We share the events that took place in celebration of Dr Cynthia’s achievements, and we look to the future to consider the little ways that Australians can help.

Photos

To see the full album of photos from the events click on the links below:

2013 City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture – 6 November at Sydney Town Hall

2013 Sydney Peace Prize Award Ceremony & Gala Dinner – 7 November at MacLaurin Hall, University of Sydney

2013 Cabramatta High Peace Day – 8 November at Cabramatta High School

Media Coverage

See photos in a Photogallery of Mae Tao Clinic taken by Fairfax photographer Brendan Esposito, published on 16 August 2013 in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WA Today, and The Canberra Times.

Watch ‘A moment with Dr Cynthia Maung’, published on the 16th of August 2013 on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Brisbane Times, and WA Today.

Read more in a feature article “Fragile Sanctuary” written by Sharon Bradley in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend, 17 August 2013. Bradley’s article was also published in the The Age, The Canberra Times, The Brisbane Times, WA Today, The Examiner, The Scone Advocate, The Illawara Mercury and The Maitland Mercury.

Read about Dr Maung in article “Peace Prize winner fights for survival of her health clinic” by Sharon Bradley in the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 2013. This article was also published in The Age, The Canberra Times, WA Today, The Scone Advocate and The Examiner.

Read about Dr Maung’s announcement as this year’s Syndey Peace Prize recipient “Humanitarian Doctor to Receive 2013 Sydney Peace Prize” on New Zealand’s independent news website Scoop, 17 August 2013.

Read about the AusAID cuts in “Burmese refugees the forgotten victims of AusAID cuts” by PhD scholar Belinda Thompson, Crikey, 24 October 2013

Listen to an interview with Belinda Thompson, “AusAid cuts hurt Burmese refugees“, produced by Bridget Backhaus, The Wire (radio) 25 October 2013. Audio file.

Read about the Mae Tao Clinic in article “Medical Inspiration” written by David Hirsch, Medical Journal of Australia on 28 October 2013.

Listen to an interview with Stuart Rees on SBS Radio Burmese, produced by Terrell Oung, 2 November 2013.

Read AAP Ron Corben’s article “Aid cuts may weaken Myanmar refugee clinic“, published on 3 November 2013, at news.com.au, in The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Townsville Bulletin, The Mercury, and The Geelong Advertiser.

Read about Dr Maung’s message in ”Burma still fragile: Peace Prize winner” by APP, published on 4 November 2013, on news.com.au, SBS news, in The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Gold Coast Bulletin, The Townsville Bulletin, The Mercury, and The Geelong Advertiser.

Listen to “Karen refugee clinic pioneer wins Sydney Peace Prize“, a radio interview with Sen Lam, Asia-Pacific, Radio Australia, 5 November 2013

Listen to  ”Burmese doctor wins Sydney Peace Prize“, a radio conversation with Phillip Adams and Jane Singleton, Late Night Live, Radio National, 4 November 2013

Read “Myanmar refugee doctor wins Sydney Peace Prize“, on ABC Australian Network News and 936 ABC Hobart News, 5 November 2013

Read about the parallels between Dr Cynthia Maung and Aung San Suu Kyi in Susan Banki’s article “Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Cynthia Maung to receive honorary degrees in Sydney“, published on 7 November 2013 in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times, The Brisbane Times and WA Today.

Read “Dr Cynthia in ‘shock and pain’ after losing Australian funding” on The Democratic Voice of Burma, published on 7 November 2013

Listen to “Cynthia Maung: Sydney Peace Prize Winner“, a radio conversation with Ron Sutton, SBS World News Australia Radio, 8 November 2013. Podcast here.

Read “Burma’s famous ‘refugee’ doctor wins Sydney Peace Prize” in The University of Sydney News, 8 November 2013

Read “The Student Voice: Cabramatta High School”, in Fairfield City Champion, 12 November 2013

Read “Burma’s ‘Refugee’ Doctor Wins Sydney Peace Prize” in Asian Scientist, 13 November 2013

Petition

As of January 2014, the Mae Tao Clinic that Dr Cynthia set up on the Thai Burmese border is set to lose $456,000 of AusAid funding. The small contribution by Australian people saves tens of thousands of lives, providing critical treatment to 45,000 refugees this year alone.

You can help by joining almost 2000 people who have emailed Foreign Minister, The Hon. Julie Bishop MP, asking her to continue the funding.

