A Time magazine “Environmental Hero”, one of Forbes seven most powerful women on the globe, and internally acclaimed author, Dr. Vandana Shiva is one of the world’s most dynamic and provocative thinkers on food sovereignty.
Trained as a quantum physicist, and with a lifetime of ecological activism, Dr. Vandana Shiva has spent the last 35 years applying her knowledge of non-separation and interconnectedness to help create healthier food and agriculture systems across the globe.
In 1991 she founded Navdanya, a movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources – especially seeds – and promote organic farming and fair trade. Navdanya has trained over 900,000 farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture over the past two decades, and helped setup the largest direct marketing, fair trade organic network in the country. She will share practical knowledge from these experiences to benefit family farmers here in the United States.
Dr. Shiva combines sharp intellectual enquiry with courageous activism. She works internationally with governments, non-profits, and grass roots movements to protect natural resources, indigenous rights, women’s rights and more. Her work spans from teaching at universities worldwide, to working with peasants in rural India, and from serving on Prince Charles’s expert group on Sustainable Agriculture to working with the Government of Bhutan to make Bhutan 100% organic.
Dr. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Her books The Violence of the Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind pose essential challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, industrial agriculture. Through her books Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest and Water Wars, Dr. Shiva has made visible the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate-led globalization. In 2004, Dr. Shiva started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K.
She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an honor known as an “Alternative Nobel Prize”.
In her own words, “The Sierra Harvest Food and Farm conference is a conference with a difference because you experience a sense of community and commitment.”