Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development

First off, Shiva cannot seem to write without clobbering repetition. The heart of her ideas and activism, however, are galvanising and foundational. She has transformed the way I think about food justice and agroecology. She questions the sanctity of science and development and [reveals] that these are not universal categories of progress, but...projects of modern western patriarchy. Food and water as life itself have been distorted into modes of generating profit—literally at mortal cost in soil degradation, waterlogging, salinity, and desertification.

Agriculture based on diversity, decentralization, and improving small farm productivity through ecological methods is a women-centered, nature-friendly agriculture. In this agriculture, knowledge is shared—other species and plants are kin, not “property”—and sustainability is based on the renewal of the earth's fertility and the renewal and regeneration of biodiversity and species richness on farms.

The scientific revolution in Europe transformed nature from terra mater into a machine and a source of raw material; with this transformation it removed all ethical and cognitive constraints against its violation and exploitation.

[The technocratic] mind proposes an extension of the disease as the cure—its solution to desertification is more dams, more tubewells, more water intensive cultivation on the one hand, and more technology intensive solutions to the drinking water crisis on the other.

Reductionist economics assumes that only paid labour produces value. On the one hand this leads to ignoring [humanity's dependence] on the natural world, while on the other, it provides the ideology of the gender division of labour such that women's work in producing sustenance is treated as having no economic value even while it provides the very basis of survival and well-being...[If] production of life cannot be reckoned with in money terms, then it is economic models, and not women's work in producing sustenance and life, that must be sacrificed.

At a time when a quarter of the world's population is threatened by starvation due to erosion of soil, water, and genetic diversity of living resources, chasing the mirage of unending growth, by spreading resource destructive technologies, becomes a major source of genocide. The killing of people by the murder of nature is an invisible form of violence which is today the biggest threat to justice and peace.