Discover the powerful lessons of nature and sustainability in Vandana Shiva’s “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest.” Explore how forests teach us resilience, interconnectedness, and eco-conscious living.
Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest Notes By Vandana Shiva
Summary of Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest By Vandana Shiva
Everything I need to know I learned in the forest is an essay written by Indian scholar and Environmentalist, Vandana Shiva. The essay was originally published in 2012. In this essay the writer tells us about the environment and also tells what she has learnt from the forest like she has learnt diversity, freedom, co-existence from the forest.
The author writes that the forest teaches us diversity, freedom and co-existence. Every human being learns a lot in his life, some things we learn from formal education and some things informal. If we say that we learn everything only from college and school, then it will be wrong because we get many experiences in life from real life.
Sometimes a common man who is not much educated or is completely illiterate also teaches us very good lessons of life.The author also learned a lot from her real life experiences. She learned about the environment from illiterate women living in the forests of Garhwal. She learnt about the diversity of life forms found in the jungle and also learnt that diversity is a very important part of life. By living with these women, the writer learnt that the earth is our mother. We exploit the earth to the fullest to get raw materials from it but we should not misuse the earth so much and should live in peace and harmony with nature.
In the first line of the essay, the writer talks about her ecological journey which started from the forests of the Himalayas. Ecology is a kind of science in which we study living communities, i.e. whatever living things exist in the environment, which can include animals, humans and even plants. The author tells that her ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalayas, her father worked as a forest conservator and her mother was a farmer.
Her mother wrote many songs and poems about the welfare of animals and plants, which she also used to recite to her children. The writer grew up listening to these songs and poems. Both the writer’s parents lived close to the jungle and loved it because both of them had such a profession. The writer grew up living near the jungle, so her love for the jungle was natural. She writes that it was from the forests and ecosystems of the Himalayas that she learned most of what she learned about ecology.
The Chipko Movement
There is a lot of mention of one movement in this essay and the name of that movement is the Chipko Movement. The Chipko movement has played an important role in the author’s life. She writes: My involvement in the ecological movement began with the Chipko movement. Chipko is a very famous movement which started in the 1970s. In the 1970s, there was a lot of deforestation due to which forests were being destroyed.
In the 1970s, a lot of deforestation took place in the Garhwal forests, due to which many kinds of problems started arising in the area like landslides, floods, along with water and food problems. Since the women were completely responsible for food, drink and fuel, the direct impact of the terrible deforestation started falling on these poor and illiterate women of the village. Now these women had to walk long distances in search of these basic needs, which wasted a lot of their time and at the same time their burden was also increasing.
Chipko was a non-violent movement started by Sunderlal Bahuguna against deforestation. In the 1970s, the peasant women living in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas took part in it in large numbers. These women knew the real value of the jungle. For them, the grass and fruitful plants growing in the jungle were food for their animals. Fire was lit in their stoves by collecting fallen wood, and the water from the springs there was used for household work. The only support for their life was the jungle. So these farmer women took upon themselves the responsibility of saving those jungles. When the tree cutters came to cut the trees, all these women hug the trees to protect it from cutting. They announced that before cutting the trees, these people would have to cut these women.
Vandana Shiva ji also became involved in the Chipko movement. She joined this movement as a volunteer. During her holidays she would visit these jungles and participate in pilgrimages along with all the women. Apart from this, she documented the activities of deforestation properly. The writer took part in the Chipko movement by taking a lead and by publicizing it, she informed the people of the whole country about this movement.
The writer also tells about a dramatic incident related to the Chipko movement. So this dramatic incident happened in 1977 in a village called Adwani in the Himalayas. A woman named Bachni Devi started this movement against her own husband because her husband had got a contract to cut trees from the jungle. Bachni Devi, like other women of the village, was also against cutting trees.
When the people who were cutting the feet reached there, Bachni Devi along with other women of the village protested against them by holding the burning mashal in her hand. The writer used to keep information about such movements and used to give her full support to them.
Now we will know what different activities the writer did after the she got involved in the movement. The writer writes that from Chipko I learned about biodiversity and biodiversity based living economies and protection of both has become my life mission. Biodiversity means all types of living beings which you find together in one place like animals, plants, bacterias etc. with which our whole world is made up, all these living beings live together, thrive, grow and maintain the balance of the environment.
Monoculture is a type of farming that refers to a single crop or the growth of a single organism. The writer does not believe in monoculture but has immense faith in biodiversity. To spread the knowledge of biodiversity to maximum people, the writer started Navdanya farm in Doon valley of Uttarakhand in Himalayas in 1994. The writer started collecting seeds of various crops from farmers’ fields so that she could give demonstration and training to people on this farm.
