Vandana Shiva lecture

By Amanda Holmes

I spent two and a half months last summer in Northern India. While I was there, I worked on an organic farm in the northwest for a few weeks and spent the rest of my time backpacking in the rural areas of the northeast in the Himalayas.

Because I was there in the summer, I was there for the beginning of the monsoon season. The monsoons are so important to the Indian people. They cool down the deserts of the west and bring fertility to the plains of the Ganges River in the east. Throughout the month of June there was a real sense of anticipation for the monsoon. Unlike here in Chicago, everyone I met there looked forward to the rains. They were not an inconvenience and no one complained of a “gloomy day” when it rained. Instead, there was celebration of this annual event.

It began to rain in mid-July, but as the monsoon season went on it was clear it was not raining enough. Because of climate change and climate instability, parts of India have as high as a 64% rainfall deficit this year. The effects of this are devastating. Many parts of India are running out of water but not all of this is solely due to this year’s insufficient monsoon.

In the past 50 years or so, agriculture in India has gone from a system that entailed local production of food to using chemical fertilizers, genetically modified seeds and methods that demand intensive irrigation. The new intensive irrigation methods required massive amounts of water and have led to the depletion of the ground water throughout rural India.

Vandana Shiva is an environmental activist who deals with issues like this. She will be speaking just 20 minutes away from SXU at the University of St. Francis next Tuesday, October 27. I’m totally going.

My explanation of this problem is really just the tip of a whole slue of issues facing the agrarian community of India that have resulted from The Green Revolution in India. Here’s a story I heard recently on NPR about the effects of the Green Revolution.

Amanda Holmes is a senior philosophy major from Atlanta, GA. She is vice president of the Philosophy Club. Consideration for the student bloggers is provided by Saint Xavier University.