The extinction emergency, climate havoc and climate chaos, and the food crisis are the symptoms and consequences of violence and war against the earth and earth citizens unleashed by the greed of the 1%. This 1% extracts, encloses and pollutes a sentient environment, destroying the conditions of life on earth by appropriating the resources that sustain people’s livelihoods. The ‘fossilised’ construct of a ‘dead’ earth, combined with the economy of extraction and enclosures, has created the multidimensional emergency that threatens our future.
Our age is frequently referred to as the Anthropocene. I do not accept this term, because all of humanity is not predatory. Humans as a species have not caused climate disasters or the extinction crisis—it is the exploitative, unchecked practice of the 1% that has done so. These crises are not the anthropogenic impact of actions caused by all of humanity; they are the capitalogenic impact of the reckless actions of the 1%. I also do not use the term Anthropocene because we need to move beyond anthropocentrism if we want to cultivate a future with all life on earth. The earth is for all beings, not just for human beings.
The top 1% of emitters produces over 1,000 times more pollution than the bottom 1%. As a 2023 Oxfam report indicates, carbon emissions by the 1% are greater than the emissions of the poorest two-thirds of humanity.1 In the absence of both experience and knowledge of the ecological and social impact of the ‘greed economy’, as well as the lack of differentiation between real solutions to real ecological problems, democratic rejection of the rule of the 1% is morphing into a denial of the serious ecological crises that threaten the lives of diverse species and vulnerable members of the human community.
Climate disasters add to the destructive impact of colonialism and maldevelopment which place profits above nature and people. A new green colonialism is emerging through greenwash—reducing a complex, interrelated ecological crisis to distinct and disconnected crises and one-dimensional symptoms, then blindly promoting false solutions for more profit and greater control over the earth, its resources and our lives.
It is the countries in the South that disproportionately pay the highest price for ecological destruction while having contributed the least to it, experiencing the worst impact of floods and droughts, cyclones and heat waves. I have worked with communities affected by the Odisha Super Cyclone in 1999, in which 10,000 people lost their lives; the Kedarnath disaster in 2013, in which 6,054 people died and the Rishi Ganga disaster in 2021, in which 250 people died.
Environmental crises invite us to go beyond the anthropocentric arrogance that drives the war against the earth and makes the 1% indifferent to the destruction of diversity and ecological processes. But, to make matters worse, polluters are expanding and accelerating the destruction by taking over international environmental treaties that were actually created to regulate their practices. Instead, they are mutating the treaties into instruments for creating new markets in pollution and environmental damage.
Ecological movements have grown since the 1970s in response to ecological destruction driven by an extractive model of the economy as ‘development’, as ‘growth’, as corporate globalisation. The destruction of biodiversity in forests, farms and oceans over the last four decades through industrial, monoculture forestry, farming and fisheries led to the emergence of movements to protect it. The pollution of the air and atmosphere, culminating in a destabilised climate, climate extremes and climate havoc as a result of pollution from fossil fuels and toxic chemicals derived from them, saw the introduction of two international environment treaties signed at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 by governments of the world: these were the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to conserve and protect biodiversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Both treaties are interconnected because the biosphere and the atmosphere are interconnected.
The Earth Summit happened before the meeting in Marrakesh in 1994, where the World Trade Organization (WTO) was set up. It was held, in a pre-globalisation, pre-corporate control era, around pressing ecological concerns, where eco-movements compelled national governments as well as international agencies to commit to the protection of the environment and of indigenous people.
The UN system created after WWII was based on ‘one country, one vote’. At the Earth Summit, both the biodiversity as well as climate agreements were shaped by the countries of the South, because they are not only home to a majority of the 36 biodiversity hotspots essential to survival but also home to over two billion people, including some of the world’s poorest, who rely directly on healthy ecosystems for their livelihoods and well-being.
The CBD was intended to protect and conserve biodiversity, the knowledge of indigenous people and the sovereignty of countries. Over time, this Convention has been completely undermined as regulations to prevent biopiracy are being subverted, biosafety regulations are being bypassed through digital mapping and gene-edited GMOs and biodiversity destruction is being concealed under ‘biodiversity offsets’. The mutation of the international environmental treaties, meant to address the planetary ecological crisis, is thus taking place at both the ecological and political-economic levels. Today, the international is no longer intergovernmental; it has become the space controlled by globalists—the 1%.
