Staying Alive : Women Ecology and Development

Staying Alive makes clear why our current development paradigm—implemented through enclosure, privatization, corporate piracy, marginalization, and violence against nature and women—is more accurately characterized as what Vandana Shiva calls “maldevelopment.” 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.

Inspired by women’s struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, she goes beyond a statement of women as special victims of the environmental crisis and shows how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically. 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.