Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change
By Vandana Shiva
Chelsea Green, 2024
168pp
Vandana Shiva and her feminist colleague Maria Mies issued the Leipzig Appeal in 1996 to say, “No to GMOs and No to Patents on Seed”. The work of the Appeal continues, and it echoes in her new book The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change.
Shiva begins her book by rejecting the term “Anthropecene”, arguing that the climate change disaster is attributable to the unchecked greed of capitalists, not to humans as a species (it is “Capitalogenic”).
Novel or “fake” foods grown in the laboratory are adding to the crisis and promoting false solutions in the name of profit and greenwashing. “Net zero” fits in nicely, juggling fake economics, offsetting pollution through carbon credits, to serve profit.
Shiva busts the myths central to the mechanistic paradigm dominating global food production, which views the world as “things” to be manipulated to achieve outcomes without consideration of the ecological consequences.
She writes that the exploitation and extraction that under-pinned empire-building, has morphed into a seductive narrative, promising zero carbon food for the billions. The patenting logic of the synthetic food movement sees plants as discrete, non-ecological items to be replaced by more “efficient” lab-engineered products.
However, in reality, deforestation, processing, packaging, transport and retail of industrial farming products are responsible for about 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out 60% of animals, decimating wetlands and destroying crop diversity.
Shiva describes how industrial foods are associated with an epidemic of heart diseases, cancer and other illnesses and that pseudo-safety laws for the benefit of fake foods are destroying the livelihoods of indigenous farmers and cottage food processors.
She writes that humans are not just witnessing the damage to the planet’s diversity and destruction of interconnected systems of soil, water, and climate, we are part of that ecology and we share in the risks to it.
Explaining the extraordinary vigour and self-repair of nature, Shiva finds hope that when “we grow food in accordance with ecological laws ... we regenerate the earth, her soil and biodiversity, her climate system”.
At present the trend is away from this, and Shiva warns that agribusiness giant Monsanto is acquiring the world’s largest climate data and soil data corporations, and the partnering of the biotech industry with software giants is taking us towards a dystopia of a digital agricultural monoculture.
She concludes that climate action demands de-addiction from a fossil-based economy and its industrial infrastructure. Transitioning to an organic agriculture that respects ecology will regenerate not just soil, but its connection with nutrient cycles that connect earth with the atmosphere.
Shiva argues that we need a qualified understanding of “decarbonisation” and a distinction between dead and living carbon.
Dead carbon is the source of the obscene wealth derived from colonialism, now controlled by the 1%. Living carbon is in the hands of those who respect ecology and regenerates the life cycle that produced the Holocene period.
Shiva writes that as a society “we need to see new potential in an economy of care for the soil”.
Her solution to the climate crisis is pragmatic. It “lies in understanding the needs of the ecosystems we are embedded in”.
This is startlingly simple and beyond argument. The question is, how do we do that?
If, as Shiva describes, every morsel we eat is a choice between degeneration and regeneration, an action for social, economic and climate justice, how do we move beyond the “capitalogenic” period?
The term “metabolic rift” originated from German scientist Justus von Liebig. He was furious that after he explained the role of nitrogen in plants, it was appropriated for profit. He wrote: “I thought it would be enough to just announce and spread the truth, as is customary in science. I finally came to understand that this wasn’t right, and the altars of lies must be destroyed if we wish to give truth a fair chance.”
In the battle between dead carbon and living carbon, we need mass movements to give the world a chance.