Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, and the Politics of Care

My first encounter with the concept of ecofeminism was during my bachelor’s degree, in an English literature elective. Until then, my ideas of feminism, environmental questions, and scientific debates sat in separate compartments—each treated as though it belonged to a different intellectual world. But the day we read Vandana Shiva’s work as part of the English coursework, ecofeminism offered a language that pulled these strands together. It argued that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women were not distinct injustices but expressions of the same systems of power—structures built on extraction, hierarchy, and the devaluation of labour and knowledge.

As I read and wrote more about gender, politics, and science over the years, the depth of those connections became clearer. Ecofeminism did not merely place women and the environment side by side; it revealed how deeply intertwined our social, political, ecological, and scientific worlds are. What happens to land is inseparable from what happens to communities, especially women, and the categories we are taught to keep apart often conceal how power actually functions. That sense of interconnectedness is reflected in the arc of Vandana Shiva’s own life.

Vandana Shiva, from documentary film Vandana Shiva's seeds.

Born in 1952 in Dehradun to a father who worked in the forest department and a mother who left her teaching career to farm, Shiva grew up amid Himalayan forests and the everyday labour of rural women. Her academic journey began in physics before moving toward deeper questions about science itself. She earned an MPhil in the philosophy of science and completed her PhD at the University of Western Ontario. Her doctoral dissertation, Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory, was a technical philosophical study of foundational questions in quantum mechanics, reflecting her rigorous engagement with the structure of scientific knowledge.

When Shiva returned to India in the late 1970s, the country was undergoing rapid transformation. The Green Revolution although were efficient in eradicating famine in India, had also reshaped agriculture through chemical-intensive practices and hybrid seeds; forests were being commercialized; and rural resistance movements were emerging. Shiva was drawn into these struggles, particularly through the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, where women protected forests with their bodies, asserting that community survival was inseparable from ecological health. Her scientific background, combined with what she witnessed in villages, sharpened her questions about development like who benefits from it, and whose knowledge is erased in its name. Central to her critique is capitalism’s narrow definition of value. Labour associated with care of children, the elderly, land, seeds, and ecosystems, is routinely excluded from economic measures like GDP, despite being essential to life itself.

In the decades that followed, her work expanded across issues that might appear disparate - seed sovereignty, biodiversity, industrial agriculture, intellectual property rights, and globalisation - but she approached them as interconnected outcomes of the same logic of domination. She coins the term "Earth Democracy" to establish this interconnected ecological ethics. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology to examine the ecological and social impacts of development. She argued consistently that when seeds are patented, farmers lose autonomy; when biodiversity is replaced by monocultures, ecosystems weaken and women’s agricultural knowledge is erased; when traditional practices are dismissed, it is because they resist extractive economic models. In 1991, she established Navdanya, a movement that created community seed banks, promoted organic farming, and worked to protect India’s biodiversity. Through this work, Shiva became a leading voice against corporate control of agriculture and an advocate for ecological sustainability rooted in local and Indigenous knowledge systems. As she has written, “Diversity is the law of life,” a principle she has defended against monocultures of both crop and thought.

What makes her work compelling is not only its scope but its insistence on linking ecology with care, labour, and justice. She frames care not as sentiment but as responsibility, describing planetary citizenship as an act of what she calls “compassionate courage.” Her activism repeatedly foregrounds the invisible labour that sustains life and the systems that depend upon it.
At the same time, Shiva’s work has attracted sustained criticism. She has been challenged for overstating claims, simplifying scientific debates, and occasionally privileging anecdotal evidence over empirical precision. Critics have also accused her of romanticising traditional communities and environmental practices, flattening internal hierarchies and contradictions. Others argue that it is the language of ecofeminism, rooted in care and relationality, sits uneasily within a patriarchal culture of knowledge that values detachment and control.

Shiva’s legacy lies not in offering neat solutions but in insisting on difficult questions. She reminds us that ecological justice cannot be separated from social justice, and that protecting the earth is inseparable from protecting the communities who depend on it. Ecofeminism opened that way of seeing for me; Vandana Shiva gave it form and urgency, as she writes, “The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for."

Written by Janaky Sunil, edited by Parvathy Ramachandran

References:

1. Shiva, V. (2016). Development, ecology and women. In Paradigms in Economic Development (pp. 243-253). Routledge.
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPQdYOb8fYg
3. https://fukuoka-prize.org/en/laureates/detail/4b4f924e-050c-4e8b-9091-072381bf333d
4. https://foodpolicyforthought.com/2013/06/22/vandana-shiva-a-figure-as-inspirational-as-controversial/
5. https://ia800301.us.archive.org/7/items/StayingAlive-English-VandanaShiva/Vandana-shiva-stayingAlive.pdf

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