 We're so pleased to be able to welcome one of our global heroes, Vandana Shiva, to the State House, who's setting such a great tone and is always on target with her message, and helps us to learn how to speak better about the things that we need to speak about to shift the paradigm to a global poison-free food and farming world. I'm so glad that you're all here. We have a few speakers that are going to proceed, Vandana, and I'd like first to introduce Meg Palit, who is the Chief of Staff for Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman. Thank you all for being here. It's an honor to be here, and I'm so grateful for the work of Dr. Shiva. As I was coming here this morning, I was listening to the highlights from the new and released report warning us of the one million plants and animals now threatened with extinction, in large part due to our farming practices. So the urgency to change our ways and the call to action is definitely now. As many of you know, Lieutenant Governor Zuckerman is also an organic farmer, and he is out farming today and asked me to read a few remarks on his behalf. I want to apologize for not attending this event today. I've known Dr. Shiva for many years and have admired her work in India and around the world, working for sustainable agriculture for our planet and for the economics of individual farmers. We have celebrated great successes, such as Vermont's GMO labeling law, as well as frustrating setbacks, including the federal government's evisceration of our GMO labeling law. In that vein of sustainable agriculture, I cannot be here because I have to attend to my own farm on this one day of the work week that the legislature is not in session. I hope that's a reasonable excuse for this crowd. I want to express my appreciation to Sterling College for helping bring Dr. Shiva to Vermont on her Northeast tour for a poison-free food and farming by 2030 goal. I also want to thank the other organizations that make up the coalition participating here today, the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition, Rural Vermont, Soil for Climate, Building a Local Economy, The Real Organic Project, and others. In particular, I want to give a special shout out to the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, as we are in a year of mourning and celebration for our own champion of organic and poison-free food and mutual friend of mine and Dr. Shiva's Enid Wanakot. Just last week, I received my heirloom apple tree to plant as part of the statewide orchard honoring her commitment to seed diversity and poison-free food. I look forward to planting this week as part of the statewide and global web of dedicated people like those that are here today. Dr. Shiva, thank you for your tireless work across the globe on behalf of all of us working here in Vermont for those same goals. This is a beautiful coalition and we will continue to build more support for our soil, water, flora, fauna, and future. Thank you. Erica Campbell is the Vermont Ag Liaison for Senator Bernie Sanders. Good morning everyone. It is an incredible honor to be here today personally for Dr. Shiva. This is a lifelong inspiration I'm sure to all of us. Bernie was in Iowa yesterday and it sends his regrets that he could not be here. He was introducing his agriculture and revitalizing rural America policy platform and headed straight to DC. Dr. Shiva champions many important issues. Having access to food is a human right. Moreover, that food should be healthy and not harm the environment. The people who grow our food should make a decent living, have fair working conditions, and not be exposed to toxic chemicals. Unfortunately, this is not our current situation. Right now farmers across America and the world are dealing with the impacts of climate change. Disasters like wildfires, heatwaves, extreme storms, and sea levels threaten our rural communities. But an aspect of climate change that often gets less attention is the impact on food systems. More drought and flooding will mean more crop failures. And the sad truth is at a time when we already face obscene levels of income and wealth inequality, the most vulnerable people will disproportionately bear the effects. Climate change has the potential to cause severe harm to our economy, food supply, access to clean water, and national security. Yet we continue to produce food in a way that exacerbates these issues. For decades, farmers have been told to get big or get out. This approach drove investments in chemical intensive production and offered no economic stability. In fact, farmers are not even getting paid what it costs them to produce the food that they produce and are being driven off the land in droves. But why is this happening? For one, corporate consolidation in the food system is rampant. And antitrust laws have failed to protect competitive markets. Low prices paid to farmers force farms to get bigger and overproduced, leaving lowering prices even further. Farms increasingly have to rely on low paid immigrant labor. And these hardworking farm workers often do not have legal protection, living in constant fear of deportation. There is no question that climate change will impact these systems and may threaten our food and water supplies. And while avoiding the worst consequences of climate change is a huge challenge, it is also a huge opportunity to create more resilient food systems that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester carbon, and increase biodiversity. In fact, I believe farmers must play a very big role in stopping