Ashish Kothari: Touched by Nature

Ashish Kothari draws on his experience in the areas of wildlife and biodiversity to explore the profound consequences of human disconnection from nature. From bonding with a baby monkey in Kerala to discussing the impact of farmer protests in North India, we navigate through the interconnected realms of psychology, economics, and ecology.

The conversation delves into personal anecdotes, societal implications, and potential alternatives to our modern, urbanised lifestyles and looks at various transformations taking place on the ground.

Learn about the “flower of transformation” and how its five petals – politics, economics, society, culture and knowledge, and environment and ecology – intertwine to shape a holistic perspective for a better world. Ashish goes into detail with an inspiring example of 5,000 marginalised Dalit women farmers in India who successfully transitioned to sustainable, collective farming practices and movements advocating for food sovereignty, such as the recent farmer protests in North India against laws promoting commercialisation.

Voiceover 1:
Biggest moment for me was during Covid, and all I could do was sit in my garden and I cleaned the entire garden, which was so full of, branches from the tree and like dirt and leaves for years and years. And I completely cleaned it out and it suddenly became full of colour and green and everything. I was digging my hands into the soil and everything, planting it and watering it. And that was a moment that I was like, I am not meant to live a life of working 45 hours a week, in a job that I do not want, in an office in a big city. I am here to be part of this soil. 

Voiceover 2: 
It will give you more of a sense of peace and more of a sense of belonging on the planet. It makes you feel like you’re where you’re meant to be. I think it’s going to take you back to a time when people, living in a capitalist hierarchy and live with the land and for the land a lot more, fulfilment, living like that, I think.

Carl Schlyter: 
I think most of us, at least once in our lives, have had one of those epiphanies in nature that brings us into contact with that feeling of how life should be. It is these moments that bring alive the magic of life that makes our connections with nature real, that remind us what is essential in life. These are the moments that challenge the capitalist logic and at least in that instant, bring us into connection with an ecological wisdom that makes us feel a sense of harmony with the planet. Welcome to another episode of SystemShift, a podcast that explores some of the pressing issues reshaping our world. Our guest today offers us his learnings from a lifetime of grounded, radical alternatives that offer hope that holistic transformations are beginning to take place. We are joined by Ashish Kothari:, environmentalist, author and co-founder of Kalpavriksh, a non-profit organisation that has been working on environmental issues and social issues for 45 years now. In this episode, Ashish challenges the dominance of modern science and technology, advocating for open-source approaches and a commons perspective on knowledge and culture. He urges us to reconsider our relationship with the environment and encourage us all to be active participants in democracy, to learn from diverse models and embrace values that enables a balance of give and take, mutual respect and the interconnectedness of kinship. So, without further ado, a warm welcome to you.

Ashish Kothari: 
Thank you. Thanks, Carl.

Carl Schlyter: 
When I researched a little bit around this episode, I saw a photo of you, with a small baby monkey holding your finger, and it made an impression on me. And it made an impression on you. And I would like you to explain a little bit the background.

Ashish Kothari: 
Sure. This was, late last year. I was down in the southern Indian state of Kerala at, absolutely fantastic waterfall. And, while climbing back up from the waterfall, there was this group of monkeys, mostly baby monkeys playing with each other. And, you know, anybody who is interested in any kind of fun would love to watch baby monkeys playing, pulling each other’s tail and doing all that stuff? So, I was watching them. And then this one monkey climbed on to the handrails and I was looking at it, taking photographs. It was looking at me. And then I just lowered my camera because the way it was looking at me, I felt that there was a possible connection being made, but of course, very tentative. So, then I reached out my hand. one of my colleagues who was with me said, be careful. It might start you actually looking at a monkey eyes to eyes are supposed to be a sign of aggression. So, that’s why she was warning me. But here the monkey actually bent down, swiped my finger, and then straightened up and reached out with its own fingers and touched me for must have been a split second. And for me, that one split second, was like an eternity. And I actually wrote about that saying, eternity in a second because it encompassed within it for me all of what it meant to be part of nature, all of what it meant to be; you know what evolution means. All of, whatever we think of as creation, etc., and the intrinsic kinship that we have with other species, with the rest of nature and being part of nature. And also then of course, flashing through my mind in terms of what we are doing as a species to the rest of nature, how we tend to think of ourselves as being superior, but in effect, actually we are one we are, equal. And also, I think to me it was a way this and other such encounter as I had, have also been a way of enhancing my own identity, where I’m seeing myself not as an Indian or even as a human being, but as a lifeform, as something that is kind of connected to the rest of the universe. So, the interconnections, all of that flashed through my mind in that one second. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I found that very interesting because I had a rather similar experience. I was going skiing in a remote part in Sweden. I sat down, had my hot chocolate, and unaware to me, you had a little deer under the rock where I was sitting, and none of us noticed each other. I think it was sleeping. But when I bent forward, I saw it and it woke up. But normally they would just run away, always. But this time I guess it felt like I had been watching it and it knew if I wanted to kill it, it I would already have done it. So, we had the same moment of figuring each other out, looking at each other, feeling each other. And it’s strange that in our society, these kind of emotions and contacts with creatures of nature are so rare. They’re so distant from our daily life. Wow do you think this impacts economy and society, that we feel so distant from the natural surrounding we are completely dependent on?

