Vandana Shiva

Environmental activist, writer

Environmental activist, writer. Through her prolific writing and speaking engagements, the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva has focused the world's attention on the potentially deleterious effects of globalization in developing countries, especially in South Asia. She is an outspoken opponent of the free-market economy promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO), believing it will destroy the environment and place farmers and cottage industries in the developing world in peril. Shiva has equated globalization of the economy with colonization, as Sara Dunn wrote for the Guardian (April 18, 1989): “Vandana Shiva considers development as applied in the Third World the most brutal facet of [a] patriarchal system.” In a spring 1998 interview with Scott London for the syndicated public radio series Insight and Outlook, Shiva stated, “Nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations.” In an interview with Daniel Mittler of the Sustainable Europe Research Institute, she called the concept of globalization “anti-planetarism.” “It's against the spirit of being part of the common planet, it's against the spirit of us being part of a common earth community, and it's definitely against any form of international solidarity,” she explained.

Education and Early Career

Vandana Shiva was born on November 5, 1952, in the town of Dehra Dun, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. Her father was a forester and her mother, as Shiva described her to Sara Dunn, was an “extremely liberated” woman who had been involved in the Indian independence movement against British colonialism. In an interview with Swati Chopra for Life Positive (March 2002), Shiva recounted her mother's dedication to India's social and economic welfare: “My mother always wore khadi [Indian homespun cotton fabric]. When we wanted nylon, she said: ‘I'll buy you nylon. But you know, if you buy nylon, some industrialist will get another Mercedes, and if you buy khadi, some woman's chulha [kitchen fire] will get lit. You decide.’” Shiva grew up in a Brahmin household where the gender distinctions in her native Hindi were not employed, so feminist ideologies were easily within reach. She told London: “I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being.”

Early in life Shiva committed herself to a career in physics. “[Albert Einstein] was my hero,” she explained to Scott London. “I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.” She studied at Canada's University of Guelph and the University of Western Ontario, where she completed her Ph.D. dissertation on quantum theory in 1979. Despite her total immersion in physics, her focus shifted to ecology when she returned to India. “As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology,” she told Scott London. She added, “I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way.”

Later Career

The first issue to command her attention was deforestation in the Indian Himalayan region. She worked with the Chipko movement, organized in the 1970s by peasant women who opposed deforestation in northern India. “I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge,” she told London. (In 1974, protesting the planned commercial use of 2,500 trees in the Reni forests, in the Uttar Pradesh region of India, local women joined hands in nonviolent resistance, surrounded the trees, and prevented the razing of the forest. The Chipko—which means “embrace” in Hindi—movement grew out of this protest and spread to other regions of northern India.)

In 1981 India's Ministry of Environment invited Shiva to study the effect of mining in the Doon Valley of northern India. “As a result of my report,” she told Swati Chopra, “[India's] Supreme Court banned mining here in 1983. That was the first time I was doing something about conservation professionally.” She continued: “I cared enough about the environment to really see it saved, and I knew that research by itself would not do it. Empowered communities are the place where action will happen.” In an effort to spur local environmental action, Shiva established the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE) in 1982 in Dehra Dun. (RFSTE has since relocated to New Delhi.) Dedicated to biological diversity (the earth's natural abundance of diverse species) and the protection of indigenous communities from the encroachment of globalization, the foundation pairs researchers with local groups to work on environmental issues such as forest preservation and water conservation. RFSTE has also addressed genetic engineering in food and food production.

Shiva's ecological philosophy is based on the idea that humanity's survival depends on nature's diversity. As she explained to Sue Wheat for New Internationalist magazine (June 1995): “Everything we have been taught in contemporary times is that monocultures are necessary, to increase both production and growth. But this kind of thinking is really one-dimensional. It negates our true human and ecological state, which is diversity.” She added, “Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.” In 1991 Shiva established Navdanya (“nine seeds”), an offshoot of the RFSTE that promotes farmers' rights, the conservation of biodiversity, and the freedom of agriculture from multinational seed corporations. Navdanya also promotes organic agriculture and provides information about bioengineered foods and seed monopolies. According to the RFSTE website, Navdanya pioneered the movement to save Indian food seeds from being co-opted by foreign corporations, establishing dozens of seed banks throughout India and rescuing more than 1,500 varieties of rice from multinational companies that have sought to place patents on them. (Proponents of genetically modifying rice varieties claim that it would strengthen the breed and create heartier rice for growing and shipping, while others argue that bio-engineered produce could be more prone to disease.) At the Navdanya farm Shiva established Bija Vidyapeeth, or the Seed University, an institution that offers courses such as “Gandhi and Globalization.” The Seed University is open to people in all professions from around the world; participants live, work, and eat together on the farm, and study topics include a course on water and sustainable cities.

