19 Rewilding includes rediscovering and regenerating forest foods and wild edibles, as well as creating food forests. It includes taking animals out of factories and putting them back on the land. Letting them be free-range, and integrating them back in an agroecological farming system, to nourish the plants that feed them. Given the planetary emergency, and the social and economic emergency of unemployment, farmers’ debt and suicides, we now need to protect the Earth, to defend the rights and livelihoods of our small peasants, our tribals, our artisans, in order to create meaningful, creative, dignified self-organized work in living economies that regenerate the Earth and people’s livelihoods, people’s hope in the future. The shift from fossil-fuel driven corporate globalization to localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative. Economic localization implies that whatever can be produced locally, with local resources, should be protected, to build a vibrant local economy so that both livelihoods and the environment are protected. Twenty years after I wrote Water Wars, every crisis I wrote about has intensified in the industrial world. Privatization of water has increased, but we have also had victories against water privateers like Coca Cola. In a small village in Kerala called Plachimade, women were able to shut down a Coca Cola plant. The movement of protecting water as a commons has grown worldwide. Industrial agriculture is water intensive and has dried up lakes and aquifers. In the chapter on climate change in Water Wars, I quoted a farmer from Orissa saying: «Too much water and too little water create disasters». Climate extremes are experienced as floods and droughts, and both have been increasing. On the other hand, our biodiversity-based practices at Navdanya do not just regenerate biodiversity, they also regenerate water systems. When soils are fertilized organically, as previously mentioned, their water holding capacity increases, thus increasing climate resilience. Soil and water are deeply interconnected. We need to shift from an extractivist model of economy to a circular model. We need to shift from separation and mechanistic reductionism to an organic understanding of ecosystems and the planet.
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