Matt Driscoll: Activist Vandana Shiva no fan of Tacoma’s proposed methanol plant

The student had a question, one she’d been itching to pose to the high-profile speaker. A question that was obviously eating at her, and had been for some time.

“What is going to happen in our generation? Are we stuck doing our parents’ jobs? Or do you think there’s going to be something that’s going to change so drastically that our lives are going to be different?” the undergrad at Pacific Lutheran University finally mustered the nerve to ask.

“What’s going to happen to us?” the student pleaded, displaying frustration with the current state of the world and trepidation about an uncertain future.

“What will happen to you is what you make happen,” replied the renowned environmental activist, ecofeminist, philosopher, author and proud “tree-hugger.” (More on that in a moment.)

“There is no fixed future in the making,” she continued in her typically blunt, no-nonsense fashion.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, who was the celebrated keynote speaker last week at PLU’s 7^th Biennial Wang Center Symposium and the recipient of the student’s question, is many things to many people.

In 2010, playwright Eve Ensler, best known for “The Vagina Monologues,” named Shiva one of the “World’s Seven Most Powerful Feminists” in Forbes magazine.

Journalist Bill Moyers has called Shiva “a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds.”

Her detractors, meanwhile, have accused Shiva, whose doctorate is in philosophy, of being a demagogue with an irrational vendetta and an inflated resume.

For Shiva, critics come with the territory. As Moyers alluded to, she’s staked a hardline stance against genetically modified food, a position that’s earned her a number of enemies.

She is also waging a war against globalization, highlighting the impact it has on local economies. Unrepentant capitalists tend to find Shiva a bit prickly.

Love her or hate her, however, and Shiva’s body of activism work speaks for itself — which made her appearance at PLU last week at the Wang Symposium, with its global theme of hope and “resilience,” fitting. Marrying environmentalism and feminism, Shiva has had an impact on a global scale.

For Shiva, it’s a career that goes back to her involvement in the Chipko movement roughly four decades ago, in her home of India.

Loosely translated, in Hindi, “chipko” means to embrace, stick or hug. Facing mass destruction of forests throughout the country, villagers and many young female activists such as Shiva literally joined together and hugged the endangered trees in opposition — an act of resistance that resulted in real-life victories, like a 15-year ban on logging in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

It also resulted in the popularization of the term “tree-hugger,” a badge Shiva still carries with pride.

“It still means a lot to me,” Shiva tells me when I ask her about being called a tree-hugger, a name that can sometimes carry negative connotations. “Because it is where I really woke up to the potential of ordinary people.

“And we stopped the logging.”

Shiva knows a thing or two about grassroots community environmental, in other words, which made her trip to the Tacoma area timely. Here, a growing number of people are rallying against a proposal to build the largest methanol plant in the world.

During a break in her busy schedule Friday, I got a chance to ask Shiva about the proposed plant. I figured her long history as an environmental activist, often fighting against huge, moneyed corporate interests, made her perspective on the situation valuable.

Shiva didn’t hold back.

“There was an earlier capitalism, where small businesses could be created, where workers of factories could buy the cars they made,” Shiva told me. Today, she pointed out, 62 billioniares hold as much wealth as half the world’s population.

Speaking broadly about globalization and the growing divide between rich and poor, Shiva believes Tacoma’s would-be methanol plant is an example of moneyed corporate entities pushing their interests on communities. She also called the proposed plant, despite its billing as a possible pathway to a greener energy future, “basically extending the age of fossil fuels at a time of collapse of that age.”

“Shipping methanol to China to bring plastic back … is about the most insane thing one can do at this point for building the new economy,” she continued. “Renewables are real. They’re the today. And this false assumption that we’ll get there in the future is distracting society and diverting resources from where they should be getting put.”

Predictably, it wasn’t long before Shiva circled back to the importance of community participation in any successful environmental movement and, well, the power of hugging.

“If there’s a site where this methanol thing is to be built, you could do a chipko of the bay,” she told me. “You could just join hands one day, with children and mothers and grandmothers, and young people, to hug that piece of earth and say we will not let a toxic economy be built here.”

Finally, I asked Shiva if she had any advice for Tacoma.

“I never give advice,” she told me.

Fair enough. But perhaps the wisdom she dispelled to that concerned undergrad earlier in the afternoon also applies to Tacoma.

“What will happen to you is what you make happen.”

This story was originally published March 2, 2016 at 2:01 AM with the headline "Matt Driscoll: Activist Vandana Shiva no fan of Tacoma’s proposed methanol plant."