All you have to do is add your name and email address to the bottom of the letter on this page: http://apheda.good.do/maetaoclinic/email-the-foreign-minister-the-hon-julie-bishop-mp/

The letter reads:

Dear Ms Bishop,

I am writing to request a reversal of the government’s decision to withdraw its funding for the Mae Tao Clinic, a life-saving medical service situated on the Thai Burma border, which is led by this year’s Sydney Peace Prize recipient, Dr Cynthia Maung.

Mae Tao Clinic provides essential healthcare to thousands of displaced and vulnerable people from Burma each year. Last year,  45,000 people – mostly women and children – directly benefited  from Australian government support to Mae Tao Clinic providing life-saving maternal and child health, HIV testing, eye care and training.  The funding to support this clinic will end in December 2013.

I support a continuation of Australian aid to the Mae Tao Clinic.

The displaced and vulnerable people who rely on the clinic mostly come from the ethnic states in Eastern Burma. Despite reforms in Burma, it is not yet safe for these displaced people to return to their villages inside Burma. Accordingly, the Mae Tao Clinic will be a vital health provider for the foreseeable future.

The Australian government’s policy of preparing refugees for return to Burma is highly premature as the conditions required for an organised return are not in place. Conflict continues in Kachin and Shan states where increasing numbers of people are being displaced from their homes and communities, and preliminary ceasefire agreements in other ethnic areas are yet to lead to durable peace. There are also the problems of landmines, land disputes, and lack of services and infrastructure.

Inside Burma there is a desperate lack of access to quality and affordable health care services – particularly in the rural areas populated predominantly by ethnic people. By withdrawing funding from Mae Tao Clinic, the government is risking the health and welfare of the hundreds of thousands that depend, and will continue to depend, on its community-based health services.

I ask that the Australian government recognise the value of Dr Cynthia’s work by continuing to fund the Mae Tao Clinic so that it can continue to address the healthcare needs of the most vulnerable people from Burma.

The post Dr Cynthia Maung’s 2013 Sydney Peace Prize: Photos, Media Coverage & Making a Difference appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

With AusAID withdrawing its funding from a clinic serving Burmese refugees, where will they go now to get the treatment they need? PhD scholar at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy at ANU College of Asia & the Pacific Belinda Thompson reports.

The post 2013 Laureate Dr Cythia Maung says Burmese Refugees the Forgotten Victims of AusAID Cuts appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

In spite of the Rudd resurrection, the refugee debate in Australia is still framed in the odious game of gaining political mileage by demonstrating a certain chauvinist pride in protecting borders.

To that end, to convey that the assessment of refugee status is not tough enough, that too many unworthy people may gain entry to this boat-people-besieged-country, the Foreign Minister Bob Carr claims that as many as 100 per cent of Iranian asylum seekers may only be “economic migrants”.

Yet, in crowded camps on the Thai Burma border, the values of refugees and their supporters suggest that if Australia wants to build a fairer society, much can be learned from refugees – people so easily stigmatised as unwanted and unworthy.

Evidence from Jim Chalmers’ recently published book Glory Daze shows Australians bemoaning their financial lot even when most enjoy the benefits from an affluent economy. On this issue there is a chasm between the values of refugees and their supporters and the priorities deemed important by politicians.

Different attitudes towards entitlement to health and education services are an indication of the width of this chasm.

Kachana, the director of the Burma Children’s Medical Fund, describes her work:

Of course we provide medical services as a right, not just because our patients are poor. We do depend on donors to finance our services but how could you talk to sick people about costs when our responsibility is to meet their needs?

In the Thai border town of Mae Sot, the Mae Tao clinic provides medical services for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrant workers. The director of the clinic, Dr Cynthia Maung, gives me her interpretation of a common good:

During the funding crisis of last year, we were $650,000 short, but we could not afford to charge patients. To combat that crisis, all the staff agreed to take a 20 per cent cut in their meager wages.

A supporting Australian doctor, Kate Bruck, explains:

That reduction was uniform because of an equity in pay policy: same wages for surgeon, nurse, social worker, fund raiser, accountant, librarian or manager of sanitation.

My interpreter and guide in the Ma Lae refugee camp was a 41-year-old Karen named Law La Say, whose salary for his job to train camp residents to be therapists for drug addicts is $250 per annum. To the question, “How do you mange to be so optimistic?”, he answered:

I survived 17 years in the jungle, always on the move from the Burmese army. There was no time to cry. Laughing expresses my feelings. This camp may seem like a prison, but we know one another, we can support one another.