Ashish Kothari: 
Yeah, I think in many, many ways. I mean, if you mostly for those of us who are in cities, especially the big cities, and how, as you say, alienated we are from the rest of nature, I think it creates, many things in us, which are problematic. One is it gives us the sense that we are not part of nature, that nature is out there somewhere. And it’s like othering the rest of nature. We do that with people also, of course, other so-called races and so on. And, because we do that, we tend to look at the rest of nature either as therefore, commodity something we need to exploit for our own resources and our own lifestyles, etc., or as a thing to be consumed. So, you know, suppose I’m a city dweller and I’m interested in wildlife. It means I want to go to a tiger reserve and watch some tigers and take some pictures and be thrilled with that. It doesn’t actually allow us to feel that we are part of nature and the alienation is so complete that we don’t even recognise the fact that even in the busiest of cities, we do have lots of elements of nature around us. When I was growing up in New Delhi, I did my schooling and college in New Delhi and, of course, a bustling city, you know, millions and billions of people and very crowded, very congested, very polluted, all of that. But even there, there’s a record of 350 to 400 species of birds. There is a large city forest in the middle of the forest, one of the largest urban forests in the world. And in fact, our own organisation, the one that I helped start, which I still work with, began by doing public actions to protect that forest. But for most people, these are invisible, even though they’re there, they might even be in your own backyard, or there might be a tree outside your window and you’re so disconnected. Also, because our education system and everything else and our consumerist system, everything else that we don’t even see that. So, I think that that, it’s enormously problematic from the point of view of, of course, the exploitation of nature and things like that and the unsustainability that we live, but also for us ourselves, right. I think in some sense, ethically, in terms of, you know, spiritually, etc., we are impoverished. And as a result of that, like my one connection with the monkey, which I spoke about or before that in, you know, sitting under a wonderful tree or whatever. So many of them are this kind of, connection that you had. In a way, it’s kind of significantly enhances us individually also in terms of what we are as a human being, what we are as an individual, how we see ourselves. I think it makes us humbler, because there’s a certain humility when you start looking at the awesomeness and the enormity of the rest of nature. There’s a certain humility when you realize that we’re not the only ones who are thinking and feeling and being happy, or being sad or whatever. There are also other species that do that, and when we don’t have that connection, I think we lose all of that, which means we’re also impoverished ourselves individually.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, so a few years back, it was a book published about, animals and their languages. And, well, due to modern AI technology, we have been much more aware of how complicated and intricate animal interactions are and how advanced their thinking are that we knew some years ago only. And I think this lack of knowledge about environment is a problem. This is not a new thought; the Swedish national botanist Linné, he already in the 18th century said that if we lose the name of things, we also lose the interest and the will to care for them. 

Ashish Kothari: 
I think, and you know, what you said also triggered in me something else that, Linné said and lot of, the more sensitive, I think, modern day scientists we had in India, for instance, Jagadish Bose, was one of the most incredible botanists, of his era, who spoke at that time about how, plants can communicate and how we can try and understand the communication of plants, which in more recent band, of course, a lot more scientists and others have, also worked on. But what I wanted to say was that, of course, modern science, in its best forms, not in its worst forms, does enable us to make these connections or understand the rest of nature better, but intuitively and through their own traditional forms of knowledge and science, or whatever one might want to call it Adivasis, as we call them in India, or indigenous peoples around the world have been making these connections forever, being able to talk to. I recently read an incredible article on this, I think Inuit man who talks to whales, and understands, the language, right. And it’s not something one can dismiss easily because even as a modern scientist examining what he’s saying, it seems that he’s on spot, which doesn’t mean that modern science should be by defying, traditional knowledge and science, or the other way around. But it’s just showing that there are these interconnections that people can do it through intuition, also through other kinds of connections. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Recently, modern science has obviously also confirmed a many traditional holisms. A lot of the modern drugs are based on what indigenous people have discovered over centuries and nature.

Ashish Kothari: 
Yeah, absolutely. And beyond that, I mean, if you look at modern quantum physics, which I understand very little of, but, you know, this whole thing of, there is no such thing as an objective way of looking at something. You look at something and the reality of that changes. You look at atoms and the reality of that changes. Right? And again, this is something that indigenous peoples have spoken about for a long time. They don’t objectify the rest of nature. Everything is a subject. Everything has its own agency. but anyway, so having lost that in some aspects of modern sort of industrialism and the ways of living in our cities and our industrial lives, or some of us, we tend then to think because we have a notion of human progress and development, which is of a certain kind, which means more and more and more material consumption and bigger and bigger and bigger infrastructure, you know, more and more sophisticated so-called sophisticated technologies, etc. And we think of human progress and development in a particular way. The word development itself has got defined not as simply opening up opportunities, which is what the totally has meant, but of more and more economic growth, GDP growth in most parts of the world. because of that, we tend to then think that anything that stands in the way, is a barrier. And what that advertisement, which I show often because that one, one image kind of says it all, when it says we have to lay pipelines in the earth for development, if there’s a forest in the way, it has to be uprooted because it’s a barrier. What the that ad does not say, but happens also is that there are indigenous peoples living in that forest, or there are farmers dependent on the land or whatever. They also need to be uprooted. So, in India, over the last few decades of so-called development, we have, our government has, physically uprooted 60 million people. That’s an unofficial figure, because the government does not keep figures, but unofficially, now that’s larger than the population of most countries in the world. These people have just been uprooted from their traditional lands and homes and forests and waters and coasts and whatever, and then been asked to just move off. So, in a sense this alienation is enabling us to cause enormous amounts of violence in the name of development in the name of governance, in the name of progress, both to the rest of nature and also the fellow human communities.

Carl Schlyter: 
I think it’s interesting you mentioned this, and we should talk more about the perspective of development. But if you read international business magazines, I will just make a few quotes here about what they say about India. The rate of highway construction has tripled since 2015. India’s net foreign direct investment as a share of GDP has been three times higher in India than in China. Capital investments is now 30% of GDP, higher than that of Taiwan and in par with, South Korea. Rather than closed economy reality that previously characterised India, the economy is now more open than China was at a similar stage of development. And after ten years of hiatus, India is recently beginning signing trade agreements once again. That’s the international business magazine perspective of India. How do you judge this perspective from the view of true development? 

Ashish Kothari:
Well, I think for the biggest corporations in the world, this is of course, great news. Right. And those biggest corporations are not just foreign, they’re also Indian as we know. This is all fantastic news because the more expressways and highways you have, the more opening up of the economy there is, the more the government removes, barriers to business, the more it does, what is the World Bank’s word, ease of doing business. The more it moves up in the ranking of ease of doing business, quote unquote, the better it is for corporations.

Also, the better it is for, those in power to hold on to power, because that’s the way they try and convince the rest of the population that we are doing develop for six decades. If a population has been brainwashed into thinking that this really bigger and bigger highways, etc., the bullet trains everything faster and bigger, etc. is development, then of course people will think, yeah, this is fantastic. So, government. So, that’s one side of the picture. And I don’t want to negate the fact that, because of that, some people do benefit. Of course, there’s a percentage of India that certainly benefits from that. But let’s see what’s happening on the other side. which of course, these international business magazines will not talk about. Let me just give you 2 or 3 facts on this. Recently it came out from government statistics themselves, which are not being very prominently highlighted, that the average nutritional status of Indians is actually going down. So, there may be more food all around because of the so-called Green Revolution pumping in fertilisers, throwing chemical pesticides, hybrid seeds, all of that. Overall food grains production has increased, so there is greater availability. But as a recent study shown by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, which is a government institution, showed over the last 30 to 40 years, the grains that we are now eating have almost no nutritional content, and in fact, they have poison in them, this is something that civil society groups have been touting for a long, long time. But finally, now it’s confirmed by a government institution. And so, we are actually seeing we’re on the cusp of a significant health crisis. We already have serious health crises of various kinds, but this is another one was malnutrition or undernutrition is already leading to, such, you know, deficiencies in immunity, etc., that people are falling sick, much more than they otherwise should be. So that’s one fact. I think that’s very important. The second one and this came out, I think, about 12 years back, or so, 10 or 12 years back, in a study that was done by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, which is all the industries and the global ecological footprint. I was actually very surprised that this federation itself came out with the study, but there were a few kinds of more progressive minded people who were in the environment being of the federation. And so, they brought this out with the Global Ecological Footprint Network. And what that showed was that because of this model of development, India was already using twice its biocapacity, which means twice the capacity of its natural resources to sustain this kind of growth or to sustain the population. 