Over 30 years have elapsed since the wake-up call at the Earth Summit, and biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency. The climate crisis has become a climate catastrophe, despite the annual Climate Change Conference of the Conference of the Parties (COP) that meets to discuss strategies and progress in coping with climate change.
Climate change is an issue of justice, and of life and death. The objective of the UN climate treaty was to stop pollution and climate injustice, and it was legally binding. Polluters must stop polluting. Polluters must pay. Since the industrialised countries were responsible for the pollution caused by fossil fuels, the emission reduction targets of the treaty originally applied to 37 industrialised nations, identified as Annex B countries at COP 3 in Kyoto in 1997. The first phase of the Kyoto Protocol (adopted in 1997 but enforced since 2005) required rich nations, the historic polluters, to reduce emissions by 5 percent, compared to 1990 levels, between 2008 and 2012. However, the polluters transformed these legally binding restrictions on pollution and emissions into trade in pollution through the Doha Amendment of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
The two most significant COP meetings were held in Copenhagen and Paris in 2009 and 2015, respectively. In 2009, US President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen, proposed a dismantling of the legal framework and its substitution of voluntary commitments with a small group of countries outside the conference negotiations, held a press conference and then flew away. That is why President Evo Morales of Bolivia stood up in the negotiating hall and said, “We are here to protect the Rights of Mother Earth, not the Rights of Polluters.” He took the initiative to mobilise citizens of the world to draft a declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, a process I was a part of.2
I wrote Soil Not Oil for the Copenhagen Summit. At that time we also conducted participatory research, entitled Climate Change at the Third Pole, and a pilgrimage across the Western Himalayas to assess the impact of climate change on Himalayan communities and ecosystems. The people of the Himalaya have not contributed to the pollution that is melting their glaciers and threatening their lives through disasters.3
COP 21, held in Paris in 2015, marked the end of a legally binding framework. Paris was all about ‘voluntary’ commitments. More significantly, it marked the end of UN agreements as agreements between countries, through their elected governments, accountable to the people. The Paris Agreement shifted the goal from the concrete and legally binding objective of polluters reducing emissions to 196 countries deciding to make voluntary promises to keep the rise in average global temperatures well below 2°C. Paris also began a new process of ‘outcomes’ and ‘decisions’ led by billionaires like Bill Gates, outside and distinct from the formal negotiations between governments.
The 2023 COP 28 in Dubai was presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), in which BlackRock Inc., Eni SpA and KKR & Co. Inc. have global investments. Al Jaber is also the chairman of Masdar, the leading building and construction materials company in Saudi Arabia. It was the first time in the history of the Climate Convention—whose aim is to reduce emissions from fossil fuels—that the CEO of an oil giant presided over negotiations. Ironically, the meeting for reducing emissions was organised in the oil capital of the world, and the future of agriculture was deliberated over in the desert.
Corporations that are driving fossil fuel pollution, both through direct use and through industrialised, chemical intensive agriculture, were the dominating presence in Dubai. Although food and agriculture have so far been ignored at most COP conferences, the corporate capture of the food and agriculture agenda was plainly evident at COP 28.
The Climate Convention opened with a special session dedicated to COP 28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action. Leaders of 160 countries endorsed the landmark declaration to help strengthen food systems, build resilience to climate change, reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the global fight against hunger.4 The UAE pledged only US$100 million, while at the same time committing US$30 billion to a new Dubai-based Green Investment private equity fund, Alterra, that will partner with BlackRock and other asset management firms to make ‘climate investments’ in the South.5
Agribusiness, represented by ADM, Bayer, Cargill, Danone, Nestlé, Olam Agri, Syngenta and Google, which have systematically destroyed biodiversity in the soil and the environment, launched an initiative to mislead people into thinking that it will contribute to what it calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. The Dairy Methane Action Alliance was formed by Big Dairy—Danone, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Lactalis USA, Bel Group and Nestlé; Big Ag; and Big Food—Bayer, Cargill, Danone, Louis Dreyfus, Nestlé, Olam, PepsiCo, Tyson and Yara—announcing an initiative to ‘decarbonise’ the industrial food chain, even as their operations contribute 50 percent of the pollution associated with industrial food systems.6
As is the practice now, at the end of the session on agriculture, Bill Gates walked onto the stage to announce a partnership between the UAE and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a US$200 million fund for food systems, agriculture innovations and climate action. This fund will focus on agricultural research, scaling agricultural innovations and funding technical assistance for implementing the COP declaration. As The Guardian (also funded by Gates) gushed, ‘Food is Finally on the Table’.7
This book looks into the root causes of climate change, explores the intimate links between our food and the climate and enquires whether Bill Gates’s fake food ‘innovation’ can be a solution to global malnutrition, hunger and climate change, or whether it will exacerbate the crises. It also offers alternatives that work with nature, according to nature’s ecological laws, and are, in fact, the real solutions to climate change that also regenerate the earth and address food security.
