STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

One of the surest ways to topple a civilization is to undermine the dirt underneath it, says Dr. Vandana Shiva.

“Soil is the basis of our life. It’ll take care of us if we take care of it,” Shiva told a full house at the Sun Valley Opera House Saturday night. “When we don’t take care of our soil, we are separating ourselves form the basis of our life. Every civilization that has disappeared did because it ignored the health and well-being of its soil.”

Shiva, an Indian physicist, has been called a rock star in the battle against genetically modified seeds by political commentator Bill Moyers. She created a trust called Navdanya (Nine Seeds) to save heirloom seeds and promote organic agriculture as her answer to seeds becoming a monopoly in the hands of a few global corporations

And she has written nearly two dozen books, including “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace,” as she’s railed against such practices as monocultures.

Some of her views are considered highly controversial. But the crowd attending her lecture as part of this weekend’s Sun Valley Wellness Festival applauded her numerous times, giving her standing ovations as she took the stage and as she ended her talk.

Bill McDorman, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, said that Shiva has inspired him for more than 20 years. He added that he had been to farmer’s markets across the country and nearly every farmer had the same question: Where do you get seeds?

Commercial seeds sold in stores typically come from thousands of miles away and are not tested for local viability, he added.

“There’s magic and inspiration in the seed itself,’ he said. “A seed is amazing technology. There’s a software and hardware package in a seed. They adapt to our needs, whether climatic, cultural or culinary—that is, we like how they taste. And seeds possess spirituality. Native people’s stories and songs came out of these seeds—it’s who they are, it’s their identity.”

When we define seed as a machine to put together from the outside, we no longer have a seed, said Shiva, who believes that efforts to patent seeds or owning intellectual property rights for seeds create “seed dictatorship.”

“This is why our food is system is collapsing,” she added.

Shiva said thousands of Indian farmers committed suicide after the seeds their people had used for centuries had been destroyed, forcing them to buy high-priced commercial seed from Monsanto. A  Green Revolution series of agricultural innovations purported to produce improved varieties of crops like wheat destroyed India’s traditional way of life, she added.

Shiva started The Earth Democracy movement to give people the power to reclaim democracy in terms of sustainable biodiversity.

Villagers have declared sovereignty to conserve, saying they owe it to future generations to conserve seeds and medicinal plants, protecting them against things like patenting and genetic modification. Efforts to save locally bred seeds have since led to efforts to self-governance over food systems, water systems and biodiversity systems.

Shiva said we’re not living in the best of times, as we grapple with such problems as climate change nd the collapse of democracy.

In world of climate change, we need biodiversity, she said. But, she added, democracy has been reduced to a false system of food security being destroyed in the name of economic growth.

Food that looks cheap is actually very costly when you consider the billions of dollars in subsidies involved and the cost of nutritionally poor food to our health, Shiva said.

“We have to have a debate on taxes,” she added.

The way ahead is to deepen democracy by bringing decisions that affect people’s lives as close as possible to where those people are so they can take responsibility, she said.

“Food democracy is an important first step to reclaiming real democracy because everyone eats,” she added.

Seventy-five percent of all disease is related to the food we eat, and every disease--no matter what--is going up, she said, holding up a fistful of pages charting the incidence of diseases.

“We need to take care of us,” she said.

The same things leading to the depletion of our soil are leading to the depletion of nutrition in our food, she said. And pesticide and fertilizer use is contributing to cancer and other diseases.

Shiva noted that there are 400,000 fungi in one teaspoon of living soil. That translates to one ton per acres.

“And we call it empty?”