A progressive interview with Vandana Shiva.

• Position: Interview

Vandana Shiva is an eco-feminist and author based in India.

Q: How did you get interested in the environment?

Vandana Shiva: My father was a forest conservator in the Himalayas, and my mom had become a refugee during India's partition and opted to become a farmer. I couldn't imagine life without the land of the forests. Bur it was the mid-1970s that really made me consciously committed. I'd gone back to my favorite places before heading off to Canada to get my physics Ph.D. I just wanted to walk in my favorite forests, and swim in my favorite rivers. Bur the forests were gone and the rivers were gone.

Q: What had happened to them?

Shiva: The forest lands had been cut down to make apple orchards, and the apple orchards destroyed the oak forests, which were the source of water. Because of this absolute shock of losing these forests and rivers, I was chatting around, and the villagers started to talk about a new movement that had started. It was called "chipko," which means to hug. The women of my region were saying you'd have to cut us up before you cut the trees because we're going to hug the trees.

Q: Was that activism by women unusual?

Shiva: I don't think it is. Look at the history of contemporary ecological movements: Bhopal, the women of Bhopal, held that movement together. Who shut Coca-Cola down in Kerala? It was the women. No matter where you look, it's the women who stick out their necks because of the division of labor. They're the ones who look after the children and get the food and the water, which are devalued in the market. But women respond very strongly to the loss of living resources--water disappearing, forests disappearing, soil drying up, seeds disappearing.

Q: So you joined their movement?

Shiva: Yes, I became a volunteer. I religiously did my physics, which was my passion and I still have nostalgia for, but every holiday I was with the women of Chipko, twice a year. And I would do the work I could do. The women had never gone to school. They didn't know how to read and write. But they knew everything about the forest. So they became my teachers about forestry and ecology. And I became their scribe, translating their local language and Hindi into English and into graphs. It's amazing: The minute you put something into a graph it has more meaning and weight than all the experience of the people of the world. I had a debate with a very famous economist once. He said what you're talking about is just "anecdotes." I...