Panel: The Seeds of Vandana Shiva
Who really feeds the world? The film’s legendary subject and its directing team are joined by leaders in the regenerative agriculture movement to answer this all-important question. Science, philosophy, and spirituality converge as they dig deep into what it will take to protect the seed, and how you can take action in your own backyard, kitchen, and community to restore integrity to our fractured food system.
Camilla Becket
Camilla Becket grew up in South Africa and worked in the anti-apartheid movement. She began her career managing outreach and communications for independent publishers who championed the work of anti-apartheid intellectuals and artists, including Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer, and Desmond Tutu. She launched Becket Films with Jim Becket in 2005 with a mission to focus on international environmental issues, social justice, and health. Camilla has co-produced several Becket Films projects, including the award-winning Sons of Africa, and films for the Religion, Science, and Environment series about besieged water bodies around the world that feature leading environmentalists and climate change activists as well as religious and indigenous leaders.
Dr. Vandana Shiva
Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocate, and is also director of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy. She serves as an ecology advisor to several organizations including the Third World Network and the Asia Pacific People's Environment Network. In 1993 she was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” A contributing editor to People-Centered Development Forum, she has also written several books including Staying Alive: The Violence of the Green Revolution... Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge... Monocultures of the Mind... and Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, as well as over 300 papers that have been published in leading scientific and technical journals. Vandana participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s — whose main participants were women.
She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the anti-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her book Vedic Ecology that draws upon India's Vedic heritage. Shiva has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, and genetic engineering are among the fields where Vandana has contributed intellectually and through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria, with campaigns waged against genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology.
Vandana's book Staying Alive helped redefine perceptions of third world women. She's also served as an advisor to governments in India and abroad, as well as to many non-governmental organizations, including the International Forum on Globalisation, the Women's Environment and Development Organization, and the Third World Network. Internationally, Vandana serves on Prince Charles's expert group on sustainable agriculture, and is a member of President Zapatero's scientific committee in Spain. She advises governments worldwide, and is currently working with the government of Bhutan to make the country's produce output 100% organic. She is also working with the governments of Tuscany and Rome to create a hopeful and livable future for young people in these times of crisis.
photo credit: Navdanya
Jim Becket
Jim Becket grew up in Lakeville, Connecticut, a small New England town. He had two ambitions, one was to make the Olympic ski team (no, broken leg wrong year), the other to become a writer (yes). There was no role model to go into films with a country lawyer father and piano teacher mother, so a number of years were wasted on a first class education (Harvard Law School and doctorate in Switzerland - good skiing). His film school was making the movie Que Hacer in Chile during the election of Salvador Allende. Seven years with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees took him around the world filming refugee crises. And then making the big move to Hollywood, so a late start in writing and directing. But he finally found the vehicle for his passion in film, the art that combines all the arts. He lives in Ojai, California with his wife, Camilla, and fifteen year-old daughter Lydia. Lydia has epilepsy which resulted in making a number of films for parents who first receive the diagnosis that their child has this seizure disorder. In the last years he has made a number of documentaries mainly on environmental issues.
Larry Kopald
Larry Kopald has been Creative Director for brands like Nike, Acura, McDonalds and Coca Cola, and a writer and filmmaker most of his life. He is also a devoted environmentalist, serving on the boards of Greenpeace, 1% For The Planet, Oceana and others. His short films for Hollywood’s Earth Communications Office have been seen by more than a billion and a half people. In 2013, when the science began to emerge linking soil health to climate change, Larry co-founded The Carbon Underground. Since then, The Carbon Underground has helped create the global movement to restore soil health, transition us from Industrial Agriculture to Regenerative Agriculture, and draw down legacy carbon.
Today TCU works with companies and countries around the world on creating a genuine shift to practices supporting farmers and the planet. In 2020 TCU launched Adopt-A-Meter, which enables anyone to adopt and restore a meter of degraded soil for just $5. To date, funds raised have restored tens of millions of meters by supporting farmers around the world to transition, or expand, their move to becoming regenerative. Larry lives in Los Angeles and Costa Rica, where he has a regenerative farm used for research and education.
Hosted by Debbie Barker
Debbie Barker has worked for over two decades on intersections between agriculture and climate change, food and water security and safety, trade, equity, natural resources, and numerous other issues. She was a consultant for The Berry Center and other civil society groups working on food and farming, ecology, trade, and more. She was formerly the international director for the Center for Food Safety, a legal and public policy institute in Washington, D.C., and executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank on economic globalization issues. Debbie is currently the marketing and development director at Sonoma Valley Museum Art.
She’s participated in many international foras such as the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, European Parliament, Congressional briefings, and guest lectured at universities. Publications include Invisible Government; The Wheel of Life: Food, Climate, Human Rights, and the Economy; Soil 2050: Rebuilding Healthy Soils for a Secure Climate, Food, & Water Future; Trade Matters: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Impacts on Food and Farming; and she contributed to the United Nations’ International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development.