Product Description

Climate change will dramatically alter how we live and is already affecting the lives of the world's most vulnerable people. In Soil Not Oil, bestselling author Vandana Shiva connects the food crisis, peak oil, and climate change to show that a world beyond a dependence on fossil fuel and globalization is both possible and necessary. Bold and visionary, Shiva reveals how three crises are inherently linked and that any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial agriculture and industrial biofuels as recipes for ecological and economic disaster, Shivas champion is the small, independent farm. What we need most in a time of changing climates and millions hungry, she argues, are sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood. Calling for a return to local economies and small-scale food production Shiva outlines our remaining options: a market-centred short-term escape for the privileged, which will deepen the crisis for the poor and marginalized, or a people-centred fossil-fuel-free future, which will offer a decent living for all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91440 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
Shiva has devoted her life to fighting for the rights of ordinary people in India. Her fierce intellect and her disarmingly friendly, accessible manner have made her a valuable advocate for people all over the developing world.' --Ms Magazine

The South's best known environmentalist.' --New Internationalist

About the Author
Vandana Shiva is is a world renowned environmental activist and author. Her many books include: ""Staying Alive""; ""Ecofeminism"" and ""Protect or Plunder"" and she has authored over 300 journal and scientific papers. Shiva has served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as non governmental organisations, including the Women's Environment & Development Organization and the Third World Network. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization and in 1993, and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (1993). Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India s leading physicists. She holds a masters degree in the philosophy of science and a Ph.D. in particle physics.

Customer Reviews

Soil not Oil
Vandana Shiva, Indian environmental campaigner, states mankind faces three intertwined crises:
climate change, a food crisis and the end of cheap oil. These crises have been created by the 'corporate interests' of industrialized countries, the World Bank, and the IMF. The solutions proposed by these bodies to deal with the climate change and food crises are based on continuing existing practices that created the crises in the first place- such as production of yet more fossil fuel-based chemical fertilisers, increasing use of biofuels (which "divert food and land from the poor to the non-sustainable energy needs of the rich") and the globalization of agriculture.
The industrialized world depends on capital and energy intensive systems, the energy coming from fossil fuels (like oil). The whole system is unsustainable. We must "power down" from capital intensive energy production to low cost energy production, from centralised economies with labour-displacing energy production to networks of renewable energy driven local communities with livelihood generating energy production, communities working with the living soil to restore soil fertility.
Hence the title of the book: "SOIL NOT OIL".

But Shiva ignores Human Population Growth, surely a major underlying cause of the world's environmental problems. Between 2007 and 2050 the global population is projected by the UN to increase by roughly the combined present day population sizes of India and China, most of this growth being in developing countries like India. Think of the consequent impact on the environment! Is this why Shiva ignores population growth?.

That criticism aside, Shiva produces lots of facts to support all her arguments and her book makes compelling reading. But she sometimes mixes her topics creating mental indigestion.

John Barker, Gaia Watch.

Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed
Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System