Law La Say’s thoughts are echoed by Naw Nweh, a member of the camp’s Women’s Support Group:

I also lived in the jungle. This camp is better because it is our family home. We know we are refugees but we have hopes for our children, even for repatriation to Burma.

With a shy smile she adds:

But don’t believe what they tell you about the reforms in Burma. The people in charge are the same people who drove us here.

In Australia, in the controversy over the Gonski report, state premiers still calculate the difference between their political fortunes and a commitment to children’s future education. The pugnacious Premier Newman of Queensland seems to favour his short-term political interests over any long-term vision about the quality of education for all children irrespective of their parents’ means.

Karen children also want the opportunities provided by education in good schools. The Bangkok Post journalist Phil Thornton records:

On the Karen side of the border, the schools have no buildings and no desks. In small groups children cluster under the shade of a large teak tree. Their teacher explains, ‘Time is precious for our children. They are desperate to learn but our biggest problem is malaria.’   

A final contrast in values concerns food. While Australian television is saturated with programs on how to cook, how to extend knowledge of nutritious dishes, and even how to lose weight because you have eaten too much, UN reports about Burma identify problems of hunger and food security. In their report Chronic Emergency, the Back Packer Workers Team from Mae Sot concluded that hunger and malnutrition has drastic effects in eastern Burma where one in 10 children will die before age one and more than one in five before their fifth birthday.

A refugee, Naw Doo, explains that she and her two teenage children are used to going without food:

Many times we only have rice and chilli. We eat twice a day. We get sick but that’s normal for people here. Look how thin I am.

In Australia’s election campaign, reference to a common good is unlikely. We are likely to hear derision about asylum seekers, probably talk about the benefits of privatising public hospitals to make them more efficient, and attacks against trade unions for eroding individual freedom.

Ironically, several significant projects on the Thai Burma border are financed by the humanitarian arm of Australia’s trade union movement, Apheda, whose staff value the ideals of a common good. To achieve such a goal, economist Jeffrey Sachs writes that perhaps the best we can do is to appeal to enlightened self-interest because it is everyone’s interest to care for the vulnerable and for the planet.

If the impressive Dr Maung became the campaign manager for Kevin Rudd or for Tony Abbott, she would emphasise why refugees who are thankful for small mercies have so much to teach those in a lucky country who might regard refugees as a threat to their well being.

On the hustings for either party, Dr Maung might start by explaining why health care should be given according to need and not according to an ability to pay:

If you want a healthy society, all people have to be treated as equals. If people are to live and work as equals, the barriers that divide them have to be removed.

Professor Stuart Rees travelled to the Thai Burma border in mid-June on an exploratory mission for the Sydney Peace Foundation. Stuart Rees is Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here.

This article was first published by ABC’s The Drum on 3 July 2013

The post What we can learn from refugees this election? appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

BARSAMIAN: On receiving the Sydney Peace Prize in November 2010, you said, “When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the bigger war is the ongoing war against the Earth. This war has its roots in an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits.” Tell me more about this war.

 This war is being fought, for example, in India across the country, wherever there are minerals, which happens to be where there are forests, which happens to be where tribals live. And it’s fueled by the very investor-speculators who brought down the world economy. Huge money is to be made out of iron ore and bauxite mining. And then to push consumption, to use more and more of these nonrenewable resources.

India until 20 years ago never had landfills. But our laws are now saying they want us to move from 1 kilogram of aluminum use to 15 kilograms per capita of use. Fifteen kilograms multiplied by a billion Indians means that every mountain will have to be mined, every forest will have to be destroyed. This generates war against nature because it devastates ecosystems. But it’s also a war against people, because every human right must be violated, and a war economy, in a real sense, has to be created.

You say that the war against the Earth begins in the mind. How does that happen?

The moment you take an Earth in which systems are mutually supporting, in which forest systems create the weather systems and create the water systems, where the soil gives us the food—a reductionist, mechanistic worldview chops up that interconnected nature. That chopping up, reductionism, is the beginning of the war in the mind.

And this “eco-imperialism,” as you call it, has its roots—are we talking a couple of hundred years now?