climate change. I suspect many of you and the organic and local food movement became involved because you care deeply about the environment. We will need you to be the leaders during this transition to teach us how to do everything from reducing fossil fuel on farms to how we treat the soil. People have the right to healthy food and to know what is in the food they eat. We can and must transition away from chemically intensive farming. Recently, I co-sponsored the Green New Deal Resolution. It was very pleased that ag and soil health were included in the bill and that people are beginning to recognize the very important role agriculture must play in addressing climate change and healthy ecosystems. We certainly have some things to celebrate in terms of what we have accomplished in promoting healthy food systems, but we can and must do much more at home and across the globe to create resilient and regenerative agricultural systems and to promote global food security. Thank you, Dr. Shiva and all of you for your good work on this endeavor. Thank you so much Erica and thanks Bernie. I don't think I told you my name and so I'll do that now. My name is Kat Buxton and I'm here. I'm so delighted and honored to be here. I'm representing the Vermont Health and Soil Coalition, rural Vermont and a bunch of other great groups. I'm so glad to be here with so many of my heroes, one of which is going to come up and speak next. His name is Michael Bald. Mike Bald is an ecosystem hero. He runs Gotweeds and he's going to speak for just a couple of minutes. Thank you, Kat. Brilliant event, brilliant occasion. Thank you, Dr. Shiva. Thank you, NOFA. Thank you, rural Vermont. Thank you all for being here today. The weather is a challenge. I see that. My purpose here today is merely to share with you a list of names that I consider cities, towns, organizations doing honorable work on and for the land. So it's not just about food production. It's how we steward our landscapes. I have a list. Some of them are my clients. Some of them are not. I've reached out to many organizations. Some respond, some do not. The list is surely not complete. It is what it is. If somebody wants to join the list, they can reach out to me. But this is the list of names that I have so far. And this is cities, towns, organizations managing landscapes without pesticides or synthetic chemicals. It's an impressive list. I'll let the truck go by and I'll start. So I'm building up. I'm building up to those cities, towns, organizations that are most forward thinking and progressive. There's a difference between action and talking about action. So the list begins with those cities and towns that have considered and thought about managing their landscapes with people, power, goats. Couldn't get a goat here today. Sorry about that. And just good energy and stewardship. So the list is Berrytown, Brookfield, Braintree, Woodstock, Giant Hogweed and Woodstock, Huntington, Windsor, Hartford, Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Williston, East Montpelier, East Montpelier, Giant Hogweed. Well done, East Montpelier. Stowe, Stowe Land Trust. Lake Champlain Land Trust. Vermont Land Trust is getting more into the work. Good for them. That's good stuff. Watesfield. The Interveil. The Interveil has a crew doing non-native invasive species removal without chemicals. That's brilliant. South Burlington, huge. If you add up all the acreage that drains into Lake Champlain, it's thousands of acres, drains directly into Lake Champlain. That's good for the health of the lake. Thousands of acres. And this is not including organic farms. Thank you, Britain Butter Farm. Thank you again, NOFA. Where was I? Burlington and the Winooski Valley Park District are so inspired by the Interveil in South Burlington. They may join in. They may launch. You could help them. Who does South Burlington turn to for people power? The VYCC. Nice. Shelburne, Pomfret. Pomfret, Vermont. Probably the only place with 20 square miles where you will not encounter wild parsnip. That's what the people have decided they want. Randolph, Vermont. Managing land every day since Irene. No chemicals. King Arthur Flowers. Support them. Certified B Corporation. Kids can roll in the grass at King Arthur Flower. No thought of pesticides. No problem. North Branch Nature Center. Black River Action Team. I'll even reach beyond the border and say Albany, New York, Lyme, New Hampshire, and yes, Hanover, New Hampshire. The list is incomplete. I'm inspired by it. Good people doing good work, stewarding the landscape. Thank them. Support them. Thank you. Thank you, Mike Ball. And next, we have Carl Tiedemann from Soil for Climate, co-founder of Soil for Climate and another one of my heroes. Thank you, Kat. And thank you to all of the sponsors today and to Dr. Shiva for being here. It's an honor to address you all. For those of you who don't know, Soil for Climate is a 501C3 non-profit based here in Vermont. We advocate for soil restoration as a climate solution. Everybody knows or almost everybody knows that every sector has to do what it can to reduce carbon emissions, transportation, housing, manufacturing, and so on. But agriculture alone has this superpower that it can not only turn down its emissions, but it can go below zero. In other words, we're relying on agriculture to get the excess carbon out of the air to solve the crisis that if we don't address it soon is going to be approaching like a tsunami. We're honored to be a co-author of Healthy Soil Legislation in Massachusetts and are supporting legislation