Carl Schlyter: 
While India generally has a lower ecological footprint per capita than many countries in the world. 

Ashish Kothari: 
As a global thing, yes, but within itself, within its own boundaries. If you were to look at it, it was already using twice that biocapacity, which is one of the reasons why India actually is going like the Imperial West has already done or China has already been doing. Now, India is also going to other parts of the world and seeking resources. There’s already sort of economic colonies in Africa, for instance, with Indian companies. So, now that but also that we had already passed the sustainability, if you look at it from the footprint’s perspective or from other sorts of things, we had already passed that many years back. So, if you just take the I can give more and more and more, maybe a third one quickly, because it comes from yet another agency, which in fact has been responsible for this model of development to some extent. The world Bank. The world Bank, again, about a decade back, came out with a report which showed that the economic cost of just five kinds of environmental damage that were taking place air pollution, water, soil loss because of deforestation, etc., were already knocking off 5.7% GDP from India’s economic growth. And at that point in time, I think we were growing at something like maybe 6 or 7%, which in effect meant that we were zero growth. So even from a just a growth model growth perspective, we were not actually doing very well. And it would be negative if you added all the other environmental and the social costs and the human rights costs. And if one goes into the social aspect, psychological aspects of this kind of process, then, of course, you get to a much more horrifying picture than what this international business magazine would like to tell us. 

Carl Schlyter: 
And the fact that these impacts malnutrition is not only about the quality of what we grow, it’s also about the international adverse change on eating habits and centralisation of power and, food resources. It is. 

Ashish Kothari: 
Yeah, it is many things. It is the cultural changes that have taken place. This is since colonial times. And colonisation is a big part of that. Where they came and told us that eating, traditional foods like millets, we call them millets, like, you know, at least a dozen species of them is not good. Those are primitive crops. You should be eating wheat and rice and if possible, heavily processed meat and heavily processed rice. So, this has been around for the last many decades, this kind of feeling. So, there’s a cultural shift that happened a few decades back and still being pushed through. and then, of course, there’s also the global, food agreements, the trade agreements, the WTO, even to a large extent. So, all of those pushing a certain kind of vision and a certain kind of agricultural policy, which is, part of the cause of this really bad situation. 

Carl Schlyter: 
And this vision is; we have endless amount of fossil resources; we have endless amount of pesticides that we can all use to increase yield per hectare of monocultures. But what would the alternative vision be for the agriculture then? Not only in India, but Global South and North. 

Ashish Kothari:
So, let me give you one example of, a group of 5000 female farmers who have come up with their own alternative to this green revolution package. And, that is not an isolated example. There are many similar things in India, but also elsewhere in the world. So, what is 5000 female farmers, they are all small-scale farmers. They are what we call Dalits or the so-called untouchables of Indian society in this society. So, they’re terribly marginalised as women in a patriarchal society, as Dalits, in a very costly society, and of course, as very small landholders. One acre, two acres, at the most. About three and a half, four decades back they kind of started getting together because they realised that they could not sustain the kind of farming the government was pushing on them. They were actually getting more and more indebted. They simply didn’t even have the money to buy the chemicals and the seeds and all that. So, they decided, let’s try and switch back to our traditional forms of agriculture, but to share our knowledge, to share our seeds, to try and do more collective farming, to fight for land rights, for women, to get land redistribution done where there were excess lands with others, or with common lands. And through that, it’s a very long story, but basically through that over a process of about a decade or 15 years, they were able to move towards food security for all of those families, which means enough food to eat, but also surplus that they could sell in the market. They then started local exchange programs with consumers, local marketing their own restaurant in a nearby town, their own shop where they could sell excess produce, under the principle that the first right to the food is the family itself, and only after that put it into the market. no chemicals. so, they also have very, very ethical and spiritual principles of how you treat seeds, how you treat the earth as a as a mother and, many other things. As I said, it’s a very long story. But through that, they actually were able to show that in one of the driest parts of India, with no external irrigation, with no hybrid seeds, no chemicals, their own knowledge, but working collectively, they were able to produce enough food. Now, whether this is possible all across India, of course one will have to see. But there are many, many similar initiatives in different agroecological parts of India and of course, the rest of the world, which show that there are not one, but there’s many viable alternatives to the Green Revolution kind of farming, and that those viable alternatives are especially important for smallholders. We know if I if my statistics are correctly, something like 70% of the food on the planet is still produced by smallholders, small landowners, not by the big corporations and big farmers. And for them, these are really very viable alternatives. But what that does is it undermines the power of the corporations and of the governments because they argue these movements. And there’s a moment La Vía Campesina, which is a global movement which argues for not just food security, but food sovereignty, which means that these farmers or any producers of any kind for that matter, should have complete control over the means of production. Right. not capitalists and not, governments and they’ve shown that that’s possible. But why will the system not accept the model like this? Because it obviously undermines the current power holders, who will try and capture and control all the seeds and everything to do with agriculture. And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that not quite the same model, but, farmers, especially in North India, fought against the attempts by the government of India a couple of years back to bring in laws which would have further commercialised agriculture, further made agriculture go into the hands of corporations. They had to come in camp for a whole year outside Delhi or in Delhi to force the government to withdraw those three laws. And now they’re back. They’re actually back on the streets because a number of other promises the government had made them are have not been fulfilled. So now they’re actually moving back in tens of thousands to protest again. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Of course, every situation here is local, but there are some global ramifications here. For example, the fact that farmers around the world are more and more indebted and they, they are in the hands of banks and financial institutions. And this means that disempowerment and all research show that if you have empowered people, people tend to get happier. Was this a result of the direct example you gave us now that this empowerment, of actually being in control, did this contribute to wellbeing? And how was it purely economically like this, self-sufficient of food, but was the surplus enough to have a good wellbeing life, or was it no change compared to before?

