Close to Home is a collection of essays edited by Vandana Shiva, published in the mid-1990s, that gathers activists, researchers and organisers writing on women, ecology and health across Asia and the United States. It grew out of a seminar held in Bangalore in July 1991, organised by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and Shiva’s own research foundation, and it moves between case studies — Thai forests and AIDS, toxic waste in California, sex-selection clinics in India, Bhopal, peasant movements in the Philippines and India, seed patents — rather than building a single continuous argument. The contributors write from inside the struggles they describe, and the book’s centre of gravity is the claim that environmental damage and human health are one subject, and that women are usually the first to know it.
The Argument That Connects the Essays
Shiva’s introduction sets the terms. Two decades after the Stockholm conference put “the environment” on the international agenda, official responses had become technological and managerial fixes that often created fresh problems, while the Rio summit of 1992 sorted the world into a polluting South and a problem-solving North. Against that, she places women whose environmental knowledge comes from the work of sustaining life: because the gender division of labour pushed them toward food production and survival, their insights are often deeper than those of experts. The book’s organising idea is continuity between the earth’s body and the human body. Penny Newman puts it plainly — for women in polluted communities, “the environment” is simply the place they live, everything that touches their lives. Ann Usher’s Thai essay makes the link literal: a forest losing its immunity and a body losing its immune system are versions of the same collapse.
The Bangalore Seminar and Its Rationale
The book grows out of a July 1991 seminar in Bangalore, “Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections,” organised jointly by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation of Sweden and Vandana Shiva’s Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun. Twenty-five participants came from seven South and Southeast Asian countries and one from the United States. The gathering’s premise was that two decades after “the environment” entered international politics, it was time to take stock from a gender perspective—to recognise that women worldwide are rebuilding connections with nature, and that there is no insular divide between what is done to the environment and what happens to people’s own bodies and health. The book itself is a North–South collaboration between the Foundation and Kali for Women in India, which handled selection, revision and production; the Foundation also published the material as an issue of its journal Development Dialogue. Both partners wanted the work to reach activists and NGOs across development, gender and ecology, and both treated indigenous publishing as essential to intellectual and cultural development.
Shiva’s Introduction: Relocating the Problem
Shiva’s opening essay measures the twenty years between the 1972 Stockholm conference and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Global concern migrated from desertification to acid rain to the pollution of the atmospheric commons—the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion—and official responses have been largely technological and managerial fixes that often breed new problems, cures possibly worse than the disease. Against these, she sets the responses of women engaged in survival struggles. Because Third World women sit on the fringes and produce sustenance, their ecological insights often run deeper than the recipes of international experts or the responses of men in their own societies. Two reasons are given: these responses come from cultures where maintaining life has been the civilising force, and the gender division of labour introduced or sharpened by development has pushed women toward sustenance production while men are drawn into military and profit-seeking activity. At Rio, men at the centres of economic and political power located the roots of the crisis and the burden of solutions outside themselves—the South as the source of all problems, the North with its technology and capital as the source of all answers. The volume relocates the problem, starting from people’s own lives and tying global issues to daily local effects. “Environment,” in Penny Newman’s words, is simply the place we live, everything that affects our lives; from women’s perspective environmental issues are survival issues. Ann Usher, writing on deforestation and AIDS, calls Thailand’s community forestry movement “not just a fight for rights over the forest. It is a fight for survival.” Survival is the juncture where movements and women in different locations meet. Usher’s image is material as well as metaphorical: an immune system weakened by AIDS resembles a degraded forest that can no longer perform its functions.
Pre-AIDS Respectability and the Question of Self-Knowledge
Usher opens on the sexual values of the urban middle class before AIDS. A woman’s sexuality was defined through men: respectability demanded virginity until marriage; prostitution was illegal and immoral yet tolerated as a necessary evil protecting the majority’s respectability; husbands bought sex with cash or favours while a woman’s sexuality belonged exclusively to one man. Social survival required a woman to shield herself from her own sexuality, and so from self-knowledge. What, Usher asks, will women teach their daughters about survival in the age of AIDS? The answer runs deeper than condom instruction: it lies in women regaining self-knowledge, perhaps the key to stemming the epidemic in the absence of a cure or vaccine. She draws the parallel explicitly—as the environmental movement resists forces fracturing living systems, women must resist divisive imposed values; as communities reclaim devalued local wisdom, women may reclaim knowledge of themselves.