in about eight states around the U.S. right now. For those of you who want to follow this topic on a global scale, I invite you to join our Facebook group. We have over 11,000 members from more than 100 countries around the world, and it's been exciting just in the last week. We've had new members join from Peru, from Scandinavia, from New Zealand, from Pakistan. So what you're seeing today is truly part of a growing international movement. In addition to the advocacy work that we do, we also feel that it's important to bring art and music and poetry into the climate movement as well. So I would like to close with the poem I've written called Climate Farming. So what's the future? Is there no hope? Healing the land can help us cope and grow better food with less flooding, too. But carbon in soil is what we must do. Draw down the heat, slow the sea rise, let birds and bees thrive in the skies. Good farming is how we deal with this mess. Now the climate's fixed, what's next to address? And next up is Dr. Will Allen. Will has been a lifelong activist, he's a farmer and author, co-manager at Cedar Circle Farm, convict, all sorts of things. Thanks a lot, Kat. And I'm really glad you all came here to see Vanda Nishiva. She's really inspiring and I've been lucky to be inspired by her for like the last 25 years and got to be in India with her three or four times and always an eye-opener and you know her support of all of these farmers who whose family has lost a farmer to suicide, 300,000 Indian farmers and all those farmers that gave up a kidney so they could keep their farms. And so being winter is really inspiring and this period is really inspiring because like beyond pesticides and Mike Bald, there are lots of people around this country and around the world who are now trying to reduce pesticides and chemical fertilizers and one of those places is Denmark. Denmark has made a commitment to go completely organic. And we're advocating at Cedar Circle that Vermont follow Denmark's lead and Bhutan's lead and Sikkim's lead because all of those states and countries are making a move towards a clean food system and a clean environment, absent pesticides. Let me just talk a little bit about how Vermont could do that and actually needs to do a major change in their agriculture right now. If you look at the history of Vermont agriculture it starts with us taking down all the trees and burning them up and then selling the ashes to the United Kingdom and France so they could make soap and other products. And then after the trees were gone we got sheep after the first farm movement started in Massachusetts in 1812 and at that time Merino sheep were introduced and so sheep took over Vermont and it became a sheep farm as much of New England was. And then in the 1840s the sheep started moving west and finally moved to New Zealand and Vermont changed over and started daring. And Vermont became the butter capital of the eastern United States and held that position until after refrigerated freight cars were created and then Vermont switched to liquid milk. Well now Vermont is at a place where when I got here 24 years ago there were about 2,000 Vermont dairy farms. Now there's maybe less than 700 because nobody knows exactly how many farms are going out of business as this season starts. And so here we are at another time in Vermont's history where a change needs to be made and this is an opportunity for us. Like Vanda is saying this is an opportunity for this region to sell itself as a pesticide fertilizer free zone and this is what we need to think about for the state that we want to live in. That state has been taken over by industrial daring. I mean if we went to Sterling College from Thetford the other day and we drove for an hour and a half and we didn't see one cow out on pasture. They're all locked up 137,000 cows are locked up 24-7 for their short lives. They you know they're all killed within five years after they're born and you know 57% of the beef on the market is dairy cow beef. And so like here we are we're in this situation where our daring industry is dying in Vermont and it either needs to change dramatically or you know we're in this place where we're in this trap again just like we were with butter just like we were with sheep and just like we were with trees. We've got to start looking at where are we going to go in the future and this no pesticide, no chemical, no poison attitude needs to take over. I mean we need to follow these other countries and states around the world that have been creative. So I will hope that you will join us and be really careful of what you eat and what you feed your kids and your grandparents because it's really important that you realize that what you eat is going to determine a lot about what our future is because agriculture is responsible, industrial agriculture is responsible for about half of the greenhouse gases. And here we're putting all of the of the troubles on fossil fuels when it's really agriculture which is another huge problem and don't forget that industrial agriculture is fossil fuels. We have 25 million tractors in this country. So let's be careful, let's eat well, bon appetit and you're going to make the difference. Thanks a lot. Thank you Will Allen and it gives me great pleasure now to introduce Matthew Durr the president of Sterling College. It's great to see so many people here today and to have the opportunity to stand underneath an agricultural goddess and introduce an agricultural goddess. So I think that we all know that humanity is facing an