Ashish Kothari:
Well, you know, if you look at, I mean, I will come back in a minute to the purely financial part of it. But I think if we think of well-being as something which encompasses, multiple aspects of life. Right. Good social relationships, and healthy, natural environment, which is not going to make you sick. the self-empowerment one feels when one is taking decisions over one’s own life rather than somebody else taking those decisions.

For women, the feeling of empowerment because they now were equal to the menfolk who were earlier, taking all the decisions, As Dalits, the feeling of equality in a village which is otherwise always looked down on them marginalised them, exploited them. Now they are able to walk around with their heads held high because they have full respect, self-respect, but also respect of the other villagers. The happiness that they get when there is global recognition for their work. They recently just two years back, also, they got the, United Nations Equator Initiative, which is almost like a Nobel Prize for environmental work. So, all of this actually brings well-being in multiple, complex, nuanced ways. It’s not easy to, you can’t quantify this kind of stuff, right? Which is why also something like GDP is just so completely nonsensical as an indicator of well-being. In financial terms, I have actually been going there over the last 25 years or so, and I have seen in many of the families how they are now doing much better, even from a material economic point of view. More assets in the house, the ability to repair their houses, which they did not have. If there is sickness in the family, the ability to actually go and see a doctor, which was never possible earlier, the ability to send their kids to school, they actually even started their own school because they believe that the government schools or the private schools don’t teach the children what should be taught. Now, the whole education system also needs to be transformed. But even if they send their kids to school, the normal dimensional schools, at least they’re able to send them. Earlier they would never be able to even send the kids to school, because either they didn’t have the money, or because the rest of the kids would treat them as untouchables, right? All of that has transformed, they have their own media station. They started India’s first radio station by the way, before it was even legal to run a community radio station. They have their own filmmaking unit. They made more than 100 films. And, you know, so, if you see all of that happening and you see the confidence and the smiles and the jokes and the way in which they organize, they have an annual biodiversity festival, the way in which these women actually, organize it, with thousands of people come from outside to see it. I don’t know, it’s, you know, I can’t even describe the sense of well-being that one is for. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Whoever I interview all around the world, when we talk about alternatives to capitalism and wellbeing economy, it always it up with the stories where the normal capitalist model is like you are yourself an atom that looks out for yourself, and then the market will figure everything out efficiently in the end. Whenever I hear these examples, you always see cultural impact, sociological impact, increased cooperation rather than only competition. I have a similar story. A podcast guest in the Swedish version of this podcast. It was a farm, a traditional farmer. He was on the poorer side of the village. So, the soil was not as good. So, they had to work together and, they cooperated more on his side. While the richer southern part of the village, they had their own big cars and their own big farms, and they went to church alone and went home alone, while the others lingered around and found projects to cooperate around. And this made him feel that this system of trying to find a balance and community is better. And then he transformed from traditional farmer to regenerative farmer. And then this connection with the living life and the planet and the Earth, and this led to many other cultural and sociological advances. So, whenever you try to resist the logic of being alone, fighting for yourself, dominating women, the nature and other races and so on, that it comes so close to today’s economy, you see that it’s not only about economy, it’s so many other changes in society that we need to do. And you have been working with this, logic of flower of transformation. I think this is a very nice image. And I would like you to explain the different petals and the flower of transformation, because I think it creates a really nice image of how we can have an alternative development. 

Ashish Kothari:
Sure, I think maybe before I do the flower, it might be useful to give 1 or 2 other examples, because the one I’ve given of the Dalit women farmers are a particular context. It’s about farming. It’s a traditional occupation. But let’s take a look at maybe an urban example where in a city. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Sure, I love these kinds of examples. 

Ashish Kothari: I also do, I mean storytelling, one can go on for hours, but just to give you quickly 1 or 2 examples. So, I think if you look at urban because, you know, cities are obviously a huge challenge; they are extremely unsustainable. Wherever they are in the world, they end up exploiting the rural, the countryside. Internally they have huge issues of inequality, the rights that people should have to the city services, 40-50% of the poor population doesn’t have that in many cities, in India certainly. So anyway, there are there are lots of issues with cities also. And here too, we have examples in many parts of the world where people are trying to do multiple things. I mean, work in solidarity to help each other with things like housing, with access to adequate water and energy, with, managing waste in a much more sensible, responsible way, with claiming the rights to decision making where they are. So, they’re saying, why should our settlement or our urban neighbourhood be planned by somebody sitting far away? And we budgeted for by somebody sitting far away? We should be at the core of planning and budgeting wherever we are building in a city. And there are lots of examples of that and also examples that are very common, you know, including in Europe for instance, and the fight to recombine private parking spaces as an example to make them urban gardens, which 20 or 30 or 50 families around that can actually cultivate together or have their own plots and share seeds and share food and, you know, build up social relations around the act of, gardening, farming, so, recombining of spaces. So many different things, trying to create spaces which are, climate wise much more sensible and climate friendly. So, I think if you look at that, in fact, last year I was also in, you know, talking about solidarity and, cooperation. I was in Germany for a month and I visited 3 or 4, communes. And it was fascinating to see how in this extremely capitalist, extremely individualistic, extremely selfish society which modern industrialism has driven people to, there were more and more. There were 200 communes. I heard, where people are trying to live together, share resources, share a kitchen, Share bagels. share things like, childcare. So, if a parents have to actually go and work somewhere, there are other people in the community who are taking care of them. They don’t have to hire a babysitter or whatever. And all of them actually, saying how much happier their lives are as a result of this kind of, sharing, this kind of cooperation, this kind of solidarity. We also did some fantastic, very, very interesting case studies in the Covid pandemic. In India, we have about 70 stories from other parts of the world, about 25-30, which showed that where people had these systems of cooperation or could rebuild them quickly, where they had collective access to the most important resources that their lives depended on, where they had more localized exchanges, not long-distance ones, where they had a more distributed leadership, not like one person who was, you know, taking the, you know, taking all the decisions. They were able to cope, not just cope but thrive through the Covid pandemic period, much more or much better than a lot of others where things just collapsed very badly. And so, what this leads me to is, yes, this flower of transformation which is based on lots and lots of these examples that we’ve been looking at. So basically, what we say is that if you think of a flower with five petals which are overlapping with each other, petal number one politics, petal number two, economics, petal number three, society or social relations. Petal number four culture and knowledge. And petal number five environment and ecology. Bit of an artificial distinction, but just one way of trying to understand, what’s happening. Sorts of transformations taking place on the ground. And you’ll begin to see that, in each of these, there is a challenge to the dominant system of exploitation, inequality, injustice, etc., and an attempt to either bring back old systems, if still relevant, or create new ones quickly in a half a minute each the Politics Petal is about saying that democracy is not about elections as much as it is about us claiming power where we are in our own collectives, our village, our urban neighbourhood, our school or NGO, whatever collectives we’re in that we are the power holders. ‘There’s a village in Central India which gave the slogan 30 years back we elect government in New Delhi. In our village, we are the government. Nobody takes decisions for us except our own village assembly, and we build the capacity of everybody in the village assembly, including women who have been traditionally marginalised to be equal parts of that decision making process. 