Mobile Cabinet Meetings and Huay Kaew
The narrative proper begins in spring 1989, when Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan staged short-lived regional Cabinet meetings to prove his concern for people beyond Bangkok. The first, in the south, went almost unnoticed. The second drew thousands of landless villagers to Khon Kaen demanding land rights. By the third, in Chiang Mai, people had grown used to the idea; the easy-going premier welcomed the chaos despite anxious police and soldiers accustomed to strict VIP security, and the preceding days filled with seminars, protests and demonstrations by villager groups. One delegation came from Huay Kaew in Sankamphaeng District, fighting for community management of two and a half square kilometres of forest that a local MP’s wife had rented as “degraded” land for a mango orchard, with rumours of a hill resort to follow. For the villagers the forest was old trees, plants and animals they depended on, and its canopy regulated water into the rice fields through traditional muang fai canals—an ecological service that ended when the concessionaire cleared the land and silt clogged the streams. The following December, after a prolonged political battle, the area became Thailand’s first officially recognised community forest, though with no community forest law the villagers fear the tractors and saplings will return. Huay Kaew became a milestone and precedent.
Kaeng Sua Ten and Khru Noi
Another group came from Chiang Muan in Phayao, alerted to Cabinet plans for a dam across the Yom, last free-running of the four main Chao Phya tributaries. Kaeng Sua Ten was Step One in a vast diversion scheme to pump water from the Kok and Ing rivers far south, occasionally uphill, through canals, tunnels and dams, to refill the chronically short Bhumibhol and Sirikit reservoirs—more big dams compensating for the failures of big dams. The Royal Irrigation Department’s gaily coloured map showed three villages in the flood zone; the true figure was fourteen. Some six thousand protesters in Phayao and several hundred in Chiang Mai shelved the project for the time being—the second of four Thai dams cancelled by public protest since 1986. Amid the commotion Usher met Oranong Phaowattana, “Khru Noi,” a rare village headwoman from Chiang Rai, who had come to speak of the “real development” villages needed to slow the yearly exodus of young people into the sex industry. She knew the industry well and AIDS barely at all; it was early 1989, and the disease was still officially portrayed as a problem of addicts and homosexuals, though infection was already climbing among prostitutes and clients. Pressed on what young people knew before leaving home, on whether they would go anyway, on how families would cope when breadwinners sickened, Khru Noi fell silent, sighed, and said: “First, the forest died …”
What the Forest Provided
Her account unfolds through the book’s catalogue of community forests. The Mien of Ban Nam Ki in Nan province spent three years delineating over three thousand hectares to protect the Matao sugar palm, which fruits only in moist, shaded forest near streams and earns each family about a hundred dollars a year; on the advice of the religious leader Jua Lin the villagers divided the area among themselves in 1987 to control fires and guard against encroachers.
The Environmental Justice Platform and Corporate Pushback
By early 1990, the movement’s effectiveness had become impossible for industry to ignore. A Union Carbide vice president circulated an internal memo branding the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes “one of the most radical coalitions operating under the environmentalist banner,” warning executives that its agenda, fully realised, would restructure American society into something “unrecognisable and probably unworkable.” What alarmed him was a platform of plain demands: no land disposal of materials harmful to life, prompt and thorough cleanup and compensation for existing toxic messes, and the right to both jobs and health. More than a thousand people had drafted it at the Grassroots Convention in Arlington, Virginia, in 1989. When confronted with his memo, the executive apologised and conceded that the smear itself proved how effective the organisation had become.
The McToxics Campaign
The proof arrived in 1990, when McDonald’s announced it would abandon styrofoam packaging. The campaign behind that retreat had begun in 1987 and taken three years and three months, succeeding because it belonged to people in their own communities rather than to a central office. Thousands of groups joined nationwide. The Clearinghouse supplied the facts—styrofoam’s ozone-depleting CFC base, its refusal to degrade in landfills—along with tactics such as ordering food and telling the server to “hold the toxics,” wrapping it in something other than styro. It declared “Days of Action” so that communities could act locally while knowing others were acting too, lending a national dimension to local fights and drawing national press. Groups could point to the ozone hole, to toxic waste, to overflowing landfills, all from their own backyards.
