The wisdom of Vandana Shiva........

[marmar]

She RAWKS!!!! :yourock:



"Humanity has eaten more than 80,000 plant species through its evolution. ... we now rely on just eight crops to provide 75 percent of the world's food...Monocultures are destroying biodiversity, our health and the quality and diversity of food"

.....

"Globalization is not the cross-cultural interaction of diverse societies; it is the imposition of a particular culture on all of the others...It is the predation of one class, one race, and often one gender of a single species on all the others. The "global" in the dominant discourse is the political space in which the dominant local seeks global control, freeing itself from the responsibility...of ecological sustainability and social justice."

.....

"Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates."

.....

"In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life."

[burythehatchet]

1. She has been fighting the enemies of humanity for years, long before

we awoke and recognized the enemy.

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. Uh, one small detail

"Humanity has eaten more than 80,000 plant species through its evolution."

But not all during a single person's lifetime. I would be very surprised if the average early human ate more than 50 species of plants during her lifetime. And I expect that the vast majority of that food came from the six or eight different species of edible plants that were most common in the person's area.

I generally agree with the sentiments given above, but there is absolutely no reason to construct straw men to get her point across.

[marmar]

3. I think her larger point was that people didn't eat engineered plants.....

..... They took them from the Earth.

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. All domesticated crops are engineered plants

Lettuce, tomatoes, onions, carrots, apples, bananas, walnuts, pecans, wheat, corn (especially corn!), soy, green beans (I really shouldn't make lists like this right before lunch....)

These crops have been engineered over many centuries -- even millennia -- by the pressures of selective breeding. The difference between a Red Delicious apple and a Roma apple is one of engineering.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. Isn't her point, that humans have the ability to eat much more diverse plant species than we

actually do? I'm sure I've probably eaten many more different species than most folks that were born and raised inside of a city. My grandmother had me eating all kinds of wild stuff as a kid.

[TechBear_Seattle]

6. Humans are omnivores; we can eat pretty much anything

And like I said, I agree with the sentiment, but there is no need to resort to hyperbolean (is that the correct word?) straw men.

[Warpy]

8. That's the point. The diets of our hunter gatherer ancestors

were highly diverse. They ate to live, not to enjoy and they ate anything that wouldn't poison them.

Much of it didn't taste very good, as anybody who's tried to eat fiddlehead ferns and purslane can attest. Those must be acquired tastes that most of us are incapable of acquiring. However, they kept people alive for another day while supplying valuable nutrients, so they ate them all.

What reduced the sheer number of foodstuffs was the development of agriculture. People planted the crops that yielded the most harvest in the least amount of land. That meant grain producing grasses and nutritionally dense vegetables and fruits.

GM crops that are incapable of reproducing their seed will likely end the monoculture of grain grasses. After enough of us starve to death, we'll probably go back to the fiddleheads and purslane eventually.

[ljm2002]

7. Uh, another small detail...

...she never says nor implies that the 80,000 plant species were eaten by a single individual or even by a single tribe. The wording would be a clue here: "Humanity has eaten more than 80,000 plant species through its evolution ."

Now who's constructing straw men?

Your point about people eating what is common to their area, simply strengthens her message. Because when people did that, there was a great diversity overall, whereas now there is an imposition of only a few major agricultural species overall. So humanity on the whole is now more vulnerable to any collapse that might occur in any of the dominant species.