Carl Schlyter: 
As the city of Bhuj. 

Ashish Kothari:
No, no, this is a village called Mandalika in central India. And then learning from that, many more have also joined them as a federation of 90 villages that has got together with a similar kind objective. And so, the first example you gave us is the urban example that I was mentioning where several settlements in the city of Bhuj, have asserted their rights to urban planning and budgeting and doing as much as they can for themselves, create much more dignified housing, including in the most in the poorest parts of the town. But anyway, so that’s politics, really, about claiming power where we are and making the state insofar as a state still exists, making it accountable for the things that it should be doing for us.

Some movements have gone beyond that and actually, said that we don’t even need a centralised state if we’re able to create more and more political self-reliance of this kind and confederate over larger areas. we don’t actually need a central state. This is what the Zapatista movement in Mexico is saying. This is what the Kurdish, freedom movement is saying in Rojava. Yeah, Rojava is one part of that. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Quadri Junction. Many indigenous peoples have been arguing for self-determination and self-governance. So really so that’s the political battle. The second one is economic. This is not in any order of priority; I’m just giving you randomly. So, the second one is economic, where, like I said, during the Covid pandemic, those who did well, were the ones who had collective control over the productive resources that could be land, it could be forest, it could be machinery, it could be tools, it could be knowledge. Anything that is useful as a means of production, collective control over that rather than somebody else controlling it. but also, it’s an economy of getting and sharing. If I have seeds, they’re not just mine, they belong to the community. And if anybody needs those seeds or that knowledge or that water or the machinery or the tools, I will share it with them, right. So, you actually create an economy which is much more about exchanges, about caring, about empathy, and not just about making money. And that’s an economy where also the, invisible eye is the role of, marginalized peoples, like women, very, very invisible. The huge role that women play as people who are holding up the house, for instance, is also recognised, and recognising that men then also say, oh, well, we should also then be doing housework. Why should only the women be? 

Carl Schlyter: 
I think here is an interesting aspect. In some studies, when you reduce working time, men’s share of household work increases and the time the true free time without household work or paid work increases more for women than for men when you reduce working time. So, I think this is an interesting thing in reaching equality too.

Ashish Kothari:
Absolutely. And then one goes beyond that. And okay. So let me give you another way, a quick example. So, we have in western India, the traditional occupation of handloom weaving craft which is actually fairly common across India but has seriously declined because of mass industrial production. That has come back because of certain innovations, the use of an organic cotton, producing some products that, sell well in the market, etc. Now, leaving aside, a little bit of contradiction of the fact that it’s based on still selling in the external market. Leaving that aside for a minute, what has happened here is that many young people have come back to handloom weaving; they have gone off to work in industries that have gone up to work, even all the way to the Middle East, work and have come back, many of them. And their articulation, I just quote one person, a boy called Prakash was weaving carpets, learning from his father, and he says, I asked him, why don’t you go into computers or I.T. or something like that. You’re educated. You can easily do it, he said. Yeah, but you know, when you are sitting on a computer, he was telling me, because I was working on my laptop, when you’re sitting on a computer, you have the same stance that I do. You’re using your mind and you’re using my hands. I do the same thing, but I’m also using my heart. I said, what? What does that mean? He said, if I don’t put my love into this product, you won’t buy it. As a consumer. Plus, you come and talk to me for two hours doing your research. I can take those two hours off. If I was sitting in an industry with a boss over my head, I would not be able to take the time off. I am sitting at home. I can have a chai break whenever I want with my family. I am being creative. I am producing my own things. I am sustaining the heritage of my own. community, the crafts heritage of my community. But I am also innovating. Learning new things, new techniques, new products, you know? So, it’s a very interesting narrative that is about dissolving the binary between work and leisure. That is also something that, you know, this whole phenomenon of weekdays and weekends of work and vacation is a very relatively, very new concept in human history. And it’s only when we start questioning that and say, look, if work was actually truly creative, enjoyable, productive, you wouldn’t have this. You could do whatever you wanted, whatever point in time. In a sense, that’s what Marx also said when he said, I can be a critic in the morning and a farmer in the afternoon. I don’t remember the exact quote. This what Gandhi said, all along, that this is what we need to do. 

Carl Schlyter: 
We also talked about this in this podcast with Guy Standing on basic income that only a third of the population in the world find their work meaningful.

Ashish Kothari:
Absolutely. I call those deadlihoods, by the way, from livelihoods removed to deadlihoods. and I think, it was David Graeber, the late anthropologist who call them bullshit jobs.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, exactly.

Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, the only slight quibble I have with that is I think bullshit is actually very useful product. But anyway, unfortunately, I never conversed with him. I would have told him and he probably would have agreed. But yeah., so that’s an aside. 

Carl Schlyter: 
That’s actually touching my life there because my professor at the university went to India to do very efficient, easy to copy ovens that used bullshit as fuel rather than deforestation. So, saving 90% of the energy use and the bullshit was actually the raw material for those ovens.

Ashish Kothari:
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. It’s been an energy source for thousands of years here. And much of fertilising the soil on all kinds of things. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I think it’s interesting the examples you give and, and what you talk about is actually true freedom compared to the traditional capitalist Western logic of freedom. So, if you have this wellbeing economy, if you have this change that you talk about, how would that promote freedom in its true sense? 

