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[Global Oneness Project]
[A Shift to the Feminine]
The ritualization of all of this I think is not complete.
I think for that Behari peasant woman or these old grandmothers
I was seeing from Rajasthan boarding my train,
for them, this is deep.
[Vandana Shiva] [Dehradun] [Environmentalist and Author] This is deep.
Because the desacralization has indented their lives.
They're not part of the consumer culture.
Not all of India is.
There's a large part of India that's still living with the earth
and still treating the earth as sacred and treating the rivers as sacred,
and I think they are really the people
who have to be put at the center for an ecological recovery.
Definitely this desacralization was part of a masculine project.
Bacon said it.
He said as long as nature is treated as sacred, the earth is sacred,
we won't be able to exploit like we have to.
And Boyle, who was a New England governor,
said very clearly that the ideal sacredness of nature
interferes in economic development.
The project of economic development was based on desacralization.
I think that project of a false economic development
based on false parameters like growth, which everyone now recognizes
did not measure human welfare, or false parameters like
excessive exploitation of resources beyond their limit,
I think that's reached its limits.
I mean, climate catastrophe in a way is the bell that's ringing
saying "It's over."
"You can't carry on on this path. We have to search another path."
And I think if we join the climate debate with the issue of water,
then there's only one way to move forward, and that is
shift from that masculine, commodification, desacralization part
of abuse of natural resources and abuse of rivers,
ending in their death, but you don't see the deathbed because you
declared them dead anyway.
You declared a living earth as dead matter.
And so how can you kill something dead?
If we have to protect the life of this earth
and her rivers and her waters, then we have to recognize their life.
And we have to create the cultural mechanisms, protect that life,
and that cultural mechanism is the category of the sacred.
The sacred that shows us the links, that shows us the primacy,
that shows us the basis of sustenance, and that does mean a shift
to the feminine both in terms of seeing the rivers as living feminine,
but also in terms of us organizing ourselves, men and women,
on less violent, less predatory ways on how we relate to the earth.
[www.globalonenessproject.org]