonderful conversation with Vandana Shiva! Maybe you can arrange for another podcast with her. I love the idea of the yoga documentary. What a wonderful opportunity to work with such a gifted, special leader for the environment. I have never traveled to India either, but don't let that hold you back! I would be glad to be part of your support team if it happens. Happy Thanksgiving! Keep going Nate! We will be successful at creating a new future for our planet!

Nate, I know it's a day before Thanksgiving but I would be remiss at this point if I didn't tell you how grateful I am for the work you're doing to expose us to thinkers who've spent a lot of their lives looking into the unprecedented challenges we're facing as a species. I've gone through the stages of grief (probably not for the last time) since first jumping into listening to your podcast and RU-vid channel over six months ago and the anchor that helps me move toward post-cynical optimism is that I'm getting to learn more and more about defining the problems. I'm looking for things to do with my law license and skill set and this is starting to become a calling for me. There's purpose in that and I so appreciate you and your guests for showing me there are so many opportunities to apply myself in a way that benefits all of us.

Vandana Shiva : president mother of earth and humanity. Thanks Madame!

Perhaps your single most important podcast to date Nate. Vandana's message of hope needs to reach more people. And you definitely need to try Chipati with your next pepper and potato curry! 😂 "Bread is my Freedom", love it! Thank you Vandana 🫶

Vandana ji, such a deep intense meaningful points,Hats off to you 👏👏👏🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 Proud of India,For Producing such great being from the vishwaguru Bharath 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

What a beautiful human being, and great questions! I must admit I generally feel pretty hopeless with the way everything is unfolding in the world, but Vandana has opened my eyes to a new way of thinking.

Nate Hagens and Vandana Shiva documentary about saving Earth and all life. Sign me up! I am a poor man but I would contribute to THAT venture! Its brilliant!

Vandana is so inspiring! Her passion and strength to protect seed and the power the biodiversity is what keeps me hopeful. Her solutions are so simple and can accomplish great change without the use of costly technology: Humility for the earth. Yoga for the earth. Watch a seed grow!

Thank you for inviting Vandana Shiva into your conversations. Her words ring true and point toward a deeper, time tested way of being human that us smart white folk with fancy plans for saving the world have forgotten. I breathe a sigh of relief. It feels like coming home.

Man the beauty of life reversing entropy and persisting. Beautifully put. This was fabulous guest

Great!!! What she said..."stop all activity that is antithetical to Life on Earth!" Love her, and you did a marvelous job of interviewing Vandana, aka Miss Gaia. Many thanks for your good work...

Wonderful insight, thank you Vandana

Nate, I knew this was going to be a humdinger of a conversation... and it was! Vandana Shiva is not only brilliant, she is a mentor for me in merging hard-hitting ideas and data with poetry and a poetic sensibility. I've got to listen to this one again (and will) do just that. If anyone wants to rest in that place of bursting through old colonization myths and into a hard-earned joy, I say check out this conversation. Oh and by the way, Nate your questions and full-on listening helped so much...

She is amazing! Thanks for having her on!

Wonderful conversation! Thank you so much. Please have her on again!👍🍀

❤Thank❤🌹🙏 you, dear Vandana and Nate, you're wonderful people!

Nate - thanks very much for that interview. Ms Shiva is an inspiration. Wow. Regarding her dinner - I've learned since moving to NZ (as a British Commonwealth country) that sweet peppers (e.g. bell peppers) are commonly referred to as "capsicum", from the Latin, I believe. (chillies, inexplicably, are still 'peppers' here) And chapatis are a delicious flatbread a bit like a tortilla, but not usually used the same way - they're often used to pick up the other elements of the meal by hand.

Vandana is wonderful! Great interview and I like the larger picture quotations at the end! She DOES have a documentary, or rather one about her, called "The Seeds of Vandana Shiva" which is AMAZING! Very worth checking out.... It would still be amazing to make the one from the discussion, however, about the yoga of the Earth. This is very much needed wisdom in this culture! You should also interview Robin Wall Kimmerer about her book Braiding Sweetgrass, which has a Native American perspective that combines with botany and ecology to say very much of the same message. One of my favorite books ever about nature and our story on this earth.

