Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis

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Title

Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis

Description

A physicist by training, a prolific author and charismatic leader by inclination, Vandana Shiva is a juggernaut of social activism. When not busy traveling the world to promote sustainable agriculture, Shiva spends much of her time at Navdanya (“Nine Seeds”), the Indian seed bank she founded to support traditional farming and social justice. In her latest book, Soil Not Oil, she reflects on her experiences at Navdanya to explain how global trade is spurring a triple crisis of peak oil, food shortages, and climate change.

Shiva charts a vicious cycle. When food became a global commodity, local economies sunk. When we started depending upon petroleum for large-scale farming, we set the fire for global warming. Selling crops for export leads to a decline in prices, forcing farmers into debt. It is the poor who lose both their lands and their identities as farmers.

Despite conventional wisdom, large-scale monocropping is unhealthy and inefficient. “Globalization,” Shiva writes, in reference to WTO programs that create import dependency, “forces nonsustainability on the world.”
--from Earth Island Journal

Creator

Vandana Shiva

Citation

Vandana Shiva, “Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Trinity College Library, accessed March 28, 2024, https://tclibrary.omeka.net/items/show/174.