soil-centric

 

from Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva

In biology, the term development refers to self-directed, self-regulated, and self-organized evolution from within. In the terms of Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, systems that self-organize and self-renew are autopoietic systems. And in the language of David Pimentel of Cornell, autopoietic systems are based on endosomatic or metabolic energy. If the economic domain were to think of development in the same way, it would lead to a flourishing of biodiversity and cultural diversity. Development would conserve resources and energy while improving human well-being and human welfare.

Unfortunately, development in economics has the opposite meaning. In economics, development is an externally driven process. It refers to self-organizing, self-regulating systems as “undeveloped” and “underdeveloped” and suggest that they should be made dependent on external inputs- external resources, energy, and money. Living systems, living societies, living cultures are thus transformed into mechanical systems, or, in Maturana and Varela's terms, into allopoietic systems- systems run from external sources. In energy terms these are based on exosomatic energy. Systems that are autopoietic and endosomatic need no external energy inputs. They are self-organizing and self-generative. They are models for a post-oil future.

. . .

Development cannot be defined by the colonizer, by those imposing allopoietic systems on society for their own end- profits and power. Development must be defined autopoietically, from within. . . When peasants resist Special Economic Zones and indigenous people resist mines, it is they who should define development, not the automobile, real estate, and mining corporations. This has always been a justice imperative. It is now also a climate imperative.

. . .

Disposability of people is built into the denial of food to millions as well as the destruction of rural livelihoods by the substitution of human energy with machines powered by fossil fuels. The very definition of productivity in the industrial paradigm is labor productivity, i.e., the fewer human beings involved in production, the more “productive” a process is, even if it uses more energy and more resources and produces less per unit of energy and resource inputs.

. . . 

The emerging food crisis poses the most immediate threat to the survival of the poor. The food crisis emerges from two historical processes, one long term- the industrialization of agriculture and the uprooting of peasants and family farmers from the land- and one more recent- the effects of globalization and trade liberalization of agriculture on food security and food sovereignty. The impact of climate change on agricultural production, along with such false solutions to climate change as industrial biofuels, which divert food and land from the poor to the non-sustainable energy needs of the rich, further exacerbate the food crisis.

. . .

Resistance to the limitless destructiveness of the industrialized globalized economy is coming precisely from those least responsible for climate change, the women, the hawkers, and street vendors who stand in front of the juggernaut of fossil fuel-driven, energy- and resource-intensive "development," refusing to be uprooted, refusing to be turned into disposable people, offering another paradigm and world view- of power and wealth, of nature and culture.