All of this was a synergy between colonialism, a conquest of the South, and defining the people of the South as if we weren’t fully human. A conquest of nature through redefining nature as dead, inert, manipulable matter. And it was a conquest over the feminine aspect of every society. The witch hunts were part of it in America and in Europe because what was being hunted was not women who were witches, but holistic knowledge and expertise by women. This triple colonization is really only a few hundred years old, and it has reached its limits. But those who gain from it, whether its power or its money would like to push that limit a little longer by commodifying every aspect of nature.

There are multiple crises facing the planet. They’re fairly obvious, and are interlinked: climate change, food, and the economic/political crisis. The interconnections have actually just intensified in the last two years.

We see the financial crisis that created the unraveling of the economy. Ordinary, hard-working people are paying the price, sometimes with their lives. The financial crisis, then, is linked to the energy crisis, because a fossil fuel-driven economy can only carry on its path of growth by converting the living earth into oil rather than finding an alternative economy based on nonrenewables, and they would like to take renewables and turn them into nonrenewables. The biofuel grab is part of it. And that biofuel grab is leading to the land grab in Africa. All of this is also creating the climate-induced catastrophes, which are then feeding back into food insecurity. So 2010 saw forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, flooding and then cyclones in Australia—after about six years of an intensive drought.

Meantime, that same financial gambling game is speculating on food as a commodity, driving up food prices, which is a big issue in Indian politics. Recently, nine opposition parties came together to fight the price rise. We are tied up in these interconnections of a vicious cycle, where each crisis feeds the other crisis. And bio-imperialists, who want to use the planet’s resources for their own gain and extension of their power, now use the crisis they have created to say, “Okay, let’s grab Africa. Let’s grab the farmlands of India. Let’s grab the last mineral. Let’s commodify every bit of food and grain on this planet,” never answering the question, “What happens to 80 percent of humanity?”

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization said food prices in 2010 were the highest in history.

In 2008 there was a spike in food prices and 2010 has gone beyond that because 2010 has been a combination of real scarcity due to climate catastrophes, along with the artificial scarcity created by speculation. And when you have two forces driving prices upwards, and they are structural, that is why any government who says, “Oh, next month the weather will be fine” or “the harvest will come,” is not realizing two things. One, industrial globalized agriculture as well as other fossil-fuel-driven systems have given us climate chaos. It’s not a future issue, it’s not a future debate of what will happen in 100 years. People are dying today. The second thing they don’t realize is politicians still try and respond to these crises as if they’re living in isolated nation states, when they themselves have signed a WTO agreement interlinking the global food system, which means a problem in one part of the world gets transmitted to the rest of the world—whether it be a speculation or climate damage.

You mentioned Australia—drought, floods, cyclones. Is extreme weather an anomaly or is it part of a pattern we’re going to see more of?

Climate chaos, as I call it, is a pattern. That’s why I am reluctant to use the words “global warming,” in which case you get one snowstorm and the climate skeptics say, “Oh, this is global cooling? Didn’t we tell you?” As if all the time the temperature will be rising everywhere rather than what the climate scientists say, average temperatures across the planet are rising.

The second is, when you talk “climate change,” you get other climate skeptics saying, “Oh, we just adapt to it. And Swedish beaches will become like the tropics, so isn’t that wonderful?” Or “England will get warmer and will now grow grapes and will become wine country.” That kind of stupidity does not take into account that the same England also gets a snowstorm and gets stalled for two weeks because they are not a heavy snow country and have none of the equipment to clean up Heathrow airport.

A large number of Americans seriously doubt there is such a thing as global warming and climate change. You’ve studied the issue, you’re a scientist. Is the science solid?

There are reasons why we have to take climate science seriously. It’s not just one or two scientists or single discipline. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, is a multidisciplinary group of 2,500 scientists. Never in the history of humanity have 2,500 scientists, trained in different aspects of the environment, resources, the planet, the climate, the atmosphere, put together their collective expertise from 1988 onwards.
Every ecosystem with an additional burden will have a different behavior. A river with too much pollution becomes a dead river. An atmosphere with too much pollution will start having different patterns, too much snow where there should be no snow, and no rain where there should be rain. All of this unpredictability needs to be seen as a phenomenon that people are living through.

Mining issues are key in India. There is the Niyamgiri Mountain issue in Orissa in eastern India. You’ve been there. Talk about that and why it is significant and the push-back and resistance from the people. They talk of something called the India story. And the India story is a high-growth story built on the outsourcing of software, creating Silicon Valleys in Bangalore. But the untold part of the India story is the outsourcing of pollution and resource extraction. So while most aluminum and steel manufacturing has shut down in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, the consumption of all of these items is being pushed even further with everything that makes this global economy run. Aluminum is vital to it. Bauxite is the raw material for aluminum.

