FINISH EDITING/WRITING!

(RE:  The Andean project) ...  

Sahtouris: We must ... shift to organic agriculture. There is so much unemployment in the world that it's very feasible. It can now be done with computers on the farms, with culture coming in, and with farm sitters, as in Denmark that permit the farmer to go to the city for a while. There are many ways to do it. Indigenous cultures show us that it can be done much more simply, much more efficiently.  You've got John Jevins here in California doing his biointensive agriculture. He is already up to 4 to 7 times the production of large-scale agriculture. In the recreation of pre-Inca agriculture in the altiplano of Bolivia and Peru , the production went from two and a half tons per hectare to forty tons per hectare in five years, and it is an agriculture that requires very little work. It's possible to do really healthy agriculture that's more productive than green revolution agriculture, and far, far more energy efficient and far, far less destructive.

So that is a place, agriculture, where our technology has been used totally inappropriately and purely for the sake of profits for a handful of people. It's inhuman to perpetrate that kind of agriculture in the face of the starvation it brings.

On the other hand, our communications technology is vital, so that we can connect self-sufficient living communities with each other into a global web. So I think this is where we integrate native techniques and modern technology — that we have the have the communications system to share the way we work at the local level in the bioregions working in healthy, organic community.

London : Journalists often talk about positive changes like recycling, solar energy, or organic farming as if these are passing fads, the whims of a small minority of people at the fringes of our culture.

Sahtouris: There is nothing more fundamental than food and air and water. If people are demonstrating that food can be produced not only more efficiently, more healthfully, less destructively, but also cheaper, in organic ways, that is only going to be labeled a "fad" by those whose interests it opposes. It will never be labeled a fad by those who get to eat the food produced in that way.

It's the same as writing the idea of Gaia off as "just" a metaphor, when all science is based on metaphor. Food production is done either in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. We know now that there are huge interests at stake in producing food in unhealthy ways. Our television sets now tell us that one third of the chickens in Los Angeles are contaminated and yet people continue to walk away from the television set and buy them. They don't realize that the supermarket food which is often so contaminated, is often much more expensive to produce than organic food. But it's subsidized by the government. Again, we are not taking on the responsibility of democracy. We are not saying, Why is the government subsidizing the production of unhealthy food when it could be subsidizing organic farmers and keeping us healthy? Why can't Clinton change the health system? What is going on in Washington ?

London : In closing, tell me something about what you are working on at the moment.

Sahtouris: I'm trying to help the five indigenous groups I work within the Andes to develop a cultural center that will revive and promote Andean culture with its wonderful agriculture — the most intensive and productive experiments in history were done in the Andes, and over half the food eaten in the world today traces back to the Andes. Their music is very healthy and alive and good for people. Their natural-dyed weavings and arts, the wisdom of their elders, their language, these are all things we are trying to preserve. I think that the world at large would benefit very much from learning about them. The Incas social organization was a kind of paternalistic welfare state that guaranteed food and housing and jobs and didn't overwork people. There are some positive things we can learn from that.

So I'm trying to help to promote this ancient culture to the world at large as well as preserve and protect it for its own descendants in the Andes . I think the Andes are a very important place in the world, spiritually and physically. Many Tibetan lamas are coming there saying that there is a shift in energy from the Himalayas to the Andes . We hope that is true and that great lessons can be learned from that source.

I'm also working on some music festivals to try to connect Andean music with other parts of the world. I'm beginning to work on the Internet. I'm interested in cyberfests and ways of having people exchange information, music, and other aspects of culture around the globe as rapidly as possible toward transformation. The Internet itself is a giant self-organizing living system that is a bit chaotic at present but has the potential for being the first real democracy in the world, for example. So those are a few of my interests. I keep writing and traveling and working in those areas.

London : It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

Sahtouris: Thanks, Scott.

===  The first part of the original interview:  

London : How do you keep your spirits up considering the enormous ecological, social, and political problems that confront us today?

Sahtouris: I try to remain optimistic in the face of terrible statistics. The ozone hole is growing by leaps and bounds. Some say that by the year 2012 there won't be any ozone at the current rate of destruction — without adding to the current problem. And we all know about the polluted oceans and the dying forests and the poisoned rivers and air and soil and so forth, the increase in desert land when we really need more agricultural land. These are all terrible statistics, but what do we do about them?

There is no time in the future at which we have to turn things around. Things are already turning around in the sense that a lot of alternative ways of living have been developed around the world, whether people are creating their own money systems, or developing communal agriculture, or organic agriculture, alternative education systems. These are all the new forms of the future.

I like to use the metaphor of the butterfly. In metamorphosis, within the body of the caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the caterpillar. They aren't recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar's immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn't until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the body of the butterfly.

I think that is a beautiful metaphor for what is happening in our times. The old body is going into meltdown while the new one develops. It isn't that you end one thing and then start another. So everybody engaged in recycling, in alternative projects, in communal living, in developing healthier systems for themselves and each other is engaged in building the new world while the old one collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. There is no way around that.

(This last part about the caterpillar/butterfly/imaginal cells metaphor opened the original interview.)