Reclaiming the Commons - Vandana Shiva

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Résumé :
Authored by world renowned activist and environmental leader Vandana Shiva, Reclaiming the Commons presents the history of the struggle to defend biodiversity and traditional practices against corporate biopiracy and details efforts to realize legal rights for Mother Earth and achieve the vision of the universal commons and Earth as Family.

Biographie:
Vandana Shiva is a scholar, author, environmental activist, and food sovereignty advocate. Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture, and women's rights, particularly in the Global South, has created fundamental cultural shifts in how the world views these issues. She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, and Jeremy Rifkin), and a prominent figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank and the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an honor known as an Alternative Nobel Prize. She has received numerous other awards and honors for her work including the Save the World award in 2009 and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2010. Shiva has authored more than twenty books and is currently based in Delhi and in Dehradun, Uttaranchal at Navdanya, a community-based women-led organic farm, school, caf?, and farmer-collective founded by Dr. Shiva that promotes agroecology, seed freedom, and a vision of Earth Democracy, seeking justice for the Earth and all living beings....

Sommaire:
Reclaiming the Commons: 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.

Two decades ago, at the height of globalization, there was an attempt by corporations, and the countries which represent their interests, to privatize and enclose our biological and intellectual commons. The result of this effort has become the massive destabilization of communities all over the world with the expansion of patents and intellectual property rights into the domain of biodiversity.

Today, there is a renewed attempt by global corporations to establish a regime in which biological and intellectual resources flow freely from poor countries to rich ones...