Global History- Erika Beltran Pino- Essay 2

In this paper I will examine Vandana Shiva’s ecofeminist thought. Shiva says that growth is the only way to eradicate poverty. She proposes that the earth is alive and it’s divine, that we all have a connection between everybody; we should respect everything that is alive because it’s part of us. If we want to change the world and create real development. We should chance the way we think. Shiva says that women are very important in the societies. Because we are closer to the development based on the communities. Women are the traditional knowledge´s guardians, including recipes and the access to the seeds. The man´s politic and economic models are focused on producing for exporting and the development for explode the nature, without taking care of the development for the people that live in that system, or the nature that in this system is called resources. In this model for being a citizen you have to be producer, owner and consumer, if not you are not considered as human, so you don’t deserve to be alive. This system tells us that we can change the government, we can change the laws, but we are never going to be able to chance the system. (this is not true, is not the only way for development, this is an illusion) We live in a world full of messages, that try to makes buy, we buy things to live, to establish relationships between us, even for dying we buy things. For getting in to the market (which is fundamental part of this system) we have to have, money for covering the basic needing we may have, ignoring how this things have being built. In this societies we are slaves of the fetish. This things that we buy make us live in a charming world, all this things are fetish, because they give us pleasure, while they hide the relationships in their production (exploited nature, kids, poverty). This way the products seem to have real live, like nobody was work on them. We live in this world where we buy things for instinct, we develop our lives around the things, wishing to buy them, use them and throw them away. Living and working for the products, that’s how men´s live turns in to a product too. We think that money can buy everything that’s in the world, like if the money would have special properties. But wait… we can’t eat money, we can´t get dressed with money or can we?. Money is an abstraction of richness. In this system they talk about freedom, but it´s only for the products or the money, because the humans; we aren´t free to go every country we want. The market is the only thing that has to be free, it’s a god that has power over himself. Democracy is just an illusion, because as the society, we are supposed to elect between the people someone assigned as the representative, to make our voices to be heard, but have we ever being consulted about the main decisions of our country? The politics? The economics? I don’t think so. For Shiva the mix between feminism and ecology is the ideal way for building a faire society that will last among the time. Both are considered the "other", the not passive. The activity, productivity and creativity that are associated with the feminine principle, have been expropriated as qualities of nature and women and transformed into unique qualities of man. (...). From creating and sustaining life, nature and women are reduced to "resources" in bad development model, fragmented and contrary to life (Shiva, 1995, 35) I agree whit her vision of the world, I think that there are many things we should chance, beginning by the system. I don’t think we should get to be communist either. I think we should chance the way we see the world, chance the meaning of richness for us. And then we are going to be able to propose a different economic and politic models for development. For women and men, being inclusive and with real democracy