Staying Alive: Women, Ecology & Survival in India

About the Book
Vanadana Shiva’s internationally acknowledged study re-issued with a new Introduction.
Taking the three related concerns of development, ecology and gender, this book argues that there is an intimate link between the degradation of women and the degradation of nature in contemporary society. Both arise from assumptions that guide maldevelopment, also know as economic development. This maldevelopment –and consequently, science, technology, politics-is exploitative by definition, and every area of human activity guided by it marginalized and burdens women and nature. The author argues that there is only one path to survival and liberation for nature, woman and man, and that path is ecological one, harmony, sustainability and diversity as opposed to domination, exploitation and surplus. In developing her thesis she explores the unique place of women in the environment, both as its savers and as victims of ecological maldevelopment. Her analysis differs from most conventional analysis of environmentalist and feminist which have focused on women in the Third World as special victims of environmental degradation. Shiva discusses the challenges that women in ecology movements are creating and explores how their struggles constitute a non-violent and non-gendered and humanity-inclusive alternative to dominant science, technology and development paradigms.

Review/s
…extraordinary in the ease of its global and historical scopes and the clarity of its arguments. –Women’s Review of Books

Cogently written, empirically sensitive, and marked by passion and conviction. –Rajni Kothari
A uniquely modern Green mixture of mythology, social disquiet, dry statistical tables and assaults on Western ‘male’ science. –Spectator
Shiva’s powerful narratives allow us to hold a piece of food in our hands and, in a thought process we have never been taught to follow, lets us trace backwards the story of the land it was grown on, the cultural and economic toll on the ecosystem and people, the sacrifice endured so that it might be made, the full weight of environmental devastation present in its existence. –Dahlia Sapon-Shevin. www.greens.org
Vandana Shiva is India’s voice of the future: the environment, poverty, women’s rights, globalization, energy, agriculture, nutrition – Vandana Shiva has been at the forefront of all the key struggles of our time … for placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse. – www.rightlivelihood.org