Vedanta, a UK-based company owned by an Indian, wanted to mine a mountain called Niyamgiri, which means the mountain that upholds the sacred law. Niyam means the law of the universe and giri means mountain. The most ancient tribes of the Dongria Kondh have been living on this mountain since the beginning of their own memory. They’ve resisted the bauxite mining. In spite of it, Vedanta managed to set up a refining plant and a smelter in the valley and further downstream. Because of the protests, they were never able to get to the bauxite, even though the courts and the Ministry of Environment were manipulated.

The interesting thing is there is another plant in Orissa which is called Posco. It is a Korean steel plant, but our research shows it’s actually owned by Wall Street. The majority of shares are owned by Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. The World Bank forced the privatization of this plant in the Southeast Asia financial crisis. They want 4,000 acres of the coast with a captive port and parkland. Then, of course, they want mines. Most of the iron ore they mine will go straight out to Korea and China. Some will be processed in an export zone, also for export.
Tell me how rivers can be sold.

Both aluminum and steel making are highly energy-intensive and resource-intensive processes. They are extremely water-intensive processes. Entire rivers are being rerouted for steel and aluminum making. The River Shivnath in Chhattisgarh is flowing through tribal areas. We use our rivers to go down and wash our clothes, to bathe. Our buffalos and our cows go to the river. The river recharges all of the groundwater around it. The River Shivnath, 22 kilometers of it was privatized, to bring water to Jindal’s steel plant. In order to privatize it, people could not access the river water, they could not access the groundwater in their own fields and wells.

It’s very much like the privatization of water in Bolivia where, when Bechtel faced resistance, they said, “You can’t have this water on your roof, you can’t take water in your well.” And the Bolivian people said, “So you now own the rain and you own the groundwater?” That’s what the people of Chhattisgarh said. That project had to be cancelled. This was a direct legal transfer of a river to a private company.

De facto privatization is happening everywhere. When you look at Vedanta, their aluminum factory has totally rerouted the Indravati River that flows southward, moved it northward, had it dropped into a river called Hati Tel River to then service this huge aluminum smelter. The Tatas, when they expanded their Jamshedpur factory, put dams on two tributaries of Suvernarekha River, and that was 100 percent water for Jamshedpur. We fought the privatization of Delhi water, which was going to bring water up into the Himalaya from the Tehri Dam, and Suez was going to then sell it at 10 times the normal price that we pay for water. So whether it’s for a city or a steel plant, an aluminum plant, they’re such thirsty projects that they have to steal water from people and from nature.

But this other story of the emerging economy, the giant with 9 percent growth, is a joint construction of the Indian elite and the global elite. The global elite, of course, spun the globalization story. The global elite need the success of the model of globalization, of free trade, of corporate-driven economies. They have to constantly sell that. They first tried to sell it through the Southeast Asian countries. You remember there was a period when the East Asian tigers and the dragons were the poster children of globalization. In 1997 that collapsed. The West was its own poster child. After 2008 that collapsed. So if that fake story of globalization and corporate control has to continue, they’ve got to have some poster child. And they’re hanging desperately to the India of today, with its rising billionaires, but constantly more and more impoverished people. We have some of the richest people in the world today: the Ambani brothers, the Mittals, and Anil Agarwal sitting in England. They are using the India story as a subcomponent of the globalization story.

But nobody tells the story that this has pushed half of Indian children to severe malnutrition, that every fourth Indian is today hungry. That the land wars are being fought between the poor, who want to defend their quarter-acre land, against the richest of these people, who are engaged in a big land grab.

You also talk about agriculture and militarized language.

The Copenhagen Treaty agreement on climate change should have brought us to the next level of legally binding agreements to bring down emissions because the Kyoto Protocol period was running out, climate catastrophes were getting worse, and something needed to be done. Instead, President Obama came, bullied four other countries—the so-called rising powers of China, India, South Africa, Brazil—and signed this Copenhagen Accord, which is a non-accord in terms of legally binding commitments.

The world is waiting for another paradigm, another worldview, another way of centering our lives. The West needs it because their economies are collapsing. The South needs it to prevent their economies from being totally wiped out, because I believe it’s cultures that define their rights through the Earth that have the strongest struggle even for their own rights. I’ve seen it with every land movement.