unprecedented ecological emergency. Earth has entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown and rapid loss of biodiversity. In the cradle of the industrial age the UK Parliament unable to address Brexit has somehow stepped forward to acknowledge that we're facing a climate emergency and to all those students and people on the streets in the extinction rebellion thank you. At Sterling College in Craftsbury Common we advance ecological thinking and action. We aspire to offer anti-racist and anti-bias learning opportunities that use education as a force to address the problems caused by unlimited growth and consumption that are destroying the planet as we know it. We are here with our partners and honored on the steps of our beloved state house to introduce a powerful voice in the movement to restore the human relationship with the natural world. Dr. Shiva combines sharp intellectual inquiry and courageous activism in her work which spans working with universities worldwide and with peasants in rural India. In 1991 she founded Navdanya a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources especially native seed and to promote organic farming and fair trade. For the last two decades Navdanya has worked with local communities and organizations serving more than 500,000 men and women farmers. Navdanya's efforts have resulted in the conservation of more than 3,000 rice varieties from across India and the organization organization has established 60 seed banks in 16 states across India. Dr. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to the changing practice and paradigm of agriculture and food on a local national and global level. Her books The Violence of the Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind pose essential challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable industrial agriculture. We're delighted to welcome you to the Green Mountain State Dr. Shiva. Thank you Matthew particularly for combining the commencement of sterling with this amazing movement. For me that's true freedom of learning very very honored to be here with all of you with the Goddess series but also in a state house that is so symbolic of freedom. In our times I was in Vermont when it was the first state to pass the GMO labeling law. The reason we've got to get rid of the poison cartel and make our food and farming poison free is not just because they're killing life on earth, our bees are butterfly, our children just look at the figures. We've had two cases of cancer related to glyphosate and Roundup. Johnson and Hardman two cases are making by a sink after it bought Monsanto but cancer cases are all over 14 million every year. 8.2 million cancer deaths and we know only 5% cancer is genetic the rest is all because of toxics in the environment and stress. This morning the intergovernmental panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services which is like the IPCC of climate change their reports come out and they're coming out with a huge warning on the sixth mass extinction the issue on which the extinction rebellion was on the streets. Climate change and species extinction and the chronic health crisis and hunger and the destruction of small farmers livelihoods are all one system and these are all symptoms of a system that is not an agriculture system because agriculture is supposed to be care for the earth care for the land it's not supposed to be using left over war arsenal to kill the earth to destroy our farmers and destroy the health of our children every chemical in agriculture came from the war it came from developing poisons to kill people in the concentration camps and that's why killing by these poisons is not a side effect it is the intention. I woke up to this in 1984 my background was physics I've never studied agriculture but 1984 when a gas leak from a pesticide plant and union carbide and according to local people 7,000 people died that night just it was a concentration camp that's how the people of Bhopal talk about that night that we were turned into a gas chamber and I realized then that first I must understand why are we using these poisons and I realized we're using poisons because I have named them the poison cartel this handful of companies grew out of war have continued the war against the earth and against life on earth they've continued the war against our children and it's this poison cartel is not just toxic to all living systems it is behind the six mass extinction including when you think deforestation why is the amazon being chopped to grow GMO soya bean so that royalties can be collected for every acre of soya bean planted the amazon is the lung and liver of this planet it's now becoming the toxic hub for all the animal feed to all the factory farms of the world and indigenous people are being killed the forest itself is being killed but as we saw in the case of the GMO labeling legislation this poison cartel is toxic to our democracy it's poisoning our democracy all the efforts to preempt the law and undermine it is the only work they can do and there are two attacks right now the first is all the constitutional rights at every level from the local to the state level to the national and the global it's either being destroyed through preemption or deregulation or it's being attacked the attack on the organic movement is so well organized diluting it my friends are here from real food comes from real soil the vision of the poison cartel for the future is farming without farmers farming without soils every bit of knowledge a new monopoly climate