Terra Viva

Trained as a physicist, Vandana Shiva says, "It was Chipko that made me realise, in intimate detail, how biodiversity is at the heart of sustainable economies". Working with peasant women in her home state of Uttarakhand, she learnt her first lessons in ecology: transferring fertility from the forest to the field. Chipko was her university and, turning away from quantum physics, she made the preservation of biodiversity, and of sustainable societies, her life's work. For over four decades Vandana Shiva has worked with farmers and peoples movements across the world, against what she calls seed imperialism, economic polarisation, and the digital colonisation of our ecological and social diversity. Her Gandhian philosophy of resistance is rooted in peoples power, true science, and real facts, through which she challenges the Billionaires' Club of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as well as the transnational corporations that manipulate and control what we cultivate and consume and how we communicate, via Big Ag, Big Pharma and Big Data. This powerful and eloquent memoir looks back at the most memorable campaigns and movements that she has been part of, while looking ahead to the challenges posed by the COVID crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources.