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Environmental leader Vandana Shiva featured speaker at Sustainability Seminar Series

Environmental leader, author and scientific advisor Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., will be the featured speaker at this year’s Sustainability Seminar Series hosted by the Center for Sustainability (CfS) at Georgia Southern. Shiva will present her lecture, “Planetary Consciousness, Local Economies,” at 7 p.m., Monday, Oct. 16 in the Performing Arts Center, 847 Plant Drive.

“Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader, author and thinker of our time, and we are privileged to host her as a part of our sustainability seminar series,” said Lissa Leege, Ph.D., director of the CfS. “She brings a global perspective to the challenges of sustainable agriculture and food security for a growing human population and is a respected policy adviser for governments in India and abroad.”

Shiva combines sharp intellectual inquiry with courageous activism, and her work spans teaching at universities worldwide to working with peasants in rural India. Time Magazine identified Shiva as an environmental ‘hero’ in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia. In November 2010, Forbes Magazine identified Shiva as one of the Seven Most Powerful Women on the Globe.

Shiva trained as a physicist at the University of Punjab, and completed her Ph.D. on the ‘Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory’ from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India.

Internationally, Shiva serves on Prince Charles’s expert group on Sustainable Agriculture, and she is a member of President Zapatero’s Scientific Committee in Spain. Shiva advises governments worldwide and is currently working with the Government of Bhutan to make Bhutan 100 percent organic. She is also working with the Governments of Tuscany and Rome to create a hopeful and livable future for young people in these times of crises.

In addition to her lecture, Shiva will lead a small roundtable for the Women’s Leadership Series with topics including women’s leadership, democracy, diverse cultures and creative knowledge. The roundtable will take place from 3:30-5 p.m., Monday, Oct. 16, in Room 2148 in the College of Education.

An RSVP for the roundtable is required. RSVP to Janina Jones by emailing janinajones@georgiasouthern.edu.

In addition to CfS, the event is sponsored by First-Year Experience, International Programs and Services, Multicultural Student Center and Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Georgia Southern University, a public Carnegie Doctoral/Research University founded in 1906, offers 118 degree programs serving 20,673 students. Through eight colleges, the University offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs built on more than a century of academic achievement. Georgia Southern is recognized for its student-centered and hands-on approach to education. Visit GeorgiaSouthern.edu.

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