You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder.

It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva has been a new discovery for me, and one which has helped
tremendously in puttingthe varied eperiences of our travel study program into a
form which is beginning to cohere. As a prominent environmental activist and she
has written over !" boo#s and received numerous awards for her wor# in promoting
awareness of global sustainability issues. she has been on the forefront of a
number of social and political initiatives calling for research into and active
application of low cost methods to better maintain food source biodiversity as well
as more traditional organic farming methods. Shiva has long been an advocate for
the education of poor and low caste women, she feels that through introducing
them to low impact farming methods they will be empowered to ta#e active roles in
shaping the ecological, agricultural and economic policies of their communities.
Vandana Shiva was born in India on $ov. %th &'%! in (ehradun, in the state of
)ttara#had. She trained as a physicist and received her *h( in philosophy from the
)niversity of +estern ,ntario in &'-.. I was very interested to /nd that she did her
doctoral wor# on 0uantum theory with a dissertation titled1 2idden variables and
locality in 0uantum theory3. 4his would later prove to serve as a #ind of poetic
model for her sense of ecologies of scale as all being intrinsically intertwined on the
very deepest levels, both physically and spiritually. ,ften as#ed in interview about
the seemingly incongruous path between her studies in physics and her current
wor# in preserving agricultural bio5diversity she has countered that it is essential to
see the issues from a fully integrated perspective, both ecologically, politically and
spiritually.
to be covered in brief 6
basic bac#ground...early life and education
*ast successes
7onsanto and big agro monoculture
8urrent activities
9uture plans:pro;ects
*ersonal assessment
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I=ve grown up in the 2imalayas > there=s no cash economy there. *eople are
wealthy at ?ero dollars a day. 4he point is that you need to have a clean
stream. If your forest is intact and your stream is @owing and your #nowledge
is with you, and you can grow your food and you recogni?e the herbs that can
cure you and you have mutuality of labor echange, so that you come and
wor# on my farm, and I come and wor# at your farm, why on earth would you
need either dollars or rupeesA ,n the other hand, if the water is commodi/ed,
if our seeds are commodi/ed, if our medicine is monopoli?ed, if there are no
;obs. If the entire system is meant to merely be a source of pro/ts for a
handful of corporations, actually, you ;ust have do your arithmetic, life
becomes too epensive to buy. You can=t buy life. And now that they are
trying to commoditi?e the very basis of life and own it and sell it bac# to us,
basically the conse0uence is disposable people. Because for most people,
then, life becomes unaCordable in any case, a life of that #ind, even for those
those who can aCord it, is not life anymore.