Although 7,644 miles separate the sharp peaks of Dehra Dun, India and the Appalachian mountains, on Monday night Dr. Vandana Shiva connected both places with a speech about sustainability, resources and stewardship.Shiva, one of India’s most prominent activists, is also a physicist, an organic farmer, and the author of more than 20 books in the last 20 years. Although she’s known for speaking about “ecofeminism,” biopiracy” and “biopolitics,” on Monday night in the Culp Auditorium her speech began with one subject: mountains.

“Mountains are important,” Dr. Shiva said. “Mountains are probably the most important ecosystems on the terrestrial level, because they do so much for us. They give us protection, and variation, that leads to biodiversity. The best biodiversity is found in the mountains of the world.”

She recalled coming of age in a time of the Chipko environmental movement in India in 1974. When the British colonized India, they claimed the forests and resources as their own. Because of excessive logging, the Himalayas began to slip, Shiva said, and water began to disappear.

The women who would one day be dubbed “tree-huggers” sought to reclaim their traditional rights to the forests and to preserve the trees from being logged. They encircled the tree trunks to prevent them from being felled.

“The village women know so much more than I do,” Shiva said. “The only difference is that they don’t speak English and they don’t draw graphs … The women know so much about the mountains and the forest, but because they only spoke their local dialect the officials said, ‘Ignorant women.’ “

When she was a student, she volunteered with Chipko. It was her first experience with “environmentalism.”

“You know, they call it environmentalism, which I think is a crazy word,” Shiva said, “because the environment is not out there – we are ecological beings.”

Interconnectedness was a strong theme in her speech Monday night, in front of a nearly full auditorium. She drew parallels most prominently between the issue of mining in the Himalayas and mining in the Appalachians.

In the 1980s, the women of the Chipko movement began to fight limestone mining.

“The women knew mining was about water, it wasn’t about mineral,” Shiva said. “It’s about how the very life of these mountains, and the life they support, is being destroyed.”

Shiva likened the destruction in the Himalayas with the “graveyards” of devastated land left by mountaintop removal coal mining. She spoke of a Supreme Court case in India in which activists fought the idea that a mining company’s revenue should be more important than the environmental consequences. “We were able to show that mountains left to perform their functions in water harvesting and water conservation played a role that was 100 times bigger than the exploitation,” Shiva said.

The study led to a Supreme Court case, and in 1983, the court ruled that if commerce interferes with ecosystem stability, then that commerce must stop because “ecosystems maintain life, and maintaining life is the number one job of the government.”

The Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance’s Alexander Munjal said he was grateful Shiva focused her speech on mountains, and on issues that students at ETSU could relate to directly. Mountaintop removal coal mining was an issue students spoke with Shiva about before her speech, and he said he was grateful that she was able to tailor her speech to address student concerns.

“She took all the things that we talked about and melded them into her speech in a way that was accessible to everyone,” Munjal said. “And in a way that I think people felt like they could potentially work to change the world.”

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