Vandana Shiva
by Brooke Shelby Biggs
Anita Roddick
With a master's degree in particle physics, a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science, and eleven books to her credit, Vandana Shiva is nothing if not erudite. But she's no ivory-tower intellectual. In 1982, several years after getting her Ph.D., she cut short her research at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore to establish the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in her home town in the Himalayan foothills. As the foundation's director, she helps communities counter threats to forests and agricultural land, leads a movement called Navdanya ("nine seeds") for the conservation of indigenous seeds, and is an active and articulate defender of diversity -- be it biological, cultural, or intellectual.
Hers is also a key voice in the international debate over globalization and development. Shiva has been an important figure in the movement to put pressure on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. "Our policy work simultaneously addresses biodiversity, intellectual property rights, and globalization," she explains. Indeed, in 1993, Shiva won the prestigious Right Livelihood Award (widely referred to as the "alternative Nobel Prize") "for placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse."
Shiva's ecological activism began in the 1970s with the Chipko ("embrace") movement, a broad-based grassroots protest -- organized principally by women -- against the commercial exploitation of Himalayan forests by outside contractors. The women chained themselves to tree trunks or threw their arms around native trees to save them from the ax.
Shiva has taken pains ever since to draw out the connections between the environmental, the ethical, and the political. Just as Gandhi and Bhave fused the spiritual and the social in the practice of satyagraha ("fight for truth"), Shiva sees ecology and equity as intimately linked. Gandhi led a satyagraha against the British policy of forcing Indian farmers to produce indigo; Shiva sees her movement as a satyagraha in the same tradition.
Shiva's primary focus is on resisting the forces of globalization in India, especially agribusiness. She sees an industry that forces farmers to abandon traditional and sustainable farming practices for genetically engineered monoculture, with its accompanying pesticides, irrigation requirements, and intellectual property demands. Farmers are plunged into debt and beholden to multinational companies while the land is quickly exhausted and misery mounts.
"The real issue, for both people and nature," says Shiva, "is the extent to which control over seeds and other genetic materials is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of those whose only interest is profits." Shiva helps farmers roll back this process in practical ways -- establishing living seed banks, training farmers in chemical-free methods of sustainable agriculture, and engaging in policy advocacy to oppose implementation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Indian law.
This question of control is also the linchpin that links the fight for biodiversity with the defense of cultural diversity and diversity of knowledge. And it is a fight, albeit a nonviolent one. "The primary threat to nature and to people today comes from centralizing and monopolizing power and control," she said as she accepted the Right Livelihood award. "Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice, and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: It is a survival imperative."
When change comes, Shiva says it will be driven by a spiritual outrage at the brutality of corporate rule. "To be outraged by violation and violence is a necessary complement to being spiritual," she told an organic farming convention. "To me this means that one has boundaries that say, 'This is sacred, it cannot be violated.' If the rage is directed to protecting the sacred, it can become a creative rage, it can be a compassionate rage." Here, as elsewhere in Vandana Shiva's thinking, the legacy of satyagraha is legible: "From Gandhi we have learned that you cannot respond to violent systems with violence. But you have a duty to not cooperate with violence through nonviolent means."
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
Founded in 1982 by Vandana Shiva, the Foundation is commited to conservation and the resistance of global exploitation of local ecological assets.
60, Hauz Khas
New Delhi India 110016
Tel.: +91-11-6968077
Email: vshiva@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in
RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR SCIENCE,
TECHNOLOGY AND ECOLOGY website
From Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits
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