Everyday Choices: Excerpt from Vandana Shiva and Shreya Jani’s ‘Slow Living’

Learning from Indigenous Communities

‘Even if you keep telling/calling us uncivilized, primitive, backward or whatever for humiliating us, we’re not going to hand over our remaining natural resources to fulfil your greed…. We’re neither backward nor uncivilized. Our knowledge is the best for the sustainable future of the Planet…. We’re not selfish. We’re not just fighting to protect our land, territory and resources. But we’re also fighting to protect your future….. The future of the planet depends on the fight of the Indigenous Peoples. If we give up, the greedy corporate in nexus with the States, will swallow the remaining natural resources.’

—Gladson Dungdung

Adivasis and Their Forest

The Western paradigm of natural rights as involving the  inalienable right to property, is therefore, completely flawed. This is why it is the ‘tyranny’ of rights which is at the root of all the violence, terror, rape, exploitation, and deprivation today. Until we stay in this paradigm of rights, this violence and destruction will only grow. By telling us that rights don’t just flow from the fact of being an ecological and biological being, what this Western paradigm has ingrained in us is the idea that being who we are, our very existence, is not enough. And this has inflicted massive, pervasive and deep mental, emotional, and spiritual damage on all of us.

If this rights regime is not corrected, we will be led on a path as devastating and destructive as our colonial pasts have been. And this time, colonization will end in the extinction of biodiversity, including the human species. This colonizing past has decimated our agricultural system, our economic system, our educational system, our political system, and more importantly, our interpersonal ways of being. The right to possess and hold property has deeply damaged and altered something inside us. It has led to a sense of xenophobic entitlement leaning into hate propaganda based on the logic of colonial empire, where some lives matter more than others. This logic creates a chasm where possession, rather than trusteeship, drives our core ambitions in life. Dismantling communities and making our human journey more individualistic breaks our interconnection with other living beings, and hyperprivatization robs us of any sense of belonging and worth derived from acknowledging that we are part of the Earth family.

Earth democracy, then, is the potential for a shared future – one where we all recognize and celebrate the natural rights arising from being a part of the Earth family; where these rights are born from the ecology of our being; where the very membership of every species and living creatures of one Earth implies the existence of these natural rights.

In the figure on the following page, Quadrants A and B represent the Western paradigm of rights, which is rooted in viewing all of us as individuals and a set of individuals with no permeability. Its spectrum remains anthropocentric and restricted to human beings. If we remain in that paradigm, the seeming ‘expansion’ of rights will still be restricted, as it will still see everything as separate with distinct boundaries.

On the other hand, Quadrants C and D represent the paradigm of the rights of the Earth family. It perceives every living being in relatedness with every other living being. There is a permeability which is recognized. Each being is also seen as carrying the past and future time and space with it and within it.

Thus, democracy as a manifestation of ecology and nature has to be a system of fractals of ideas and practices. As Adrienne Maree Brown says in her book Emergent Strategy, ‘we must be like the oak trees where they hold on together sub-terraineally through a network of strong roots to weather a storm but stand tall on the surface; we must be like mushrooms converting toxicity into beauty and sustenance and be like the dandelion, a community of healers who spread far and wide for one flower is enough to create a field of it and the health benefits of dandelion is immense.’

As we create these communities which respect diversity and interconnectedness a truly healthy democracy can thrive.