corporation bought by monsanto soil data corporation solemn bought by monsanto insurance like health insurance is destroying the health system of this country and bernie has taken this up in such a strong way agricultural insurance is destroying farmers everywhere and who's selling insurance the people who now monopolize all the knowledge and all the data and they sell it as big data so i said first they came and said you won't have food if there are no chemicals you'll starve without chemicals then they came and said you'll starve without gmos now they're saying you'll starve without big data and there's a new merger of the information technology the biotechnology the poison cartel and big money big finance food is where they want to make money from and it isn't just that they make money selling inputs they now want to make knowledge itself the ultimate commodity but they make money after they make a sick buyer has bought monsanto buyer is one of the biggest seller of cancer drugs and we know how they try to destroy our patent law because our patent law does not allow patents on seed and it does not allow absolute monopolies on medicine it allows the creation and existence of generic drugs which is why even the u.s. generic drug is supplied by india because of the way we did not create patent monopolies in the case of patents on seed i had i worked with my parliament to say but seed is not an invention it's the embodiment of evolution creation unfolding the brilliance and intelligence of centuries of farmers of breeding we've just saved a few thousand varieties of rice our farmers could take one grass or as a sativa and turn it into 200,000 rice varieties that's the brilliance of the biodiversity the intelligence is in the plant in the seed in the farmers minds and they're treating life as empty soil as empty farmers heads as empty when i walked this morning through the state house with matthew i read a few of the quotations from governors of the past from presidents of the past every one of them addressed the issue of slavery and the issue of freedom for me the poison free movement is the freedom movement of our times it's our freedom to be able to make laws according to our constitutions it's about the freedom of us as human beings and earth citizens to live lives according to the laws of the earth and because it is food that connects the web of life the food web is the web of life it's food and nutrition that moves is the pollen of the plants that becomes the food of the bees it's organic matter that becomes the food of the soil organisms about which you have very very beautiful drawings and paintings all over everything is food our ancient taxid everything is something else is food and when we poison food we are poisoning the web of life the poison free movement is therefore about defending our bees and our birds rachel karsten tried to wake us up to it decades ago we must complete the work she started it is about defending every farmer because every farmer is in debt for high-cost inputs and poison free farming means you can do farming without that debt it's debt free farming for me in India it's suicide free farming it's about freedom from the seed slavery of intellectual property on seed and I notice in the revitalization plan for rural America Bernie has talked about addressing these seed monopolies I did a calculation 10 billion is what American farmers are paying annually for royalties for corn and so yeah GMO in India 80 thousand percent was the increase in seed prices when Monsanto entered even though they had no pattern they could not have a pattern because our laws don't allow it that's what pushed farmers to debt that's what drove the farmers suicides that will Alan talked about we are working in the communities we've dropped BT cotton GMO 60 percent in the villages where we work and I'm going to work till the last GMO is out my dedication to poison free food and farming is that every species can thrive in the future and not be pushed to the sixth mass extinction when we worry about 80 percent insects dying well we created an entire breed of chemicals called insecticides whose one purpose was to kill insects and will allen has done a brilliant book on the war on bugs if you haven't read it all of you should it's that mentality of the war on every species on the farmers on indigenous people after all it was an exercise of extermination which drove 90 percent of the first nations to extinction extinction been begun now it's an experiment that's going on for 500 years and now it must stop extinction rebellion is the freedom movement of our time the science of the collapse around us as Matthew so clearly pointed out but because we are members of the living earth and the earth family if only we shift the paradigm from the militarized monoculture mechanistic paradigm that creates knowledge for war against the earth and war against people and instead works with the earth and her processes and her diversity to regenerate the earth without poisons we have a solution to climate change soils for climate said it so clearly my books all not all we worked out while 50 percent greenhouse gases come from industrial agriculture based on fossil fuels and chemicals 100 percent solution to climate change both in terms of reducing emissions absorbing past emissions and creating resilience and regeneration one thing that is not getting common in the climate movement is that the climate chaos and climate disruption is a disruption of the living nutrient and food cycles of this planet the carbon cycle is