Thanks, Nate, for facilitating. Vandana shares so much truth, wisdom and encouragement during this brief conversation. At 44:15, she summarizes the scientific/factual understanding of syntropic energy flow within our living Biosphere vs the entropic energy flow of industrial civilization and its non-living technology. She calls syntropy "autopoetic energy". Nate and Daniel Schmachtenberger might consider this as the so-called "third attractor" so central to their other themes/memes. Here is what she says... Vandana Shiva: > Well, energy in the universe is not the coal and the oil underground. The world is energy. > The universe is energy. > Nature is energy. > > And the fact that a seed can become a tree, that is amazing autopoietic energy. > > And Schrödinger, who did the Schrödinger equation and the Schrödinger's cat, he's done a brilliant book called "What Is Life?" > And in that book he says, "Well, unlike machines and physical processes, living systems have the power to reverse entropy." > Fossil fuels and mechanical systems create entropy and waste. > Living systems take the energy and turn it into more creative energy. Every leaf comes out. > Now, if it can happen to the seed and can happen to the soil organisms and all of this amazing self-organized capacity of the soil-web-of-life, then I think we just have to be conscious of that tremendous energy and participate in it... and at the same time, not participate in that which degrades, depletes, destroys. > >

Inspiring women!

Nate, many thanks for this discussion with Vandana, one of my favorite peeps - along with your good self ofc.

Yes, thanks so much for talking with Vandana. She's a vibrant life spirit and one who has learned much about life, humanity, science and nature. It's true wisdom.

Wow Vandana i admire you so much. Thank you so much!

Yes! Yoga of the earth. You will find yourself naturally doing yoga throughout a good day of farming if you do it by hand. Great discussion

So there you have it, Nate : You must go to India to visit Vandana Shiva's success stories. She is an inspiration for millions around the world. Keep up your conversations with this extraordinary human being. I love your podcast, and I listen to bits every single day. Namaste 🙏

Nate! Please look up Andrew Millison’s RU-vid channel (200k subs). He’s a professor of ecology at Oregon State. He’s a permaculture/regenerative agriculture advocate and expert. He has made several mini docs about some of the best hydrological and agricultural regeneration success stories in the world. At a minimum please familiarize yourself to his work. Geoff Lawton as well!!! (Greening the Desert Project)

such an inspiration, has battled these technocratic control demons for decades without any loss of enthusiasm and a beautiful smile on her her face :)

When you consider the fact that virtually ALL of our dysfunctions : economic inequities, specious wars, environmental degradation, religious adversity, etc, etc. are MAN-MADE, a much greater respect for the natural, symbiotic balance of Earth systems should be acknowledged and appreciated, in the same manner as Vandana Shiva. It is our last remaining hope.

Nate, This was Incredibly Invaluable. Thank you❤ Been Listening To Dr Vandana Shiva for A While Now & She is Loaded in Wisdom not Just Intellectually but Intuitively. Namaste❤

What an inspiration and how simply she gets her message across.

Gracias Nate por este hermoso episodio. Vandana Shiva es un ser de amor. Ojalá escuchemos y actuemos según su sabiduría. Todo es más simple.

I have been waiting for these two to have this very conversation. Thank you both

I had read a few things from Vandana years ago that rubbed me the wrong way, and so I avoided listening to any more of her content. But I believe on the whole she has so many good ideas and is an important activist. I was seeing things from my own echo chamber initially and since then my mind is more open.

she is amazing, we need more of that all around the world :) To comment on the technology vs ecology lens: i prefer the ecology lens and build from there, but there is great hope in technology if it is used to benefit humans on earth, in a holistic way considering all factors for health for all living things. I think we only need technology for sustaining billions of humans on earth, and i think billions are too much for the earth to bear and to big of a thing to ask teknology to solve, when we decide how many we want living and thriving on the earth. Nothing can get better as long as we have capitalist systems in place, any monetary economies will bring destruction. so that is why i advocate to a resource based economy.

