It was a trip to an old oak forest in the mountains of Uttaranchal that turned Vandana Shiva’s future around. The environmentalist ? then a student ? was leaving for Canada to do her PhD. Before she left home, she wanted to revisit the woods that her father used to take her to. But the old oak trees, Shiva found, were gone, and a stream that ran through the forest had dried up. Instead, she found an apple orchard.

Shiva got talking to the villagers over a cup of tea. She brought up the subject of the missing trees, and was told by the people, “Yes, but now Chipko has started.” That was when she heard about the Chipko movement ? a struggle that the people of the Garhwal hills had launched to stop the felling of trees.

“I got involved instantly. Twice a year I would return from Canada to India to be a part of the movement. We did padyatras and documented the movement. In a way, we spread the word,” says Shiva. “By then I was also getting concerned about agriculture. Right after Chipko, I set up a seed bank project.”

Shiva did her research and worked in Bangalore for three years at the Indian Institute of Management. Every year, she spent a month working with villagers involved in the Chipko movement. “But I saw that the 11 months of research in an institution would just get buried, while the one month that I was involved with the Chipko movement would initiate huge policy changes,” she says.

So, Shiva decided to start her own “tiny institute” for the people. “For every report that says that there is no problem, there ‘is’ a movement because there ‘is’ a problem. So we thought we’d document the problem and present a solution.”

Today, nearly 30 years on, Shiva has her own centre for protecting farmers’ interests ? the Navdanya project ? a community seed bank project. She also heads an institute in Delhi called the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE). Set up in 1982, the institute is the first independent research organisation in environmental conservation, she says. “The problem was that the very companies that were being blamed for ecological destruction would undertake research and claim that all was well,” she says.

Shiva is a qualified physicist, an internationally renowned ecological activist and a dedicated mother ? and these are all roles she dons with equal ease. She received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in 1993 “for placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse”.

Born in Dehra Dun, she did her bachelors in physics from Chandigarh. “Einstein was my idol, not just because of his brilliance, but also because he was aware of the social responsibility of science,” she says. The interest in physics spread to ecology, and to growing concerns on agriculture. She recalls how a drought in 1984 in south India led her to start working on seed conservation. She was intrigued by the fact that the region had recorded a normal rainfall that year, and yet there was a drought.

“I sent someone to investigate the matter,” she says. "It was traced to the fact that farmers had switched from the old variety of sorghum seeds to the genetically-modified variety. The soil became such that it was unable to retain water, resulting in a drought. This alerted me to the significance of seeds. Some could cause drought, while some could prevent it.”

That was the start of Navdanya. For the first 10 years, Shiva worked with independent resources, but later started accepting funds from NGOs and government grants. “We strongly believe that even while we work with outside funding, we will never give in to any sort of external pressure,” she says.

As for the research foundation that is a non-profit organisation, Shiva keeps it going with her own earnings. “I write books and earn some money. I lecture at various institutes in India and abroad,” she says. “I keep aside enough to support my son and myself and put the rest into the foundation.”

In Shiva’s line of work, for every victory there is a disappointment. But the environmental activist is upbeat. “My dream is that when our work is done, nobody will steal society of its ability to sustain itself.”