Indian physicist, activist and author Vandana Shiva reflects on her decades of work on climate change, food and health and assesses the challenges we face in the future
Review by Elizabeth Wainwright
Vandana Shiva is an Indian physicist, environmental activist and anti-globalisation author. She has been described as ‘the most powerful voice’ for people of the developing world. Her work links the destruction of nature, the polarisation of societies and indiscriminate corporate greed, and her memoir, Terra Viva, reflects on her decades of work and care.
Shiva describes her childhood in post-partition India and her education at a time when girls didn’t usually go to school. She was also taught by the trees and soil of the Himalaya: ‘The forests of my childhood were the source of abundance and beauty, diversity and peace.’ The felling of those forests prompted her to join a movement to protect them and her lifelong work in grassroots resistance was born.
Shiva’s PhD in physics and her community work led her to conclude that ‘research itself cannot save the environment’, so she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology to combine research with social and ecological responsibility, and to connect communities and treat them as experts. Much of her work concerns sustainable agriculture; during a drought in 1984 she ‘realised that the very way we do agriculture is flawed. The Green Revolution… was pretending to create more food but was actually destroying nature, farmers’ sense of self, and creating war within society.’ Reading Shiva’s story, I thought of the work of US author, activist and farmer Wendell Berry; both blend science, soil, community and care.
Terra Viva explores Shiva’s work on food sovereignty, climate change, health and the soil and soul that link it all. She brings nuance and humanity to big issues through her blend of academic and rural knowledge, research and activism, head and heart. She’s concerned about the ‘growing insulation between a rural India of farmers and an urban Westernised elite that is dividing the country so deeply’.
Shiva’s book is a record of a remarkable life and a compelling assessment of the challenges we face. We would all be a little more informed, inspired, perhaps even wise, after reading it.