Ashish Kothari: 
So, I think, yeah, I mean, the capitalist system has been extremely good at trying to convince us that freedom is about being able to go to a supermarket and choose from 30 different brands of soap, or the sort of liberal democratic, conventional political system has convinced us that freedom is about choosing one political party, another political party, if you don’t like current one, right. So, the very narrow concepts of freedom, or even worse than that, of course. Well, the United States, if the country doesn’t give us cheap petrol, we can go and bomb it, that’s our notion of freedom. so, as opposed to all of that, what freedom, Azadi, one of the terms that’s probably used all across from Central Asia all the way to South Asia is really about. Yes, as an individual or a collective or a community or a country, we assert our identity. We assert that we will be making the choices that we want to make. We assert that our needs and aspirations, we will do what we can to meet those needs and aspirations. But not at the cost of anybody else’s freedom. And so, Swaraj, the meaning which Gandhi brought back. It’s an old Indian term, but Gandhi bought it back during the independence struggle. He was very careful to say Swaraj is not about self-rule. It’s not about independence of India from British colonial rule, only it is much deeper. It is about the right to be self-determined and autonomous and free, but with responsibility towards others freedoms, which means there’s rights and responsibilities, there’s freedoms and constraints. He was saying that the rights have to go hand in hand with duties and responsibilities. Otherwise, it’s an incomplete concept and you cannot be free. If what you’re doing is making somebody else unfree. You cannot even be free. If you know that there is somebody else unfree and you’re not doing anything about it. So, for us, to have freedom means nothing unless we can stand up in solidarity with, you know, people in Gaza who are being bombed out of existence right now.

So that is indeed a much deeper sense of freedom or Azadi or self-determination or autonomy or self-governance, self-rule or democracy. 

Carl Schlyter: 
And again, it’s based on participation and not exclusion. Like if you have freedom based on capacity to buy something in monetary terms, it’s not true freedom because some people might not have the capacity to partake of those freedoms offered because they’re based on a mean they don’t have. So, it’s a more universal freedom based on solidarity.

Ashish Kothari:
Not just that, absolutely. What you’re saying. Absolutely. But not just that. It’s also that is it really a choice that I have 30 brands of soap to go and buy from, and maybe some others don’t have it. That’s one part of it. But I’m saying, even just for myself, do I actually have the choice of making my own soap if I want to? Do I have the choice of going to a local neighbour or the next village or town where there are traditional handmade soap makers who are struggling because there’s mass production of soaps, which are much cheaper. So, freedom goes well beyond even just a choice I might have in a modern, consumerist society. It is also about being able to do things myself. I remember many years back I was in the US and I went to one of these fairs, festivals in Maine where there was a big slogan saying the future is handmade. People want the freedom to be able to make their own things. That’s coming back. Even in industrial societies, people are actually and societies in India are moving towards mechanization. And you folks are actually wanting to come back to making things with their hand. What that carpet maker, boy said, you know, the freedom to actually do things with my own hands, my heart, my head, but also take off when I want to have joy when I want to. All of that actually gets encompassed in the notion of freedom or of Azadi.

But anyway, the third sphere, the third petal is social justice. And this is very important because you could in theory, you could have and in practice you could have political radical political democracy of the kind I describe. You could have radical economic democracy of the kind I described, where local people have control of the land, of productive resources, etc. but you could still have serious social injustices and in a country like India, this is still very serious because we’re talking about thousands of years of gender injustice, of casteism, and others like ableism, like people with disabilities are often marginalised. So, the struggles for social justice and equality and, doing away with discriminations of various kinds, old or new, that’s the third petal of this flower of transformation. So, when those Dalit women farmers were struggling to not just create food security and sovereignty, but also, against their status

as Dalits and women, they were adding the third sphere of transformation also. 

Carl Schlyter: 
What kind of tools and tactics can we use to increase the strength of social web? What have you seen has been successful here?

Ashish Kothari:
Well, I think it’s a combination of enabling the agency of the most, marginalised peoples to be expressed, which can happen by themselves organising or being enabled to organise with the help of people from outside. Sometimes they don’t have their own, strengths to do it because of hundreds of years of, exploitation. it could also be with the help of, government policies, policies of, what we call reservation here, where certain occupations or seats in, university school are reserved for those who have been historically marginalized. Then larger circles of solidarity. This is very important because when marginalized people speak up or when they fight back, there is going to be obviously, those in power are going to take back, it could be men in families where women are asserting their voices. It could be the so-called upper castes. Who don’t want the marginalized caste to? Whoever is and has been in control of power for a long time now. It could be the government, could be corporations. So, you need those larger circles of solidarity also to make this kind of social justice and those formations possible. So that’s the third sphere. The fourth one is about culture and knowledge. And again, going back to the same examples, whether the Dalit women farmers or, the urban transformations or any of them, or the Central Indian villages arguing for local democracy, they are saying that they are asserting that their own cultural identity, their language, their food cuisines, their ways of relating to the rest of nature and each other, etc., and their knowledge systems, which are not necessarily the same as modern science and technology, but could be very different that they are all worthy of respect and that they will build their transformations on them, but they may not necessarily stick only to them. They’re also open to saying, okay, maybe we use some aspects of modern science and technology, or we also learn English or India or whatever, so we can relate with equality to the outside world, but we will also assert our own language and our own cultures. that is also very much. And there again, many, many movements of this kind, for instance, the reassertion of, tribal languages, indigenous languages in many parts of the world or the fights for slow traditional local food or cuisines, you know. And some of them are beginning to also get policy recognition. Just recently, for instance, in one of the southern Indian states, a new commission for, indigenous or tribal languages has been set up to try and enable those modern writing. There’re 2000-3000 languages, which can then also become, formally recognised so that they don’t die out. so that’s the whole sphere. And in that culture and knowledge also to fight against privatisation, against intellectual property rights, against the theft of knowledge by corporations or governments or others, and to say that, no, these must remain in the commons or must be brought back into the commons. Knowledge commons, cultural commons, copyleft instead of copyright, open-source technologies and things like that. So that’s the fourth battle of transformation. 

Carl Schlyter: 
The traditional capitalist logic here is that you will have no development if you don’t have the copyrights. What he has to say against that?

Ashish Kothari:
Well, I mean, you know, if you look at most of human history, except for the last couple of hundred years, we didn’t have intellectual property rights. Okey, some very small elements of traditional medicinal knowledge were held by, faith healers or traditional medicine men, mostly men, but those are very small elements. Most knowledge was otherwise in the open in the Commons. And we’ve had I mean; can anybody tell us who invented the wheel? Would any of the so-called modern progressive happen without the wheel? Nobody claimed the copyright on it. It was invented one of the most incredible inventions in human history. and you can think of hundreds of thousands of things like that. Most human innovation has actually happened in the Commons, not private. We tend to only look at the last 100 years of innovation because that mostly also became industrial technical innovations. 

Carl Schlyter: 
And we also tend to look at only the last chain in innovation. For example, nine out of ten fundamentally new medicines are actually innovated with public money and universities, and they’re only then further developed into a drug by the industry. And then they have the 100% of the copyright. So, we can also see here that, they get the false claim to the innovation. It’s done by public money in universities, but then they claim the whole protection from the current system.