Bill Gates is not government—he is not a ‘party’ in UN negotiations—but in Paris, for the first time, he emerged as the ‘master’ of global platforms, using the COP to promote geo-engineering, genetic engineering and now fake food, Net Zero and carbon offsets. Through manipulation, Gates has replaced elected governments and displaced democracy. He has substituted the principle of ‘polluter pays’ with ‘polluter gets paid’, using false climate solutions to create new markets, enclose new commons and find new ways to make money.
In the years following Paris, the agenda of false solutions has gained firm ground. Gates is blaming nature and farmers, pushing anti-nature, anti-farmer remedies which will only deepen the social and ecological crises. The sun is not the problem, pollution is; so ‘dimming the sun’ by injecting aerosols in the atmosphere is not going to solve the issue of global warming. Cows are not Enemy No. 1, factory farms are. Feeding cows an energy intensive feed of corn and soyabean is a major source of pollution, not the methane that is produced when cows digest the feed. Trees are not the problem, so ‘fake trees’ can’t be a solution to climate change. At the Climate Forward event in September 2023 in New York, when David Gelles of the New York Times asked Bill Gates about trees sequestering carbon dioxide, he declared that those who think trees absorb carbon dioxide are idiots: ‘Are we the science people or are we the idiots?’8 Gates promotes industrial, mechanical systems of carbon capture as a technological innovation. But fake trees, which capture carbon mechanically, cannot perform photosynthesis; they cannot produce food and fiber; they cannot give or sustain life—they cannot create humus and living soil; they cannot regenerate and conserve water. It is a mechanical mind that sees one function only and tries to substitute it without taking into consideration a diversity of functions. Net Zero is not zero emissions; it is about making more money through clever financial jugglery. Gates has admitted that getting to zero doesn’t really mean zero:
There are no realistic paths to zero that involve abandoning these fuels completely or stopping all the other activities that also produce greenhouse gases (like making cement, using fertilizer, or letting methane leak out of natural gas power plants). Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we’ll have ways to remove the carbon they emit.9
The Net Zero Initiative, chaired by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, talks of ‘changing the plumbing of the whole financial system forever’, but really it’s just another way by which, riding on fake economics and fake science, the 1% can make more money while ‘offsetting’ pollution through ‘carbon credits’. The finance and accounting firms are ready with the financial infrastructure for Net Zero. According to a McKinsey report on Net Zero transition: ‘We estimate that the cumulative capital spending on physical assets for the net-zero transition between 2021 and 2050 would be about $275 trillion.’10
The biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis and the food and health crises are a single planetary crisis, because the biosphere and atmosphere are an intimately coupled system of the living earth. The biosphere has created and regulates the earth’s climate system. The biosphere, in turn, is sustained through food cycles and the flow of food as the currency of life across species and ecosystems. The carbon cycle is a food cycle. What flows across living systems is nutrition. The nutrient cycle is the foundational cycle of life. It begins with the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with the help of sunlight through photosynthesis. Atmospheric carbon is transformed into carbohydrates by plants. The carbon thus returns to the biosphere, including the biodiversity of plants and the biodiversity in the soil. Animals, including humans, eat the plants as food and emit carbon dioxide. This is the carbon cycle. Climate change is a result of the rupture of this cycle, caused by fossil fuels.
The shift from biodiversity-based food systems to oil-based, fossil fuel- and fossil chemical-based food systems has violated the earth’s ecological cycles, created a paradigm of linear extractivism and the associated creation of waste, contributing to the pollution of water, of the soil, of the atmosphere and of our food. The earth’s capacity to regulate her climate through the biosphere and biodiversity is being disrupted by pollution from the burning of fossil fuels and using their products in the form of petrochemicals. This pollution creates what are referred to as greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been increasing since the industrial age.
