Te Case For Interdependence

The physicist-turned international environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva gave the opening keynote address at the Living Future “unconference” on May 2 in Portland, Oregon. Shiva is the author of Earth Democracy and Water Wars, among other books, including Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (South End Press, 2008). This book posits that the triple threat of climate change, peak oil, the food and agrarian crisis, together, represent a “triple opportunity”—but only if we change our thinking and our systems.

The theme of this year’s event, put on by the International Living Future Institute, is Women Reshaping the World, and Shiva opened her remarks with a reference to the “feminine principle” of Shakti, the concept of feminine creative power in Hinduism, which can also be present in males, and which means “to be able” and refers to empowerment.

“The vocabulary is shifting,” she said. “And it should. Words signify imagination and we need a shift from dominance because it is failing us and the planet.” The mistake she sees is a system of artificial boundaries. These, she notes, are part of the unfortunate, destructive, and hubristic elevation of man over nature. “We need to give up the hubris of that notion and embrace interdependence. We may be in the anthropocene, but we can make this cooperative, creative anthropocene, rather than an age of dominance.”

She referenced her attempts to talk to naysayers at the highest level, scientists and thinkers who claim that traditional agricultural methods and economic systems will never be sufficient to feed the world’s population. When she queries them about the “externalities” and unintended consequences of their monoculture solutions, they say, about water or soil health or other matters: “that’s not my department,” or “that wasn’t part of my study.” But as Shiva points out, “If you want to build a living future, everything is your department.”

Her biggest complaint about the current approach, and the artificial boundaries that she sees as part of capitalism, is the persistent devaluation of the work of the planet and of women. In particular, she pointed to the economic valuation system that had created a false production boundary: “If producers consume what they produce—such as food in a family or community garden—they are, somehow, not producing anything. In other words, production takes place only when commodification begins, but not before. This results, perversely, in a system that produces less and less while pretending to produce more and more. We are in a situation where we are using increasingly more units of energy to produce fewer and fewer units of food.” More

 

China and the Geopolitics of the Mekong River Basin

Two decades after the Paris Peace Accord that ended the proxy war in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin hasre-emerged as a region of global significance. The rapid infrastructure-led integration of a region some call “Asia’s last frontier” has created tensions between and among China and its five southern neighbors – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Both expanded regional cooperation as well as increased competition for access to the rich resources of the once war-torn region have created serious environmental degradation while endangering food security and other dimensions of human security and even regional stability.

China’s seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials and tropical commodities has made it a fast-growing market for several Mekong countries and an increasingly important regional investor. Economic integration has been boosted by a multibillion dollar network of all-weather roads, bridges, dams, and power lines largely financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is linking the countries of the Lower Mekong to each other and to China. To date, the ADB’s Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperative development program has primarily benefited large population centers outside the basin proper in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the same infrastructure that speeds the flow of people and goods to urban centers also facilitates the environmentally unsustainable exploitation of the forests, minerals, water resources, and fisheries that are still the primary source of food and livelihoods to millions of the Mekong’s poorest inhabitants.

No aspect of China’s fast-growing role and influence in the Mekong region is more evident and more problematic than its drive to harness the huge hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong through the construction of a massive cascade of eight large- to mega-sized dams on the mainstream of the river in Yunnan Province. The recently completed Xiaowan dam, the fourth in the series, will mainly be used to send electricity to the factories and cities of Guangdong Province, its coastal export manufacturing base some 1,400 kilometers away. China’s Yunnan cascade will have enough operational storage capacity to augment the dry season flow at the border with Myanmar and Laos by 40-70 percent, both to maintain maximum electricity output and facilitate navigation on the river downstream as far as northern Laos for boats of up to 500 tons.

Continue reading on the Stimson Center.

Photo Credit: “Xiaowan Dam Site,” courtesy of International Rivers.