Shiva is particularly opposed to what environmentalists call biopiracy, the practice of appropriating folk remedies or rural knowledge by large companies and then restricting their use through patents. Shiva explained to Scott London that firms “from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back [to the U.S.], claim it as an invention or an innovation, take a patent on it, and grab the exclusive right to the use of the products or processes that are linked to that knowledge.” This process is “worse than slave trade,” she told London, “because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. [This] 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.”

The concept of biopiracy is best exemplified by a dispute over basmati rice, variants of which the Texas-based company RiceTec attempted to place under patent in the 1990s. (Basmati rice is considered part of India's national heritage but has never been trademarked.) RiceTec's initial patent was granted in 1997, and many in India and Pakistan viewed RiceTec's patent as a threat to the economic survival of thousands of farmers. “Granting exclusive patent rights amounts to stealing economic options of daily survival from the developing world,” Shiva explained to Saritha Rai for the New York Times (August 25, 2001). She believes that patent rights are the latest manifestation of colonization, in which a resource or property of one population is co-opted for the sole benefit of the dominant party. In this atmosphere, seeds, the “last resource of the poor,” as she called them in an interview with Nic Paget-Clarke for In Motion magazine (August 14, 1998), have become the property of multinational corporations. Shiva told Paget-Clarke, “New legal property formations are being shaped as intellectual property rights treaties, through the World Trade Organization, trying to prevent peasants of the Third World from having free access to their own seed, to have free exchange of their own seed.” (In the spring of 2001, RiceTec withdrew about 15 of its patent claims but was granted a limited patent by the U.S., one that allowed the company to trademark only a few variants of the rice.)

“Acting by your conscience, doing the right thing without being afraid of the people around you. That's been an important lesson for me . . . .”

Shiva is also a staunch defender of India's cottage industries, manufacturing operations that take place on a small scale in homes or small factories. Because the WTO supported China's entrance into the world market at the turn of the early twenty-first century, Shiva argued, the promotion of low-cost Chinese products throughout the world would have a detrimental effect on India's small-scale manufacturing sectors, particularly the manufacture of silks, textiles, toys, and small electronic goods. “Globalization and the end of [trade] restrictions are celebrated as freedom for the individual,” Shiva explained in an interview shortly before China's official entrance into the trade organization, as quoted by Tyler Marshall for the Los Angeles Times (July 29, 2001), “but these are rules that put societies at odds with themselves, that put consumers against producers. We have to write new rules for a wholesome, sustainable society.” The end of import controls, she believes, could mean the end of domestic industries that help shape India's cultural identity.

In 2000 Shiva took part in the Reith Lectures, a series of five presentations organized by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to address issues surrounding sustainable development. She delivered her lecture "Poverty and Globalization" on April 27, 2000, at the Nehru Museum in New Delhi; it addressed such issues as the declining role of women as food producers in an increasingly globalized society. During her Reith Lecture, Shiva explained: “The devaluation of women's work, and of work done in sustainable economies, is the natural outcome of a system constructed by capitalist patriarchy.”

Shiva is the author of several books, including Green Goddesses and Down-to-Earth Mothers: Women and Environment (1993), which she co-wrote with the European ecofeminist Maria Mies. In her review for the Guardian (November 20, 1993), Maxine Molyneux stated that for the authors, there is “no alternative but to reject industrial society as a whole—and to return to a form of survival based on subsistence agriculture. The advances of science and technology have brought little good to women; and have only increased the power of their oppressors. Birth control programs, in particular, they see as part of an imperialist policy of ‘de-populating’ the Third World which should be replaced by a return to traditional, woman-friendly methods.”