The pollution of the atmosphere through GHG emissions—CO2 (carbon dioxide), N2O (nitrous oxide), CH4 (methane)—is what drives climate change, and industrialised, globalised food production is responsible for 50 percent of GHG emissions. The Poison Cartel has already trapped farmers worldwide in an energy intensive, chemical intensive, capital intensive agricultural system that is causing a deep agrarian crisis, food crisis and health crisis. The Age of Oil has totally transformed our food systems. We are actually eating oil, from the production of food to its industrial processing, plastic packaging and distribution. The junk energy of fossil fuels has not only negatively impacted the earth’s metabolism and led to climate havoc, but junk and ultra-processed foods have disrupted human metabolism and led to a pandemic of chronic diseases as well.
Climate havoc has made natural disasters like floods and droughts more common, and more extreme, leading to frequent crop failures and intense food insecurity, because unlike indigenous, diverse, artisanal farming, industrial monocultures are more vulnerable to destruction. Global estimates reveal that by 2050, 3.5 billion people will suffer from food insecurity, an increase of 1.5 billion people over today.11 Rise in temperature, combined with the destabilisation of the hydrologic cycle, has adversely impacted our food systems. Between 2021–22, farmers in the Bay of Bengal were hit by multiple cyclones—Yaas, Gulab, Jawad, Asani and Sitrang—that completely destroyed their standing crops. In 2023, there was no rain, which led to a drought, affecting the sowing of paddy and tubers like turmeric and colocasia. Several districts in the desert state of Rajasthan were battered by the tropical cyclone Biparjoy on June 18, 2023, significantly wiping out local bird and animal populations, which in turn caused severe damage to crops, as harmful insect populations grew unchecked. In the Doon Valley, in the hill state of Uttarakhand, where a decade ago there was a flourishing growth of pulses, such as urad, navrangi, masoor and moong, today they are nearly extinct because of extreme rain. In 2024, the failure of the winter rains here has already ruined the rabi crop of wheat and mustard. The Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, too, showed signs of climate change in 2023, as erratic monsoon rains dumped half the year’s precipitation in one day. Heavy rains destroyed soyabean and cotton, as 35 percent of the area could not even begin the sowing process.
Food is at the heart of the climate debate at present both because of the impact of climate catastrophes on agriculture and due to the concerted efforts of the 1% to eradicate small farms and farmers by aggressively funding fossil fuel and tech-propelled food production. Bill Gates and the tech giants of Silicon Valley are heavily investing in fake food businesses and also buying farmland. In fact, Gates is now the biggest landowner in the US.12
The false solution to climate change, being promoted in the form of fake food made in labs, is creating a dystopia of farming without farmers, and food without farms. However, lab food requires more resources for feedstock and, being resource and energy intensive, contributes to higher GHG emissions. Rushing faster and further down the path of resource and energy intensive industrial food production, processing and distribution will only increase centralisation and corporate control of the food system and accelerate the destabilisation of the earth and climate systems.
There is an alternative path, a path made by walking with the earth, following the ecological laws of the earth—the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health. This path offers solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected.
Regenerating the earth through care is our ethical, ecological duty. In regeneration lies the potential, power and promise of healing the earth and humanity. Ecological laws have sustained life on earth through its diverse evolutionary stages, increasing recycling through circular economies based on biodiverse, chemical-free, artisanal, local food systems. The same processes, based on regenerating biodiversity, that produce healthy food also address climate change by getting rid of emissions from fossil fuels and fossil chemicals used in energy and chemical intensive production, long-distance transport and industrial processing. The ecological, democratic and humane option for addressing climate change is growing, as is eating real, healthy food by creating biodiversity and ecological, local, circular, living food economies. The artificial solutions offered by the food industry will increase hunger by diverting food from people to feedstock for producing lab food, just as the diversion of food to animal feed and biofuel has exacerbated it. It will aggravate climate change through increased energy use and increase disease through the ultra-ultra-processing of food using synthetic ingredients.
