Vandana Shiva

Nominated by: Guy Fisher

For over three decades, Dr. Vandana Shiva has been tirelessly promoting the ideals of sustainability and protecting the rights of women, farmers, and others marginalized by modern society.

Shiva is perhaps best known for her efforts to promote organic, community-based farming, particularly in the Indian countryside, where corporate-driven farming methods have caused such severe declines in income for so many family farmers that more than 150,000 have committed suicide in recent years.

In 2007, Shiva's Navdayana group continued its efforts to provide indigenous seeds to tens of thousands of farmers and widows of suicide victims to help them revive their agriculture. The farmers took a pledge to conserve, rejuvenate, and protect the diversity of their foods and farming.

In 2007, Shiva also was a leader in the movement to oppose corporate-driven ways of life that are fueling climate change.

"Let us together build an Earth family. Let us in our diversity create an Earth democracy."

In a document prepared for the UN climate change conference in December, she called out the international food company Cargill for promoting the deforestation of the Amazon and the vitally important peat lands of Indonesia, and she warned that "Wal-Mart's model of long distance centralized trade is a recipe for increasing the carbon dioxide burden in the atmosphere."

Shiva also used her global notoriety to emphasize the dangers of a headlong rush to replace oil with biofuels, or fuels derived from corn, soya, and other common food crops. This "false solution" to climate change, she charged, is being promoted by world leaders "at the expense of the satisfaction of human needs, with poor people priced out of the food market."

"There are few people who are doing more to practically demonstrate the value of traditional organic and biodiverse farming methods as a solution to global climate change and the corporate takeover of our food systems, whilst vigorously lobbying for change at all levels," said Guy Fisher in his nomination letter for Shiva.

Says Shiva: "The defence of nature's rights and people's rights have come together for me in Earth Democracy -- the democracy of all life on Earth, a living democracy which supports and is supported by living culture and living economies.

"Let us together build an Earth family. Let us in our diversity create an Earth democracy."

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THE OTHER FINALISTS...

Vicky Tauli-Corpuz & the world's indigenous rights campaigners

Betty Makoni

Rajendra Pachauri & the scientific community and governments contributing to the IPCC

Justine Masika Bihamba & Eve Ensler

Burma's Monks

Molly Melching & the women of Senegal and West Africa

Vandana Shiva

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