The Seeds of Vandana Shiva

By Karen Lindell

photo: COURTESY NAVDANYA

The bean-shaped thing under- ground, its tiny embryo tucked inside a hard coating, gradually sprouts tiny roots and tender green shoots when exposed to sun and water.

Food and flowers are born. A child’s drawing of a seed and its germination is pretty basic. But a seed, so simple it can be understood by a kindergartner, is also loaded with the weight of the world, entwined in culture, politics, economics, health, and social justice. To Vandana Shiva, seeds are all powerful. “Food is a weapon,” says Shiva, an Indian eco-activist, philosopher, scientist, author, and feminist. “When you control food, you control society. When you control seed, you control life on Earth.” Shiva is the star (although she’d be the last person to use that term) of The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, a documentary about her life and activism produced by Camilla and Jim Becket of Ojai-based Becket Films. With large agricultural companies in control of the world’s food supply, the system is destructive to the Earth and its inhabitants, Shiva believes. Seeds, the foundation of our food supply, should not be in the hands of big business, but rather tended to by traditional small farmers.

Shiva, who admired Einstein growing up in India, has master’s degrees in nuclear physics and the philosophy of science, and a PhD in the philosophy of quantum physics. She has written more than 30 books; speaks at world environmental conferences; founded a research institute and international sustainability movement; leads protests against agricultural companies; advocates for fair trade; and campaigns against GMOs, even preventing the former Monsanto company from sowing its GMO seeds in India.

TIME magazine named her an “environmental hero,” and she’s received numerous awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, which has been called the “alternative Nobel Prize.” Greta Thunberg follows her on Twitter. Why isn’t this eco-activist and thinker more well-known beyond the world of agricultural politics? “That’s our job as documentary filmmakers, to let people know she’s an important figure,” Jim Becket said.

Most people don’t know a lot about the intricate system that brings food to their plates. “The food system is a bit of a wonky subject,” Camilla said, but Shiva “makes it accessible.” The Beckets hope their documentary will do the same.

Shiva said she agreed to be the subject of the fi lm, even though she was originally “very embarrassed about the idea,” in part because she knew Jim Becket from events where she spoke, and was aware of his background and dedication to causes similar to hers. Jim has worked as a human rights lawyer, journalist, author, and filmmaker, producing and directing films about refugees and environmental issues, including for the United Nations. Camilla, born and raised in South Africa, served as an anti-apartheid activist before shifting to book publishing and fi lm production. The couple met in the 1990s in West Hollywood through mutual friends. After they married and had a daughter, they moved to Ojai in 1999 because they didn’t want to raise her in Los Angeles. Ojai “was small, it was beautiful, and we felt like they were our people,” Jim said. They created Becket Films in 2005 with a mission to focus on international environmental issues, social justice, and health. Jim met Shiva about 20 years ago when he was involved in filming environmental symposia that brought religious leaders and scientists together. He didn’t know much about her before he heard her speak, and his first impression was that “amid a group of very distinguished scientists and religious leaders, she more than held her own.” Camilla, equally inspired, said Shiva was “good at connecting dots between culture, economics, society, science, food, and social justice. She had this incredible capacity to distill it in a way that impressed deeply intellectual people and also people who didn’t know much about it.”

The Beckets said they realized Shiva was “an eco-activist rock star,” and after spending more time with her, wanted to tell her life story, tracing her evolution as an activist and showing viewers that one person can make a difference.

“We also wanted to amplify her message, which offers real hope for the future of farming and food,” Camilla said.

In 1982 Shiva created the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and in 1987 founded Navdanya, a movement that supports biodiversity, sustainability, seed saving, fair trade, rural farmers, and “Earth democracy.” (“Navdanya” means “nine seeds” or “new gift” in Hindi.)

The documentary took about eight years to produce. The Beckets, as independent filmmakers, had to constantly seek funding, via both grants and investors, to make the fi lm.

Jim said that although much of the fi lming took place in India, the documentary “really is an Ojai-made fi lm” because most of the people on the fi lmmaking crew were from Ojai.

In addition to interviews with Shiva, the documentary features historical news footage and photos from Shiva’s life and the worldwide environmental movement. The information is combined with gorgeous cinematography of nature: seeds, flowers, trees, grasses, and Indian farmland and landscapes. The Beckets traveled five times to India to fi lm and interview Shiva.

“We love India for its chaos and color,” Camilla said. “What is normal to Indians can be confronting to Westerners until you adapt and learn to go with the flow.”

