Vandana Shiva

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India

Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 2010, 224 pp., $34.95.

Vandana Shiva was one of India's leading physicists before becoming a activist committed to radical social change. This year she will be awarded the prestigious Sydney Peace Prize, some seventeen years after she was first awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the 'alternative Nobel Prize'). Shiva bridges scientific understanding with moral philosophy--imbued with a deep concern with the environment, poverty, women's rights, energy and nutrition.

This book, first published in 1988, is one of the foundations of modern eco-feminism. The 2010 edition included a new introduction, addressing 'the gendered politics of food and the challenge of staying alive'. It situates concerns with food security as part of a broader contemporary political challenge to the power of global corporations in agriculture, the push for developing nations to grow cash crops for export and 'the masculinisation of biodiversity that has led to violent technologies' adversely affective food production (p. …