Is there a connection between capitalism and environmental degradation?

There is a very intimate connection with the rise of capitalism and the plunder of nature, because capitalism located wealth in capital, which is just a construct. It’s in human imagination. And it gave power to those who owned capital to then start owning the resources of the Earth. The privatization of rivers, the privatization and patenting of seeds (the basis of my work in Navdanya) the privatization of the atmosphere for emissions trading, all of these privatizations are defending the rights of capital and allowing capital to expand its control, because capital is an abstract.
Given the urgency, it seems to me individuals are limited in what they can do and that collective action is required.

Individuals acting consciously as members of society and collectives is what we need. The two things we need that everyone can do are, first, a shift in the mind. If these wars are wars in the mind, then the place to make peace is in the mind, peace with nature and peace with each other. Creating living economies, a movement we’ve tried to build through Navdanya here, local living economies, but a movement that’s very strong in the U.S., is something people can start engaging in today. If they don’t, they will have nowhere to turn to. Our calculations show that even though global corporations have the power to reach the last resource, they only have the power to generate employment for 3 percent of humanity. You can’t have a system where 100 percent of resources are owned by probably 15 to 20 corporations, and 3 percent are hired for them to do the stealing of the planetary wealth. So you need to have other ways for people to look after themselves.

You cannot do that individually. You can begin the shift in your mind, but framing other economies and framing other ways of structuring society has to be a collective enterprise, because what was killed by the privatization of the economy was a very collective identity, the identity that we are interconnected. And Margaret Thatcher saying, “There is no society, there is only individuals,” is part of that market individualism of atomizing us, making us lonely, isolating, and telling us we have nowhere to turn.

Just like Evo Morales removed the censorship on the rights of Mother Earth, India is a civilization based on the recognition of the Earth as a living system, as our living support, and peace with the Earth as our duty.

This ancient prayer has always been my inspiration. It is from the Bhoomi Sutra of the Athara Veda. And it says:

May there be peace with space and the skies,
Peace with the atmosphere,
Peace with the waters.
May there be peace with the earth.
May there be peace with the herbs, the plants, the trees.
May all the divine beings pervade peace.
May the peace that pervades all creation
Be with you.

First published on http://www.zcommunications.org/war-on-the-earth-by-david-barsamian

The post War on the Earth: An interview with 2010 Laureate Dr Vandana Shiva on planetary crises appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

Shiva, who grew up in the Himalayan foothills, spent subsequent university breaks as a volunteer with the Chipko movement, a local women’s group famous for hugging trees to protect them from being felled. The forest women taught her ”practical ecology” and inspired a change of direction. Despite training as a nuclear physicist at an elite Mumbai research reactor and then gaining a PhD in quantum physics from a top overseas university, Shiva switched her attention to environmental activism.

”I went from nuclear science to quantum physics and then to being a natural philosopher,” she says. ”I would describe my vocation as a combination of natural philosopher – the old, old notion of trying to understand nature in all its complexity, which is the original form of science – and as a protector of the earth.”

Shiva’s attempts to protect the earth have brought her into regular conflict with big corporations, especially those patenting genetically engineered seeds.

Shiva, 57, says this ”bio-piracy” is an attempt to hijack the global food supply. In response, she sued one of the seed firms, Monsanto, and also founded Navdanya, a national network of ”seed savers” and organic farmers. It has helped set up 55 community seed banks to preserve traditional seeds and trained more than half a million farmers in sustainable agriculture. Those wanting to learn about organic farming can sign up at the Bija Vidyapeeth or School of the Seed.

”For me seed saving became a way of defending freedom in the face of patents and trade rules which to me sounded like a totalitarian regime,” says Shiva. ”We can’t have freedom if we don’t have seed freedom.”

Shiva met The Age at an organic cafe run by Navdanya inside a popular New Delhi crafts market. On the menu were dishes made from ”forgotten” crops such as amaranth, jhangora and ragi. Navdanya promotes the use of little-known pulses and grains in a bid to promote biodiversity.

”So many foods have gone out of use and often they are very nutritious and good for conservation,” she says.

Shiva’s campaign to save traditional seed varieties is one reason she will receive the Sydney Peace Prize on Thursday. The jury awarded it to her for ”courageous leadership of movements for social justice – the empowerment of women in developing countries, advocacy of the human rights of small farming communities and for her scientific analysis of environmental sustainability”.

