Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author. She is the founder of Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights. She is also the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. During the 1970s, she participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement, whose main participants were women. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as non-governmental organizations, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women's Environment and Development Organization, the Third World Network, and the Asia Pacific People’s Environment Network.

Her writings include Staying Alive, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Monocultures of the Mind, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, as well as over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals.