We are Earth. We are biodiversity. We are Jīva. We are conscious. We are alive. We are free.

We are members of a single earth-family, made up of intelligent, sovereign, autonomous, self-organised and independent beings.

We are biodiversity: interconnected with other beings through food and water, through air and breath, through life and intelligence. Like all other beings, we humans are sovereign, living, intelligent, self-organised and autonomous beings, mutually supported and interdependent. In the living world of biodiversity, all life is sacred, and life does everything it can to nourish and sustain life. Life is the nature of all living things. When we patent and "pirate" life, biodiversity, natural processes and nature itself (including the minds and bodies of humans), we violate spiritual law, ecological law, the laws of biodiversity and the laws of human rights.

But there is no need to view the theft through these lenses to recognise it as such. Patenting life is a theft of life — it is the claim to own something that cannot be owned. Patenting life, quite simply, amounts to enslaving life itself, stealing (or pirating) the nature of life.

The mechanical mind separates, digs and extracts

The mechanical mind, connected to the money-making machine of extraction, has created the illusion of a separation between humans and nature, in which nature is raw, dead material to be exploited. This assumption of a "dead nature" lies at the heart of the logic of extractivism and the metaphor of extraction — extraction of land from indigenous peoples, of fertility from the soil, of water from rivers and aquifers, of genes from biodiversity, of knowledge from indigenous communities. Biopiracy is the practice of extracting knowledge and biodiversity in order to patent it and place it under intellectual property rights.

A new form of biopiracy is on its way: the patenting of information about our bodies and minds, and the extraction of data on human bodily activity. They are turning us into the next raw material. Our bodies and minds are the latest colony of extraction. They have already said it themselves: "information is the new oil" — and just as the oil industry extracted oil to fuel its war against the planet, the extraction of information is already being used against people's minds and bodies.

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This is a higher level of biopiracy, because it creates new tools for manipulating and controlling people. It is the attempt to make human beings disappear into a world designed by the blunt and narrow mechanical mind that cannot see beyond its money-making machine. The mechanical mind sees only its objective: profit. We are on the brink of extinction. Will we allow our humanity — our existence as living, conscious, intelligent and autonomous creatures — to be destroyed by the machine of greed, which knows no limits and is incapable of curbing its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop this machine to defend our humanity, freedom and autonomy? So many species have been driven to extinction because the conditions for their survival were no longer available. We have a choice: we can continue to live, protecting the conditions for our survival, or we can extract all life for "profit", leaving a dead planet to witness our funeral.

For five decades I have worked on the theme of non-separability; my doctorate focuses on the themes of non-locality and non-separability in quantum theory. With the Chipko movement I committed myself to devoting my life to understanding the ecological interconnections of biodiversity and to protecting biodiversity. For me, protecting biodiversity means protecting both the integrity of life and the rights and needs of local communities who are the preservers and custodians of biodiversity. I have witnessed how the mechanical mind of people in power (who control the money-making machine) has reduced forests — which were themselves a source of water, food and fuel for local communities — to a mere source of timber and metal extraction. They have reduced rivers, including the sacred Ma Ganga, to volumes of water to be extracted in order to be privatised, to kilowatts of energy to be obtained from dams and hydroelectric power plants.

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Life is not an invention. Seeds are not machines

In 1987, when I attended the conference "Laws of Life" on new biotechnologies, I heard for the first time the poison cartel (the group of chemical companies that also includes the former IG Farben) attempting to categorise living organisms and seeds as machines invented by them, over which they wished to extend patents. I knew that seeds are not machines assembled by chemical companies. They are the embodiment of biodiversity and of nature's drive to reproduce, renew and multiply. Genetically modified seeds are seeds stolen from farmers and modified with genes from bacteria found in nature. The only "invention" is the injection of genes in a laboratory using a gene gun, or the infection of a cell with Agrobacterium, a cancer of plants. Companies steal seeds and extract genes to create GMOs. The patenting of seeds was wrong ecologically, ethically and ontologically. It is a mistake that must be corrected. Thirty-three years ago I began my journey to protect biodiversity, the integrity and diversity of seeds, and to prevent biopiracy and the patenting of seeds.

The Navdanya project grew out of this commitment to biodiversity. The movement has claimed the status of "common good" for seeds and has created one hundred and fifty community seed banks. Around the world we have inspired the free seed movement. A new awareness of seed sovereignty has taken root.

We have also passed laws and treaties to protect biodiversity. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, a new legal framework emerged for the convention on biodiversity. In India in 2002, the national biodiversity law was passed: "An act to provide for conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the use of biological resources, knowledge and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto".

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India has passed laws recognising that seeds are not an invention and therefore cannot be patented. Art 3 of the Patent Act (the legislation on patents) clearly defines what does not constitute an "invention", excluding such subjects from patentability. Art 3j of the Indian Patents Act excludes from patentability: "plants and animals in whole or any part thereof other than micro-organisms, including seeds, varieties and species, and essentially biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animals". This is the article used by the Indian patent office to strike down a Monsanto patent on climate-resistant seeds and to halt Monsanto's claims over Bt cotton seeds.

The 2001 Indian law known as the Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights Act contains a clause on farmers' rights: "farmers have the right to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share and sell their farm produce, including seed of a variety protected under this Act, in the same manner as they were entitled to before the coming into force of this Act". Not only have we enshrined the integrity of life and biodiversity in law, stating clearly that plants, animals and seeds are not inventions, but we have also fought and won cases against patents based on biopiracy, such as USDA and WR Grace Neem (patent number 436257), Ricetec's Basmati (patent number 56,63,484) and Monsanto's Wheat Patent (patent number 962578). As I wrote in my book Biopiracy, patents on life and patents on seeds are a second coming of Christopher Columbus.

A little history on World Biodiversity Day

In 1492, Columbus was given a letters patent by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castile to "discover and subjugate islands and continents in the ocean". The continent Columbus was looking for was India, which is why all the native peoples of North America came to be called Indians. On his return from "discovering America", Columbus described to the king and queen the gold he had found, its extraction, processing and transportation to Castile. In his letters there was not a single word about the native peoples, not a moment's reflection on the theft committed. Theft and piracy were central to colonialism, and they still are. In 1493, Pope Alexander issued a papal bull, "Inter Caetera", to naturalise the appropriation of the land, territories and wealth of indigenous peoples; this bull defined colonialism as a civilising mission of the Church, carried out by European monarchs, their pirates and merchant-adventurers. In our own day, Columbus, the monarchs, the Pope and God have all merged into a single identity: the billionaires who play God with the tools of technology, who shape and define the new "civilising missions" on the basis of instruments and technologies of extraction and control. These are new religions to be forcibly imposed on the entire world.

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Patent number 060606: our bodies and minds are not "data mines" — we are sovereign and autonomous beings

On 26 March, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of lockdown, Wipo (the World Intellectual Property Organisation) granted Microsoft world patent number WO 2020/060606.

Just as our biodiversity and indigenous knowledge are territory for extraction through patents and biopiracy, and there was an attempt to reduce us to consumers of patented, manipulated and engineered GM seeds by pirating our seeds without our consent, so now we are witnessing an attempt to extract and pirate information from our bodies and minds, without our permission or consent. Our humanity and our autonomy are being stolen. We are being reduced to "users" of "machines" that extract our humanity and our information to create the next-generation money-making machine.

Patent 060606 states: "Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified".

This patent dramatically changes the meaning of being human. First, it redefines us as "mines" from which to extract data, robbing us of our autonomy, sovereignty and control over our bodies and minds. This patent claims intellectual property over our bodies and minds. And the mere act of being connected through their servers would constitute a declaration of consent. Just as during colonialism the colonisers arrogated to themselves the right to seize the territories, resources and land of indigenous peoples, to erase their culture and sovereignty, and in the most extreme cases to exterminate those peoples, so too patent WO 060606 is a unilateral declaration by Microsoft of the colonisation of our bodies and minds. We are reduced to mines of raw materials (the data extracted from us).

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The "body activities" that Microsoft wishes to extract without our permission or consent include, but are not limited to: "radiation emitted from the human body, brain activity, body fluid flow (e.g., blood), organ activity or movement, body movement or any other activity that can be detected and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees or any other information or data. Examples of body radiation emitted from a human body may include body heat radiation, pulse or brain waves.

Brain waves include, for example, in a non-exhaustive manner: 1. Gamma waves involved in learning or memory tasks 2. Beta waves involved in logical thinking or conscious thought 3. Alpha waves which may be connected to subconscious thoughts 4. Theta waves which are thought to be linked to thoughts involving deep emotions 5. Delta waves which may be involved in sleep or deep relaxation, and 6. the electroencephalogram (EEG) which may be a measurement for assessing the electrical activity of the brain as in the case of deep concentration. Examples of body movement may include eye rotation, facial movements or any other muscular movement."

Patent number 060606 undermines our humanity

Secondly, this patent erases our humanity as sovereign, spiritual, conscious and intelligent living beings; it does not regard us as beings who make their own decisions about the impact of different actions on the natural and social world of which we are part and to which we are inextricably bound, guided by wisdom and ethical values. We are reduced to "users" of tasks assigned to us by a mega digital extractive machine. A "user" is a consumer without choice within the digital empire. Human creativity and consciousness disappear in the world imagined in patent 060606. Thirdly, the patent redefines human values and the value of being human. Human values include ethical, ecological and spiritual values.

For us, right living is Dharma, right action within the web of life of which we are part. Nurturing and sustaining our relationships as part of the earth-family, and our social relationships as a humanity composed of so many diversities, is what makes us spiritual, self-organised and solidary beings. The value of being human is measured through love and compassion, through sharing and giving. The unit of measure and the currency of life are life and love. "Value" derives from "valere", meaning to be strong. Streng