Breaking an addiction: lessons from a weekend with environmentalist Vandana Shiva

How a weekend with environmentalist Vandana Shiva is a lesson on being content. Also, here’s why farms are going to be more relevant than ever in the post-pandemic world

At a vipassana course I took years ago, I learnt the difference between making an assumption and gaining true knowledge. When we read something in a book, we assume it’s true; but we can only become knowledgeable through experience. So, even though I write on wellness and was aware of the term biodiversity, I only understood its real impact after visiting author, activist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva’s biodiversity conservation farm, Navdanya, on the outskirts of Dehradun in Uttarakhand. Spread across 52 acres, this land was earlier a sugarcane and eucalyptus plantation. Today, these commercial crops have been replaced with a heaving abundance of trees, shrubs, creepers, grasses, and herbs. There are approximately 72 species of birds, 5,000 varieties of crops (paddy, wheat, pulses, oil seeds, vegetables, millets) and 78 types of herbs within the farm, not to mention worms, beetles, butterflies, lizards, spiders, and toads, all playing their roles in this diverse landscape. In just an acre-long patch, there are 650 indigenous varieties of paddy.