The constant gardener
Vandana Shiva
Julietta Singh,
University of Minnesota
Vandana Shiva is one of the world's leading contemporary environmental activists and the winner of the 1993 Right
Livelihood Award — otherwise known as the "alternative Nobel Peace Prize." She is widely described as a
"radical scientist" who has been trained in both physics and the philosophy of science. Her activist work explores
the impacts of economic liberalization on the lives of Third World people, with a particular emphasis on the plight
of farmers and women in rural regions of India. She is the author of many books, including Staying
Alive, The Violence of the Green Revolution (1993), Monocultures of the Mind
(1993), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (1997), Stolen
Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (1999), and most recently, Water Wars:
Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (2001).
Shiva is the head of Navdanya: A Movement for Biodiversity Conservation and Farmer's Rights, a national program in
India established to fight Western seed monopolies in the Third World. She also serves as the director and founder
of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) in New Delhi, a foundation established in
1982 as an independent initiative to perform participatory and interdisciplinary research with rural Indian
communities. The RFSTE focuses on the conservation of biodiversity and the protection of individual rights against
economic liberalization.
Shiva is perhaps best known for her protests against corporate patents (or exclusive rights) that are placed upon
natural resources, a practice that she terms "biopiracy." According to Shiva, this corporate patenting is the
world's most modern form of colonialism. She is renowned for her work opposing the increasingly widespread use of
monocultural production on a global scale — a form of production that sacrifices vital ecological diversity
for corporate profit. Much of her work investigates the devastating ecological and psychological consequences that
such forms of production have upon local communities. She targets Monsanto, McDonald's, and Pepsi, among
innumerable other corporations, all of which she argues threaten to destroy the traditional land management
practices, and subsequently the lifestyles, of Third World communities.
At the forefront of Shiva's activism is the need for a global shift toward an "earth democracy" that respects the
essential right of all individuals to have access to the commons. From this perspective, the commodification of
nature must be rethought and understood not as a corporate right but rather as an extreme abuse of our shared global
resources. Shiva advocates for a sustainable ethics of production and consumption that fiercely opposes the
corporatization of natural resources. At the root of this ethic is a deep respect for women's traditional knowledge
of land management and food cultivation practices that corporations deem to be archaic and unproductive.