Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development

A feminist and environmental justice classic, with a new introduction by Vandana Shiva

Extraordinary in the ease of its global and historical scopes and the clarity of its arguments.” Women’s Review of Books

Since at least the days of Francis Bacon, the dominant view in the western world has framed technological and economic development as progress and championed that same narrow vision of progress” as inherently benevolent and inevitable. Multinational corporations, the IMF and World Bank, national governments, and humanitarian organizations regularly promote development as the only road to securitybut those being developed” know otherwise.

Staying Alive makes clear why this development paradigmimplemented through enclosure, privatization, corporate piracy, marginalization, and violenceis more accurately characterized as maldevelopment, and how it is inexorably dragging the world down a path of self-destruction. Prescient and fiercely relevant, this pioneering work illuminates how women, more than surviving the crises brought on by development, are creating and safeguarding vital sources of knowledge and vision on not only how to stay alive, but why we should in the first place.

Vandana Shiva is one of the world’s most prominent radical scientistsin Staying Alive she defines the links between ecological crises, colonialism, and the oppression of women.” Guardian

A world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, Vandana Shiva is the author of many books, including Stolen Harvest, Earth Democracy, and Soil Not Oil. She is the founder of Navdanya and a leader in the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) and the Slow Food movement.