The lessons were plain. The movement could affect the big picture without pulling people out of their communities—no mass march on headquarters, just a nationwide campaign waged from a local perspective. “Think globally—act locally” became literal: landfill opponents could cite excessive packaging filling disposal space, incinerator foes could note the toxics released when styrofoam burns. Because the pressure came from McDonald’s own customers in scattered towns, the company could not dismiss it as a stunt by “wild-eyed, radical environmentalists,” and franchise managers began calling headquarters for guidance. The ripple spread: children demanded schools drop styrofoam, cities passed ordinances against it, and the material became socially unacceptable. The Clearinghouse’s journal Everyone’s Backyard documented at least fifty tangible victories a month—blocked facilities, closed dumps, tested land, air, water and health, new sources of clean water.
Stopping Up the Toxic Toilet
Having made it impossible for corporations to find a cheap, easy way to ship wastes “somewhere else” within the United States, the movement forced the question to shift from where toxic waste should go to how to reduce it. The next step was to challenge the use of toxic substances in everyday life altogether—to ask whether corporations have the right to produce whatever they want with whatever poison they choose, and to answer no. Closing the remaining loophole meant stopping the export of waste from industrialised countries to the Third World, for as long as corporations have somewhere else to ship toxics, the problem will not cease. Third World communities were plainly the next targets of corporate greed: Global Telesis tried to dump in Papua New Guinea; fifteen thousand tons of Philadelphia incinerator ash killed much of the vegetation on the Guinean island of Kassa; Haiti received thirteen thousand tons of the same ash; up to four thousand metric tons of chemical and possibly radioactive waste from Italy went into the port of Koko in Nigeria. New firms specialised in Third World disposal, among them the Colbert brothers of New York, who warehoused outdated pesticides, industrial chemicals and solvents bound for India, South Korea and Nigeria—and who were hired by the US Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and many city governments. Whether the movement could link with organisations across the Third World without overpowering them was, the book argues, not only possible but necessary for everyone’s survival; the Clearinghouse’s rule of going only where invited was both a limit and a strength.
The Geography of Poison
Stricter pollution controls in the US and Europe pushed polluting industries into the Third World, and pesticide plants multiplied across Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, discharging effluent into the Ganges. Bhopal had exposed more than corporate negligence: government, state authorities and scientific and medical professionals knew nothing of the toxicity of the chemicals involved, of their hazardous effects, of treating poisoning. In the 1988 H acid poisoning at Bichri in drought-prone Rajasthan, five companies discharged effluent into the Udaisagar canal; sixty wells were polluted, water undrinkable within five kilometres and to a depth of two hundred feet, and over five hundred acres made uncultivable. Pesticides banned in their countries of origin made cultivation capital-intensive and poisoned the food chain; resistance appeared, crops failed, debts mounted. In 1987 more than sixty cotton farmers in Prakasam, Andhra Pradesh, killed themselves by drinking pesticides. At a 1990 wedding in Basti, food served in recycled pesticide containers killed two hundred people. Toxic pellets ground with grain poisoned families; thousands of fish in Kuttanad broke out in sores, with similar reports from Malaysia tied to industrial effluent.
The Population-Control Orthodoxy
This habit of dangerous excess ran through planners’ thinking, nowhere more visibly than in population control. Critics called the discourse racist, sexist, imperialist and anti-poor, asking why corporate giants—Dupont, US Sugar, General Motors, Chase Manhattan, International Nickel, Marconi, RCA, Xerox, Gulf Oil—sat on the board of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and why defence establishments funded fertility research and treated population as a security threat requiring coercion of governments and women. Latin American countries where eighty per cent of women had been sterilised grew poorer; Brazil cut its birth rate by half in twenty years and still had street children. Hunger and indebtedness worsened while the poor relied on children for labour and old-age security. India’s National Population Policy, launched with the First Five Year Plan in 1951, was centrally planned, financed, monitored and imposed from above. It failed. Renaming family planning as family welfare and maternal and child health changed nothing in strategy or in the treatment of women. Female literacy, minimum wages and social awareness mattered more than coercive, technology-centred programmes. Ashish Bose called the craze for male children “demographic fundamentalism.” Women lacked the right to say no: a study by Drs Rani and Abhay Bang in the tribal district of Ghadhcharoli found ninety-two per cent of women suffering gynaecological disease, over half with symptoms of pain, leucorrhoea and dyspareunia, and maternal mortality ran high, a fifth of it from iron-deficiency anaemia. Amniocentesis and prenatal sex determination carried gender bias before birth. Target-setting bred manipulated “target meeting,” corruption, concocted statistics and camps performing tubectomies without after-care, turning women against sterilisation. Bose blamed foreign orientation, bureaucratic and central-government monopoly, obsession with quantitative targets, and neglect of women’s health.
