There is no figure in the anti-GMO movement that commands more respect than Vandana Shiva. An Indian writer and activist, Shiva has placed herself at the center of the anti-GMO movement through her relentless opposition to biotechnology and her willingness to theorize the objectives of the anti-GMO movement into a broader vision of society.
In order to better understand where she was coming from with all this, I decided to read her book Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. It is her first book, and considered a serious statement on her “ecofeminist” ideals. Upon reading it I was shocked at both the content and the scholarship. It was full of fallacies and creative interpretations of history—not to mention repetitive statements which inflated her message, but did little to fortify it against obvious criticisms. Most surprising though—and probably to the dismay of many western liberals—soon into the book it became evident that Shiva’s “ecofeminism” is a profoundly conservative, if not reactionary, ideology. Once you peel back the layers of her thought, you find that she is a vicious opponent of modernism, suspicious of enlightened humanism, a wily eco-mystic who has more in common with religious fanatics than the progressive activists who are her main audience.
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Read the full, original article: Marco Rosaire Conrad-Rossi on The Eco-Philosophy of Vandana Shiva