Fossil fuel/chemical-free farming and returning organic matter to the soil allow soil biodiversity to flourish, as the symbiosis between plants and soil organisms, like mycorrhizal fungi, produces healthier food. When fungi feed the plants with minerals, photosynthesis increases, allowing more food to grow while also feeding the soil organisms. Degenerative cycles are transformed into regenerative cycles. The web of life feeds us, and when we participate in the food web, we feed the web of life.
Ecological science and ecological medicine recognise that the health of the gut microbiome is the basis of our health; most chronic diseases have their roots in the destruction of the gut microbiome. Healthy, biodiverse food grows a healthy gut and healthy food grows in healthy soils. Healthy soils are rich in organic matter and in soil biodiversity. Biodiversity intensive, photosynthesis intensive, regenerative organic farming draws out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus following nature’s path of cooling the planet. One-third of the carbon fixed by the plant is returned to the soil as a soil exudate. Organic soils, rich in soil organism biodiversity, also add to the nutritional density and diversity of food, contributing to our health and nutrition.
Mycorrhizal fungi can hold 30 percent of emissions. Earthworms are important drivers of global food production, contributing to approximately 6.5 percent of grain yield. They contribute to soil health and resilience to climate change, as well. Soils with earthworms drain four to ten times faster than those without, and their water-holding capacity is higher by 20 percent. Earthworm castings, which can amount to four to thirty-six tons per acre, contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorous, three times more exchangeable magnesium, eleven times more potash, and one-and-a-half times more calcium. Their work on the soil promotes the microbial activity essential to living soil.
Building the infrastructure for oil has been the human preoccupation for at least one century. Cocreating the infrastructure of life with the earth and her beings must now become our commitment for the next century. In many cultures, traditional scientific knowledge recognised the links between ecology, agriculture, food and health, something that mechanistic science totally set aside.
We need to reconnect earth justice to human rights, to recognise the pain of the earth as connected to the pain of people. It is time to connect the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis to the industrial food system. It is time to see that the same fossil fuel-based, chemical intensive, resource intensive, ultra-processed food systems that cause metabolic disorders for humans are leading to the metabolic disorder of the earth, whose symptom is climate change. At the root of the polycrisis is a mechanical, militaristic mind, a monoculture of the mind, which reduces the biodiverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine. It is time to recognise the difference between the fake science and false solutions of the 1% and the deep ecological sciences of living systems, and real ecological solutions to the real, interconnected crises we face.
A paradigm shift requires walking a path beyond climate colonialism and climate change denial. It means walking the path of regenerating the earth as members of the earth family, interconnected and entangled in a thriving, living web of life. It means seeking climate justice and food freedom in our everyday lives, everywhere—reclaiming our food, reclaiming the earth, reclaiming our lives, our freedoms and our futures.
1 ‘Richest 1% Emit as Much Planet-Heating Pollution as Two-Thirds of Humanity’, Oxfam International, November 20, 2023, https://
2 For more, read Vandana Shiva, Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2020); Vandana Shiva, Origin: The Corporate War on Nature and Culture (Delhi: Natraj Books, 2018).
3 Vandana Shiva and Vinod Kumar Bhatt, Climate Change at the Third Pole: The Impact of Climate Instability on Himalayan Ecosystems and Himalayan Communities (New Delhi: Navdanya/RFSTE, 2009).
4 COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action, https://
5 Joe Lo, ‘What Is Alterra, the UAE’s $30 Billion Green Investment Fund?’, Climate Home News, December 10, 2023, https://
6 ‘The Davos-isation of the Climate COP’, GRAIN, February 15, 2024, https://
7 Whitney Bauck, ‘“Food Is Finally on the Table”: Cop28 Addressed Agriculture in a Real Way’, The Guardian, December 17, 2023, https://
8 ‘Can Planting Trees Really Help Fight Climate Change?’, Al Jazeera, October 3, 2023, https://
9 Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 19.
10 McKinsey Global Institute, The Net-Zero Transition: What It Would Cost, What It Could Bring, January 2022, https://
11 ‘IEP: Over One Billion People at Threat of Being Displaced by 2050 Due to Environmental Change, Conflict and Civil Unrest’, PRNewswire.com, September 9, 2020, https://
12 Darren Orf, ‘The Truth about Why Bill Gates Keeps Buying Up So Much Farmland’, Popular Mechanics, January 18, 2023, https://