She teaches on this farm how different types of crops can be grown in a single field. She also teaches how different types of things can be grown in a year by growing different crops. The writer tells with great pride that today she and her team grow 630 different varieties of rice, 150 varieties of wheat and many other things by conserving them.
This movement was started in 1987 and in 1994 the writer established Navdanya Farm. The main reason for establishing this movement was to encourage affordable farming, promote biodiversity and teach farmers how organic farming is done. Together with the farmers the writer established 100 community seed banks all over India. It was said that many varieties of rice of India were going extinct, through this movement the writer along with his companions saved and conserved almost 3000 varieties of rice.
People associated with this movement also teach farmers about organic farming. Till now farmers were using fossil fuel and chemical based pesticides and fertilizers in their fields but after joining this movement they realized that crops can also be nurture through organic fertilizers which are nourished by sun and soil which does not cause any harm to the health of the people.
The writer understood the value of forests and natural fertilizers well after joining the Chipko movement. This knowledge could be used properly only when he could take these things to the farmers and she did this by bringing a movement in the field of agriculture. She explained the values of organic farming to the farmers by establishing Navdanya Farm and she revived the disappearing crops like many varieties of rice, wheat and many other crops. So these were all the activities that the writer did by joining the Chipko movement.
In this essay, the writer also tells us about how the rights of nature were highlighted on the global stage. Ecuador is the only country in the world which has included “rights of nature” in its constitution. There is another country Bolivia which has made a universal declaration of the rights of mother earth. Both these countries encouraged The United Nation general assembly a lot to think on the issue of Nature and Earth.
As a result, when Earth Day was celebrated in April 2011, the General Assembly of the United Nations organized a conference in which it was discussed that how nature can be managed. During this conference another term was used which is Eco-apartheid.In the 20th century, apartheid was quite prevalent in South Africa. Many laws and policies were made by differentiating between black and white people. Gradually, many movements against colour discrimination also took place.
That is why the word apartheid was used in a new way by Cormac Cullinan, an environmentalist from South Africa. He said that just as the whole world had united against color discrimination, similarly today we all have to understand a very big and deep Eco-apartheid which has been spread upon this illusion that man and nature are separate.
What I mean to say is that man and nature are related to each other, they are connected. We cannot separate them, with the destruction of one it is natural for the other to be destroyed. If nature gets polluted and destroyed, then man will also be destroyed. If we want the welfare of both, i.e. nature and humans, then we will have to live together in harmony with good will.
Now we will talk about another issue which the author has named “The Dead-Earth World View”. The industrial revolution started with a new thought. The thought was to consider the earth separate from humans, to understand that the earth is only for the benefit of humans and humans have full rights over whatever raw materials are present in it.
The earth started being considered as a dead matter. This was happening because to run these factories, raw materials were required which were only found in the earth. The illegal use of these raw materials started. This was a kind of exploitation of the earth. The industrial revolution believed that the earth is different from humans and that is why humans have full right over all the raw materials found inside it.
Such ideas separated man from nature. Two famous philosophers of that time are Francis Bacon and Caroline Merchen. Francis Bacon, also known as the father of modern science, believed that science and inventions not only change the direction of nature but have so much power that they suppress nature and subjugate it.
Moving ahead in the chapter, we will now read that the writer got a lot of inspiration from Shri Rabindranath Tagore and what he did in his life by getting inspired from him. The writer was greatly influenced by Shri Rabindranath Tagore, Shri Rabindranath ji started an education center in Shantiniketan of West Bengal which was known as forest school. This forest school was influenced by nature and was also working towards reawakening the Indian culture.
In 1921 the forest school was converted into a university. Shri Rabindranath loved the forest and nature very much. He wrote an essay called Tapovan. He writes that the best thoughts of great men of India were born only when they were close to nature. In the jungle all plants, birds and animals live together. In the jungle we study unity and diversity. Unity and diversity depend on each other. Diversity in nature means existence of different living beings in nature. And diversity in human life means existence of people of different caste, state, gender and religion together. Along with diversity in nature there is also unity and this is the part we learn from nature. We have to bring unity in our life by living together with everyone, understanding each other and tolerating each other.
That is why it is said in this part that it is this unity in diversity that is the basis of ecological sustainability and democracy. According to Tagore, jungles do not only give us knowledge and freedom but they are also the source of beauty and happiness. Along with this they also teach us the lesson of peace. Jungles also teach us that everything belongs to everyone, nothing is mine, everything is ours. If we keep thinking like this then the life of all of us will become very easy and peaceful. The writer was very much influenced by these thought of Tagore. She adopted this culture in her university named “The Earth University” which is located in Navdanya.
The Earth University offers two popular courses: A-to-Z of Organic Farming and Agroecology, and Gandhi and Globalization. Thus, the author is very closely connected to nature and has always been trying to find ways to save forests from being cut down. The journey of her life started with the Chipko Movement and continued.
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