Aling Masang and the Barricade at Langkaan
The book turns to Loreta B. Ayupan and Teresita G. Oliveros, who open with Aling Masang, a widowed peasant woman from Langkaan in Dasmariñas, Cavite. The land her ancestors cleared is titled in another family’s name, and that family intends to sell or develop it, so eviction hangs over her. When an evacuation team arrived with tractors and armed guards, women and children formed a human barricade armed with bolos and stones. Aling Masang led the negotiations and stopped the tractors from clearing the land for sugarcane. The women said they feared bullets less than losing the land, because losing land means famine and dead rivers. The team, military men included, withdrew.
Calabarzon and the Economics of Displacement
Elsewhere in Langkaan people had already been displaced by the Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese firm building an industrial estate; farmers received only “disturbance compensation.” Marubeni is one project under Calabarzon—Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, Quezon—a scheme begun by the Aquino government. In barrio Tartaria, Silang, UGIT women affiliated to AMIHAN, led by Teresita Alvarez, drove away surveyors for a proposed market, slaughterhouse and cemetery, citing river pollution and soil destruction; a barrio meeting produced a unified position, and the barangay captain promised only to inform the governor. The authors argue that peasant women’s family survival is environmental survival: seventy per cent depend on natural resources; 13.1 million of 30 million hectares were farmed in 1989; the resource base could feed 126 million. They critique a neo-colonial export-led economy, cash crops against food crops (63.2 versus 36.8 per cent in 1989), and rice shortages despite pineapple and banana export dominance.
Calabarzon, under the Philippine Assistance Program, would extend Metro Manila into southern Tagalog, with OECF, JICA, World Bank and German funding; it may displace 100,000 families, possibly female-headed, while promising only 340,000 jobs. There are 2.6 million rural illiterates aged fifteen to fifty-four. Landlords refuse CARL sales and convert land; polluting plants rejected abroad—the Luzon Petrochemical Complex rejected in Taiwan, the Kawasaki Sintering Plant in Misamis Oriental displacing 300 families—locate here. Laguna Lake plans would displace 400,000 while 340,000 benefit; Calaca geothermal expansion worsens sulphur pollution; Mt Pinatubo rendered three provinces unarable for ten to thirty years. Displaced men take construction work; women scrape by or sell sex to contractor-engineers, security men and soldiers. The Green Revolution alienated women from indigenous methods, forced spending on chemicals, created seventy per cent import dependence, and caused abortions, stillbirths and illnesses among plantation workers; it destroyed soil fertility and traditional foods, and the golden apple snail brought Brestan and Aquatin molluscides, banned mid-1990 but sold under the counter. AMIHAN’s 1992 demonstration farms in Bulacan and Calabarzon, a Cebu member’s organic restoration, soap-based pesticides and integrated pest management, and Isabela’s smoke-drawing stone stove are noted; peasant resistance stems from fear of lower yields and from confronting corporations and government.
Rita Sebastian on Sri Lanka
Rita Sebastian’s essay describes the 25,332-square-mile island’s 17 million people—75 per cent Sinhala Buddhist, 13 per cent Tamil, seven per cent Muslim—and draws on K.M. de Silva’s account of Sinhalese-Tamil harmony before 1922, the shift to one majority community, grievances over administrative representation and university marking, and S.D.R. Bandaranaike’s 1956 “Sinhala only” bill and riots. The 1977 TULF mandate for a separate state was abandoned, militants emerged, and 1983 brought the killing of an estimated 2,000 Tamils and flight to India. Militants crossed the fourteen-mile strip; May 1987 “Operation Liberation” against Jaffna was halted by India, which brokered a July pact; the JVP revolted; 8,000 Indian troops arrived. LTTE dominance, a militarised caste society, and destroyed Jaffna follow. Three waves of confrontation are identified; a World Bank team reported 7,000 lives lost, 100,000 families or 500,000 people homeless, USD 700 million infrastructure damage, over USD 2 billion losses, RS 13 billion reconstruction; the programme never started, and in October 1987 the LTTE reneged. Militants destroyed bridges, culverts, roads and railway sleepers; 70,000 Indian soldiers occupied the northeast; forests were scorched. Forestry work was hampered in Jaffna, Mullaitivu, Vavuniya, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Ampara; women lost fuelwood access. The Environment Congress of 161 rural associations and the Sinhala Demala Gemi Kantha Sammelanaya are noted. Women’s LTTE wing, the “Freedom Birds,” included Rajiv Gandhi’s assassin; Rajani Thiranagama’s The Broken Palmyrah is quoted on women cadres, dowry, recruitment, middle-class frustration, rural defiance with rice pounders and kitchen knives, IPKF rape allegations, the Mothers’ Front’s decline, and widows Rajeswarie and Chelvi; half of 600,000 displaced are women and children.
