It all started with a red sipper bottle… Stubborn and introverted Benedict has been carrying around his unresolved issues for years and has little ambition in life. The merging of college campuses (and fate) crosses his path with cheerful and unnaturally kind Hazel. One conversation is all it takes for her to carve a special place in your heart. Ignoring popular theories and potential red flags, Hazel decides to find out more about the brooding basketball player. Opposites do attract, but the important question is — can opposites hold onto each other? Narrated from alternating points of view, Benedictions gives you a taste of love, loss, angst, vulnerability, persistence, and, above all, selflessness. Our parents, friends, and partners — we take them for granted on so many occasions and often regret our choices when it’s too late to alter them. Shouldn’t we be cherishing them for as long as they’re around? They are, in the true sense of the term, our benedictions. This is not simply a love story, but the journey of new adults growing up.
It all started with a red sipper bottle… Stubborn and introverted Benedict has been carrying around his unresolved issues for years and has little ambition in life. The merging of college campuses (and fate) crosses his path with cheerful and unnaturally kind Hazel. One conversation is all it takes for her to carve a special place in your heart. Ignoring popular theories and potential red flags, Hazel decides to find out more about the brooding basketball player. Opposites do attract, but the important question is — can opposites hold onto each other? Narrated from alternating points of view, Benedictions gives you a taste of love, loss, angst, vulnerability, persistence, and, above all, selflessness. Our parents, friends, and partners — we take them for granted on so many occasions and often regret our choices when it’s too late to alter them. Shouldn’t we be cherishing them for as long as they’re around? They are, in the true sense of the term, our benedictions. This is not simply a love story, but the journey of new adults growing up.
“All of us who care about the future of Planet Earth must be grateful to Vandana Shiva.”—Jane Goodall, UN Messenger of Peace A powerful new memoir published to coincide with Vandana Shiva’s 70th birthday. Vandana Shiva has been described in many ways: the “Gandhi of Grain,” “a rock star” in the battle against GMOs, and “the most powerful voice” for people of the developing world. For over four decades she has vociferously advocated for diversity, indigenous knowledge, localization, and real democracy; she has been at the forefront of seed saving, food sovereignty, and connecting the dots between the destruction of nature, the polarization of societies, and indiscriminate corporate greed. In Terra Viva, Dr. Shiva shares her most memorable campaigns, alongside some of the world’s most celebrated activists and environmentalists, all working toward a livable planet and healthier democracies. For the very first time, she also recounts the stories of her childhood in post-partition India—the influence of the Himalayan forests she roamed; her parents, who saw no difference in the education of boys and girls at a time when this was not the norm; and the Chipko movement, whose women were “the real custodians of biodiversity-related knowledge.” Throughout, Shiva’s pursuit of a unique intellectual path marrying quantum physics with science, technology, and environmental policy will captivate the reader. Terra Viva is a celebration of a remarkable life and a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges we face moving forward—including those revealed by the COVID crisis, the privatization of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources. “Vandana Shiva is an expert [on the dangers of globalization] whose analysis has helped us understand this situation much more deeply.”—Russell Brand “One of the world’s most prominent radical scientists.”—The Guardian
Inspired by women’s struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, award-winning environmentalist Vandana Shiva shows how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically. She argues that “maldevelopment”—the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected, and interdependent systems that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, and injustice—is dragging the world down a path of self-destruction, threatening survival itself. Shiva articulates how rural Indian women experience and perceive ecological destruction and its causes, and how they have conceived and initiated processes to arrest the destruction of nature and begin its regeneration. Focusing on science and development as patriarchal projects, Staying Alive is a powerfully relevant book that positions women not solely as survivors of the crisis, but as the source of crucial insights and visions to guide our struggle.
Vandana Shiva has established herself as a leading independent thinker and voice for the South in that critically important nexus where questions of development strategy, the environment and the posititon of women in society coincide. In this new volume, she brings together her thinking on the protection of biodiversity, the implications of biotechnology, and the consequences for agriculture of the global pre-eminence of Western-style scientific knowledge. In lucid and accessible fashion, she examines the current threats to the planet's biodiversity and the environmental and human consequences of its erosion and replacement by monocultural production. She shows how the new Biodiversity Convention has been gravely undermined by a mixture of diplomatic dilution during the process of negotiation and Northern hi-tech interests making money out of the new biotechnologies. She explains what these technologies involve and gives examples of their impact in practice. She questions their claims to improving natural species for the good of all and highlights the ethical and environmental problems posed. Underlying her arguments is the view that the North's particular approach to scientific understanding has led to a system of monoculture in agriculture - a model that is not being foisted on the South, displacing its societies' ecologically sounder, indigenous and age-old experiences of truly sustainable food cultivation, forest management and animal husbandry. This rapidly accelerating process of technology and system transfer is impoverishing huge numbers of people, disrupting the social systems that provide them with security and dignity, and will ultimately result in a sterile planet in both North and South, In a policy intervention of potentially great significance, she calls instead for a halt, at international as well as local level, to the aid and market incentives to both large-scale destruction of habitats where biodiversity thrives and the introduction of centralised, homogenous systems of cultivation.
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