The concentration of these projects is to “update society to present day knowledge, taking the carrying capacity of the earth into account and realigning our methods based not on the reward of monetary gain..but the goal of social sustainability as a whole.”

For more info  on these projects or to get involved please go here:  http://zday2010.org/about-zday/what-is-zday

THERE REALLY ARE PEOPLE WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES — PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW — TO PROVIDE YOU WITH BLESSINGS.

The virtually unknown hero who saved millions of lives…

Click here.

Prairie Pioneer Seeks To Reinvent The Way We Farm

Listen to the story here, on NPR.

We must begin to learn from the mistakes of the past – When the ancient Maya abandoned their forest conservation practices, it was to the detriment of their entire culture.

Ancient Mayans practiced forest conservation 3,000 years ago

Washington, July 27 (ANI): In a new study, scientists from the University of Cincinnati (UC) have determined that the ancient Mayans practiced forest conservation about 3,000 years ago.

Paleoethnobotanist David Lentz from the University of Cincinnati has concluded that not only did the Maya people practice forest management, but when they abandoned their forest conservation practices, it was to the detriment of the entire Maya culture.

“From our research we have learned that the Maya were deliberately conserving forest resources,” said David Lentz, a professor of biological sciences at the UC and executive director of the Cincinnati Center for Field Studies.

“Their deliberate conservation practices can be observed in the wood they used for construction and this observation is reinforced by the pollen record,” he added.

Read the complete article here.

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

Research Institute for Science, Technology and Ecology
New Delhi, India

I would like to differ with Suman Sahai on her presumptions that bioethics is not Indian or Third World in content or substance and that ethics is a luxury for the Third World. In fact it is the separation of ethics from technology that is a peculiarly Western phenomenon, and by calling the bioethics debate “bogus”, Suman Sahai is speaking like the transnational biotechnology industry which refers to ethics as an “irrelevant concern”. In fact Suman Sahai was cheered loudest on the internet by Henry Miller of Stanford University Hoover Institute, a right wing think tank, who has been acting as a major spokesman of the U.S. biotech industry.

The argument that the Third World cannot afford bioethics is systematically used by the biotech industry which states that for the hungry, ethics and safety is irrelevant. This was also the logic used by Lawrence Summers when he recommended that polluting industry should be shifted to the Third World. Removing ethics from technological and economic decisions is a western construct. THIS is the imported dichotomy. The import of this dichotomy enables control and colonization.

The separation of science and technology from ethics is based on the Cartesian divide between res extensa (matter) and res cognitans (mind), with the objective mind acquiring objective and neutral knowledge of nature. It was also constructed by Hume when he said no logical inference could be drawn from what “is” to what “ought to be”. “Hume’s guillotine” was an effective instrument for separating ethics from science (which in the empiricist and positivist philosophy was supposed to provide an objective view of what “is”).

For the complete article click here.

Earth Democracy – an interview with Vandana Shiva
by Sarah Ruth van Gelder and Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva is a physicist and an organic farmer, an instigator of India’s historic “tree-huggers” movement, and a renowned author. She speaks internationally on the perils of globalization, while mobilizing fellow citizens to reclaim their rights to life itself.

Sarah Ruth van Gelder: Tell me about the Earth Democracy movement. Where did that notion come from, and what form is the movement taking?

photo by Linda Wolf

Vandana Shiva: The notion comes from a very ancient category in Indian thought. Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human—we are a continuum.

When the issue of the patenting of life emerged, for example, there were two levels of response from those opposing this practice in India. The one level was resistance: “This is immoral. Life is not an invention. Life cannot be a monopoly. You cannot sell us the seeds you stole from us, and you cannot charge us royalties for the product of nature’s intelligence and centuries of human innovation.”

The second level was the reclaiming of democracy: people claimed the right to look after their biodiversity and use it sustainably. This came out of discussions among the movements we’ve been building at the grassroots.

I remember one meeting of 200 villagers who had been involved in seed saving and seed sharing with Navdanya, the trust that I founded to save seeds and promote organic agriculture. These 200 villagers gathered on World Environment Day in 1998 and declared sovereignty over their biodiversity—not sovereignty to rape and destroy, sovereignty to conserve. These 200 villagers, gathered in a high mountain village near a tributary of the Ganges, said, “We’ve received our medicinal plants, our seeds, our forests from nature through our ancestors; we owe it to them to conserve it for the future. We pledge we will never allow their erosion or their theft. We pledge we will never accept patenting, genetic modification, or allow our biodiversity to be polluted in any form, and we pledge that we will act as the peoples of this biodiversity.”…

[For the rest of the article, click here.]

This feature length film, The Future of Food, will educate you and inspire you to action. Please pass the information you learn to everyone you know. Our children’s lives depend on it.

(Props to contributor Faith Gimzek for sending this our way.)

Watch the complete film HERE.