Interview: Vandana Shiva talks to Judith Bizot - Science - March 1992

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001

* You are a physicist who abandoned your country's nuclear energy programme to devote yourself to nature and to halting its destruction. How did you reach your present position?

Ever since I was a child, love and knowledge of nature have given me my deepest satisfaction. I was very lucky to have been born the daughter of a forester in India and to have grown up in the Himalayan forest. Then I studied physics. The real basics of nature as defined in the reductionist scheme of things are understood through physics, the foundation of all the sciences. I had the opportunity to study biology and chemistry too, but real, profound understanding of nature was supposed to be reached through physics. Then I went into nuclear physics, where I experienced massive disappointments. It was only when I was doing my master's degree that I realized how unthinking nuclear scientists were about the question of radiation hazards. We were taught how to create chain reactions in nuclear material and we knew all about energy transformations, and so on, but nothing about the interaction of radiation with living systems. I learned about radiation impacts from my sister, who is a doctor. When I was working in a nuclear reactor in India she kept saying: "Promise me you're never going to go back there!" "But why?" I'd say and she would reply, "but you could have babies with mutations. You don't know what's going to happen to you.

When I was groping my way and exploring these issues, senior physicists would say, "You don't need to know these things." Again this was an exclusion and a violation of my search for knowledge. If science means to know, then I had no scientific training. So I went to Canada and enrolled on a Foundations of Physics programme, where some of the basic questions about science that were troubling me were being asked.

I knew that if I continued studying the foundations of quantum theory I should be marginal to my situation and I decided that I must do something to relate myself to the Indian context. I shifted to science and technology policy issues. In the meantime, the Chipko movement had been created and because this had happened where I was from, I kept going back and doing volunteer work and writing for them. Before I knew where I was, ecology had become my primary concern.

What is the Chipko movement? In your book Staying Alive you talk of the forest, for instance, not as a product for the market but as prakiti--a life-giving force. You talk of the importance of women in the struggle against the massive consumption of natural resources.

-- I responded to the destruction of the forest first because I was a child of the Himalayan forests. They were my identity and my sense of being. The erosion of the forests hit me very hard. Just before I left for Canada, I wanted to go back and visit a favourite spot of mine, a place where the British had built lovely rest houses from which the foresters managed the forests, There was one I particularly loved, near a stream in the beautiful oak forest. I went back there, and the oak forest had become a mere sprinkling of trees, and the stream was no longer gushing with water. When 1 talked to the people in the area I found that the stream had disappeared because they had cut the oak forest down to plant apple orchards, an enterprise which had never really been successful. (Apple trees need very fertile soil and virgin forest is usually cut down for this purpose.)

As for my involvement with Chipko, a movement of Himalayan women dedicated to the protection of the environment, I first got to know a leading figure in the movement named Sundarlal Batinguna, who was a great Inspiration to people like myself. But at a second and more lasting level my involvement was with the ordinary women who form the bedrock of Chipko. It was their perceptions and their beliefs that were the really rich foundations of my knowledge of ecology. They offered me a new sensibility about relationships. Ordinary people don't theorize. They have visions and beliefs. The germ of an idea or insight that I have developed has always been a phrase or an action from a person committed to act in a concrete situation. All my theory-building has come out of this nature-centred and woman-centred action. The special relationships women have with the environment are due to this. In my book Staying Alive I attempted to explain why my insights came from women who were considered ignorant and marginal, who were not given a platform of any kind by society.

Why is it that women sense destruction faster and are more persevering in the struggles against destruction? Why do they carry on when everyone else is cynical and hopeless? The reason is that women have a distinctive perception of what life is, a sense of what is really vital, which colours their view of what is at stake in the world.

* Can women lead the way in the new concern for the environment?

-- I think women are taking the lead today. The important thing is that their leadership should be taken seriously. For us in India Chipko marked the reawakening of an ecological consciousness, in a movement stretching from the villages of central India to the western Ghats. This new ecological consciousness is as old as our civilization, but what is new is its re-emergence as a political force in response to destruction, a force like Chipko in which ordinary women define the issues.