I want to just meet vandana ji once and touch her feet and take her blessings, such great being 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻👏👏👏

Vandana Shiva! 🤍 I love her boundless energy and fighting spirit! I was on precisely the same page when the question was posed-in so many words-to Shiva, "How do you DO it so tirelessly, and without becoming demoralized?" The only area I felt weird about was when the discussion briefly turned to the need for men to "become more womanly (caring)." Setting aside today's roiling, chaotic "wokery" for a moment, I definitely see the value of men & women striking healthy balances with their respective "feminine" & "masculine" sides, but-honest to God-(maybe I'm reading more into it than I should...?): men do NOT need to become "more womanly," in any context. LOL! ...Just in my not-very-well-read, and hopelessly outdated Generation-X opinion, I mean... Outstanding interview. Thank you, Prof. Hagens!

Regarding the question about replenishing the water table. One way is to restore ROOT STRUCTURES. When we chop the trees down, we disrupt the water cycle.

So glad you finally got to talk with Vandana. (She's Top Goddess in my world.) Do that film with her, Nate!

This woman is a saint.

Good evening Nate and Vandana Thankyou for your sharing of these most important and difficult realities, truths. I have similar thought's experiences regarding the history and ongoing pictures being painted regards mental health our body and mind. Measures are failing our true progress, growth and all the possibilities of all encompassing good health. As one mental health nurse after seventeen years of practice. I know we need a diverse progressive model to enable acknowledge and validate more than, the measures DO NOT enable presently! Lots of work can and needs to be undertaken. Most obvious! We can do so much more with less! To rebuild, improve community health requires vision innovation and ACTION from all people, within all our systems of governance. 💜

The underlying unspoken presumption in this entire conversation (as cogent as it is) is that LIFE on Earth is all about HUMAN life, and not merely the mystery of the life of EVERYTHING. Our innate homo-centric view of everything is our fatal error, our human "achilles heel". Our foolish disrespect, our egotistical blindness to the TOTALITY of all life, not just human life, is the source of the man-made global catastrophe that looms over the entire Earth.

Amazing talk! Thank you! Sooooo inspiring! In the North it is hard to grow food. We need inspiration..

She is my hero!

Wow! Love your pod and have been excited about all she does for a long time!

What you call Art of living/ caring, i call life skills. I keep requesting that children are taught more at home first and then in school. "But there is no money in that. "

This was amazing. I've got a few books on my wishlist

That was a STUNNING interview. I have to admire your strength in not being brought to your knees emotionally by what you were hearing. I have known about Vandana Shiva for many years, but have never listened to her for so long. When I was about 15 years old (more than 60 years ago), I found myself on a spiritual journey that took me from strict Lutheranism to Hinduism. I was reminded of why, though I have never been able to explain it well. If I were you, I would absolutely accept her invitation to visit her in India -- in spite of the carbon footprint of the journey. You could make it worthwhile for so many of your viewers. Thank you for that.

"Appreciate your smallness". Great line from Vandana. If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito. - Dalai Lama

Another amazing discussion. Thank you! IMHO: If it aint Yoga of the Earth, then it aint Yoga.

She, I and You, Are Nature. She grows ever, dies and grows more. She is Love, green energy living and giving All She has. She loves her children, US.. Just feeling this critical message my friend..

One of the most conversation only have 5.7k views... This is quite a sad time...

How inspiring this conversation with this great lady Vandana Shiva was for me, and I hope for all who listened! I will, selfishly, ask for more conversations (and that proposed documentary) with her.

So amazing!

Yes... Yoga Soil I hope to see this documentary... The Art of Living

Thanks, Nate! You are enhancing Vandana's service by sharing her with your viewers! Earth Yoga! Do the film!

Nate, you need to go find a good SIMPLE curry and enjoy it with a chapati amongst friends! (In fact I might do the same...very inspirational interview, thank you both)

So VANDANA WAS FRAMED as being responsible for the Sri Lanka rapid policy of moving away from chemical fertilizers too rapidly. She Was Framed... ! I am shocked and disgusted: the number of articles on the internet blaming Her and her views on Agroecology for being responsible greatly exceeds any other sort of information. I hope she has enough time money and support to counted this disgusting manipulation. Thanks Nate for helping to uncover this...

I´ve watched many interviews with Vandana and this is one of my favorite´s so far, although not entirely surprised as I really appreciate Nate´s angle. I interviewed her myself on this channel, feel free to check it out.