In 1997 Shiva's Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge was published, in which she argues that cloning and genetic engineering are the inevitable result of the commercialization of science and the use of the natural world for profit. Ruth Hubbard, professor emerita of biology at Harvard University, called Biopiracy “an important book that should be read by anyone wanting to understand the global threat posed by the technological transformations of organisms, cells, and molecules and by their exploitation for profit.” In her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000), Shiva chronicles the impact of globalized corporate agribusiness on the world's food supply. Tomorrow's Biodiversity (Prospects for Tomorrow) (2001) publicizes the dangers of biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Shiva's book Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit was published in 2002. The reviewer Steven Poole provided a synopsis of it for the Guardian (May 11, 2002): “In icily passionate prose, Shiva surveys water disputes of the last few decades—characterizing Israel's conflicts, for example, as heavily water-motivated—and argues that, unless something is done, water wars will be to the 21st century what the oil wars were to the 20th.” Also published in the United States and England in 2002 was her book Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, a work that was originally published in India in 2001. In this book she discusses intellectual property law and explains the ethical, ecological, and economic impacts of globalized patents. Shiva's other books include Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival (1989), The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (1992), Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993), Patents: Myths & Reality (2001), Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005), Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (2008), and Making Peace with the Earth (2013). She has also cowritten Wealth Per Acre (2015) with Vaibhav Singh and edited the essay collections Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed (2007) and Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard (2015). Further opposing industrial agricultural practices and the genetic modification of food sources, she published Who Really Feeds the World?: The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology (2016) and took on the richest men in the world in Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom(2018). Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements (2022) is the author's powerful memoir, a compliment to her 2021 documentary of her life story, The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021).

In 1993 Shiva was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize. The Right Livelihood Award was founded in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull, a Swedish-German writer, to honor individuals and grass-roots organizations dedicated to addressing problems faced by the modern world. The name of the award is inspired by a Buddhist precept that holds that each person should live responsibly and mindfully as a member of society and the world. The award is presented annually at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament. Shiva has also been honored with the Earth Day International Award, the United Nations Environment Program–sponsored Global 500 Award in 1993, the Alfonso Comin Award in 1998, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2010, the Calgary Peace Prize in 2011, and the Fukuoka Award in 2012, among others.

In addition to her work with the RFSTE, Shiva has reportedly served as an adviser to the Third World Network, an independent, nonprofit international network of people and organizations dedicated to development issues in the developing world, and to the Malaysia-based Asia Pacific People's Environment Network. She was a leader of the Women's Environment and Development Organization, a global advocacy group headquartered in New York City, and is a board member of the International Forum on Globalization, a citizen's group that monitors the impact of globalization. She has also lectured widely at university and college campuses in the United States. In 2020, she began warning of the dangers of environmental pollutants to India's food supply and offered alternatives to the twenty-first century genetically modified foods trend. At Shiva's advice, the Sri Lankan government banned the import of chemical fertilizers to increase the use of organic options in 2021; however, this resulted in negative repercussions for the farming industry and was repealed within months.

Despite being the recipient of much acclaim, Shiva's often-provocative statements have also made her a lightning rod for criticism. Some dispute her claims about agriculture, genetically modified organisms, and economics, arguing that she makes her stands on disproven science or on ideological grounds. Others have questioned her scientific credentials.

“'There are two trends,'” she was quoted in an August 25, 2014, New Yorker profile. “'One: a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture—people celebrating their lives. And the other: monocultures, deadness. Everyone depressed. Everyone on Prozac. More and more young people unemployed. We don't want that world of death.'”

In her interview with Swati Chopra, Shiva spoke of the impact her parents have had on her life. “My parents . . . taught us fearlessness. Acting by your conscience, doing the right thing without being afraid of the people around you. That's been an important lesson for me because you can't take on the [global biotechnology and agri-business firms] of the world without rising above fear.”

Bibliography

Entine, John. "Wealthy Activist Vandana Shiva Is a Poor Advocate for the Poor." Genetic Literacy Project, 16 July 2014, geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/16/viewpoint-wealthy-activist-vandana-shiva-is-a-poor-advocate-for-the-poor/. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Nordhaus, Ted, and Saloni Shah. "In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong." Foreign Policy, 5 Mar. 2022, foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Shiva, Vandana. The Vandana Shiva Reader. U of Kentucky P, 2015.

Specter, Michael. "Seeds of Doubt." The New Yorker, 25 Aug. 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt. Accessed 24 June 2024.

"Sri Lanka’s shift towards organic farming." Navdanya International, 16 June 2021, navdanyainternational.org/sri-lankas-shift-towards-organic-farming/. Accessed 24 June 2024.