In this bonus episode, we're sharing a special presentation from environmentalist, physicist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. This session is from our Summer Research Institute, held in June of this year, entitled The Mind, the Human-Earth Connection, and the Climate Crisis. We're adding this to the podcast feed because Vandana speaks powerfully about how the mind contributes to so many of the world's current emergencies, including health, hunger, poverty, climate, extinction, and injustice, exclusion, and inequality. Countering these outcomes of disconnection, Vandana offers Earth Democracy as a worldview, paradigm, and practice based on the recognition that everything is interconnected. She covers a lot of ground, touching on topics such as:
- the intellectual architecture of disconnection;
- the many ramifications of Cartesian dualism;
- the colonialist mindset of conquest and mastery;
- mistaken frameworks that try to dominate nature;
- how dead carbon leads to wars;
- food and our microbiome;
- quantum physics and interconnectedness;
- statistics and updates on the science of climate change;
- the economy of earth care;
- and the power of self-organizing systems within nature to heal ourselves and our world.