Vandana Shiva (born November 5, 1952, Dehra Dun, Uttaranchal [now Uttarakhand], India) is an Indian physicist and social activist. She founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy (RFSTN), an organization devoted to developing sustainable methods of agriculture, in 1982.
Vandana Shiva, the daughter of a forestry official and a farmer, grew up in Dehra Dun, near the foothills of the Himalayas. She received a master’s degree in the philosophy of science from Guelph University, Ontario, in 1976.
The thesis “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory” earned her a doctorate from the department of philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in 1978. She developed an interest in environmentalism during a visit home, where she discovered that a favourite childhood forest had been cleared and a stream drained so that an apple orchard could be....
