Vandana Shiva

Born in India, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Monocultures of the Mind, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Staying Alive, and her most recent Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis.

Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. She has addressed the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, as well as the recent World Economic Forum in Melbourne. Time magazine recognized Shiva as an environmental hero, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia. Shiva is a recipient of Global 500 Award of the United Nations and Earth Day International Award. She has also received the Alternative Nobel Prize Right Livelihood Award and is a member of the Order of the Golden Ark.

The founder of Navdanya “nine seeds,” a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, she also set up the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in her mother’s cowshed in 1997. Its studies have validated the ecological value of traditional farming and been instrumental in fighting destructive development projects in India.

Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists. She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a PhD in particle physics.