There was never Beauty, without Melancholy

I’ve grown up in the Himalayas — there’s no cash economy there. People are wealthy at zero dollars a day.
The point is that you need to have a clean stream. If your forest is intact and your stream is flowing and your knowledge is with you, and you can grow your food and you recognize the herbs that can cure you and you have mutuality of labor exchange, so that you come and work on my farm, and I come and work at your farm, why on earth would you need either dollars or rupees? On the other hand, if the water is commodified, if our seeds are commodified, if our medicine is monopolized, if there are no jobs. If the entire system is meant to merely be a source of profits for a handful of corporations, actually, you just have do your arithmetic, life becomes too expensive to buy. You can’t buy life. And now that they are trying to commoditize the very basis of life and own it and sell it back to us, basically the consequence is disposable people. Because for most people, then, life becomes unaffordable in any case, a life of that kind, even for those those who can afford it, is not life anymore.

—Vandana Shiva (via la-hija-del-quinto-sol)

(via transcending-nihilism)