Accidental Blogger

(Thanks to Ruchira for the idea).

Dr. Vandana Shiva , world-renowned ecologist, activist, editor, and author of many books, has been in the limelight recently, appearing in an  interview on PBS.

Hailing from the valley of Dehra Dun in Northern India, she grew up
in a family with a love of and close connections to nature, her father
being a forester and her mother of farmer/landowning stock. In her
early days, she gravitated to the study of nuclear physics, eventually
abandoning it for ecology and feminism issues, but not before
completing her Ph.D in quantum physics at the University of Western
Ontario.  She credits her sister, a doctor by profession, with inspiring
her to question the value of nuclear physics  and influencing her switch from physics to ecology and rural
empowerment.

In a nutshell, her manifesto is anti-biopiracy, anti-corporatocracy, anti-GMO, with a long list of publications and awards
to prove it. She is quite intent on reclaiming the credit for
long-maintained traditions to the cultures that generated them, pushing
aside narrow claims to invention and monopoly by giant multinational
companies with deep pockets and resources to fight and win legal
battles that question their claims.

Shiva’s main current project is Navdanya , an outgrowth of the earlier Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology founded in 1982: 

…The main aim of the Navdanya biodiversity conservation
programme is to support local farmers, rescue and conserve crops and
plants that are being pushed to extinction and make them available
through direct marketing.

Navdanya is actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous
knowledge and culture. It has created awareness on the hazards of
genetic negineering(sic), defended people’s knowledge from biopiracy
and food rights in the face of globalisation.

As an activist against ‘biopiracy’, she has been in the vocal forefront of several attempts to protest the patenting of folkloric knowledge by large corporations and universities.

London: You
have spoken out against the patenting of plants and herbs, something
the pharmaceutical industry has been pursuing very aggressively in
recent years.

Shiva: Yes, it’s a phenomenon that started in
the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms,
biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents
on them. For example, pesticides made from the neem tree in India are
patented. There is now a patent restricting the use of an herb called philantis neruri
for curing jaundice. An even more blatant example is the use of
turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and
grandmother does in every home in India. Now the Mississippi Medical
Center claims to have "invented" the capacity of turmeric to heal
wounds.

The patent in
question was challenged by the Indian government and
successfully voided in court in 1997, 2 years after it was issued. The
original patent,
which is so poorly written and sweeping, was a cause celebre to rally the biopiracy opponents.
As it turns out, in many cases, patents are
applied for by researchers eager to pad their resumes with claims to
invention, and this appears to be one of those instances. The University of
Mississippi chose to turn over the rights to the claimants (of Indian
origin, themselves), who  couldn’t defend their sloppy claims in court.
There are several other patents either voided or facing litigation, as with methods to produce novel varieties of American basmati (vigorously opposed by Dr. Shiva, who even participated in a demonstration against Ricetec, the company behind it), neem and wheat flour. Genetically modified varieties, such as Golden Rice, engineered to provide extra Vitamin A, have come under withering criticism and attack by Shiva. In a diatribe against Golden Rice, she opines:

In
my view, Golden Rice is a trap for Asian societies to become dependent on patented
seeds and false promises while giving up the agricultural systems and technologies
that have been based on women’s knowledge and have fed people over millennia.
An analysis of this "Golden Rice" shows that, at best, it will provide
33.3 micrograms of vitamin A per 100 grams of rice instead of 750 micrograms.
This means that you would have to eat about 2.5 kilograms of rice daily to meet
your basic requirements, while normally we eat 30 grams per meal. Who is able
to eat that much rice daily? In India, the government allocates 10 kilograms of
rice per month to an entire family. Thus, to remove vitamin A malnutrition, one
individual would have to eat up the entire family’s ration in three days, in order
to inefficiently do what amaranth or fenugreek or other greens or bananas or mangoes
or pumpkins are currently able to give us. In addition, it will also create protein,
mineral and iron malnutrition.

This seems like a lot of exaggeration for effect, the hallmark of the typical politician.However, it begs the question. Who is her audience and what is the effect of her writings and speeches on them? Accurate or not ,it definitely helps frame the debate about the benefits of technology in terms of real costs to real people  who  bear a disproportionate burden of these attempts to push shiny ‘new technologies’.

Her most recent article is Food, Forests and Fuel
in which she eviscerates the current wisdom of selling ‘carbon credits’
as inequitable and castigates the push for biofuels at the cost of
massive deforestation and disenfranchisement of native populations.

She raises many valid issues and concerns, but her style
is over-the-top, the passion outweighing the facts.

Consider for example the following statement in her article
on Food, Forests and Fuel:

One ton of corn produces
413 liters of ethanol. 35 million gallons of ethanol requires 320
million tons of corn. The US produced 280.2 million tons of corn in
2005. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. made Mexico dependent on U.S.
corn, and destroyed the small farms of Mexico..

It
sounds like a horrendous energy trade-off indeed. The problem
is, the math is not accurate. Checking the numbers used in the above statement, the
‘requires 320 million tons of corn.’ is an overstatement by a factor of  1000.
1 ton of corn -> 413 litres of ethanol = 413/3.875 = 109 gallons.
35 million gallons/109 = approximately 320000 tons of corn.
Another inaccuracy occurs  a few paragraphs later in the same article :

One gallon of ethanol production requires 28,000 kcal. This provides 19,400 kcal of energy. Thus the energy efficiency is — 43%

Calculations show:
energy efficiency= Useful energy output /total Energy input (Source )
Effic. = 19400 kCal/28000kCal = 69%
Of
course, if she had reworded the statement to say that  it took 43% more
energy to create a gallon of ethanol than the ethanol  yielded as energy output, it
would be correct.

It does not behoove someone who trumpets her scientific background and training to fudge the small details, but that may be beside the point- she is aiming for effect, not accuracy.

The message she conveys is something we need to heed, but to me, the
sloppiness of the fact-checking detracts from her message. An interesting analysis by this German professor sums her rhetoric as a classic example of ‘development narrative’:

A development narrative is a normative causal explanation, simplifying the message, and
leading to a proposed action…
The beginning will often refer to a past where people were living in harmony with nature. The middle is a dramatic change which often is induced by external forces, but it may also be population growth or internal political factors. The middle contains a simplified causal explanation of a perceived environmental or developmental disaster. The end is the proposed solution which is based on the simplified explanation, and which therefore is similarly simplified.
The narrative is strongly political although it may not appear to be so. And it may often be
seen as the way a complex message from academic analysis is distorted in media and
transformed into politics and to policy. Development narratives live their own life in the
development business where governmental and non-governmental organisations alike have
become dependent on their maintenance. Local people are often assigned the role of victims who are in need of external assistance to get out of their peril, but may also be villains who need to have their minds enlightened and actions controlled.

It’s nevertheless a remarkable achievement on her part that she has been able to raise the profile for the issues of ecofeminism and living in harmony with nature. She is not afraid to take the bully pulpit and preach her sermon to the world, living up to a favorite Gandhian saying of being" the change that you wish to see in the world".

A scientist par excellence, perhaps not, but a diva of ecofeminism and activism – a resounding yes.