So excited to see this guest

She is a living Saint, guardian of garden and people. She is powerful and pure, irresistible (I pray) like Nature herself. Her compassion and heart are divine. She has been the heart of millions, for so many years. She is an angel, from and for dearest Earth herself. Perfect guest/expert.

Hearts, minds, & hands.

A great episode on hope . Lots to learn here so will have to listen again. Reminds me to not always look at the world through the lens of the industrial world. Thanks for a great podcast.

Brilliant saleswoman, ain't she? Yea, this is why I love her. I need to be more like her...

Thank you

Also, Nate if you are interested in how trees can bring water, I recommmend this video by Andrew Milison ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oY8ds4BiG1A.html On that, have you considered asking David Hologram or Geoff Lawton or Andrew Millison from permaculature onto your podcast? They have worked with others (in India) to help regenerate deserts and the like

Wonderful interview☀️☀️

in a perfect world she would sit in our council of elders and nate and his friends too........but its not a perfect world ..

Enlightening to see the other side of the green revolution in India. I feel like I have a working definition for exploitation. Exploitation is profit at the cost of social or ecological systems.

Vandana is wonderful. There seems to be an inherent asymmetry. The 1% employ the cold application of power and manipulation to achieve their goals. Vandana favors caring and love. It does not seem like a fair fight. I’m guessing she uses creative legal strategies as well. Those were not highlighted in this interview.

Extremely insightful interview. Looking forward to the new documentary 🥰

I'm a newcomer to the channel (and its ideas in general), so sorry if this has already been analyzed, but: how are the increased costs of permaculture for the consumer addressed? If I were to change my feeding habits and go for organic food, my costs would easily triple overnight, and living in a big city, my options for growing food are quite limited. I might be able to afford it some years down the line, but not until I get rid of my mortgage, at the very least.

I love this woman

I first saw her interview with the bullying BBC on Hardtalk and admired her stand up to the rude BBC journalist.

Nate, Brad Lancaster is the author of "Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands." He has a RU-vid channel and did a Ted Talk. He can explain water capture.

Please call a guest to discuss the UN population report finding that half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. We can't achieve any development or climate goals of any kind if we can't provide women access to convenient and reliable family planning options and protection from violence

Earth Yoga! How to?? We know that just working with the soil emproves mental Health! Earth Yoga can help us foster community feelings, helping with the loneliness crises, the lack of exercise and really emprove mental health!

Sweet lady with a noble cause, however, please interview Geoff Lawton or maybe David Holmgren, both will offer a much more practical and immediate response to our global necessity to regenerate soils, heal our environments, and at the same time create security for our future as a species and that of all other life on this beautiful planet. Permaculture is not just a technique of organic farming it is a multifunctional highly intelligent process that is both ethical and integral to societal well being on multiple levels.

Oh yes! You know it’s gonna be a good day when two of the best minds out there come together for some dialogue. Pushing play! Love you both.

I watched this again, and I think I see things shifting in Nate's mind, am I right?

In my experience geoengineering also has the potential to start wars when one country accuses another of stealing their rainfall.

Beautiful :D

Another thing to consider is the birthrate is around 1.8 per couple, which means population collapse is inevitable.

44:52 living systems have the power to reverse entropy

I have been in love with this woman for years. I would be her padawan learner and she my guru.

And land-based labor is good for mental health. And agricultural communities will take care of their own to a certain extent. There comes a potential solution to homelessness. Or rather we remove part of the origin of homelessness?

She is special not because of the numbers she can crunch but because she can communicate to the heart of everyday people without adopting the climate cult narratives.

Vandana is wisdom on steroids.

Thanks to modern farming techniques famines which were once commonplace are today a result of political malfeasance. So I guess modern agriculture is good for something. Fact is humanity today produces more food per person than at any time in history. We make plenty of food. But it does not always make it to where it is needed

She is one of the person responsible for current crisis in Sri Lanka

"the empty earth, the empty seed.." yes, this way of seeing world as something to fill up, grab, manipulate. sounds like iain mcghilchrist left brain idea of world.

well she is right...but her and others like her will have to go up against the billionaires and fossil fuel industry.......good luck....she will be seen as a threat to their power and their money

Shame she is a con artist who was a visionary of the shift to poverty and food insecurity in Sri - Lanka and doesn't understand the very issues she talks about. This comment shall be removed, I'm sure.