Vandana Shiva
If science doesn't benefit the people, then what's the point of doing it? And...if it doesn't, why doesn't it?
Vandana Shiva started out her professional life studying nuclear and theoretical physics......and realized during her PhD program that her country needed her, and too urgently to wait until she was finished with her studies. She says she'd like to come back and finish it someday, when she's 60. "The linear equation that says modern science equals progress and poverty reduction did not apply to India," she said in an interview titled "In the Footsteps of Gandhi" by Scott London. She had to know why. Her father was a forester, and so she'd learned to think about the forest in a certain way from his example. But at the time she was studying for her PhD, the Chipko movement, a grassroots movement of local, rural women from her hometown was growing. 
Vandana learned that these women think of the forest in a completely different way, and that the forest belonged to them in ways that it could never belong to her father. The forest and the streams were their livelihood, their lives, and if the forest was decimated, so were they. It wasn't dollars and cents to them, it was life.So she went to them, the peasant women in the Chipko movement, and studied for them and learned from them. And that is where her mission to put scientific knowledge to the common people's use was born. India and "Progress": What happened to the little guy when Free Trade came to town
The WTO (World Trade Organization) brought new markets (developing nations) to multinational corporations, using vehicles like
NAFTA
and
GATT.
In other words, big companies like Monsanto and Novartis, makers of pesticides and pharmaceuticals, found new customers in China and India. All they had to do was convince the governing body, the WTO, that small-time farmers (
mostly women
in this part of the world) were being "barriers to free trade" by growing their own food and saving seeds......and the governments would send police and armies to arrest them, kill them, burn their fields. Then Monsanto and Novartis and others would swoop in and "help feed the third world", by selling them expensive genetically-engineered seeds which had to be bought every year, thanks to terminator technology, and which required gargantuan amounts of fertilizer and water, and which also required generous application of pesticides/herbicides, depending on the type of GE crop being grown. Guess who provided the pesticides and fertilizer, for a price? Yep, the same mega-corporations. 
Unfortunately, things went wrong, as things sometimes will. Crops failed. Indian farmers, over their heads in debt to the mega-corporations, committed suicide using those very pesticides (See this
PBS article,
and this
NY Times article
for more information on the farmer suicides). Vandana Shiva saw these farmer suicides as a symptom of greed-sickness. Read her analysis of the farmer suicide epidemic here. Her commitment to social justice and the environment, and the links between the two, grew with every suicide and every instance of police brutality against the small farmers.
She went after the mega-corporations with the two weapons she knows best: Research and words. Then a few year later she wrote "Water Wars", on the privatization of water and how "progress" and greed is making scarce (and thus, marketable) the very precious stuff we all need to live...which should be free. They are both well worth getting; I have them both. I bought the first one, read it, and immediately ordered the second; ) How do you get there from here?
It's a long way from nuclear physics, but she's devoted her life to doing what she felt was more important, and she did it for the sake of others; the poor (and often female) in her country. This last picture is of her, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. Walking in the footsteps of Gandhi, doing her best to create a sustainable world...she looks pretty happy, doesn't she?
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