Vandana Shiva is an Indian physicist turned environmental activist who has spent her career fighting the people who want to own seeds. Yes, seeds. Not patents on phones. The actual things that grow food.
seed sovereignty. Multinational corporations like Monsanto (now Bayer, same shit, different label) have patented genetically modified seeds( I fucking know you didn’t even know that you could patent seeds lmfao). Farmers who have been saving and replanting seeds for thousands of years are now legally banned from doing so. They have to buy new seeds every goddamn year. If they save seeds from their own harvest, they get sued.
Shiva founded Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity and seed saving that has preserved thousands of native seed varieties. She argues that industrial agriculture is not just destroying the environment. It is destroying the social fabric of farming communities, erasing traditional knowledge, and concentrating power in the hands of a few fucking corporations.
She also criticizes the Green Revolution, which is a controversial take. The Green Revolution (high-yield crops, chemical fertilizers) is credited with feeding billions. Shiva says it also created dependency, destroyed soil health, and wiped out thousands of local crop varieties. She is not anti-technology. She is against technology that serves corporate power instead of human need.
Starter book: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988). A book about the environment that is also about feminism, colonialism.