The Seed and the Earth
Shiva argues that regeneration is the core principle of life and of sustainable societies, and that modern industrial society ignores it, causing both ecological and sustainability crises. Patriarchy broke the continuity between regeneration in human and non-human nature: man was separated from nature, creativity became a male monopoly tied to “production,” while women’s “reproduction” was treated as non-production. Male activity was constructed on separating earth from seed and casting an inert earth as passive and female; the seed/earth metaphor was applied to human reproduction to naturalise male dominance, built on a material/spiritual dualism. She quotes Bachofen on triumphant paternity liberating spirit from nature. Dualisms obscure that activity, not passivity, is nature’s nature. She aims to show new biotechnologies reproduce old patriarchal divisions and colonise the regeneration of plants and humans, and to reclaim women’s and nature’s creativity by decolonising regeneration.
Capital, having colonised land, forests, rivers, oceans and atmosphere, seeks new colonies: the interior spaces of women’s, plants’ and animals’ bodies. Gunboat technology enabled land colonisation; genetic engineering enables colonisation of organisms’ life. Ancient patriarchy used active seed and passive earth; capitalist patriarchy reconstitutes the seed as passive, locating creativity in the engineering mind—devaluing Third World farmers, as terra mater’s conversion to terra nullius devalued non-European cultures five hundred years ago. Terra nullius denied original inhabitants’ prior rights and negated earth’s regenerative capacity; decimation was justified by casting indigenous peoples as fauna. Invasions were called “
Survival as the Common Ground
What holds these very different chapters together is the word survival. Usher’s village headwoman, Khru Noi, answers a question about AIDS with “First, the forest died,” and the essay unfolds from there: deforestation, dams and the pull of the city push young people toward the sex trade, and the market must supply what the ecosystem no longer does. In the United States, Newman’s account of the Stringfellow Acid Pits — a canyon licensed to hold millions of gallons of chemical waste above a community that was never told when it overflowed — shows the same logic of exposure visited on people with the least power to refuse it. Mira Shiva traces industrial effluent and banned pesticides into Indian water and food, from the H acid poisoning of wells in Rajasthan to farmers drinking pesticides under debt. The Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-selection follows the same thread into reproduction, where amniocentesis turns daughters into a liability to be prevented, and the authors end by questioning whether law can do what a movement must.
Women as the Measure of Themselves
The later essays widen the frame. Gail Omvedt examines two Maharashtra movements — one fighting drought and water rights, one demanding fair prices — and finds peasant women at the core of rural resistance, while Loreta Ayupan and Teresita Oliveros describe Filipino women barricading their land against tractors with bolos and stones. Rita Sebastian’s account of Sri Lanka traces how ethnic war and militarisation fall hardest on women, destroying forests and fuelwood access along with everything else. Shiva’s own essay on seeds is the collection’s intellectual keystone: patriarchy split seed from earth, casting the earth as passive matter, and biotechnology now repeats that gesture by patenting the seed and making farmers rent what they once saved. Her closing image is of forest monks ordaining great trees with saffron robes — a life force answering collapse.
What the Book Leaves Behind
Close to Home belongs to the moment when environmental justice was naming itself, and Newman’s chapter records the Movement for Environmental Justice’s platform and the McToxics campaign against styrofoam as evidence that local action can shift corporate behaviour. Its insistence that health, ecology and women’s rights are a single question, and that the answers come from the people living with the damage rather than from the institutions causing it, is the thread running from Bhopal to the seed patent — and the reason the book still reads as a working document rather than a retrospective.