Navdanya maintains an organic farm and seed bank in India where the Beckets conducted interviews and shot fi lm.

“Vandana’s farm is calm and peaceful, the pace is slower (than other parts of India), more rhythmical and more considered,” Camilla said. “is unbelievably good.” And Camilla called the chai tea there “pretty much the best I’ve ever had (the chai at Farmer and the Cook being a very close second).”

The timeline of Shiva’s life and activism, covering decades, is extensive. But the documentary covers it all in 121 minutes.

Shiva, 69, grew up in the Himalayas, where she learned to love nature by tagging along with her father, who inspected forests as a conservator. She attended school at a convent, and early on became interested in physics. Originally, she wanted to be a nuclear physicist, and earned a master’s degree in the subject, but realized that “science only teaches you how to modify nature without the understanding of what that modification does to the larger world; [it] is not a complete science.” Shiva says in the fi lm that she prefers “knowledge in the whole. If you don’t understand the whole, you don’t understand the patterns. If you don’t understand the interconnections, you really don’t have knowledge.” After earning her PhD, she truly absorbed and applied this epistemological orientation: When she returned to India, her beloved forest had changed due to logging. Streams were gone, trees cut down. She got involved in the nonviolent Chipko movement, run by rural women in India who were the original “tree huggers” (“chipko” is a Hindi word that means to hug or embrace) as they sought to protect forests from logging. “The women activists of Chipko became my professors in biodiversity and ecology,” Shiva said. “They taught me about the relationship between forests, soil and water and women’s sustenance economies.” Meanwhile, quantum theory had taught her four principles that guide her thinking: “Everything is interconnected, everything is potential, everything is

indeterminate, there is no excluded middle; we are inter beings.” Her feminist side flourished in the 1980s after she was invited to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi. A publisher told her no one was connecting issues of women and the environment and suggested she write a book. Shiva published Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, and became a voice for ecofeminism.

A defining moment in her activism took place in 1984, when a gas leak at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed thousands and harmed many more. Shiva realized that the “Green Revolution” was doing more harm than good.

The celebrated Green Revolution (one of its founders won a Nobel Peace Prize) featured the introduction of new varieties of crops, mainly wheat and rice, that multiplied considerably the amount of food available in countries such as Mexico and India. But these new varieties required high amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, which Shiva calls “poisons.” Another turning point in her life occurred when she saw that big corporations like Monsanto were trying to monopolize the world’s seed market. She began to collect and propagate seeds, and shifted her research, activism, and teaching priorities to biodiversity, food, and traditional farming.

She began studying the biotechnology industry, whose companies say their GMO technology can feed the world.

But industrial farming, with its emphasis on pesticides, GMOs, and replacing humans with machines, harms traditional small farmers, Shiva believes.

She visits farmers in India, encouraging and training them to save seeds and shift to organic farming. The seed bank at her farm, she said, is not a “museum.” The goal is to sow every seed saved, and to show how biodiversity and native seeds can feed the world.

Shiva has taken her activism to other countries as well, particularly in South America and Africa, as well as North America and Europe.

The documentary does address Shiva’s critics, who aren’t just leaders in the biotechnology business.

In 2014, The New Yorker featured an article by Michael Specter titled “Seeds of Doubt: An activist’s controversial crusade against genetically modified crops” that went viral.

Among other critiques, the article questioned her total condemnation of GMO foods, noting that the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and other scientific organizations “have all concluded that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food.”

She’s been called “a dangerous fabulist” (Forbes) and criticized for not being a true scientist because her PhD is in philosophy.

But Shiva, and the Beckets, see her background in both philosophy and science as a strong point. “She has a huge and varied deep knowledge of quantum theory and thinking,” Jim said. “Uniting science and philosophy leads to common ground. You can’t have just one or the other.”

So far, the film has been shown at film festivals, and a screening took place in Ojai in October 2021, with Jim attending for a Q-and-A session. Camilla has been in Australia living with the couple’s daughter; the COVID-19 pandemic has kept them from traveling.

After screening The Seeds of Vandana Shiva at film festivals, the Beckets hope to work with distributors to show the documentary at schools and universities, then via mainstream fi lm, TV, and streaming platforms.

The Beckets said Shiva’s greatest gift is her ability to help people see that healing the earth is synonymous with healing themselves.

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder,” Shiva said. “It is good to remember the planet is carrying you.” Even a kindergartner can draw that.

For more information about The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, including possible upcoming screenings, visit vandanashivamovie.com. For information about Becket Films visit

becketfilms.com