PULLMANBiodiversity, conservation and women’s rights activist Vandana Shiva is coming to speak at WSU at 7:30 p.m Wednesday, Nov. 5 in the Compton Union Building Senior Ballroom.
This is one of the only 10 appearances she will make in her U.S. tour this year.
Shiva will talk about “Sustainability and the Global Food Crisis.” The event is being sponsored by the ASWSU International Counsel and International Programs. Admission is free.
There will be a question and answer session after the speech and the bookstore will be selling books for signing at the event.
Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, Shiva was born in 1952 in Dehradun, India, She is trained as a physicist and earned her doctoral degree from the University of Western Ontario. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management.
Combining her sharp intellectual enquiry with courageous activism, she is equally at ease working with peasants in rural India and teaching in universities worldwide. Shiva has lectured at universities, organizations and institutions worldwide on ecology, feminism and globalization.
In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehradun, an independent institute dedicated to research how to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times, in close partnership with local communities and social movements. She also has founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade; and started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K.
She is the author of “The Violence of Green Revolution” and “Monocultures of the Mind,” and also wrote “Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge,” “Stolen Harvest,” and “Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit,” analyzing the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate-led globalization.
Biotechnology and genetic engineering are also part of Shiva’s activism. She has helped organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with their campaigns against genetic engineering.
Her contribution to gender issues is internationally recognized. Her book, “Staying Alive” shifted the perception of third World women. In 1990, she wrote a report for the Food and Agriculture Organization on women and agriculture entitled, “Most Farmers in India are Women”. She founded the gender unit at the International Centre for Mountain Development in Kathmandu and helped initiate an international movement of women working of food, agriculture, patents and biotechnology called, Diverse Women for Diversity.
She is the member of several NGOs and governmental organizations in India and around the world. Time Magazine identified Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.
