Ariel Salleh launch speech for The Nature of Nature
The Nature of Nature is vintage Shiva! Halfway through first read, I said to myself - I must get a dozen copies of this for family, neighbours, activist friends. It would be useful for teaching too - a transdisciplinary argument with four layers of analysis woven together. The book
introduces the geopolitics of global neoliberal capitalism
exposes the reductionist methodology of Eurocentric science
unpacks the health and ecological costs of so-called progress
and explains the true logic of nature, which is relational.
I will start this review by visiting these four macro-agendas briefly, as they spiral through the text.
Argument 1 - Geopolitics
The story begins with 20th century corporate capture of social democratic governments. Increasingly public-private partnerships strip down the welfare state and sabotage regulation of industrial development. The global South succumbs to a neocolonial push for cheap labour and natural resources, community livelihoods are ravaged, and the result is homeless refugees wandering the Earth, people excess to capital. Not only states but international agencies like the United Nations; treaties and protocols like the Convention on Biodiversity and Precautionary Principle are hollowed out by the ruling class 1% as Shiva calls them. The planetary system destabilised faces an extinction emergency.
Argument 2 - Scientific method
Into this political mix, the book weaves a critique of the Western development model and its first premise - 'Mastery over Nature'. By this tradition, Nature covers indigenous peoples, women, animals and plants. For five decades now, ecofeminist thinkers and activists like yourself, have been deconstructing this instrumentalism. The self-styled 'scientific Enlightenment' led by Sir Francis Bacon was its source. For by his assertion living nature was no longer to be understood as an organism but as 'a machine', which modern rational men would perfect. And you can see where this has got us. To quote Shiva:
At the root of the polycrisis is a mechanical, militaristic mind, a monoculture of the mind, which reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living Earth to raw material for the money machine. It is time to recognise the difference between the fake science and false solutions of the 1% and the deep ecological sciences of living systems (p. 21).
Argument 3 - Costs of progress
The book begins unravelling the metabolic consequences of 'mechanophilia' with the startling observation that: 'The age of oil has totally transformed our food systems' (p. 12). It takes off with the adoption of petro-farming based on artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and soon enough genetically engineered seed. Not only soil organisms are destroyed by this, but the World Health Organization has already conceded that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide is a probable carcinogen. Another hidden cost of agroindustrial production in the age of oil is plastic, leaching daily into our bodies from packaging. Shiva's economic link between nitrogenous fertilisers and the manufacture of military explosives is a further eye opener. Then she unpacks the deadly cocktail of flavours hidden in Burger King's strawberry milkshake: 'amyl acetate, amybutyrate, amyl valerate, anethole, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid and more' (p. 79). No surprise that human health fails under the 'mastery of nature'; valuable insect species and some 800 million birds have been lost too; and what of the cruelty enacted on animals in the name of scientific research?
Argument 4 - Metabolic disorder
Shiva points out that the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) should have been interconnected from day one. Biosphere and atmosphere are one entity, not separate linear variables as the mechanistic mind has it. Her account of the international political sabotage of climate politics is invaluable here. People may not know about Obama's role in undermining the 2009 Copenhagen COP. Or, that the promotion of 'voluntary agreements' on carbon emissions at the 2015 Paris COP ended any framework for legally binding government obligations. The book outlines the policy subterfuge of 'carbon offsets' and the Net Zero idea, and how local oil interests at the 2023 Dubai COP shifted the climate agenda across to agroindustry - ostensibly as a climate salve!
Food and Climate
What is most new in this book is its connection between fake food production and climate. The corporate 1% argues that laboratory based food 'saves' the environment by using less land and water. But Shiva estimates that many more acres of forested land actually get cleared because of the need for palm oil and soy bean mono-crops as the genetic basis of 'farmless farming', that is, lab-generated food.
The reductionist paradigm of biological engineers and entrepreneurs generates a synthetic biology, by which genetic materials, bits of living DNA, are cut and pasted into a plant or animal to change its function or appearance. Aside from eugenically designed babies and hybrid species, artificial foods like dairy products and even baby milk, are now cultured on the lab bench. Soybean products made to look and taste like real meat are naively claimed to be free of the environmental impacts that come with on the ground farming. Meanwhile farmers, from Europe to India are in uproar over their threatened livelihoods.
Shiva explains how the agribusinesss agenda emerged at the 2021 Glasgow COP in conjunction with a Gates Foundation inspired UN Food Systems Summit. It was even backed by the medical journal Lancet. Gates was already funding golden rice, but now his Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) lists these start-ups - Mosa Meat, Eat Just, Just Egg, Good Meat, Meatech 3d Aleph Farms, Cubiq Foods, Because Animals, Blue Nalu and Upside foods The latter uses biotech to extract and cultivate stem cells in muscle tissue, that is then fed into bioreactors to grow fake chicken. Plant based egg alternatives are also on the menu. Meanwhile, Blue Nalu in the seafood sector has lab made tuna, snapper, and molluscs.
This new food regime is maintained by the capitalist ruling class through Blackrock, Microsoft, BASF, DOW Chemicals, Syngenta, Walmart, Dupont, Monsanto, and Chem China. What Shiva calls the 'food fascism' of governments and agencies promotes notions like 'food security' to facilitate the market. It is disheartening to read that the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement of the World Trade Organization was drafted by the merchants of junk food; that there are no internationally recognised laws on genetically modified organisms; that in the USA the practice is entirely unregulated and the US has challenged EU attempts to apply the precautionary principle. - Even in Australia the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator is captured by the industry. I can say this after serving time on the Government's Gene Technology Ethics Committee myself.
Finally, to the metabolism of climate - where Shiva estimates that 20% of global greenhouse emissions come from packaged food and food miles associated with global supply chains.
Water and Climate
In her 1989 classic - Staying Alive - Shiva explained how ecologically responsive farming among peasant cultures is gentle on soil bacteria and fungi, which in turn support the natural evaporative process of plants. Shiva cites our late friend and complexity geneticist Mae Wan Ho, on the pivotal role of leaf photosynthesis which, with sunshine, drives the Earth's water cycle while taking carbon from the atmosphere. This analysis of climate is precisely the opposite of what the factory farmers and fake food makers assert. Moreover, in Shiva's words:
Nitrogen fertiisers also emit a greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more destabilising for the climate system than CO2. Chemical agriculture needs 10 times more water to produce the same amount of food than organic farming (pp. 55-56).
As distinct from the logic of profiteers and mechanophiles, the key to healing 'the metabolism of climate' is water - the planet's blood stream. A relational science recognises the agency of multiple life-processes in steering the Earth's cooling circulation of local and global water cycles. Biophere and atmosphere are one.
Ariel Salleh
www.arielsalleh.info
Ariel Salleh is the author of books and articles about feminism and ecology including Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice and Ecofeminism as Politics. She has held academic positions in UK, South Africa, Germany and Australia. Read more.
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