The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change

In an age of climate catastrophes and extinction, we need to turn back to nature and learn, once again, how to live sustainably on planet Earth—beginning with our relationship to food.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a hot, lifeless planet. Through the process of evolution, the Earth and its diversity of living organisms gradually reduced the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. About 200,000 years ago, the conditions aligned for our own species—Homo sapiens—to emerge and thrive.

But what will it take to continue to survive?

In The Nature of Nature, world-renowned environmental thinker and activist Vandana Shiva argues that food is the currency of life, a thread woven throughout the web of all life, indivisible from Earth and its natural systems. When this interdependence is ruptured—as it is now—the conditions for the “metabolic disorder” of climate change and countless other ecological imbalances come into being.

Proposals put forward by Big Ag and Big Tech to solve the intertwined climate and food crises will only exacerbate both. With clarity and a detailed analysis, Shiva unpacks the false promises made by technology-oriented, lab-intensive digital agriculture, revealing the dangers posed by fake and ultra-processed foods—dangers to the environment, to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, to the health of animals, and to our health and food security.

In The Nature of Nature, Shiva takes a powerful stand, arguing with urgency and passion for a food and climate future based not on techno-optimism, hallucination, and corporate delusions, but on the natural regeneration of biodiversity in partnership with the biosphere.

Praise for Vandana Shiva:

“She’s been called the ‘Gandhi of grain,’ the ‘rock star’ of the anti-GMO movement and an ‘eco-warrior goddess.’ . . . Above all, [she] is a staunch believer that the food we eat matters. It makes us who we are, physically, culturally and spiritually.”—BBC

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Oneness vs. the 1%Making Peace with the EarthSoil Not OilGlobalization’s New WarsSeed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the VanguardWho Really Feeds the World?

Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (1993); the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (1998); the Horizon 3000 Award (Austria, 2001); the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace (2008); the Save the World Award (2009); the Sydney Peace Prize (2010); the Calgary Peace Prize (2011); and the Thomas Merton Award (2011). She was the Fukuoka Grand Prize Laureate in 2012.