Ashish Kothari: 
Absolutely. And also, I think there was a study more than 20 years back which showed that, I think 85% of modern medicine is based on traditional medical systems, right? Especially traditional knowledge of plants and how those have been used in traditional systems. So, without those hundreds of years of, innovations and trial and error and all that communities have been doing, so much of even modern medicine would simply not have been there or would have had to spend huge amounts of more money to actually get where they have gone. 

Carl Schlyter:  
And if we destroy the ecosystems they are based on, we are lost forever.

Ashish Kothari:
Yeah. So, nature of course, is never in the picture in the intellectual property rights, of course, nature is also being privatised or the contributions of nature are never nice in in that old system or even what somebody like Einstein said that if I’m looking further, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. We have the humility to say that. Right. Anyway, so that’s the fourth battle and then the fifth battle, which some people say should not be a fifth battle, but should be at the foundation of all of this is ecological wisdom, working within the earth, being part of nature, respecting the rest of life, just as we want human rights, the rights of the rest of nature. and looking at, trying to understand what are the ecological limits within which we should be restricting human activity, economic and other human activity, and respecting, we know that we’ve already crossed most of the planetary limits, according to the latest scientific assessments. So, all that evidence is already with us, which is a result of our first few minutes of conversation about our alienation and domination has enabled us to do this. So, that’s the fifth sphere. Now, if you think of the intersections, any of the examples I gave you, like going back to those Dalit women farming, you see that they are trying to work transformations along all of these five spheres. It’s not like they’re stuck in only one. But this is a problem with a lot of civil society and of course, with a lot of government, because they’re stuck in departments, they’re stuck in their silos. We, I should say, not they we are stuck in our silos. Academic disciplines, government departments, etc. are stuck saying, well, I’m working on agriculture and I have nothing to do with health or water or land. I’m working on, I don’t know, physics and I have nothing to do with anything else, as if the interconnections don’t exist. And this is partly also a result of, a certain form of, Western, modern industrial, knowledge systems and, modern governance systems, so apparently also called democratic governance systems. So, the intersections, are really very important to work on and to take further. And then at the core of this flower of transformation, this is where the intersections also become very interesting. You know, we spoke about solidarity and, cooperation, right? At the core of this flower of transformation is ethics and principles. And why this is important is because people often ask me, they say, okay, how do we replicate what those Dalit women farmers did? Or how do we upscale it? And my response has always been no, neither replication nor upscaling, because replication assumes that your situation is the same as theirs, it’s not. Your soil conditions might be different. Your social and cultural relations may be different. And neither is upscaling, because it’s not like those Dalit women farmers want their organisation called the Deccan Development Society, to become bigger and bigger and bigger and become some big or multinational corporation. But what is important is out scaling, which means we learn the principles of cooperation, of working with the earth, of respecting seeds and earth as spiritual entities, of sharing knowledge, of being available for those who really need them, of claiming self-reliance, of claiming autonomy. Those basic principles and values are at the core of that flower of transformation. And those principles. If we can learn from each other and then apply them in our own context with whatever modifications are necessary, and then connect up. So, these 5000 farmers here, another thousand somewhere else, another 10,000 somewhere else in India. And then across the world, you connect up to create the scale. So that’s why I call it out scaling. and to create the critical mass and then push further and further for policy shifts or other macro shifts that are necessary. 

Carl Schlyter: 
I think this comes very close to the Zapatista idea about, multiverse and pluriverse and that every solution doesn’t need to be the same everywhere. And you have been working a lot with these issues, so if you would advise government and for example, Europe to promote the Dalit logic and principles and experience, what could they do to assist people in taking more control and reverting power back to communities? What kind of policy issues could help facilitate this development?

Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, I did a paper last year, actually, for GIZ, me and a German agency, on how international assistance, should be transformed with all of these perspectives in mind.

And there are 2 or 3 things that I, put forward, one for countries in Europe like Germany, to look at its own footprint, across the world. So, to be able to transform its own production and trade and consumption patterns in a way that is not impinging on or taking away an ecological space of other parts of the world, which clearly it is right now. So that’s also part of the, let’s say, the degrowth movement in in Europe, itself. The second is to say that insofar as it’s continuous, you know, how it packages for other countries, so-called developing countries, that they should be examined from this holistic perspective.

Suppose you’re giving support for agricultural progress in countries in Africa and Asia.

What are the implications for the land? What are the implications for the cultural aspects?

What are the implications for inequality within the community, etc., etc. Unless you look at it more holistically, using something like the narrative transformation, you will not actually know whether you’re overall benefiting that society or not. and that is again, rarely done.

And part of that is also saying, okay, if you really want to do it, have long term support, you don’t do not these 3 or 5-year cycles don’t mean anything. All the examples I’m talking about, including Dalit farmers, is at least 10-15 years of transformation before something actually settles in, before the institutions, local institutions that can take it forward are established.

These 3- or 5-years cycles are very problematic. And the third thing I said was to decolonize yourselves. All those who have colonised the world are also self-colonisers. You know, there’s the certain view of what is development. Okay. We are now very well developed; we will come and help the rest of the world in a way that is a self-colonisation. And that’s also restricting yourselves as individuals and societies to be enjoying life in a much fuller way, where you then realize that, okay, for instance, the spiritual relationship that the Dalit women farmers have with the earth. Oh, wow. That’s a perspective I never thought of. And maybe if I treat the earth under my feet in Germany or Europe in the same way, I might actually be happier. So, lots of decolonisation that needs to be done in the relations between the Global North and the South. And I would quote Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher, thinker, writer who spent most of his life in Mexico, I think, who once told a university in the US who invited him for a lecture because the university students were going to go to, Latin America for helping the local people to develop. He said, look, if you are going to help them or assist them, please don’t just stay here. He was very rude, okay. Very, very straight. He said, if you are going with an open mind to learn from them and also teach impart what you know to them as equals, then you are most welcome. But do not go there with this very patronising view that I am developed. I have something to offer to others, and I’m going to give it. So that would be also my response to anybody in Europe who wants to improve the situation. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Well, this is exactly experiences we have from, Canada and Netherlands regarding municipal foreign policy and municipal development assistance and cooperation, because you are more equal if you meet your local counterparts somewhere in the world, it’s per definition, a more equal relationship. And that is also, I think, assisting like local-to-local cooperation. Another thing you have been talking about is the word radical that I think is a nice touch. People have forgotten that it means roots. It goes back to the roots of things. I think part of when you explain what changes we can do is like, don’t be affected by the colonial logic, neither as a European or an Indian or wherever you live, but go back to be radical and feel what is right.

