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"Reclaiming the Commons: In Defense of Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge and the Rights of Mother Earth lays out the scientific, legal, political, and cultural struggle to defend the sovereignty of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Corporate war on nature and people through patents and corporate Intellectual Property Rights has unleashed an epidemic of biopiracy resulting in important legal battles fighting efforts to patent the rights to many plants, including basmati, neem, and wheat. The author presents details of the specific attempts made by corporations to secure these patents and the legal actions taken to fight them. This book goes beyond the legal struggle to position the necessary solutions to corporate control including explorations of the Rights of Nature and proposing a framework for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. It is the first detailed legal history of the international and national laws related to biodiversity and Intellectual Property Rights"--

Introduction: Converting abundance into scarcity -- Water rights: the state, the market, the community -- Climate change and the water crisis -- The colonization of rivers: dams and water wars -- The World Bank, the WTO, and corporate control over water -- Food and water -- Converting scarcity into abundance -- The sacred waters.

The Green Revolution has been heralded as a political and technological achievement unprecedented in human history. Yet in the decades that have followed it, this supposedly nonviolent revolution has left lands ravaged by violence and ecological scarcity. A dedicated empiricist, Vandana Shiva takes a magnifying glass to the effects of the Green Revolution in India, examining the devastating effects of monoculture and commercial agriculture and revealing the nuanced relationship between ecological destruction and poverty. In this classic work, the influential activist and scholar also looks to the future as she examines new developments in gene technology

For the farmer, the seed is not merely the source of future plants and food; it is a vehicle through which culture and history can be preserved and spread to future generations. For centuries, farmers have evolved crops and produced an incredible diversity of plants that provide life-sustaining nutrition. In India alone, the ingenuity of farmers has produced over 200,000 varieties of rice, many of which now line store shelves around the world. This productive tradition, however, is under attack as globalized, corporate regimes increasingly exploit intellectual property laws to annex these sustaining seeds and remove them from the public sphere. In Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains it. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered foods. The preeminent agricultural activist and scientist of a generation, Shiva implores the farmers and consumers of the world to make a united stand against the genetically modified crops and untenable farming practices that endanger the seeds and plants that give us life

"Presents a clear case for why our current development paradigm is more accurately characterized as what Vandana Shiva calls 'maldevelopment'--the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected and interdependent systems that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, violence, and injustice that is dragging the world down a path of self-destruction, threatening survival itself"--

It is 20 years since environmental issues were first put on the international agenda at the Stockholm Conference, and concern for planetary survival has shifted from desertification to acid rain to ozone depletion to biodiversity. The official responses to all the various crises, however, has largely been one of offering technological and managerial 'fixes,' which often fail to address or solve the basic ecological issues.Genuine, viable improvements can only be implemented at ground level, by those most strongly affected by the problem. Because of their location 'on the fringes,' and their tr