ruptured we took our attention to mining 600 million years of fossil carbon and forgot the amazing gift of living carbon and that we have to be partners in cultivating that living carbon and the more we increase it the more the broken cycle gets healed or nitrogen synthetic fertilizers also products of the war they've ruptured the nitrogen cycle and nitrous oxide is 300 times more deadly than carbon dioxide in destabilizing the climate it's killing the soil using 10 times more water single biggest reason for land degradation and soil destruction which then leads to uprooting of people it leads to the certification it is leading to the refugee crisis the inability of the land to support you and Matthew and I were talking in sterling how the the new agenda local regional and planetary has to be returning home those who've destroyed this planet are talking often about only two options extinction or escape in the colonial times they escaped to this continent they escape to my land they escape to Africa they escape to Australia that's what colonization was about escape now they're saying extinction on this planet or escape to Mars but it's a dead planet there is no planet b this is the living planet we have to take care of and poison free food and farming also means shifting our learning our minds our work our hands to cultivating an abundant diverse living earth she's waiting she's waiting so we save the seeds we work with the animals we refuse to accept that farming without farmers is production of food we refuse to accept that farming without soil is production of food we refuse to accept that petri dishes and lab meat and fake milk and fake cheese is going to be the future of health of our planet the two big impacts of the poison cartel besides the health of the planet and the health of our democracies is our health 75 percent of all ecological destruction comes from chemical industrial agriculture 50 percent greenhouse gases 75 percent of the growing croning diseases which are growing exports naturally all of them are rooted in the industrial food and the chemical and toxic poisoned food that we are eating we've done a new manifest to own food and health the total costs of health care in the global food system related illnesses let me just share them with you neurodegenerative diseases 2.5 trillion autism 171 million cancer 2.5 trillion diabetes 2.5 trillion endocrine disruption 549 billion AMR infections 1 trillion obesity 1.2 trillion birth defects 222.9 billion we are talking of a disaster no health insurance can manage this only real food real farming and poison free food and farming is the solution that's why we have to shift our minds to seeing agriculture and food production as protecting and rejuvenating the health of the earth the health of our rural communities and the health of our children it is a health system it's not a production system it is definitely a healing system based on working in co-creation and co-production with the living processes of a living earth with living minds it is not a system to continue to use war chemicals that war must end we have 10 years to make this shift together we can do it because as ever expanding and never ascending oceanic circles where every community that's already done this work and you've already done this work we just have to spread it we have to refuse i call this the satyagraha for life satyagraha was Gandhi's word for the force of truth the duty to not obey unjust laws the state house passes laws but the earth passes laws those are the laws of the earth that govern our lives our communities pass laws that is self-governance slavery began with people refusing in their hearts and minds to accept slavery as an acceptable condition that people could be property it is now time for us to refuse to accept that life on earth can be property of monsanto that poisoning people can be a freedom it has to be treated as a crime we are dealing with a poison cartel of three an organized mafia organized criminals we need to find new creative organized ways to be able to respond to this at every level and just like life is about diversity freedom is about diversity at every level from the individual to the community to the legislator to the planet i know we can do it thank you the the poison free pledge is there for you to sign but don't just sign make it your organizing facilitator for work in your community let the movement keep growing we don't have to find a physical war like they had to against slavery we need to find a we have a resistance from our hearts our minds and creating alternative economies food economies and creating real living democracy living the democracy of life we would love to do a group picture so if you would all please come on up and fill these two spots and while you're gathering i would like to give a very deep thank you to all of the sponsors that helped to put this event together and also to those who have put together the entire northeast journey for dr shiva sterling college school of the new american farmstead at sterling college nabdanya international cedar circle farm rural vermont connecticut nofa vermont nofa mass nofa bail building a local economy vermont compost company soil for climate nyu at steinhardt independent science news real organic project and chelsea green publishing dr shiva underneath the green tent for the next little while they're going to have to move on to their next speaking engagement but we would love to have all of you sign the pledge in the presence of dr shiva over here by the green tent thank you so much