Shiva grew up in Dehra Dun, a bustling town in the foothills of the central Himalayas. She says her parents were feminists, even though the word didn’t exist at the time. ”That was their thinking and practice and I think it seeped into us,” says Shiva. ”My inspiration for life is our parents; so many of the values we have come from them … they told us that if you live by your conscience there is no reason to be afraid. That’s how I have been able to take on the likes of Monsanto, never having an equation of fear in my head to assess what I should and should not do.”

Social activism runs in the Shiva family. Her sister Mira is a medical doctor and well-known Indian health activist, and her brother, a retired air force pilot, does voluntary work for Navdanya. Shiva also has an adult son named Kartikeya who is a photographer in Mumbai.

The Shiva sisters have recently campaigned jointly on some issues including GM food. ”Even though we have walked very different paths – my sister in health and me in agriculture – we now work very closely together,” says Shiva.

Shiva’s mother, Jagbir Kaur, was a committed Gandhian. She once visited the mahatma when he was jailed in Pune and insisted that the family wear clothes made of locally spun cotton. Before her seventh birthday, Shiva asked for a nylon dress in a popular style. Her mother told her that buying a nylon garment would help ”get the next Mercedes for a millionaire” but buying one made from locally spun cotton would ”provide the next meal” in the house of a poor woman. ”She asked me to make a choice – it was my first lesson in political economy.”

Shiva also draws heavily on Gandhian philosophy to guide her work. She says he showed that people have ”the freedom to say no and the duty not to co-operate with unjust laws”.

What Gandhi did with salt ”we do with seeds” says Shiva in a reference to the mahatma’s famous salt march of the 1930s that marked the beginning of the end of British rule in India. ”I draw a lot of energy from my work because it’s what my conscience is telling me to do,” she says. ”If you do the right thing, you don’t deplete yourself.”

Shiva’s work with the women of Chipko shaped her first book, Staying Alive, which was published in 1988 to international acclaim. It drew parallels between the oppression of rural women and environmental destruction in India and established Shiva’s reputation as a leading eco-feminist thinker. She later co-wrote a book called Ecofeminism with sociologist Maria Mies. Shiva describes eco-feminism as a ”philosophy of inclusion” and is critical of what she calls a ”catch-up model” of feminism where women are in a battle to simply mimic men.

”Combining nature’s liberation and women’s liberation shows a different path that is good for all beings on earth,” she says. ”Eco-feminism is about giving both nature and women their rightful place.”

Shiva is also well known for her criticism of the ”green revolution”. Many in India argue the fertilisers, pesticides and genetic engineering that combined to create the green revolution rescued the country from regular famines and a reliance on food imports.

However, Shiva believes high-tech agriculture is only a short-term solution that will ultimately destroy farmers and the land. She warns that the threat of violent conflict over basic resources, especially water, is increasing thanks to the subcontinent’s unsustainable farming practices.

”When you run out of water it’s a recipe for killing,” she says. ”Water really makes people desperate.”

She also rejects orthodox economic analysis that says India must prepare for the massive migration of rural workers to the city as the country industrialises.

”If you take people and climate change seriously it’s just the wrong way to go,” she says. Shiva estimates that about 40 per cent of the world’s climate problem ”is related to industrial, globalised agriculture”. Therefore, she argues, 40 per cent of the solution requires labour-intensive forms of ecologically sustainable farming.

Shiva is disappointed that the debate about climate change is too often limited to temperature increases. She claims there is clear evidence that glaciers in the Himalayas are receding, and snowfall dwindling. She also believes India is experiencing more extreme weather.

”Focusing on temperature alone is not good enough. I never talk global warming, I talk about climate chaos,” she says.

Shiva has written a swag of books with gloomy titles including The Violence of Green Revolution, Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, and Water Wars: Privatisation, Pollution and Profit. But she is surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for change.

”There are huge reasons for hope,” she says. She cites many successful protests, including one that recently stopped plans to privatise water in Delhi, as proof that non-violent resistance can work. ”If you look at the negative things that have been stopped there’s reason for hope. But even more importantly, look at all the seeds that have been saved, the half a million farmers who have been trained in organic, and the growth in alternative movements all saying we will not go down the industrial path.”

Dr Vandana Shiva is the recipient of the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize. She will speak at a free Melbourne event next Friday, 6.15pm, at Collins Street Baptist Church. Bookings via wheelercentre.com

Written by Matt Wade, this article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on October 30, 2010. 

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