Vandana Shiva is one of the world's most prominent radical scientests... in Staying Alive she defines the links between ecological crises, colonialism, and the oppression of women. It is a scholarly and polemical plea for the rediscovery of the "feminine principle" in human interaction with the natural world, not as a gender-based quality, rather an organising principle, a way of seeing the world' - Guardian.
Inspired by women's struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, this book goes beyond a statement of women as special victims of the environmental crisis. It attempts to capture and reconstruct those insights and visions that Indian women provide in their struggles for survival, which perceive development and science from outside the categories of modern western patriarchy. These oppositional categories are simultaneously ecological and feminist: they allow the possibility of survival by exposing the parochial basis of science and development and by showing how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically.
The book has six chapters:
| CHAPTER 1| CHAPTER 2| CHAPTER 3| CHAPTER 4| CHAPTER 5| |CHAPTER 6|
Examining the position of women in relation to nature - the forests, the food chain and water supplies - the author links the violation of nature with the violation and marginalization of women, especially in the Third World. Both arise from assumptions in economic development, a process the author argues should more aptly be described as maldevelopment. One result is that the impact of science, technology and politics, along with the workings of the economy itself, are inherently exploitative. Every area of human activity marginalizes and burdens both women and nature. There is only one path, Vandana Shiva suggests, to survival and liberation for nature, vomen and men, and that is the ecological path of harmony, sustainability and diversity. She explores the unique place of women in the environment of India, in particular, both as its saviours and as victims of maldevelopment. Her analysis is an innovative statement of the challenge that women in ecology movements are creating and she shows how their efforts constitute a non-violent and humanly inclusive alternative to the dominant paradigm of contemporary scientific and developmental thought.
