A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Dr Vandana Shiva opens with a striking claim: agriculture is an act of love. From her earliest experience of her father’s nurturing care to her lifetime of work defending seeds, soils and the rights of farming communities, she traces a single thread — that love is not sentiment but relationship, not abstraction but practice rooted in the living world.
She articulates a vision of love as compassion, as the recognition of interconnectedness that makes exploitation impossible: when there is unconditional trust, there is unconditional love. The problems humanity faces — ecological destruction, corporate monoculture, the erosion of commons — arise, she argues, from blindness, denial and a fear of love; from a manipulated world of domination and control that severs the thread of relationship between human beings and the living systems that sustain them.
Vandana Shiva calls for spiritually inspired activism that does not mimic the aggression of oppressive systems: non-violent power grows, she insists, while violent systems, being ultimately loveless, cannot endure. She describes economies of love — drawing on Aristotle’s sense of economy as the art of living well — in which the only true measure of wealth is right relationship, care and the recovery of the commons.
And she closes with a seed: a simple, radical act of love available to anyone. If we can save one seed, she says, it will hold within it the imagination of love.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).