Ashish Kothari: 
Yeah. 

Carl Schlyter:
And I think this, perspective where radical is transformed into something more basic, I think is an interesting concept that you mentioned. 

Ashish Kothari:
Well, you know, one of my favourite pastimes is to look at the original meanings of words because, the words we use, the meanings that we use today are actually very often very distorted from their original meanings. Radical is one, because in India we tend to think of radicalisation as being people killing each other, which is completely the opposite of what it actually means, going to one’s ecological roots, one’s cultural roots, one’s roots as a human being, let’s say on roots as life, but also many other terms. Democracy I just mentioned, democracy has gotten restricted to mean elections and political parties, whereas the original meaning is power of the people. And we tend to forget that. Or school, you know, we spoke just briefly about the education system. The word school comes from scholē in Greece, which meant learning with leisure. Now it was often restricted to a certain leisure class. But the point was that you are learning I mean, 95% of India’s schools are prisons. Nothing to do with leisure, nothing to do with creativity, right? 

Carl Schlyter:
Well, and also India has a sad history there where this education system was outright and purpose of colonialism from the beginning.

Ashish Kothari:
So called Lord Macaulay and he was very explicit about it. He said, if a Great Britain wants to continue ruling India, it will not be through the army, it will be through brainwashing the Indian population. And that’s still happening unfortunately, despite us being independent. So yeah, I think, going back to the original meanings of words, and reviving them and bringing back those original meanings, not just as language, but also on the ground is also very crucial part of transformation. 

Carl Schlyter:  
I think a lot of what you say is linked to participation rather than being a spectator, both in regards to democracy and culture and social development and nature, like participation and integration into these processes, rather than just going to vote every four years, just letting the power lose for the great corporations, or just going to a spectacle rather than actually being part of a cultural development. I think this relation between spectator and participator is an interesting difference. How could you promote and help people of being participants rather than just spectators?

Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, I think, that’s a huge challenge because the system actually makes us, I think what Pink Floyd once called Comfortably Numb. So as long as you can go down and get your food or you can get water in your taps and you get electricity at the flick of a switch and so on and so forth. You think that you’re okay. And the government is providing, and this is especially the case, for instance, with people in, supposedly good welfare societies, like many of the European countries. So, you tend to kind of switch yourself off from problems that others might be facing, or even you yourself might be facing in terms of your own psychological or cultural of things. and to sort of snap people out of that and say that, look, you could actually be happier and healthier and whatever, but also you can contribute to other people’s happiness and health if you just make these changes in your lives. And I think this is why something like, say, the German communes are very important to actually point to say that how people are actually living more healthier and happier lives, how their well-being is increased simply by making the shift somehow communal living, shared living kind of thing.

Now. So, you can start out very small. It can be that in your own urban neighbourhood, start taking part in the neighbourhood assemblies, or in whatever local institutions exist, or go to the school where your children are and see if you can help a little bit in improving the quality of education or improving the facilities in that school, or even for your own health’s sake, even from a somewhat selfish point of view. See if you can make a little bit of a difference in how the garbage in your localities is looked at, or how the pollution in your city is to be tackled. Right? So, I think starting small because people are a little scared and worried about doing very big things, starting small, and creating that sense that you could be more involved in decisions that affect your own lives. That’s how I mean, so many initiatives would start, and then you can get bigger and you’d need some more ambitions or be larger in terms of participation. But there’s I think, 3 or 4 crucial elements to this. For me, there’s four crucial elements of functioning good democracy, like what we would here in India called Swaraj or central radical democracy. One is, people need to have the rights to participate. And to me that needs to be either legally or in some other customary way, a right that can be enforced in all decisions that affect my life. I may or I may not take part, but I should have that right.

Second, the capacities. Now here in India, for instance, this positive, I mean, the reservation we have for women in decision making units at the village level, 50% or 30% is there. So, women will go and sit. But for hundreds of years, they have been told to keep quiet, so, they’re not going to go and actually, say anything. So, building that, empowering that capacity to actually speak up and be equal in making your voice heard. The third thing is accessibility to forums of decision making. We have examples where, you know, a so-called development project is to come up and by law, the government is supposed to do a public hearing, but they’ll do it 50km away where nobody can travel. Or you might have, an assembly process where, you know, there are, strong men standing outside and, the marginalised people try and go in their kind of, you know, so accessible forums of decision making are the third crucial element. And the fourth one, which is the most important, but the most difficult is the majority to take decisions that are responsible to everybody, not just one.

Carl Schlyter:
Yeah. 

Ashish Kothari:
Right, so therefore not a majoritarianism kind of thing. More consensus building based on capacities, decentralised capacities, more distributed leadership, and responsible not just to other human beings, but to the rest of nature. So that majority that wisdom of decision making is obviously very, very crucial. All of this comes in when you talk about meaningful participation. 

Carl Schlyter:
I have also encountered examples in India about sociocracy, is that something you would like to develop?

Ashish Kothari:
So, I think sociocracy, I mean, I haven’t really studied to much myself, but I think a lot of the examples I can think of already have elements of that. I mean, Swaraj is one of the words that we use in India. So sociocracy is a new word that’s probably coming from the West, I’m not sure, but Swaraj when Gandhi was speaking about it, the meaning was precisely that, that I am free, my communities free. we have autonomy, we have self-determination, but we also are responsible towards others, which means we are also listening to others just as much. Important to talk is as important to listen, and build into that was also nonviolence, which is not just about hitting each other, but also, the language one uses, how we behave with others. And I would again extend that to other species. So, nonviolence or peace is a very crucial part of it. So, in different ways, many of these, radical democracy initiatives kind of express what otherwise could be called sociocracy, and sociocracy has a few other elements that are specific to specific contexts. But again, I would say it’s a pluriverse. Let’s not use any one model. There are multiple different models with the commonalities of the values and principles like I was talking about; equality, solidarity etc.

Carl Schlyter:
Well, thank you so much and I will try to be less colonialist and maybe use the word Swaraj next when I about this, but thank you so much. And I think this end where we began, actually, because you’re a focus on pluriverse and the multiverse is a bit copying the logic of nature and biodiversity, how things are interlinked and not one thing dominates everywhere, because then you have a monoculture and you have problems. So, I think learning again where we started this episode, learning from nature in order to solve our problems. So, I thank you so much for this talk today.

Ashish Kothari:
Thank you. It was a stimulating discussion. Thanks a lot.